MaybeToday.org

Once upon a time, a society made a conscious decision to confer a particular benefit upon a certain segment of the population. The rationale for this decision was that it was determined that people with various physical ailments encountered particular hardships when attempting to access various public places, because of the long distances they often needed to locomote themselves after parking their cars in parking lots and garages – their physical ailments and disorders making such treks tedious, and sometimes even dangerous. As a remedy to this perceived problem, the society – let’s call it Liberstan – decided to require the designation of a certain amount of choice parking spots for these citizens in all public parking areas, creating a phenomena known as handicapped parking spots.

Despite the occasional cheat, the program worked pretty well for a number of years. People who experienced difficulty walking could obtain placards or special license plates identifying them as legitimate beneficiaries of this perk, which better enabled them to participate in public activities with their neighbors. Most able-bodied citizens respected the handicapped parking privilege, but human nature being what it is, not everyone did. Usurpers of the privileged parking, when caught, would have their cars towed, and would be subjected to fines. This punishment deterred most people, but it unfortunately eventually inflamed the passions of a small group of fully able-bodied citizens who felt wronged by the situation.

These citizens – let’s call them Samers – insisted that the conferring of this privilege on the other group of citizens amounted to iniquity toward themselves, reasoning that all people with cars to park in public places should have equal rights to the choice spots. The Samers were offended that some people were being privileged while they were not, because they were egalitarians, and their definition of egalitarian was “we’re all the same.” And they prized those choice parking spots.

Critics of the Samers argued that having a physical handicap legitimately qualified those others for such a privilege, since it merely made it easier for them to engage in activities common to the rest of the citizenry; it leveled the playing field somewhat.

This sounded like a difficult argument for the Samers to overcome, but they prized those choice parking spots. So they were faced with a tactical problem: would their aim of being able to use the choice parking spots for themselves be better served by arguing honestly against the legitimacy of the policy of privileged parking spots for particular people (a legitimate policy question, even if transparently mean-spirited), or by undermining the intent of the policy through subterfuge, dissembling, and sophistry? Well, that was a no-brainer…

“Nobody’s perfect,” the ensuing counter-argument announced: “hence we all have some sort of handicap, and it is therefore discriminatory to withhold choice-spot parking rights from citizens who are merely differently handicapped than those who have been historically privileged by this policy.”

The controversy was heard by a judge who, being far more clever than wise, and easily enthralled by reason that seems to emanate from penumbra, was delighted to find himself flummoxed by the Samers’ argumentation, and who decided that parking equality was an idea long overdue. Soon, people with any kind of handicap – that is, anyone who was not a physically perfect specimen, which meant… well, everybody – converged upon the RMV to pick up their special Handicapped Person placards, and the choice parking spots were finally available to everyone equally, regardless of handicap type. Furthermore, it quickly became a “hate crime” to question anybody’s claim to handicap status: “we’re all handicapped, and that simple truth unites us in a global brotherhood that just might somehow sow the seed of permanent peace and understanding among peoples.”

Now, some quicker thinking readers might at this point be predicting a logistical complication to the story. After all, if, say, 5 percent of the population previously had handicapped parking privileges, and 5 percent or so of the available parking spaces were accordingly designated as handicapped parking spots, how could these spots possibly accommodate the ninety-five percent of the population that was now legally handicapped? [In any population, it is fair to assume at least 5 percent of the people will not debase themselves by participating in such a self-serving scheme, but once the perks start to flow, most everybody else will.]

Well, not to worry: there’s no problem here a little paint can’t fix. The solution, of course, is to designate a full ninety-five percent of the available parking spaces for privileged handicapped parking. This not only allows everyone who desires it to enjoy the privileges of handicapped parking spots, but has the added social benefit of exiling those obnoxious, self-righteous troublemakers – who make up the recalcitrant 5 percent of non-conformists – to the far reaches of all parking areas. Equality wins out over bigotry again.

The moral of the story is that the kind of moralistic bullying engaged in by the “Samers” produces losers, but no real winners. You begin with a legitimate benefit, but end up with an anti-benefit for a minority of well-behaved people, and a loss of benefit for those whom good reason had once privileged. If the argument over “equality” could have been made in honest terms, the once-good-reasoned privilege could have been examined rationally and reasonably, and a good-reasoned decision could have been made to continue or terminate the privilege of the genuinely handicapped. But by using subterfuge to eliminate the once-privileged distinction (the state of being handicapped) by changing the definition of the criteria upon which the benefit distinction was made, reason was undermined by demagoguery.

With 95% of parking spaces marked as privileged, and 95% of the population eligible for the privilege, the idea of privilege becomes absurd. More to the point, so does the idea of handicap. By equivocating on the meaning of handicap, the antagonists are able to do sufficient violence to the meaning of the term as to render it impossible to use as a differentiator between those who face serious difficulties in accessing public places and those who don’t, despite the fact that the term was initially intended to mean precisely that. This not only all but eliminates the opportunities for the truly needy to park in the truly choice spaces, but makes it impossible to even have an intelligent discussion about the problem – at least using the term “handicapped,” which no longer has any distinction (i.e. meaning).

How does this analogy hold up to the case of the “gay marriage” movement?

In an important sense, this parable is more analogous to the question of the legitimacy of civil unions for gays than it is to “gay marriage” – because it turns on legal definitions for political concepts such as social privilege and benefits, whereas marriage is a pre-political institution that cannot in reality be defined by a polity. Nonetheless, it does demonstrate how the question of the political privileging of marriage in society (an early emphasis, one will recall, of the anti-marriage lobby – our own “Samers”) was used as a rhetorical tool to subvert the original intention of the political structure around marriage by a moralistic misrepresentation of the concept of equality, or egalitarianism. Still, the battle over marriage is not about benefits, or any other realm of politics, but about the survival in this present society of the fundamental institution of human decency.

More to the point of the “gay marriage” problem is the example of how the usurpation of the term “handicapped” to mean most anything at all only renders the term meaningless. This is precisely what the “gay marriage” advocates have largely accomplished with the term “marriage” – and note that I put that in the present tense, for this is a political accomplishment that is social in character, not legal, and is largely a fait accompli. The Left has successfully manipulated the terms of the controversy so as to make the arguments of the traditionalists incomprehensible in the ears of many. The looming legal victories, if they come, will simply make it illegal to engage truths that are becoming increasingly difficult for many people to understand, anyway.

It’s true that people are being bullied into abandoning the idea that marriage is different from other sexual unions out of fear of being called bigots, but they never could have found themselves in such a vulnerable position unless they had already lost the ability to see the differentiation for themselves; unless they were already prepared to believe that marriage is no more than an honorific bestowed upon a sexual relationship by some social authority – be it religious or the state.

As a rule, I like Jeff Jacoby’s columns, but every now and then he comes out with something I find downright unconscionable. His July 5th Boston Globe op-ed promoting the marketing of human organs is an unfortunate example. The recent liver transplant of celebrity tech guru Steve Jobs having roiled again the waters of the debate over the “fairness” of our current organ donation system, Jacoby has added his voice to the rising tide of liberal, utilitarian opinion promising free market “solutions” to the “problem” of death.

I’ve read a number of these proposals over the years, and they all seem to involve the same three basic errors. As can be surmised from the title of this piece, I see these errors as involving misunderstandings of the nature of man as a being both physical and spiritual, in ontological unity; the fundamental and unique character of human subjectivity in differentiation from other material objects (or ‘what are people for?’ – to steal a phrase from Wendell Berry); and the inability of mankind to cheat death (or “what is not given to man” – to steal a phrase from Leo Tolstoy).

The premise of these proposals is that there are currently many people dying from organ failure who could be spared death if more organs were available for transplant, and that the economy of transplant organs would produce at least part of the requisite supply if it were freed from legal constraint, to function more or less unimpeded in the liberal model of supply and demand, therein saving lives. The thinking is that everything else is for sale, after all, including all the other products and services involved in actually transplanting an organ – the organ donor is the only non-compensated person in the entire chain, and that not only introduces market inefficiencies, but may even be unjust.

The most fundamental moral or ethical dilemma that arises from these proposals stems from the fuzzy — and yet now widely appealed-to — notion of human dignity, which itself has its origins in the recognition of the sacredness of human life. Meanwhile, sacrality is a concept that is all but alien to modernity (my spell-checker didn’t even recognize it as an English word when I typed it!). Jacoby, like most any writer promoting blasphemy, marginalizes the matter of sacrality, conflating the transmission of human organs with the broad vista of “medical care” ( a concept which does not share with organ transmission the very characteristic at issue), and substituting utilitarian arguments about “needless” deaths.

Ethical concerns also arise around the prospect of the rich and powerful exploiting the poor under such a system. Jacoby, ironically, writes these off as resulting from misguided altruism (but see, for example, this column from University of Minnesota Bioethicist Jeffrey P. Kahn, discussing a JAMA article on organ sales in India, where it is legal). Though I am convinced that Jacoby is actually the one suffering here from a misguided altruism (and am not in the least surprised by the realities come to light in India, as per the linked article), I am not particularly interested in this angle of the argument, as it is clearly a secondary issue: the unjust character of any specific policy implementation is wholly subordinate to (and inevitably predicated upon) the immoral nature of the proposal in and of itself (in other words, it is secondary because there is simply no right way to do a wrong thing, so there’s not a lot of point in harping on method, or even consequences).

Both of these areas of ethical concern refer directly to the second area of error I am pointing out: the commodification of man; the failure to adequately distinguish between the human being himself, and those things which are produced by man. When the term “human dignity” is used properly, it refers precisely to the ontological distinction between the human person (a subject) and an objective reality that lacks subjectivity, or personhood, or a spiritual soul. The dignity that humans distinctly possess within the material world derives from our unique spiritual character, which is the capacity to love rationally – or to choose love. The violation of humanity consists in asserting that that subject can be objectified, and treated as a thing.

The idea of the wrongness of treating people as things is widely acknowledged, even among people who don’t put a lot of thought into moral issues. That does not mean that it can’t be (and isn’t often) trumped by utilitarian arguments, but at least the notion is readily available to most people. So when folks like Jacoby argue that the human being (or human parts) should be a commodity, because everything else is for sale, the argument runs against the grain of an intuitive sense that it is wrong to treat people as things. Or, to be more precise, even if we allow that everything should be for sale (a dubious proposition in and of itself), people are not things.

This is the moral or ethical problem with the human parts market proposal, but it is not the root of the problem, because the moral error is itself grounded upon an inadequate understanding of human nature, or what it means to be a human being. It is furthermore, in this case, driven by a culturally pervasive but irrational view of death, but that is a point to be taken up later. It can be clearly demonstrated by example how the “commodification of man” proposal fails the moral test by noticing how the “everything else is for sale” argument not only meets intuitive resistance to treating people as things, it also runs smack into the fact that, no, not everything is for sale – or at least it shouldn’t be.

For examples, we have only to look at slavery and prostitution to see that society does not accept as morally licit the notion that anything can be bought and sold: people cannot morally be bought and sold. Sure, there are those who will argue that prostitution should be legal, just as there have been many who never flinched at legal slavery, and we have our chorus today calling for the buying and selling of human body parts, but civilization has come to see that people cannot morally be themselves reduced to commodities, and this insight is the genius behind the modern ideas of human dignity and human rights, being long anticipated in the ancient idea of tsedaqah (righteousness), or what we owe one another as fellow beings created in the image of God.

If someone who despises slavery promotes the marketing of body parts (whether for medical purposes or sexual purposes), he most likely has fallen into one of the two popular errors concerning the nature of man: naturalism, or (much more commonly) dualism. In a follow-up post, I will explore how slavery, prostitution, and organ sales share a common mode of unrighteousness in the degradation of the self, properly understood. This is no trivial matter, as it is the unrighteousness itself, not this it that particular expression of it, that is a growing menace to a human civilization that has largely succeeded in forgetting that righteousness comes from God, and is rooted in right relationship with Him. We must not allow our “misguided altruism ” to feed the beast of unrighteousness.

Still thinking tonight about the assassination of George Tiller; a few things have surprised me. I lead a busy life, and don’t spend a lot of time perusing news sources and other media outlets, so my sample size is rather small, but it seems from my limited perspective that the press coverage has been strangely muted. There is no serious debating that the journalistic class almost purely represents the cultural elite that embraces abortion, and I really thought they would be harping all over this.

I suppose it’s early yet, and it could still become a cause célèbre over the next few days, but it seems odd to see it low on the ratings totem pole of major liberal news outlets. Of course, that could very well be explained by the likelihood that the web site layouts, unlike the newsprint of old, are driven much more by visitor interest – by clicks – rather than by pure editorial agenda. That would suggest that the readers of these sites have more interest in plane crashes, and in Susan what’s-her-name who sings on British television. Strange, that, and it doesn’t fill me with a new optimism for my country or my countrymen.

The biggest surprise, though, was reading yesterday that Tiller had been killed while serving as an usher at church. In what kind of church could such a man possibly be a member in good standing, one might reasonably be tempted to ask? A community of devil worshippers? We’re not talking here about some clueless, complicit politician without moral spine, or something like that, we’re talking about a man who actually killed the babies with his own hands – thousands of them – and who was proud of what he’d done. But no, this was a Lutheran church. That is just staggering. Was the money he made from abortions put into the collection basket as the Lord’s portion? Did this guy have it in his head that he was a disciple of Jesus Christ? How could the condition of the Church ever have been brought to such scandalous woe?

So, “Tiller the Baby Killer” has met his demise – assassinated this morning during church services. I can only groan over the anticipated avalanche of righteous indignation cascading from the heights of the pro-abortion ranks. Like the proverbial mandatory pinch of incense for Caesar, everyone who is publicly pro-life will be required to preface any and all remarks on the matter by condemning the assassination. I am not an advocate of violence – assassination or otherwise – so I have no personal  problem with condemning the act, but I do have a problem with the screwball notion that apologists for the legal and shameless murder of literally millions of “unwanted” innocents can somehow paint as morally irredeemable anyone who fails to sufficiently condemn the extra-judicial killing of a mass murderer. That is simply perverse. I’m sorely tempted to say “I’ll condemn his murder as soon as you condemn his daily murders-for-profit.”

There is no doubt, however, that abortion proponents will quickly and loudly hoist the flag, charging hypocrisy against not simply the man who carried out this act, but the pro-life movement as a whole. This is an absurd assertion, for even if the entire pro-life movement endorsed assassinating notorious abortionists (as opposed to just the tiny fringe who do see their way clear to such lethal vigilantism), it is surely faulty logic to assert that it is hypocritical to resort to murdering a mass murderer in order to protect countless further innocent victims.

Bonhoeffer, for example, is not considered a hypocrite for his involvement in the attempt to assassinate Hitler, but is rather admired for his courage and conviction – regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the act itself. Furthermore, history hardly finds fault with him, despite the gross violation of legal and moral norms his actions represented from the perspective of the Nazi system of thought. He (rightly) saw Hitler as a mass murderer and lethal threat to civilization, and (rightly or wrongly) determined that the best way to deal with him, under the circumstances, was to assassinate him. Was he right?

There is a vicious war being waged against the innocent unborn, and it should come as no surprise that some folks are tired of talking about it; tired of waiting for a political solution that never seems to really get any closer, but often seems to be permanently hardening into the kind of legal insanity that turned Bonhoeffer’s Germany into the textbook example of evil that it serves as today. Frankly, given what is at stake, I think it is a real testimony to the moral quality of the pro-life movement that this sort of thing is not much more commonplace.

This killing may not have been righteous, it may not have been wise, it may not have been prudent, it may not have been faithful to the spirit of the pro-life movement, it may have been an instance of despair triumphing over hope, but it sure isn’t a sign of hypocrisy. The basic pro-life principle is that human life is sacred, and must be defended from exploitation and destruction. That means that exploiters and destroyers must somehow be stopped. The ends cannot justify the means, but we should not be conned into believing (let alone declaring) that the killer has violated the core principles of the movement – therein confusing the guilty and the innocent. It is sufficient to say that there is a better way.

Hypocrisy? …The murder of unborn babies is a “personal choice” matter that we should all be able to disagree over amicably, while the murder of a notorious abortionist is beyond the pale? I don’t think so… talk about hypocrisy!

Is there any end in sight to the inanity of Homosex discrimination claims? I have watched, befuddled, as my society has lurched like a drunken monkey along the road to recognizing the legal validity of the inherently absurd and self-contradictory notion of “gay marriage” (having had a front-row seat for one of the opening acts of the circus here in Massachusetts), and today Reuters is reporting that the online dating service eHarmony.com has been forced, via lawsuit, to offer dating services that meet the particular aims of homosexuals.

According to the article, there have been at least two suits brought against eHarmony by homosexuals claiming to be discriminated against by the company, which apparently matches up clients with other clients of the opposite sex. These claims are strikingly similar to many current arguments claiming that marriage laws, as they have existed for some thousands of years, are discriminatory – and though they are admittedly somewhat less absurd than the marriage law complaints, they are no more credible.

If discrimination claims, in general, have had us on the slippery slope for a while, we now appear to be on the very waterslide itself, heading straight into a cesspool of legal tyranny.

The point, of course, is that the service offered by the company was offered to all comers, without discrimination. Well, that is actually not quite true, as a quick perusal of the website reveals that the company in fact discriminates against people who are “married, separated, or dishonest.” Their stated goal is to help clients find partners for long-term relationships – especially marriage – and candidates who either misrepresent themselves, or who are already legally committed, are not considered appropriate matches for the other clients, so they are refused service. This, I say, is a good thing, and an example of the prudent exercise of discrimination – though I wouldn’t rule out a future lawsuit on behalf of either the married or the confessionally dishonest.

However, homosexuals, it appears, are not denied service via policy or practice, and any homosexuals who wanted to subscribe to the service and use it as provided by eHarmony.com would apparently be free to do so – as long as they were not currently married or separated, and did not misrepresent themselves.

The problem, as we well know, is that the service provided by the business is not the service that the homosexuals want, and they think they have the right, under the banner of “discrimination,” to force the business to provide their desired service – with no respect whatsoever for the rights of the business or the business owners to self determination. Unfortunately – and unbelievably – many dim-witted citizens, including far too many sitting judges, are succumbing to this pretzel logic.

One would think that discrimination, in its pejorative sense (and Lord knows how close we’ve come as a culture to losing the knowledge of its meliorative sense), would be understood as making an unfair differentiation between persons in the provision of or pricing of goods or services – which most clearly is not the case here. Instead, what we have is “discrimination” being used as an ill-defined bludgeon to advance the bald self-interest of the accuser, at the expense of justice. What we have is legal violence.

Does anyone think they have the right to sue McDonalds for discrimination against aficionados of Chinese food for their failure to serve Roast Pork Chow Mein? Do I have the right to sue my local supermarket for discrimination because they’ve stopped selling my favorite brand of Greek salad dressing? Can I sue Dunkin Donuts to bring back coconut-covered chocolate donuts? Can someone righteously accuse their local synagogue of discrimination for refusal to preach from the New Testament? If you’re not doing what I want you to do, you’re discriminating against me…WHAT??? Since when do individuals have the right to impose their personal agendas upon the freedoms of others to engage in the activities of their own choosing?

And why are so many people capitulating to this tyrannical nonsense?

BlogCatalog.com is organizing a campaign today, May 15th, to encourage bloggers around the world to help raise awareness of human rights issues by blogging about them. I think it’s a terrific idea, and was more than happy to sign up to join the campaign.

Human rights is a concept that speaks to the need for each of us to acknowledge the common humanity we share with the rest of the race, and to recognize the duties that we all inherently and inalienably have toward each other in the light of the particular dignity we each possess as human beings. Simply put, we are all brothers and sisters with a responsibility to have each other’s backs.

This is a fine sounding concept, but historically, societies have had an awful lot of difficulty living up to such a vision, even those societies that would embrace it conceptually. Someone always ends up getting the short end of the stick- or worse. We witness the injustice that society’s true prophets have always railed against – and it can take diverse forms, from economic exploitation, to limiting access to society’s goods, to slavery, to some even truly grotesque perversions.

In thinking about what kind of post I would write for this campaign, I thought it would be appropriate to look, not in some far-flung gulag halfway around the world, but in my own backyard; at my own society. I decided that I should write about the most grotesque form of injustice and offense against human rights being practiced right in my own hometown.

As I see it, there are basically two ways of subjectively understanding one’s own participation in the commission of human rights violations. The first would be to know it to be criminal. In this scenario, the culprit is entirely cognizant of the unjust nature of the violation he is inflicting upon his victim(s). He knows that what he is doing is wrong, but he does it anyway, because he has a disordered desire of some sort or another that trumps the weak voice of conscience. This may be, and in all likelihood is, a recurring pattern, but the point is that the violator has a bad conscience: true criminality involves a bad conscience, a guilty conscience, the knowledge of wrongdoing (even if the criminal is indifferent about it).

The other understanding is one that I struggle to come up with a good name for. Our criminal justice system calls it insanity – which may be accurate, but if it is, then I fear the world might be full of mostly insane people. It is the stance that calls injustice by the name of righteousness. It’s the approach that permits people to do terrible things to other human beings with a perfectly clear conscience, or at least with a repressed conscience. It involves a denial of the unjust nature of the offense, which is almost always – and perhaps absolutely always – facilitated by dehumanizing the victims. The violator sees the victim as some lesser kind of creature, as something sub-human. This conscience-evading self-delusion is essentially voluntary insanity.

Voluntary insanity can only thrive in a culture of complicity, because most people cannot hang onto insanity for long in the face of reality. Without a network of co-denial supporting a mutual self-delusion, most people are forced into either a (self-acknowledged) criminal choice for evil, or acceptance of the moral good – however reluctantly accepted. The conscience eventually confronts the will, and either it fails or succeeds to compel a moral response. Either way, there is basically full acknowledgement of responsibility on the part of the individual as a moral agent. People just aren’t usually that stupid, except as part of a mob.

Without meaning to downplay the brutality of criminality, it seems to me that the great violations of human rights are generally of the second order – they are carried out in a culture (or sub-culture) of insanity – if that’s the right word, and I’m not sure it is. There is a dehumanizing of the subjected class, who are then seen as means to the ends of the perpetrators. We end up with second-class citizens, with slave classes, with social groups selected for extermination, with classes of human beings whose very humanity is denied. And at the very, very bottom of human degradation, you end up with abortion. If "Human Rights" means anything at all, it has to begin with the right to be human.

There are many reasons abortion is the greatest social evil and violation of human rights in our day, and even a nominally educated hack like me could go on and on in explicating them, but I just want to make what I think is the very obvious point that abortion is such a great human rights crisis in our age precisely because it is so often not recognized as a human rights violation at all.

Now, that fact usually strikes pro-lifers as entirely bizarre. But that is because pro-lifers recognize that children – human beings – are intentionally killed when abortions are performed. If a pro-lifer were to be materially complicit in an abortion, it would be a criminal act (not, of course, according to current criminal law in the US, which happens to be insane, but according to the subjective distinctions I made above between criminality vs. insanity).

But like any great violation of human rights, the abortion machine is driven primarily by insanity, not by a rational criminality. It is utterly dependent for its perpetuation upon widespread complicity in the self-delusional denial of the simple truth that mothers really do go into abortion clinics to have their children killed (and of course that, in most cases, fathers are either materially complicit, or couldn’t care less – and in other cases are coercively responsible for the killing).

They may come to their senses later – many do, in great grief – but the vast majority of people involved in abortions – either directly or through political support – are engaged in the age-old practice of dehumanizing their victims in order to avoid confronting the reality of the evil they are committing. They are insane, if that’s the right word. Despite the rather obvious reality that each one of them was at one time a fetus, they deny with all their might that a fetus is in the same way one of them, one of us; that a human fetus is a human being.

I’m sure there’s a better word for this than insanity, and I wish I could put my finger on it. Hannah Arendt famously called it banality, but she, whatever her intentions, ended up exploring evil more at its roots – exposing how ordinary people can make horrific moral choices without batting an eyelash – whereas I’m simply trying to show how such a mechanism works in our current historical and social context. Nonetheless, Eichmann in Jerusalem just might be the best background reading available for understanding the moral underpinnings of the modern abortion debacle. I should probably mention that Arendt would likely protest my use of the word insanity in this context. I understand that; it is voluntary,I maintain, though that may not convince her of the word’s usefulness here.

I think this insanity factor is not often grasped by pro-lifers. Hence, they tend to project criminal intent (in my usage of the term) where it doesn’t really exist. They find it unfathomable that people involved in abortion don’t know perfectly well what they are doing. That is understandable, and at a certain level they are right (I do not propose that what I call voluntary insanity mitigates moral culpability), but I think they fail to perceive the power of human self-deception. I recall an adage that goes something like: Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence. Here’s a case in point I came across very recently.

Out at UCLA, there is a quarterly called The Advocate published by a small group of student pro-life activists that has put considerable effort into exposing the ugly face of the abortion industry. In particular, they have collected some very damaging information on Planned Parenthood locations in various parts of the country.

They are alleging racism on the part of Planned Parenthood, based on undercover operations that repeatedly demonstrated that the organization was more than willing to take donations from individuals who were expressly requesting their contributions be used to kill black babies, because, they complained, there are too many black babies in the world. There are transcripts and actual audio tapes of phone calls available as links from the site – but they are very creepy; not for the faint of heart.

As much as I admire the spunk of these young defenders of the defenseless, I think they are overstating the case against Planned Parenthood – damning audio tapes notwithstanding. What these kids are not grasping is the insanity factor. Those folks at PP are not accepting donations because they are specifically targeted to kill black children (that would be criminal), they just couldn’t care less, because they don’t acknowledge what is going on in their clinics (that is insanity). These workers might be made temporarily uncomfortable by the wacky telephone caller, but they really just want to collect more money to do what they consider their good work, and it doesn’t dawn on them to honestly consider the morality of how they are going about accomplishing the "social improvements" that give their professional lives meaning. Freedom is a powerful elixir, even when it’s sham facade for violence – just ask the French, who remain the standard bearers of the need to discriminate between liberty and lunacy. The bottom line is that these workers have too much at stake in keeping the moral blinders on, and focusing on the dreadful "benefits." Voluntary insanity.

This, then, is the true face of human rights violators. For every sadistic monster who fills our imaginations with righteous indignation, there is a platoon of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmanns: unremarkable folk living respectable work-a-day lives while wallowing in moral infantilism, oblivious of the evil they perpetrate in the name of social convention- a study in banality and cluelessness. Evil is most insidious when it dons the mantle of righteousness.