Just when you thought American public life couldn’t get more deranged, the Great Pine Tree Flag Indictment was handed down.
I refer, of course, to the ravings of those who found themselves shocked, shocked that the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, a cherished relic of the American Revolution (well-known to those who watched HBO’s John Adams), was flown at Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s New Jersey beach house. That flag, featuring a green pine tree on a white field, has sometimes been expropriated by fevered MAGA-types and conspiracy theorists with whom no sane or honest person could imagine Justice Alito identifying.
Yet right on Pavlovian cue, the geniuses at the New York Times and in the Senate Democratic caucus connected imaginary dots, smeared Alito as sympathetic to “insurrectionists,” and demanded that he recuse himself from Supreme Court cases involving the madness that was January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol.
All of which reminded me of a scene in Ron Howard’s film, Apollo 13.
There are just a few days before launch and the flight surgeon is fretting that Ken Mattingly, command module pilot on the Apollo 13 prime crew, might have been exposed to measles. So, a NASA administrator and Deke Slayton, chief of the astronaut office, decide to scrub Mattingly from the mission—expected to be the third to land men on the moon—and replace him with the command module pilot from the backup crew, Jack Swigert. Mission commander Jim Lovell, at that point America’s most experienced astronaut, hits the roof. After expostulating at length about the stupidity of breaking up his crew at the last minute, Lovell shouts at Slayton, “And this, Deke…this is flight surgeon horse***t!”
So (absent the flight surgeon) is the attack on Justice Alito.
It is, however, of a piece with the rank dishonesty that has characterized the “pro-choice” movement and its political acolytes for the last half-century or so.
For while Justice Alito’s assailants were putatively in a froth over Supreme Court cases involving the riot at the Capitol in January 2021, anyone who understands the passions of modern American politics will recognize that this bucket of horsefeathers—I’ll be polite—has been dumped on Justice Alito because he was the author of the brilliantly argued Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. There, the Court corrected the fifty-year-old mistake of its predecessors in Roe v. Wade, wherein a “right to abortion” was concocted out of thin air—as even liberal legal scholars conceded in 1973. And in Dobbs, a campaign of mendacity underway since the late 1960s met its constitutional Waterloo.
Lying about abortion has been a hallmark of “pro-choice” politics for decades. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, activists determined to overturn state laws protective of unborn life blatantly lied about the incidence of “back alley” and “coat hanger” abortions, exaggerating those numbers by orders of magnitude (as a repentant perpetrator of those lies, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, later confessed). When the Supreme Court invented a constitutional abortion right in Roe v. Wade, the movement lied about the allegedly “limited” scope of that decision, which, with its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, in fact, legalized abortion across the country at any time in a pregnancy.
As the “pro-choice” movement morphed into a lucrative, multibillion-dollar industry, the lying intensified. An unborn child was “tissue,” and the grisly details of what happens in a “procedure” called “dilation and curettage” were hidden as far from public view as possible. Even the act involved in the “procedure” was euphemized, as frightened young women were asked by abortuary counselors, “Would you like us to restore your period?” And the whole swindle was packaged and defended—as it continues to be today—under the Orwellian label of “reproductive health care,” which would doubtless come as news to the tens of millions who died because of such “care.”
Justice Alito’s majority decision in Dobbs demonstrated clearly and, to my mind, irrefutably that Roe v. Wade was a results-driven exercise in shambolic constitutional interpretation. I suspect the “pro-choice” world, in its lucid moments, understands that full well. In crafting Dobbs, Justice Alito was doing his sworn duty as a jurist and no more than that. Yet one ancillary effect of Dobbs was to falsify the claim that the “pro-choice” movement is the moral heir of the classic civil rights movement, which is one of the biggest lies of all.
That is something the movement can’t handle. So its lies, and those of the politicians beholden to it, become ever more egregious, and their tactics ever more disgraceful.
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Thank you George for telling the truth. After decades in the pro-life movement, I could fill a volume of lies told to me. Hardest to take was the betrayal from RINO Republicans. And yet, most surprising was that with each stabbing in the back I was surprised! Christ warned us to expect as much. Abortion is Satan’s sacrament:
“(The devil) was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” John 8:44
Did not the Civil Rights Act set the stage for the contention that that their rights were derived from the secular state (and not God)?
We read: “As the “pro-choice” movement morphed into a lucrative, multibillion-dollar industry, the lying intensified. An unborn child was “tissue…”
Here, more of the word game as compared to other recent history:
“I know of not a single case where anyone came out of the chambers alive” (Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess on the destructive capacity of Zyklon B gas, 1947) and “It never ever results in live births” (an experienced abortionist on the merits of dissection and extraction, 1981);
“The subjects were forced to undergo death-dealing experiments ‘without receiving anesthetics’” (Dachau freezing experiments, 1942) and “the fetuses are fully alive when we cut their heads off, but anesthetics are definitely unnecessary” (Fetal researcher Dr. Martti Kekomaki, 1980);
“No criticism was raised” (conference of German physicians to the Ravenbrueck death camp sulfanilamide experiments, Berlin, May 1943) and “no one ever raised an eyebrow” (meeting of American pediatricians to an experiment involving beheading of aborted babies, San Francisco, 1973); and
“What should we do with this garbage” (Treblinka, 1942) and “an aborted baby is just garbage” (fetal researcher Dr. Martti Kekomaki, 1980).
In “Mein Kampf” (1925) Adolf Hitler referred to Jews as “a parasite in the body of other peoples”; fifty years later, the year of Roe v. Wade, a radical feminist group branded the unborn as “a parasite within the mother’s body” (an early edition of “Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book By and For Women”).
(From William Brennan, The Abortion Holocaust: Today’s Final Solution [St. Louis: Landmark Press, 1983], Chart 6, and 100-102.)
Rather than even “abortion,” the term “fetal infanticide” has been recommended.
The end goal of the atheist materialist over population alarmist globalist is the objectification of the human person, and thus the denial of the fact that God, The Most Holy And Undivided Blessed Trinity, (See Treaty Of Paris that ended The Revolutionary War) Is The Author of our Inherent Unalienable Rights, not Caesar. We can know through both Faith and reason, we are in the midst of a great spiritual battle, for as Pope Benedict said in his Christmas Address in 2012, “When God Is denied, human Dignity disappears “.
And when human Dignity disappears, anything can become permissible , including the destruction of an innocent beloved son or daughter residing in their mother’s womb.
Woe to us🙏🌹💕
I have the flag of the Vendee hanging from a tree upon entry into my driveway. People ask what it is and then I have an opportunity to tell them about the anti-Catholic massacre by the secular Statists of the French Revolution. I then remind that our government is headed in the same direction. Just for example:
1. The pro-life father whose family was terrorized in the middle of the night by the Stasi of the FBI violating every constitutional right he had.
2. Think of the “Garland 9” arrested and imprisoned for protesting the murder of unborn and defenseless human persons.
3. The FBI surveillance of Catholics in the Catholic diocese of Richmond by using insider informants.
Good for you & God bless you Deacon Edward.
I’ve seen that flag locally where we live.
Do you know when an abortion advocate is lying? Same as most Democrats: their lips are moving.🤣
Perhaps I’m being pedantic, but I wish people would use the term “preborn” instead of “unborn.” If a linguist can tell me why the latter term is preferable, I’m willing to listen; however, the term “preborn” seems closer to the reality of the situation than “unborn.”
Excellent illustrations of parallel insanity and the retention of Weigel’s sneer quotes around “pro-choice,” the most preposterous lie in history. We can no more advocate reinventing what already exists as a deprivation than we can advocate rationally as pro-eyeball or pro-earlobe.
My comment should have been placed as a follow up to the comment of Peter D. Beaulieu above noting parallel sophistries.
Excellent article, Mr. Weigel. The mental balance issues of the current White House occupant appear to be percolating throughout most of his ‘following’ as well.