Welcome to our depraved new world
Human beings have an amazing ability to rationalize the irrational, justify the unjustifiable and substitute our own beliefs for fact. There is poignancy in the way that we deliberately replace science and empirical evidence with our personal view of what is good, what is efficient, what is compassionate, and what is ethical in any given situation. The problem comes when we have to distinguish between the ever-evolving standards of what society considers beneficial, and what is undeniably true.
And as we have become more sophisticated in our thinking, more tolerant in our acceptance of alternative ways of living and less willing to set limits and draw boundaries on human behavior, we have lost sight of that truth, the one that Jefferson captured like lightning in a bottle with the words “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
We have redefined the meaning of “life” to the point that a woman is now able to veto its existence, we have stretched the bounds of personal liberty beyond anything tenable in a civilized society, and we have turned the pursuit of happiness into a hedonistic farce.
I saw this with the struggle over the fate of Baby Charlie Gard, the 11-monthold who is fighting for his life – and the right to actually live it until its natural end – in a hospital in London. I wrote about Charlie a few weeks ago, when it seemed as if he would be sacrificed at the altar of expediency, dishonestly called “compassion” by the nihilists who believe that judges in courtrooms should determine the moment at which a baby’s breath is stilled.
Miraculously, there was a grass roots uprising, as if human beings had come out of their morally anesthetized state and realized what we were allowing to happen on our watch: The murder, by judicial fiat, of an innocent child. Of course to Americans who see nothing wrong with the concept of allowing a mother to terminate the developing life of her unborn child, the whole Charlie situation seemed much ado about nothing, since they viewed that child and his innate dignity as “nothing.” Some, with their degrees in cyberphilosophy, tried to explain how this “brain-damaged” husk of life (actual words used on my Facebook page) would be better off exiting stage left, so we could get on with the more important business of figuring out what gender our children were going to choose over their breakfast cereal and orange juice.
Yes, you saw what I did there. I made a rather awkward but important detour into that other great example of modern magical thinking. We have had 44 years in the United States pretending that the unborn child is a mass of undistinguished and inanimate cells, and we have become very good at ignoring the human reality growing, stretching, pulsing with life in the womb. The courts and feminists have helped us do it, God love them.
It was just a small step from that point to then look at a child who breathes, albeit with the assistance of machines, and who fights, and who is loved by the people who should matter mosthis parents, and consider him no more than an already-vacated shell that once held the shape and soul of a human being. The most repellent aspect of it all is that we have convinced ourselves that it is the compassionate thing to keep this child from the hope of a cure, however slim it might be.
But that’s what we do, we compassionate Americans! We take that obvious reality of unborn children, and of one that is born and fighting to remain alive, and we disregard the science. These are not living creatures, we say, because to do otherwise would make us barbarians. Civilized people do not kill children, so we redefine when life begins, its relative value, and when it should be ended. That way, we are able to live with ourselves.
And we simply can’t live with ourselves if we force a little boy who thinks he is a little girl to remain in that oppressive male carapace until he’s old enough to really understand the consequences of this gender game. Now, we have respectable doctors and psychologists telling us that we must allow confused 8and 10-year-olds to experience the gender they prefer, putting little boys in tutus and turning tomboys into actual boys. And then, reality and science be damned, we pump them up with hormones so we can redesign them according to their own juvenile desires. Prometheus only stole fire from the gods. We want to steal the future.
It is very sad that we’ve come to a place where unborn children, so clearly and scientifically human, are considered non-viable appendages of unwilling women. It is sadder still that a baby who has the right to fight for what we take for granted – our next breath – is being hurried toward the gates of Heaven.
And it is saddest of all that we are giving children an autonomy they neither want, nor can safely handle, as some perverted form of compassion.
Depraved new world.