The Evil Left Strikes Again

Tom Trinko had an article up over at The American Thinker Thursday that spells out The Heart of Darkness, the Evil at the Core of Liberalism. It is long past time to acknowledge that those who claim the mantle of "Liberal" have long ago left the classical liberals in the dust, and have joined their brothers, the Communists, Socialists, and Fascists in their debauchery.  At issue is the latest from the Supremes on abortion:

This week the abominable evil at the heart of liberalism has been revealed once again.

The Supreme Court has ruled that a woman’s health is less important than ensuring that she can be used as a sex object.

What matters is not a woman’s right to choose but her ability to be used. The Court has said that access to unsafe abortions is more important than ensuring that a women’s life is not at risk when having an abortion.

The Supreme Court also ruled that Muslims must serve pork in their restaurants. Oh wait, no -- the Supreme Court would never issue that ruling, but the Court did rule that pharmacists whose deeply held religious beliefs tell them that abortion is murder must actively cooperate with the murder of unborn blacks -- black women are 5 times more likely to abort their child than white women, a disparate impact that never seems to bother liberals.

That’s on par with saying that Jews must serve as guards at Nazi concentration camps.

Trinko marshalls fact after fact to support his thesis that liberals are no longer simply good people, with bleeding hearts who desparately want to help the poor, but have become the demon possessed destroyers of our culture. For instance, he notes that:

It’s settled science, far more settled than so called climate change, that human life begins at conception. That’s why when polled only 12% of Americans believe that abortion should be allowed for any reason at any time in a pregnancy.

That makes sense given that the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a spinoff of Planned Parenthood, tells us that 1% of abortions are due to rape or incest and 3% are due to possible maternal health problems which means that 96% of abortions are not the hard cases that are used to sell abortion.

Or this:

By saying that abortionists need not have admitting privileges at a hospital, a significant thing if complications develop which they often do, and that abortion mills need not meet the same standards as other surgical facilities the Supreme Court is putting the back alley back into abortion.

Instead of asking what sort of doctors can’t get admitting rights at a hospital, or why abortion clinics don’t want to provide a safe environment for their customers, the Court decided that all that mattered is that as many abortion mills as possible should be open.

These are but a few samples of Trinko's tour de force.  Go read the whole thing, then come back here to read  Jonah Goldberg The Left's Different Approach to Rights it Opposes. Goldberg starts out, channeling Jonathan Swift with a proposal:

I have an idea.

The federal government needs to compile a list of women who shouldn't be allowed to get abortions. The criteria for getting on the list must be flexible. If an official at, say, the NIH or FBI think that a woman should be a mother for some reason or other, he or she can block an abortion. Maybe the woman has great genes or a high IQ or the sorts of financial resources we need in parents. Let's leave that decision where it belongs: in the hands of the government.

Heck, there's really no reason even to tell women if they're on the "no abort" list. Let them find out at the clinic. And if they go in for an abortion only to discover they are among the million or more people on the list, there will be no clear process for getting off it, even if it was a bureaucratic error or case of mistaken identity.

Sound like a good idea?

While I am one who believes that abortion is murder, and murder of the most innocent and the least deserving of punishment, the above idea suffers from the same deficiencies as the "No Fly" list and the other lists the Government maintains: no due process. If a person's rights are to be taken away, even temporarily, the Constitution has a process, and putting someone's name on a secret list is not how it is to be done. Claims of expediency are illegitimate. The Constitution must be honored even when, especially when, it is most unpopular to do it. ( Now, as an aside, whether or not abortion is a right, it can hardly be denied that the unborn have at least an equal right to life, and these conflicting rights, the right to life versus the right to murder, should be adjudicated in front of a judge and jury.  The problem as the law stands is that the State is essentially sanctioning the murder of unborn children in our name.  Our objection to this is not unlike the abolitionists objection to slavery.  It can not stand, and as before, it pits the Republican Party as the party of anti-abortion and anti-slavery against the Democrat Party as the party of pro-abortion and the party of pro-slavery.)

Which brings us to this:

The contradiction I find most glaring and galling is that the euphoric hysteria from the left over the court's decision occurred right in the middle of a conversation about guns and terrorist watch lists.

In that conversation, many of the same voices on the left argued that the federal government can -- nay, must! -- have the unilateral power to put American citizens on a secret list barring them from exercising two constitutional rights: the right to bear arms and the right to due process when the government denies you a right. (Both, unlike abortion, are rights spelled out in the Constitution). Congressional Democrats even staged a tawdry tantrum on the House floor about it.

Never mind that the Orlando slaughter -- the event that set off the House sit-in -- would not have been prevented if the Democrats had their way. Writing for the majority in the Hellerstedt case, Justice Stephen Breyer argued that the Texas statute was unnecessary because "determined wrongdoers" like Gosnell wouldn't be deterred by new laws given that he was willing to violate existing laws.

Maybe so. But isn't that exactly the NRA's position on gun laws? Murderers, never mind terrorists, by definition don't care about the law.

It is indeed.  We in the gun rights community have been making that point for a very long time.  It is good that a mainstream journalist like Goldberg noticed.  Or as Dave Workman noted in 2014 in an article entitled Is it Time to Treat the First Amendment just like the Second? there is "world class hypocrisy" in these laws and decisions, but it is not accidental. It is quite deliberate, and it is evil. Everyone legally residing under the jurisdiction of the Federal Governmentment should receive equal protection of the law. Today, with the left's full knowledge, indeed with its blessing, Christians, gun owners, and other undesirables are being treated differently under the law. If we don't capitulate, the left is fully prepared to step things up a notch, and to ratchet them further if need be. The goal is capitulation, and the Constitution be damned. How will you feel when your grandmother and grandfather are sent to a death camp for being a Catholic and a gun owner?