Gosnell, Abortion, and Slave Trading

One of the finest pieces yet to emerge about convicted murderer, Dr Gosnell’s House of Abortion Horrors has been published by The Witherspoon Institute.  It has been written by Matthew J. Franck who is Director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute. 

The thing about the Gosnell case is this: you can get outraged over the death of innocent women who died at the hands of Gosnell’s ministrations due to the squalor, filth, and brutality of his surgical interventions.  Plenty of people have.  Or, you could get angry over the purposive and deliberate actions of Gosnell and his staff to murder babies who had emerged from wombs alive (Gosnell “specialised” in late-term abortions).  People have.  But if you then go on to assert–as millions do–there are no problems whatsoever provided those same babies died whilst still in the womb due to Gosnell’s actions, then your conscience has become as dead as one of Gosnell’s victims.
 

Franck, drawing on arguments from Lincoln against slavery, makes abortion politically and morally equivalent to nineteenth century slavery, and abortionists equivalent to slave traders. Firstly, Lincoln’s position on slave trading:

Abraham Lincoln addressed part of his argument to his southern fellow citizens. He was convinced that their own social customs gave evidence of a moral principle against slavery half asleep in their souls:

[Y]ou have amongst you, a sneaking individual, of the class of native tyrants, known as the “slave-dealer.” He watches your necessities, and crawls up to buy your slave, at a speculating price. If you cannot help it, you sell to him; but if you can help it, you drive him from your door. You despise him utterly. You do not recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may rollick freely with the little negroes, but not with the slave-dealer’s children. If you are obliged to deal with him, you try to get through the job without so much as touching him. It is common with you to join hands with the men you meet; but with the slave-dealer you avoid the ceremony—instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact. If he grows rich and retires from business, you still remember him, and still keep up the ban of non-intercourse upon him and his family. Now why is this? You do not so treat the man who deals in corn, cattle or tobacco.

Of course, if the right to own and traffic in slaves was protected by the Constitution—as the Supreme Court was to assert in 1857—then the slave-dealer was doing absolutely necessary work. But Lincoln was right: Decent people instinctively recoiled from contact with someone whose business was the despoliation of others’ human dignity.

Those in the business of despoiling other human beings are contemptible indeed. 

Franck concludes by addressing our own modern “slave-dealers’ lobby”.

In statements issued immediately after the Gosnell verdict, the slave-dealers’ lobby—Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America—reacted as though the real problem with Gosnell is that he preyed on women and endangered their health. To be sure, he did just that. But Gosnell victimized these women as the logical extension of these groups’ moral reasoning and public policy goals, which they have advocated for decades. They have devoted themselves to teaching American women that their unborn children simply don’t count in any moral calculus, and horrors like Gosnell’s clinic are the fruit of their diligent work.

There is no alchemy, no magic spell that can tell us how to distinguish, in terms of their moral claim on us, between the children aborted in Gosnell’s Philadelphia abattoir and the ones who were delivered and then killed. In certain respects, Kermit Gosnell has a right to be the most surprised man in America right now. We, on the other hand, who have not wanted to notice the slave-dealers in our midst, have no such excuse.

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Daily Devotional

May 20

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Republished from the OPC Website

Bible Text:
Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do? —Acts 2:37

Devotional:
This is the beginning of repentance, this is the entrance unto godliness, to be sorry for our sins, and to be wounded with the feeling of our miseries. For so long as men are careless, they cannot take such heed to doctrine as they ought. And for this cause the word of God is compared to a sword, because it fortifies the flesh, that we may be offered to God for a sacrifice.

But there must be added to this pricking in heart readiness to obey. Cain and Judas were pricked in heart, but despair kept them back from submitting themselves unto God. For the mind oppressed with horror can do nothing else but free from God. Therefore we must take a good heart to us, and lift up our mind with this hope of salvation, that we may be ready to addict and give ourselves unto God, and to follow whatever he shall command. —Commentaries

Budgets and Beggars

In New Zealand, national budgets in the parliamentary Westminster tradition are presented annually to the parliament and the people.  We feel compelled to make this rather basic point because many of the US readers may be confused, since in the United States the Federal Government can stagger on for decades it would seem without a budget stipulating spending and revenue.

Budget times in New Zealand have historically been occasionally dramatic.  When the government ran the economy more tightly than an Eastern European sphincter most folk in the country furtively huddled around the radio on Budget night waiting to see if some dramatic announcement would be forthcoming.  Sometimes instantly, whilst we were all supposed to be sleeping, the currency would be devalued twenty percent by legislative fiat.  Or petrol tax went up forty percent.  Fortunes were made or lost overnight. 

Thankfully Eastern European economics and tyranny were tossed out (at least for a time) early in the nineteen eighties, when the IMF was on the verge of declaring New Zealand bankrupt.
  (There are a few political parties determined to return to a command and control economy, such as the Greens and the Mana Party.  For the moment, most New Zealanders regard them as being on the lunatic fringe–thankfully.)  But we digress.  We are much more sane now.  New Zealand has a free floating currency, an independent Reserve Bank, and a much more transparent mode of government.  Take the budget, for example.  It is now a big yawn–deliberately so.  Recent administrations make a point of drip feeding all the juicy bits weeks before to the media and public so that there will be few, if any, surprises.  All in all, this is a much much better system than we once laboured under. 

But one thing never changes.  All the special interest groups approach national budgets with a deep commitment to MMFM, which is a Maori acronym, but down the pub loosely translates to “More Money For Me”.  We have always found this an unseemly sight: hundreds of special interest groups holding begging bowls out to the gummint, pleading for more of other peoples’ money.  Always.  We have never, ever seen a special interest group be allocated taxpayers’ money in a budget, only to refuse it on the grounds that it was too much, or it was way beyond what they actually require, or they are incompetent to administer such a vast sum.  No matter how much money is beneficently bestowed, it is never enough.  The best you can hear is, “It’s a start.  But much, much more is needed.” 

We find this entire spectacle unseemly, but it is an inevitable consequence of the welfare state.  This is not to say, incidentally, that the causes advances by such groups are not worthy, nor that they are addressing real social needs.  It is to say that there is something indictable about a society and system that has such interests beg from the government, which in turn extracts cash compulsorily from citizens to meet the demand.  The ethic of thankfulness and gratitude has disappeared like the moa. 

The New Zealand Government and Its Prime Minister

When the state becomes beneficent, private (non-government) charity begins to die on the vine.  The state becomes so bloated, it resembles Jabba the Hutt.  The sub-text is that the gummint begins to intrude itself into so many social and community affairs that we inexorably inch back towards an Eastern European dystopia.  Another sub-text is that communities come to believe themselves both dependant and helpless.  Another sub-text is the fertile stimulation of envy and grievance.

Public media usually present “winners and loser” lists after the presentation of a national budget.    The Civilian presented his own list of beneficiaries.  Sometimes real life eerily resembles the parody.

Politics

What’s in the Budget?

16/05/2013 at 4:36 pm

The Civilian takes a look at what you’ll find in this year’s Budget.

• $1.7 billion to buy back Mighty River Power after Minister for State Owned Enterprises, Tony Ryall began missing it.

• $1 billion to build roads that go around Hamilton instead of through it.

• $200 million for construction of single unaffordable house.

• $125,000 to (Attorney General) Christopher Finlayson’s ongoing investigation into who framed Roger Rabbit.

• $64 for Treasurer Bill English to get his printer fixed.

• $540 million for Tauranga rebuild.

• $57 to buy all MPs name tags so that everyone will know who they are.

• $65,000 to bolster the Government’s strategic reserve of anti-Australian jokes.

• $800 million to Gore, just to see what happens.

• $6 million for an awareness and policing campaign to ensure mixtures only have proper lollies, and not the ones nobody likes, such as black jellybeans and those chalky things.

• $2 million to buy copies of 2013 Budget for impoverished families.

• $5 million to explore what more the Government could be doing with jigsaw puzzles.

• $240,000 to see if we can get Sam Neill in some more Hollywood movies.

• $20,000 to figure out why a McDonald’s deluxe cheeseburger costs less than a regular one.

• $236,000 for more cows in schools.

• $250 million to make the transformers in the national grid look more like the ones in the movie Transformers.

• $900 million to rename the country “A Yellow Submarine” for one day so that we can all sing “We all live in a yellow submarine.”

• $3 billion to get rid of rivers, so they stop flooding and getting all polluted.

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Of Tape Measures and Biblical Originals

A helpful piece from Justin Taylor:

The Original Text of the Bible

Even Though We Lack the Original Manuscripts

Justin Taylor 1:45 pm CT

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Daily Devotional

May 18

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Republished from the OPC Website

Bible Text:
In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise, —Ephesians 1:13

Devotional:
Paul asserts that the Ephesians were “sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise.” This shows that there is an eternal teacher, by whose agency the promise of our salvation, which otherwise would only strike the air, penetrates into our minds. Similar also is his remark, that the Thessalonians were “chosen by God through sanctification of the Spirit, and belief of truth.” By this connection he briefly suggests that faith itself proceeds only from the Spirit.

John expresses this in plainer terms: “We know that he abideth in us, by the Spirit which he hath given us.” Again, “Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit.” Therefore Christ promised to send to his disciples “the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive,” that they might be capable of attaining heavenly wisdom.
He ascribes to him the peculiar office of suggesting to their minds all the oral instructions which he had given them. For in vain would the light present itself to the blind, unless the Spirit of understanding would open their mental eyes; so that he may be justly called the key with which the treasures of the kingdom are unlocked to us; and his illumination constitutes our mental eyes to behold them.

It is therefore that Paul so highly commends the ministry of the Spirit; because the instructions of preachers would produce no benefit, did not Christ himself, the internal teacher, by his Spirit, draw to him those who were given him by the Father. Therefore, as we have stated, that complete salvation is found in the person of Christ, so, to make us partakers of it, he “baptizes us with the Holy Spirit and with fire,” enlightening us unto the faith of his Gospel, regenerating us so that we become new creatures, and purging us from profane impurities, consecrates us as holy temples to God. —Institutes, III, i, iv