On Wednesday, March 6, that palladium of journalistic poise, Yahoo News, ran a story about Crystal Kelley's recent surrogate-abortion-adoption struggle. I was hardly concerned by just another one of the usual, back-alley-educated, pop-illiterate-Progressive (if aptly named) Yahoo stories. Rather, the article's unilateral commentary is what startled me.

With Yahoo News' ideological univocity, nothing is shocking any longer. Between an article linked to on Yahoo the same day entitled "Was Mother Teresa Actually Sort of a Jerk?" and the litany of character assassination pieces they've run over the last weeks on Pope Benedict XVI (pieces with farcical titles akin to "How Evil is the Pope, Quite or Very?"), one should expect the very worst. The media, as the acting unelected fourth branch of our wicked, despotic government, loathes life and liberty and all that was once great about our nation. Plain and simple. Nothing new here.

But once again, the lowbrow news site's pedestrian commentary afforded a frightening peek into the blackened heart of what we used to call, before the dark times, "popular sovereignty." If the writer of a so-called news journal informs some sort of (barely literate) elite class member -- an analogue to a powerful member of a deciding class -- individual readers of the story constitute a mandatorum class of those receiving his heavily freighted dicta. Moreover, they are the class that digests it and makes of it what they will. That's precisely what commentary panels afford a peek at.

In this case, it was a glimpse into the abyss: a peek into the bloodsoaked crucible of befuddled popular opinion in the fifth decade now of the Supreme Court's blessing of the mandated national (so-called) "right to abortion."
Commenter T. Pace commented that "she [Kelley] should have aborted and saved Baby S. from a lifetime of pain, suffering, and humiliation." Along a similar wavelength, Evelyn wrote, "That's a shame a baby has to suffer as she will: brain damage, unable [sic] to walk or talk. In my opinion that's child abuse."

Such endorsements of eugenics were far and away the most common sentiment on the panel, a pathetic, know-nothing's confident consensus. If I had to estimate, 70% of the commenters reflected just such a view. It was ghastly.

Granted, every fifteen comments or so, the board was peppered with a slightly more flippant instance of naked Hitlerianism, like "That's an ulgy [sic] kid," by Doom, or the following by Robert (whose personal icon was a child flipping the bird): "It's [sic] got a finger coming out of its neck. Sorry lifers... sometimes aborting is the best option... the humane option. They shoot horses with 1 broken leg."

Evidently, a large portion of people now believe openly in... killing the crippled. Bear in mind, these "folks" have evidently been educated exclusively by their televisions -- as the improper usage and grammar instances attest -- and so their attempts at language-expression merely echo back a blunter version of what those televisions have been sounding at them. (And ironically, their capacity for cogitation probably ranks dangerously close to that grade of neuronal disuse which they've blithely designated as worthy of nonexistence.)

I hadn't realized just how Hitlerian the TV agenda had grown. But one thing's for sure: this phenomenon doesn't slow down, once it's acquired this momentum. It's coming.

Here's where the rubber meets the road, for our purposes today on AT: commenter Lizzy wrote that "the surrogate had no right to defy the biological parent's [sic] wishes" (before going on to hit a note consonant with the above that "that child is going to have a hard life with all the medical issues she was born with").

Since when does biology (read: both chromosome donors without a view to the perspective of the carrier of the fetus) matter, from the pro-choice camp? The abiding wisdom has placed its argumentative heft in the corporal context: the body of the pregnant mother has always been the mantle of their claim. Clearly, pro-lifers like myself like this story because it demonstrates the pro-abortion side's abject lack of belief in their own argument.

But since other people have already pointed this out, I want to take it a step further: of course no one ever believed that little, in utero humans were not human! It never really mattered. Here's the proof:

In Roe v. Wade, contrary to popular opinion, several limits on abortion were actually set, based on the viability of the fetus -- if a fetus could be shown to be "alive," abortion should be "limited" (although, bafflingly, still legal). But in a little known case called Doe v. Bolton, decided by SCOTUS later the same day as Roe, the Court expunged these limits and the viability test was basically thrown out: abortion was okay for any reason, at any gestational time. The inconsequentiality of fetile viability was solidified in 1992's Casey v. Planned Parenthood, where the Court more or less admitted that, beyond any doubt, technology shows fetuses to be living humans (which had informed the same Court's prime criterion 19 years prior... if only for half a day!). But the "legitimacy of the Court," and the devastated consciences of those who had relied on its errant judgments in Roe and Doe, could not suffer an overturn. That was the main of the reasoning in Casey for failing to overturn: murder legalized to cover tracks and assuage consciences!

The "take away": never trust a Progressive prime criterion for an argument. They don't feel compelled to stick by it when it fails.

Evidence for this is unending. Liberals never believed -- as they professed in the '90's -- that the prefatory clause of the 2nd Amendment meant that only militias were allowed the keeping and bearing of firearms. And so of course when devastating Originalist reasoning debunked that pathetic argument, did the anti-gun nuts fail to withdraw their objections!

"Global warming" became "climate change" -- without the agenda missing a beat -- after the planet was shown to be cooling. These same "environment folks" failed to withdraw their concerns about "fracking" even after it was plainly shown to them that fracking is safe for the environment. Keynesian economics is still championed as fervently as it was before it was amply shown to be doomed to failure.

The point is that the sort of person who calls himself a 21st century Leftist is the sort who -- without respect to facts -- openly attacks the young, the weak, and the disabled. They're not interested in debating matters honestly or fairly, with the winner of the debate taking all.

So why should you be?

When you hear someone glibly giving voice to wickedness -- i.e. "it's a shame that 'ulgy' baby wasn't murdered" -- aren't you a bit appalled at your own heart, calloused by pragmatism? Whether it's hearing Mother Teresa called a "jerk," or some charmed little survivor "ulgy," I propose a schematic of robust civil disobedience coupled with, instead of dialogue, silence. While I love argumentation, and have made a couple of careers out of it, I'm simply not having fun arguing with today's wicked Left over matters of life and death.

In our infanticidal cultural context, I'm confident that fathers no longer ask their sons, "what sort of a man are you?" None of this vileness or despotism would have come to pass if they did. But, as one who still plays for keeps, my self-impositioning of such a question requires that I cease to treat this topic like a casual forensics prompt. It's a matter of life and death. I'm not sure precisely what requirements all this sets on the moral actor, but as sure as I sit here, the Hitlerian eugenics agenda is on the ascendancy (along with all the other trappings of a burgeoning statist agenda). Its proponents are enemies of the common man, the common good, and the Commonwealth. For starters, we must regard them as enemies in the strict sense.

There's nothing for it. Not only the state, but also the culture has gone over to the dark side. Eugenics is coming, and in the name of humanism.