Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Ghouls

By Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

By now most of you have seen the video sting of Deborah Nucatola, a high placed operative in Planned Parenthood, discussing PP’s brisk trade in fetal body parts. If you haven’t, the video is embedded below.

What will it take before that which is self-evident is treated as self-evident?

That video perfectly captures the insolence of our secularist elites. The fact that she could discuss the sale and distribution of livers, hearts, and baby heads, and do it over wine and salad, has left everyone with a functioning conscience aghast. She looks like a nice lady, and Kermit Gosnell looked like a creepy abortion doctor, and so it just goes to show. The whole thing is vile. The face of evil looks out at America from the mirror — but we have not yet recognized it.

C.S. Lewis described modern evil in this way:

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of ‘Admin.’ The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices” (Screwtape, Preface).

Watch just a few minutes of that video, and ask yourself if the description above applies to Planned Parenthod. To ask the question is to answer it.

That said, here are just a few thoughts and suggestions:

1. Do whatever you can to make that video show up in every Facebook feed in the world.

2. Thank the Center for Medical Progress for capturing the footage. This was well done, and is one of the most potent things that pro-lifers have ever done.

3. Our nation has tried to muddle through the abortion issue by means of a willful suppression of imagination. This video cuts through all of that. Livers. Hearts. Heads.
But our natural response is a feeling, and feelings pass. One of the principles of war is pursuit. We must want this feeling to be codified in the public imagination. Planned Parenthood is an organization of ghouls with a taste for salad and wine. And money. So we should press the point so that every elected official we know of comes to the unalterable conviction that any vote to fund Planned Parenthood ever, under any conditions, is a toxic vote.

4. Embrace their inconsistency. Lean into it. Press it. This is because our nation is profoundly schizophrenic on this issue, and their inconsistency must be pressed hard, especially now. In other words, everyone is outraged because the body parts were sold to traffickers, instead of being thrown into the dumpster. Got that? Our nation wants to retain its self-respect on this issue through arbitrary legalisms. But surely the heart of the crime is the murder itself, and not the disposal of the body?

5. When the pope denounces free markets, he is talking through his mitre. Capitalism as gift is the work of the Holy Spirit. But like all gifts, when it is exalted into the place of the Giver and turned into an idol, it becomes something else entirely. Capitalism as ideology, capitalism as god, commodifies absolutely everything in order that it may devour. Merchants without Jesus are terrifying. What won’t they buy or sell? “And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; For no man buyeth their merchandise any more: The merchandise of gold, and silver . . . and wine, and oil . . . and slaves, and souls of men” (Rev. 18:11–13).

6. Now would be a good time for a bunch of people to get down off their high horse on any matters concerning the Confederate battle flag. If you voted for Obama (twice), the most pro-abort president we have ever had, a man who is an ardent supporter of Planned Parenthood, an organization that we now see practices (illegal) partial birth abortions, which preserve more marketable pieces, an organization which chops babies into pieces and then sells them off for ready money, then you are the problem. You want to do all this feeling morally superior to Robert E. Lee? I am not defending the sin of any past generations, but it seems to me that moralistic fury from this generation is more than a little bit out of place.

7. The way out is repentance. The only way out is to turn from sin, and turn to Jesus Christ. America needs to take a lesson from what the Lord said to another nation with a heart of stone.
“Have ye forgotten the wickedness of your fathers, and the wickedness of the kings of Judah, and the wickedness of their wives, and your own wickedness, and the wickedness of your wives, which they have committed in the land of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem? They are not humbled even unto this day, neither have they feared, nor walked in my law, nor in my statutes, that I set before you and before your fathers” (Jer. 44:9–10).