Satanic baby-killers.

News item: “Columbus Planned Parenthood clinic vandalized”

Vandalism at Planned Parenthood’s East Columbus Surgical Center is an example of the alarming increase “in vitriolic, hateful rhetoric” over reproduction rights, the organization said.

Someone splashed red paint on the front door and painted “SATAN DEN OF BABY KILLERS GOD SEE ALLLL (sic) Mark 9:14” on the front of the center at 3255 E. Main St. sometime overnight Sunday.

Please open your copies of Mere Christianity and read along with me as C.S. Lewis explains the corrosive rot festering in the center of American evangelicalism:

The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?

If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

This is how it works. The process begins with “the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible” and it accelerates downhill, leading to fever-dreams of the worst-possible “bad as possible” that we can imagine.

And ultimately, that worst-possible bad-as-possible always takes the same form: Satanic baby-killers.