Liberals and the Culture of Violence

Liberalism hacks off the branch on which society sits, then blames conservatism for its fall. On smug shows like Hardball, liberals gasp self-righteously about the assassination of abortionist George Tiller and the shooting at the Holocaust Museum.

How -- they ask while glancing furiously at the "right" -- did killing become thinkable in America?

Mother Teresa answered their question over a decade ago at a D.C. prayer breakfast that they snored through: "Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love but to use any violence to get what it wants.…If we accept that the mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?"

The fashionable left presides over a culture of death, using man-made legal parchments to mop up its encircling pools of blood. But the blood never comes out; the stain remains and grows more obvious with time.

What threatens America's future the most is not the transparently rancid extremism of the insane, but the "mainstream" extremism of the rich and powerful. To a Chris Matthews, left-wing extremism is somehow rendered "respectable" by law and recent custom. But reality is impervious to such phony distinctions.

As Abraham Lincoln said of legal slavery and the inexorable patterns of history that ripple from injustice, "every drop of blood drawn with the [slaveholder's] lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword." Do we really think that every drop of blood drawn with the abortionist's scalpel is exempt from the invisible laws of justice? The longer we permit this scourge to continue the more horrible America's fate will be.

That hidden James Von Brunns exist in the hinterlands of America is scary. But what's more chilling is the commonplace legal evil done "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," as C.S. Lewis once put it. Extremists exist not just on the margins of society but in the center of it: the Park Avenue feminist on her third abortion, the charming and "brave" abortionist feted at cocktail parties, the celebrity who pens an anguished memoir about drugging to death an enfeebled and annoying parent.

Around the time James Von Brunn was preparing to shoot up the Holocaust Museum, Barack Obama's extremist mentor was shooting off his mouth about "them Jews." The liberal elite are shocked by the former, yet tolerant of the latter. Jeremiah Wright still sits at their posh dinner parties in Chicago, as do for that matter Muslim activists, whose statements about Israel and the Jews differ from Von Brunn's, if at all, in degree not kind.

Killing the weak and undesirable is the "final solution," said Hitler, but as Chris Matthews and company walk through the Holocaust Museum in shock at such notions they neglect the extent to which their own moral philosophy mirrors his. The culture of death which they excuse and extend is essentially Hitlerite: the "final solution" to an inconvenient pregnancy is abortion; the "final solution" to soaring health care costs is euthanasia; the "final solution" to disease is experimenting on embryos; the "final solution" to disability is prenatal screening, etc., etc.

"Every child a wanted child" is a slogan Hitler himself could have devised. Instead, pro-abortion liberals did, and they have been killing "unwanted" children ever since. They are in no position to lecture "the right" on America's violence.