Savage Culture Shift

It appears to me the side of evil is trying to one up each other. Last week New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo rejoiced that the state legislature had passed a bill for abortion up until birth.

Not to be left behind, the next day the Vermont legislature announced a state constitutional amendment to make abortion up until birth a right.

This week Virginia made the news when Governor Ralph Northam said infanticide is a right to privacy issue for the woman.

Earlier today, Andrew Klavan started his podcast talking about the shifting culture. He showed an election map from back in the 70s of Nixon winning reelection by an overwhelming majority; only Massachusetts and DC went for the Democrat. Then he showed a photo of some dope smoking hippies. There weren’t so many of them. Just a small part of the population, really.

Screenshots from Andrew Klavan's program

But now, if you were to ask who won, it would be that small minority. They changed the culture to want free sex without consequences, drugs without stigma, foul language, and a general coarsening of the culture. Klavan even pointed out that his not wearing a tie on his show is a result of their win. It wasn’t about numbers. It was about influencing the culture.

Further into his podcast, he was talking about the abortion bill in Virginia that got a lot of attention yesterday. It didn’t pass at this time (thank you Virginia Republicans). But there is video of the bill's proponent, Democrat Kathy Tran, giving testimony, and being pressed to answer what finally becomes clear: abortion would be accepted for essentially any reason (the mental health of the mother under too much stress) right up to the moment of birth, well beyond viability, and even during labor.

Then, to clarify, the Virginia’s governor did a radio interview. And he certainly did clarify—in a way that is beyond shocking. He calmly describes what would happen in the case of a completed birth in which the mother didn’t want the baby, maybe because of a disability or deformity. The baby would be made comfortable, and then doctors and the mother would discuss what should be done about whether to care for the baby or let it die. Or perhaps actively hasten the death of the baby (i.e., murder). He seemed mystified that there should be any upset about something that he thought should be a decision between the mother and the doctors.

Screenshot from here

The mainstream media did not cover the issue. At all. Fox News, however, did cover it. One part of that referred to a Maris poll (which I referenced the other day) showing that only 15% support unrestricted abortion at any time during pregnancy, while 74% want some kind of restrictions: in cases of rape, incest, life of mother, or first trimester, or possibly up to 20 weeks (when pain is known to be felt).

Here’s the transcript of this two-and-a-half-minute segment of Andrew Klavan:

Very few people support third trimester…. What he was talking about was infanticide. He said the baby could be born, and if they decide--  I’m only laughing because it’s so nuts. If you don’t laugh, you cry. I mean, he’s basically saying you could leave it there to die.

What I’m telling you is it doesn’t matter what the polls say. It doesn’t matter what the polls say. He has moved the Overton Window to where a governor of a state can talk about legalized murder, and people just say fine. [He had mentioned that the 3 main news networks were silent on it.]

I know so many liberals, and they all say the same thing. Whenever I talk about the radicalism in the Democrat party, the liberals all say, “Well, most of my friends don’t agree with that.” It doesn’t matter. It’s not how many people. It’s where they are, and what they do, and how they change the culture.

And whether you speak up. Because, if you’re sitting there going, “Well, I don’t agree with that, but I’m voting for him. I’m voting for him, because, you know, that’s radical, so he won’t get away with that,” then you just made that acceptable. If you vote for a guy like that—in fact if you vote for his party, as far as I’m concerned—you have made that statement acceptable. It is all right, if all the doctors agree, and the mother agrees—and men don’t get a say, because what have they got to do with humanity?—it’s all right to leave that baby to die.

If you vote for that, if that’s acceptable talk to you, if you’re not outraged, you’re part of the movement of the culture in that direction. It does not matter whether you agree or disagree. It doesn’t matter what the polls say. It matters that you allow that atmosphere, like poison, like miasma, to seep into the culture.

And people breathe it in, and the next generation of people sitting here will go, “You know, the majority didn’t want to be killing children, but somehow here we are all killing children. I killed mine, but it was different; I disagreed with it. I thought it was wrong.”

You know, it’s just in the same way I don’t wear a tie. You know, in the old days of course I would’ve been wearing a tie, but the 60s culture won. It’s—  Even I use a lot more foul language than I think is right, because the 60s culture won. The culture is dominant. It dominates everything.

What has the culture been doing? I’m not sure I can tell. I had hoped that the growing evidence that a fetus is a growing human baby, made more and more obvious as technology improves, would persuade more. And it does seem to.

And yet, simultaneously, the small minority of the pro-infanticide crowd gets more brazen.

Back in 2013 there was a Salon piece in which a woman admits that, yes, the growing fetus is a human life. But then add, “So what?” (I wrote about it here.)

There’s a story from several years ago, out of Melbourne, Australia, describing a debate over allowing “after-birth abortion,” or killing of a baby after it is born, if that is the mother’s “choice.”

Even earlier, 2011, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva wrote a piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics, inventing the term “after-birth abortion,” trying to change the emphasis from the Dutch guidelines: “infants with a hopeless prognosis who experience what parents and medical experts deem to be unbearable suffering”, instead proposing “‘after-birth abortion’ rather than ‘euthanasia’ because the best interest of the one who dies is not necessarily the primary criterion for the choice.” In other words, let’s ignore any caring feelings about the infant and shift the emphasis to the mother’s choices about her quality of life.

In 2015, Princeton bioethics professor Peter Singer declared that infanticide wasn’t necessarily wrong; he’d been saying this for years, but in 2015 disability activists started a petition calling for his resignation. Here’s Singer’s logic:

Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living. That doesn’t mean that it is not almost always a terrible thing to do. It is, but that is because most infants are loved and cherished by their parents, and to kill an infant is usually to do a great wrong to its parents.

Sometimes, perhaps because the baby has a serious disability, parents think it better that their newborn infant should die. Many doctors will accept their wishes, to the extent of not giving the baby life-supporting medical treatment. That will often ensure that the baby dies. My view is different from this, only to the extent that if a decision is taken, by the parents and doctors, that it is better that a baby should die, I believe it should be possible to carry out that decision, not only by withholding or withdrawing life support—which can lead to the baby dying slowly from dehydration or from an infection—but also by taking active steps to end the baby’s life swiftly and humanely.

Notice the shift away from acknowledging will to live of the infant (which is evident even in utero). Change the recognition of the baby’s human right to life, and pretend the baby is subhuman, without even a noticeable will to live. Then consider only the convenience or inconvenience to the mother. And then, with the attention shifted there, simply snuff out the life of the baby. Actively. That means to poison, stab, suffocate. To murder.

Yesterday a sitting governor declared, with apparent calm rationality, that killing a baby after it is born ought to be just as acceptable as before it is born, and no mainstream media found that remarkable. Since we know, from ultrasounds, that the baby is just as alive before birth, why should birth make a difference? If you’re not horrified by that, then you need to ask what cultural shift you’ve already succumbed to.

Another good story from the Babylon Bee

At what point does an infant become fully human? Well, that depends, according to these “experts.” On something vague, such as developing a “sense of their own existence over time.” How do you measure that? Do they have to develop language in order for you to measure it? Are you talking months, or years? At what point is a child safe from its parent’s murderous wishes?

The dehumanization that leads to genocide is something we ought to recognize from the last century. If there was an error the Germans made, it was not speaking up, loudly and clearly, to prevent the atrocities from happening.

We must stand up and loudly declare that killing babies is wrong. After birth, or before birth. As a wise elephant once said, “A person’s a person no matter how small.”

Tectonic Shift in Thinking



At Spherical Model, some years ago, I wrote something about Ron Paul in the 2008 election being valuable because he brought something important to the conversation:

He reads the Constitution. More than most he insists that our economic system would function much better if we actually adhered to the Constitution. He would limit taxes to what is permissible in the Constitution. Up to this point, he sounds very much like a lone voice in the freedom zone.

This election cycle it’s totally natural to be reading the Constitution. All candidates must convince primary voters that they are Constitutional scholars and protectors. That wasn’t true last time around. So there has been a shift.

Have you heard of the Overton Window? It’s a way of describing shift in public opinion on any policy. [It’s named for Joseph P. Overton, former VP of the free market think tank Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Glenn Beck wrote a thriller with this title based on the concept of public opinion shift. Take a look at the site for more detailed explanation and examples.] In short, there is a spectrum of reactions to an idea, ranging from unthinkable to becoming policy. The spectrum looks like this:

Unthinkable     Radical        Acceptable     Sensible        Popular        Policy

The “window” is the range of policies that are considered acceptable, rather than extreme at any given time. One election cycle ago it seemed odd to talk about the US Constitution as the basis for economic policy, even within the Republican Party. McCain claimed to be conservative, but in practice he wasn’t against federal intervention in the economy, and wasn’t even strongly supportive of cutting the budget, reducing the deficit, and lowering taxes. (Romney was clearly for those things four years ago and was considered, in some ways, too conservative to be electable.)

I know it seems like we’ve always believed in the Constitution (and some of us always have), but back then it was called extreme to insist that people who make the money should be the ones to decide who spends it. Now, in part thanks to Ron Paul for helping to shift the window, conservative free market economics are the only acceptable position for a GOP presidential candidate. All of them tout free market economics, and some articulate the concepts with words very similar to 2008’s Ron Paul.

In a Wall Street Journal editorial William McGurn wryly credits Obama for the shift. The piece as a whole deserves reading, but here are some excerpts:

Yes, in the Bush years the air was also thick with accusations that the Constitution was being "shredded."…

Where the accusations against Mr. Bush were led by prestigious law faculties and law firms, those against Mr. Obama reflect a more popular hue. Where the indictments of Mr. Bush were largely limited to war policy, those against Mr. Obama's extend broadly to all areas of policy: foreign, economic and social. And where critics of Mr. Bush were obsessed with outcome, the discontent with Mr. Obama has been magnified by the uneasy sense that he is changing the fundamental rules of the game….

We are learning, however, that ordinary Americans who never before heard of the Commerce Clause are perfectly capable of grasping the argument that if the federal government can require a citizen to buy a product in the market, there's nothing he can't be forced to do….

You can say Mr. Obama probably will not like where a greater public familiarity with the Constitution is likely to take us politically. But you can't say the former University of Chicago professor hasn't made it exciting.

The more Obama is out of touch with the “window” of acceptable ideas, which has shifted away from him rather than towards him, the more often he will seem extreme. If the shift is real, that is if Constitutional principles have become widely understood and appreciated, then it is a matter of articulating the principles to currently listening ears.

In terms of the Spherical Model, we have an opportunity to move upward toward freedom, prosperity, and civilization—if we can continue to articulate the philosophy to people who, after four failed years of imposed socialist policies, are ready to consider cutting government and abiding by our Constitution as a normal thing to consider.

The tempest within the GOP primary is evidence of this positive news. Tea partiers aren’t convinced anyone is conservative enough to suit them (maybe because they won’t be satisfied until the window shifts further). But all of the candidates are more conservative by record and word than our last nominee (maybe our last several nominees). Last time there was pressure to downplay conservative philosophy. This time all are practicing how to articulate the conservative message and honing their ability to do so.

At some point we will have a nominee. There will be some who refuse to believe he is good enough. But take heart that, whoever it is will speak a message that resonates with many more people. And the pull will continue to be toward freedom. That’s a good thing.

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*Photo credited to Corbis, from WSJ piece linked above.