Texas and the Cracked Idols | The American Conservative
Behold, as I looked on social media, those places of inner darkness, there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth, and I rejoiced and I asked, where are your gods now?
As Texas s heartbeat abortion law went into effect this week, the servants of Moloch furiously raged. Women and their male allies (not men, exactly many acolytes in the mystery religions of the ancient world castrated themselves) wailed their tired lamentations, about sharia law, about Christian fascism, about the self-hatred that must drive other women to defend the unborn. Some 60 million human babies have been offered up since Roe confirmed our Punic piety in 1973, passed through the acid fires of syringe and scissors and forceps. One would think that was enough to slake any amount of blood thirst, but the Lone Star State s effective ban of sacrifices after the sixth week of pregnancy elicited the fury and despair of the passionate religious beholding an obscenity.
It was, for abortion activists, a violation of the sacred, a defilement of their high places and casting down of altars. By now you know the thrust of the Texas law, but let me summarize it once again. It bans abortions after the point that an ultrasound can detect the unborn baby s heartbeat, which can come as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, rather than tying protection to some sort of definition of viability for the infant. Our creator endowed us with the right to life and yet millions of children lose their right to life every year because of abortion, Governor Greg Abbott said as he signed the bill this past Wednesday.
Perhaps it is unfair to associate America s cult of reproductive rights with a minor deity of Canaan when an older, greater god would do. Mammon rules the land, and it is in his service that women so eagerly unsex themselves, and turn the safety of the womb into a grave. A woman must, so the argument goes, be able to choose whether her child will live or die because there should be no difference between a man s and a woman s experience or opportunities in the market. If he will, by nature, not be burdened with a pregnancy nor by the most intimate nurture of a newborn life, then she must, by law and technology, be made able to slough off the necessities of biology, the better for both to give themselves to economic production, living sacrifices to Mammon.
From the perspective of the whole war against abortion in America, the victory in this Texas battle is primarily significant for the introduction of an innovative tactic, a tactic essentially having to do with law but misperceived as being of a piece with Mammon the liberal sees his gods everywhere. The legislation permits private parties to file civil lawsuits against people who either intend to or do perform or aid an abortion after a heartbeat has been detected, and success in court entitles the plaintiff to at least $10,000 in damages. While Mammon s servants typically sue the enforcing government officials before restrictions on abortions go into effect, tying the initiatives up in interminable and punishingly expensive
via www.theamericanconservative.com
And now you know the rest of the story. Of course, as a faculty member at a Contemporary Catholic University (TM), I take no view on this Texas law or abortion itself, which I assume, being more Contemporary than Catholic, I am obliged to neutrally support. Or not. I’m not sure. So I will just remain silent on this. Most of the time.