Why I won’t call Wolf ‘governor’

This week, Christians celebrated the birth of the Christ child, the alpha and omega of our faith. Whether you truly believe in the significance of that infant, or simply appreciate the transcendent beauty of what you might call a myth, the week before Christmas is filled with all kinds of light.

The star that guided the wise men to Bethlehem was light.

The halos above Jesus, his mother and father, were light. His existence cut through the dark night of many errant souls.

It was not, then, lost on me that what Gov. Tom Wolf did in vetoing a bill that would have banned certain forms of abortion and treated the unborn child as worthy of greater consideration was a sick sort of irony.

The week that Christ is born, our governor uses his pen to deny that right to other developing children.

You might stop reading at this point, disgusted that I would use this most festive and glorious of occasions to argue against such a highly political thing as abortion.

If you do, I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year and apologize for ruining your celebrations with a dose of brutal reality.

If you persist in reading, you will not find any great surprises, because regulars of this column know how I feel about the wanton destruction of the child in utero.

What made me particularly angry this week was the fact that Tom Wolf chose to mark Christmas by blotting out the light and giving women the nicest of all presents: The right to dismember their children, if they chose, because anything else would be …what did he call it? ... “a vile assault on women’s ability to make their own decisions about their own health care.”

I love the word “vile.” It conveys such feeling, in those four letters.

You know that it denotes something toxic, repellant, dark.

That’s what I think of Gov. Wolf this week, the Sweeney Todd of Harrisburg, who refuses to see the unborn child as an entity of value beyond the value given to her by the mother.

It is such a random thing, this desire to give deference to the mother who might wake up one morning and decide that she can’t emotionally deal with bearing a child who was the product of rape, or who might not be perfect (God forbid she might have Downs) or who will keep her from fulfilling her dreams of being on Law Review.

You might scoff at the idea that abortions would be available in those circumstances, well into the third trimester.

Well, a case called Doe v. Bolton which was decided the same day as Roe v. Wade, held that the “mental health” of the mother was a factor legislators should consider when drafting abortion statutes.

Some “choice” advocates have argued that a woman who threatens suicide if forced to give birth should be able to have the procedure because her “health” is threatened, with health being defined as sanity.

States have fought back against these whimsical horrors.

Pennsylvania has tried to do so numerous times, tightening the avenues through which a woman can destroy the life within her body (which is not the same thing as “her body”).

To be honest, it’s hard for me to understand how any compassionate human being could believe that the vivisection of a fetus that is less than a month, a week, a moment from being born is anything less than murder.

But the thing that truly angers me about what happened this week with the veto of SB3 is that Tom Wolf, who I will never again honor with the title “governor,” chose to make his political statement during this holy period.

I’m not saying religion should determine the scope and nature of civil law.

What I am saying is that Wolf’s decision to show such rank disrespect for the prolife members of his constituency by vetoing the bill on the eve of the single most important birth in history (because Jesus was also a political figure) is, to use his own language, a “vile assault” on human decency.