Things We Can’t Not Know

A reader writes:

The contrast between the attitude in this post and this one reminds me of your point about the most strident advocates of the culture of death being uncomfortable with doctors participating in executions.

Sort of. To be sure, I do say that we are ill at ease in our enthusiasm for death. But my point was not that we are uncomfortable with doctors participating in executions (and abortions) but that we *insist* that they do. In the case of executions, that’s weird because any butcher would do as well. But we want to make it all sterile and clinical as a way of hiding from ourselves what we are doing.

In the case of abortion, of course, we have a fig leaf in that a doctor is “necessary” to an abortion since it is “surgical”. But that only adds a slightly more plausible layer of deceit onto what we still know to be shameful and evil. The proof of this is the staggering non-success of those periodic campaigns to make abortion socially acceptable such as the “I Had an Abortion” t shirts. Even the Dems shroud the whole transaction in “safe, legal and rare” language, acknowledge the distaste and disgust people instinctively feel. Our culture has tamped down the horror of the thing with euphemisms and a refusal to look at what is done, but it cannot, through any inducements, get any but a few ideological zealots to call it good.

We have eternity in our hearts and we always know, at some level, that human dignity is sacred. There’s a reason Paul says that even those “under the earth” (i.e., the damned) will bend the knee. Even the devil must pay his honors to God. His very lies give homage to the fact that there is a truth to be perverted.