His reply\u00a0to me, for instance,\u00a0is deeply disappointing<\/a>.<\/p>\n My point<\/a>, of course, was not (as he insinuates) to threaten violence, but to point out the folly of his guest poster saying \u201cA life that can be taken is a life that is aware it can be took\u201d. If that\u2019s the case, then killing a sleeping or otherwise unconscious person is not murder.<\/p>\n Frank, I think, knows this. He\u2019s been in prolife circles long enough to be familiar with such elementary points of logic. But he now dances attendance on a new audience of lefty culture warriors who eat up that \u201cprolifers are violent nuts\u201d stuff as readily as many righty culture warriors\u00a0eat up the \u201cObama is a Kenyan Muslim Atheist who is just about to impose atheistic communist shariah on America\u201d rubbish. So he dishes it out via insinuation, just as he chose to dish out his guest blogger\u2019s dimestore eugenics that is also popular with the HuffPo\/MSNBC demographic he now courts. Frank\u2019s choice to trumpet the notion that abortion is the beautiful way God culls the lebensunwertes leben <\/em>and improves the breed is, in some ways, the apotheosis of his trajectory of successive betrayals over the past 30 years. It\u2019s the gospel according to Judas Iscariot and\u00a0means, in plain English,\u00a0\u201cLet us do evil that good may come of it.\u201d It makes the thoroughly pagan argument that, since innocents in the womb (and, by the way, every other human being not killed by man) die naturally, therefore it\u2019s okay for man to appoint himself the Angel of Death and help God by killing innocents:<\/p>\n Evidently the God of nature is much more concerned about ensuring a healthy body for a potential human soul than the destruction of a fetus through miscarriage, because nature is the most prolific abortionist of all.<\/p>\n Our evolving understanding of miscarriage reveals nature is at work using her brand of wisdom to ensure not all conceptions result in live birth, one could argue for the sake of a potential soul. But we also know that nature sometimes fails in her tasks and so we seek to perfect or purge those failings, as we evolve in our own understanding and dominion over nature, to advance humanity\u2019s well being<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Thank you, Dr. Mengele.\u00a0 \u201cInnocents die naturally, so enlightened people can and should make<\/em> them die for the greater good\u201d is a program that has been attempted before.\u00a0 And the reason for stopping the purge of the lebensunwertes leben<\/em> with the unborn is what?\u00a0 Obviously euthanasia and destruction of the weak and chronically sick (as well as other Undesirables)\u00a0fits the agenda too.<\/p>\n This is tragic and nauseating stuff.\u00a0 But it is a weirdly logical outcome of Schaeffer\u2019s ongoing usage (and that is the word) of people throughout his adult life.\u00a0 The one constant theme in Schaeffer\u2019s work is a deeply disturbing eagerness to abort those who have loved him<\/a>, done him good, provided his livelihood and prayed for him as he declares them unfit and evolves himself to a higher and purer breed. He has, with remarkable consistency over his adult life, systematically exploited as family and friends\u2013and then re-exploited as enemies\u2013the people who have been kindest to him: beginning with his own father and mother. God alone knows what his problem is, but it\u2019s sickening and heartbreaking to watch. In this latest betrayal, he has chosen to become, as fellow Orthodox convert Rod Dreher pointed out, \u201cthe left-wing version of the stock character in fundamentalist circles: the supposed former Satanist who got religion and who now goes around peddling ooga-booga stories to gullibles who love a conversion story<\/a>.\u201d Frank Schaeffer is Mike Warnke <\/a>for the MSNBC\/HuffPo crowd, helping them delectate over the horror stories of the Red State Rubes (and, feel really good about their own superior secular pieties) all while he gets to pose as prophet and keep climbing the ladders of his Personal Evolution while aborting everybody he leaves behind as he enters his latest phase. The sole constant in each of his transformations is how much better he is than\u2013and how much contempt he holds for\u2013the people he is leaving behind and how deeply righteous he is for spurning and sneering at them. He has a prophet\u2019s anger, but not a prophet\u2019s love.\u00a0 A prophet stays<\/em> with his people, even when they go into exile, even when they murder him.\u00a0 Frank always and repeatedly leaves\u2013because\u00a0it is always all about Frank.<\/p>\n Even his perpetual mea culpas for the supposedly \u201cpivotal\u201d role he allegedly played in the rise of the religious right and its corruption of American Christianity (a very legitimate thing to protest) have a pornographic quality of Baby Boomer narcissism. His\u00a0 The whole toxic mix of keeping up the now-fading Orthodox schtick (so he can feel deeply spiritual and superior to all those numbskull Catholics and Evangelicals) while increasingly prancing as a post-Christian Emergent for the delectation of the MSNBC\/HuffPo lefties and going on about his Highly Evolved Post-Christian contempt for stupid believers and lying prolifers reminds me of Uncle Screwtape<\/a>:<\/p>\n Sooner or later, however, the real nature of his new friends must become clear to him, and then your tactics must depend on the patient\u2019s intelligence. If he is a big enough fool you can get him to realise the character of the friends only while they are absent; their presence can be made to sweep away all criticism. If this succeeds, he can be induced to live, as I have known many humans live, for quite long periods, two parallel lives; he will not only appear to be, but actually be, a different man in each of the circles he frequents. Failing this, there is a subtler and more entertaining method. He can be made to take a positive pleasure in the perception that the two sides of his life are inconsistent. This is done by exploiting his vanity. He can be taught to enjoy kneeling beside the grocer on Sunday just because he remembers that the grocer could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world which he inhabited on Saturday evening; and contrariwise, to enjoy the bawdy and blasphemy over the coffee with these admirable friends all the more because he is aware of a \u201cdeeper\u201d, \u201cspiritual\u201d world within him which they cannot understand. You see the idea-the worldly friends touch him on one side and the grocer on the other, and he is the complete, balanced, complex man who sees round them all. Thus, while being permanently treacherous to at least two sets of people, he will feel, instead of shame, a continual undercurrent of self-satisfaction. Finally, if all else fails, you can persuade him, in defiance of conscience, to continue the new acquaintance on the ground that he is, in some unspecified way, doing these people \u201cgood\u201d by the mere fact of drinking their cocktails and laughing at their jokes, and that to cease to do so would be \u201cpriggish\u201d, \u201cintolerant\u201d, and (of course) \u201cPuritanical\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In the words of one of Rod\u2019s readers:<\/p>\n It says something about American political life in general (and though not merely, but perhaps still especially, Huffpo style liberalism) that Schaeffer\u2019s personality type engages with his new political community in exactly the same way it engaged with his previous religious communities. Being a person emotionally consumed with exclaiming the rectitude of certain points of liberal orthodoxy satisfies exactly the same psychological necessities as being consumed with evangelical orthodoxy, or Eastern orthodoxy. The only thing he\u2019s good at doing is being a footsoldier, and so he\u2019s made a mercenary\u2019s career out of shopping himself around to different armies.<\/p>\n Lesson: A man cannot serve two masters, but will always end up serving at least one. Choose carefully.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nboasting<\/s> penitential screeds against his past are just one more form of bragging: attacking others but, in the end, always leaving himself untouched as the heroic truthteller, prophet, and saint shaking the dust off his feet in protest against a rabble unworthy of his greatness. They are all\u00a0varying forms of \u201cI thank you, O Lord, that I am not like my crazy family, my nutty mother, or those stupid Evangelicals, or those impure Catholics, or those lying prolifers who believe that abortion is an \u201cabominable crime<\/a>\u201c, or even like a lot of Orthodox. I have a Larger Perspective.\u00a0 I\u00a0have Grown\u00a0and no longer think belief in God or Jesus or the Resurrection matter<\/a>, and I am also rocking this new \u2018abortion is the way to improve the breed\u2019 thing which is really putting me on the cutting edge of\u00a0post-modern Emergent Spirituality with the Rachel Maddow and Arianna Huffington set.\u201d\u00a0 Again and again he aborts somebody he has deemed unfit in order \u201cevolve in his own understanding and dominion, to advance Frank\u2019s<\/s> humanity\u2019s\u00a0well being.\u201d<\/p>\n