Leftists are winning the culture war, the war on western
civilization, because rootless politicians have shown themselves unwilling to
enter the lists and do battle with the new morality.
For this reason, American culture is being redefined –
reinvented, as the leftists would have it – by social anarchists with knives in
their brains. It has become fashionable among New York leftist politicians to
wink at, and even to publicly celebrate, infanticide. No assault on traditional
sensibilities, it would seem, is beyond the pale.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s notion that third trimester
abortion is too close to infanticide to be tolerated by men and women of
conscience is now regarded as embarrassingly quaint by New York’s smart set, among whom are Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, not his
birth name.
Moynihan was a sociologist, the author of “The Moynihan Report,” a professor at Harvard University, a top adviser to President Nixon, and
a four-term U.S. Senator representing New York. He was also a proud liberal.
Today, it is very nearly a philological sin to call the new moralists “liberal”
in the sense in which liberalism had been embraced by Moynihan or, here in
Connecticut, by such prominent governors as Abraham Ribicoff and Ella Grasso.
In Europe, the
moral deracination – which, of course, marches under the banner of moral
rectitude – has proceeded at an alarming rate. The Netherlands in 2005 stole a march on other morally
backward-looking states by becoming the first country to decriminalize
euthanasia for infants with presumed “hopeless prognosis and
intractable pain. “ Nine
years later, Belgium amended its 2002 Euthanasia Act to extend the
rights of euthanasia to minors.
People living in
the United Sates have always fancied that, though conjoined historically to
Europe by history and ties of affection, there was an ocean separating us.
Modern communications have removed this cultural prophylactic. Historical
differences also have served as a barrier to disruptive ideas that in Europe
plunged France into a bloody revolution centered on fatal utopian ideas.
Under Hitler,
Mussolini and Stalin – socialists all – fascism and the totalist state were necessary
and indispensable political instruments in creating what all three thought of
as “the new man,” a mechanist free at last of a western culture that had
imprisoned humankind in religious and cultural chains. In a future shaped by mechanistic
ideology, politics and brute force, the very nature of man would be
irreversibly altered. This is, as Roger Scruton points out in his brief and
indispensable history of the conservative movement in the western world, “Conservativism:
an Invitation to the Great Tradition,” the original sin of socialism, the absurd notion that the world may
be made over anew by a transcendent state. For Mussolini, the fascist
administrative state was a secular god clothed in omnipotence and omnipresence.
“Everything in the state; nothing outside the state; nothing above the state” –
such was the fascist definition of social bliss.
History, tradition,
subsidiary political organizations such as family and church, a
constitutional state, a media determined to declare the truth at all costs,
modesty in politics, the good manners of polite society, respect for women,
personal honor, the protections a state holds out to “the least among us” -- the
infirm, the aged, the poor, victims of unfettered abortion – all these
blessings were, in effect, walls and barriers that prevented a false god, the
omnipotent and omnipresent state, from clawing away from us our God-given rights
AND responsibilities with its mechanical, inhuman talons.
U.S. Senator Dick
Blumenthal, for two decades Connecticut’s Attorney General regulator-in-chief,
regards ANY limitation of abortion, however practical or reasonable, as
proceeding from immoral premises, and he continues to insist falsely that
regulations concerning third trimester abortion deprive women of a right to unfettered
abortion. Limiting abortion to the first two trimesters of a pregnancy does not
remove a presumed right to abortion; it simply designates the time frame in
which an abortion may be legally appropriate.
At the end of May,
Lamont and Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz sent a
missive to women who
own businesses in Alabama, Georgia and
Missouri pronouncing themselves “appalled
at… actions that erode the ability of women to make informed decisions about
their health and bodies” and inviting women who own businesses in such states “to
relocate your operations to a state that supports the rights of women and whose
actions and laws are unwavering in support of tolerance and inclusivity.” The
carefully constructed sales pitch does not once mention the word “abortion.”
Indeed, any discussion of unregulated abortion on demand, at any time
for any reason, is delicately dropped from the polite conversations of the political
new moralists. But the euphemisms – “informed decisions” about “health and
bodies” – serve to cinch the point without discomforting women, also concerned
about their health and the bodies of their unborn children, whose birth
decisions may have been informed by the prevalence of ultra-sound images that
show late term fetuses bearing a striking resemblance to newly born children,
Moynihan’s enduring point.
The new moralists have not yet raised abortion to the level of a new
secular sacrament, but the Orwellian letter from Connecticut’s governor and
lieutenant governor suggest that the state’s discarded motto “Still
Revolutionary” may in the near future be replaced by a new sales pitch to
states considering relocation – “Connecticut: The Abortion State.”
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