Baal in New York

 

A new bronze statue supposed to represent Ruth Bader Ginsberg—although it looks nothing like Ruth Bader Ginsberg—has been installed on the facade of the New York state courthouse in Manhattan. She joins an array of great lawgivers of history, including Confucius, Manu, Justinian, Zoroaster, and Moses.

It is a non sequitor. Ginsberg, as a US Supreme Court judge, was a law interpreter, not a law giver. It is a different role.

Although perhaps this is a legitimate if not a very self-reflective comment that Ginsberg did not, in fact, follow the law, but made it up as she went along. That has certainly been argued.

The sculptor says this statue is needed now because “women’s reproductive rights [are] under siege.” So the statue might  better be seen, particularly as it does not look like the late Supreme Court Justice, as a representation of “women’s reproductive rights” rather than Ginsberg personally.

It looks like traditional representations of evil: hair curling back like the horns of a ram, like those of some depictions of the Devil; inhuman octopus tentacles sprouting from her side instead of arms; a hint of spider in search of flies to devour.

The Devil: Wade-Giles Tarot card

If inadvertently, it all seems apt. What Freud called the subconscious is better understood as a guilty conscience.

“Women’s reproductive rights” is, of course, a euphemism for abortion. Abortion destroys children.

And it destroys more than that. It is destroying our society and our civilization. It puts us in the same class as the ancient Canaanites, the Carthaginians, or of Nazi Germany: of civilizations that must, for the good of mankind, be destroyed, and the earth salted over.

It is not hyperbole to compare unrestricted and free abortion to the Holocaust: it has killed far more people. And it has killed them younger, robbing them of more life. Unlike the Germans, none of us can claim ignorance of what is going on.

To be sure, the defenders or abortion will insist that it is not murder, because the foetus is not human. It is just a "clump of cells." Right?

Exactly the tack the Nazis took: Jews were not human. They were untermenschen.

The refusal to see the victim's humanity does not absolve one of the crime. It increases it.

Abortion is also a genocide; a genocide against the young, but ultimately against whatever “race” or nation

 allows it. Governments throughout the developed world are stressing the need for mass immigration, because of a low birthrate. And what is at least one of the causes of that low birthrate? It might almost as aptly be called a high death rate.

It is not just the number of babies aborted; but that the culture that defends abortion also goes on to despise and discourage children and childbearing. In implicit defense of the right to abort, in order to allow unrestricted sex, the myth of “overpopulation” and resource scarcity has been popularized for decades, in the media and in the schools. Our underpopulation is the result. Our culture is dying off.

But it does not end there. We all know, in our conscience, in our thoughts alone in the night, that abortion is murder. We all know that we are collectively and perhaps individually guilty of a great wrong. The hysterical desire to conceal and deny this guilt rather than repent and give up sex on instinct has led to the general collapse of civil discourse. It has let to an intolerance of any disagreement or dissenting views: for truth itself becomes the enemy. If, after all, we allow people to speak freely, someone might at any moment mention the elephant in the maternity ward.

It has led to a persecution of all moral lawgivers. They make us feel guilty.

Most obviously the church. It has led to the persecution of priests for supposed pederasty. Yes, there are pederastic priests, but probably no more than in the general population. It is not, in any case, a fault of the church per se. It has led to the myth of the evil residential schools, the imaginary mass graves, and the vandalism of churches. People want to blame the church, and they will come up with something.

It has led to the toppling of the statues of other lawgivers: Sir John A. Macdonald, Thomas Jefferson, Egerton Ryerson, Henry Dundas. Not those guilty of actual misdeeds or injustices: those guilty of combatting misdeeds and injustices. Those who built the society and its structure of laws. Laws are “patriarchy.” Laws are “white supremacy.”

 It has also led to a glorification of homosexuality and transgenderism. Why? First, because homosexuals are an emblem of sex without any thought of reproduction. Homosexuality  separates sex from babies, representing the libertine ideal. But more deeply, “gays” have gained some unconscious moral cachet from the fact that they cannot be suspected of having or having demanded an abortion. They are better than the rest of us.

One can see that it also leads to a hatred for civilization itself.  Partly because civilization is law, and so makes us feel guilty. Partly because it represents us, our self-image, and we hate ourselves for the sin. The guilty conscience does this, on the group or on the individual level. It leads to self-hate and self-destructive behaviour. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

Some years ago, when she was still quite young, my daughter made a Christmas card for her mother. It was beautiful; she has great artistic talent. I posted it proudly on Facebook. 

Unexpectedly, a number of friends, North American women, commented in alarm. What was going on? Was she being abused? 

She had included a line thanking her mother for not aborting her. 

The American and Canadian women immediately saw this as “something wrong.” And they jumped to the conclusion that her mother hated her.

As I pointed out to one of them, anywhere abortion is legal, the mother makes a conscious choice whether to kill or not to kill. It has nothing to do with the child’s merits—she has not yet met the child, and cannot know its character. She could not have decided whether she liked or didn’t like her. So my daughter’s comment was only sensible. She was and is a verry bright child, and saw the implications of legal abortion.

In the meantime, their comments were obviously traumatic to both my daughter, who could not understand what she had said that was so wrong, and to my wife, who had been accused of child abuse. The commentators seemingly took neither into consideration. They were too hysterical to have thought such things through. Their guilty conscience had taken over their reason and their compassion.

So we see everywhere in the larger society. Once one embraces vice, vice takes control, and one becomes vicious. That is what the word “vicious” means. We become weasels fighting in a hole.

It is significant that none of our Arab or Filipina friends, which probably outnumber our North American friends on Facebook, thought there was anything disturbing or untoward about my daughter’s abortion comment. They only admired the lovely card.

Abortion is illegal in the Philippines and in the Middle East. 

It was only the North Americans who were upset about the comment.

In short, it was their guilty conscience speaking to them.

Since I pointed out to that one friend that my daughter’s comments were reasonable so long as abortion is legal, she has not “spoken” to me. She will not respond to any attempts to reach her.

She is not the only old friend who has “unfriended” me over exactly this issue: abortion. Not something I am vocal about; leaving aside what I might post here, I do not evangelize on the issue with friends. I only respond when it comes up; I do not bring it up.

Perhaps that is a mistake we are all making. Perhaps the only way to save civil discourse, our friendships, our families, our civilization itself, is to ban abortion. 

The future belongs to those nations in which it is banned.