April 15, 2013
Kermit Gosnell
Not all abortionists behave like Kermit Gosnell. Then again, not all gun owners behave like Adam Lanza. And not all racists behave like Adolf Hitler. And not all egalitarians behave like Mao. Yet the infantile modern-day left/right herd mentality is ever eager to jump in a toboggan and careen down the slippery slope.
But as is the case with all binary political discourse these days, one side seized the details to attack, while the other side avoided the details and tried to deflect the sunlight. Some blamed abortion itself; others blamed a culture of poverty that sent poor women to clinics such as these. Very few mentioned that condoms or morning-after pills could have averted the whole bloody Grand Guignol banquet.
Perched as I am on another planet, I try to take the middle road. On one hand, this case doesn’t say much about an unregulated free market, because Gosnell was making loads of cash”one estimate had it at $15K a day”not only on third-trimester abortions, but on peddling pain medication. On the other, it doesn’t say much for government regulation because state officials ignored nearly two decades’ worth of complaints about the clinic. If government workers can”t be trusted to regulate a private clinic, who but a fool would trust them to clean their own house?
Far be it from me to eagerly stomp on everyone’s toes, but the private and public sectors are both filled with human beings. Therein lies the problem. With rare exceptions, humans can”t be trusted.
Despite the universal human urge to paint everything in moralistic terms, it seems obvious to me that nature is amoral. Just as all societies condemn murder unless they”re murdering people they don”t deem to be human, there’s an almost universal human definition of good and evil:
If it enhances my survival, it’s good. If it harms it, it’s evil.
It’s the application of that definition that becomes insanely subjective. I can”t think of a war in history where the combatants didn’t think they were on the “good” side fighting the “evil” side. What are the odds?
And that’s why political discourse, at least these days, consists of little more than apes flinging feces at one another. It’s a social-status game to prove the other side is morally “evil” rather than factually wrong.
The feminists fatales who run their necks about their “bodies” and their “rights” consistently ignore the presumed rights of the little bodies growing inside them, as well as the rights of the sperm donors without whom those little bodies never could have been created. “Rights,” as well as who gets to define what’s right and wrong, are zero-sum games and always have been.
Same goes for who gets to define what constitutes murder.
