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I Will Pray for Her, But I Will Not Mourn for Ruth Bader Ginsburg
As I woke up Friday morning, I turned on Fox News only to see Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s casket being carried up the steps of the Capitol, there to lie in state for the next few days. The Fox anchor was droning on about the “iconic” justice who, I was told, was a person of great importance. So have things gone in the few days since Ginsburg shuffled off this mortal coil. One could be forgiven for thinking some great saint rested in that oblong box. But no, the “saint” is better described as a princess of darkest who was responsible for the murder of millions of babies resting innocently in their mother’s womb.
To put it in the starkest reality, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a stone-cold killer. There is exactly nothing in Ginsburg’s legal career that qualifies her for the moniker “iconic.” “Butcher” is more precise. Along with her allies, Ginsburg pushed the unlimited expansion of abortion, marking her as one of the most enthusiastic mass murderers of the truly defenseless. And I will be damned if I going to mourn her death or shower her with accolades.
As a Roman Catholic, I am required to pray for the dead. It is one of the spiritual acts of mercy. So last night I offered up a decade of the Rosary for the repose of Ginsburg’s soul. I am not, however, required to feel a sense of sadness over Ginsburg’s expiry, any more than over the deaths of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Chairman Mao. Indeed, statistically, Ginsburg puts these historical mass murderers to shame. Since 1973, the year Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton were decided, more lives have been stolen by abortionists than by any of these genocidal thugs, with the possible exception of Mao (although as abortions continue apace in the United States the baby killings will soon exceed even the number of Mao’s victims of genocide).
So, after watching the “All Heil Ginsburg” show for about two minutes, I shut off the tube. The praises heaped on a ruthless killer were just too much to bear. Each plaudit brought to mind the words of Isaiah: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” Isaiah 5:20. Ginsburg”s “thinking” falls right into the prophets warning that perdition is coming for those who trip and fall down the nihilist’s mountain. Woe to those who promote infanticide.
To truly appreciate Ginsburg’s genocidal philosophy consider her reaction to partial birth abortion as described by Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.
Let’s look at the evidence that Justice Ginsburg heard during that particular case.
The court recited an abortion doctor’s clinical description of the partial-birth abortion procedure. Then it went on to quote a nurse who happened to witness the procedure: “The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out, like a startled reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he’s going to fall. The doctor opened the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby went completely limp.”
One wonders whether Justice Ginsburg flinched, just a little, when she heard the description of the baby flinching as the abortionist stabbed him in the head. Might it have been possible to detect even the slightest hint of a startled reaction on her features as the savagery of the procedure was described to her in its full horrific goriness? One would like to think so, even though she was still ready to advocate that such barbarism should continue, protected by the law.
And yet, since she knew what partial-birth abortion entailed, her support for it is sickening, almost beyond comprehension. It beggars belief that anyone can advocate for such horrific treatment of innocent human persons. Under this procedure, the cervix of the woman is dilated and the whole of the child is extracted except for the head. This means that the child is not yet in law born, because not fully extracted from the mother’s womb, and that the deliberate killing of the child, which then takes place, is not murder in law. This is what Justice Ginsburg was willing to advocate. In her judgment defending this butchery, she employed the phrases “tearing a fetus apart” and “ripping off its limbs”, in a dispassionate way, as coldly as Josef Mengele, the Butcher of Auschwitz, might have spoken of his victims. Nor is the comparison with the Nazis inappropriate. When any society becomes desensitized to the extermination of those deemed to be untermenschen, it ipso facto becomes an inhuman society. Unborn children are every bit as human as those whom the Nazis exterminated in Auschwitz and every bit as innocent.
The Catholic Church requires that sinners in the confessional list their sins specifically. It will not do to describe sins in vague terms like “I am prideful,” or “greedy,” or “selfish.” Each sin must be detailed. The penance given by the priest must also fit the individual sins of the person confessing. Ginsburg’s sins are legion and, while I do not know how God will treat the late justice (a word that scarcely comports with the magnitude of Ginsburg’s baby-killing numbers), I suspect that if she repents she’ll be required not only to confront each murdered child and plead with them for mercy, she’ll also need to suffer the pains of her individual victims. Justice is an element of mercy, which all the saved will be required to satisfy, including this “iconic” hero of the baby-killing industry.
Now, to be sure, neither I nor anyone else can say with certainty that Ginsburg is now shrieking in despair in a hell she created for herself. But it takes a thick rug to hope for her salvation.
I realize this may sound uncharitable, but I would suggest it also fits within the demands of truth and proportionality: the punishment must fit Ginsburg’s crimes. I will pray for her; it is my duty to accept the wounds inflicted by praying on my knees, which I must if I hope for mercy for myself. But it is a daunting task.
So God rest her soul. And may God also require she satisfy the demands of justice.
Published in Law
It’s funny because I was thinking of using this as an example before you commented.
As an ancient carthaginian of his social standing, Hannibal Barca almost certainly participation in the holocaust of innocent children to malevolent phoenician deities like Baal and Moloch. If however I wrote a book entitled “Hannibal: heathen child murderer” it would be fatuous nonsense for the same reason that the 1619 project is fatuous nonsense.
Most people aren’t great social reformers or moral visionaries. Some people are notable for fighting moral reforms, but many more are notable for their own accomplishments in an imperfect world.
That doesn’t mean those accomplishments are even positive. I don’t want Ginsberg’s judicial philosophy to prevail any more than I wish Hannibal had succeeded in conquering Italy. But it’s those things that made them remarkable, as opposed to bog standard for their time and social circle, on which they should be judged.
There should at least be a small statue near one of the McDonald’s locations here.
Morning Dennis,
Concerning RBG and abortion, I am not sure I understand your position. You say abortion is our modern day equivalent of slavery, if I have understood your position. Many/most of the founders saw that slavery was an evil, and that this evil was unfortunately knotted into founding a coalition of colonies into a country. I think many hoped that slavery would fade away. A difference I want to make concerning abortion is that abortion an example of the destructive hyper individualism of modern enlightenment. The argument supporting abortion sets out to strip the fetus of value, it is just a bunk of cells, slaves were never, in any culture, thought to be worthless.
Your comment suggesting that you would compare abortion to child sacrifice is also missing the true difference. Child and human sacrifice have been part of some cultures often when those cultures are under duress, but these sacrifices were always part of what was thought to be a sacred action, not just the discarding of unwanted humans. Abortion is part of the denial of the concept that there is anything sacred. One could say that her views have been captured by a modern ideology and she can be forgiven for being blinded by an ideology common to many. I am not sure we want to go easy on folks who follow a common ideology and use their persuasive skills to support evil acts. We could confess our own capacity to do evil while noting that there is much evil done in the name of ideologies.
This may just be my own rationalization, but I think that an ideology that allows one to do evil to a large group of individuals, and gives support for others to do the same is worse than the acts that individuals do evil in light of that ideology. For example, person who turns in his neighbor to the government because his neighbor said something against the government is just a fallen human who could be acting out of fear or selfishness, where as the theorists who create and support the ideology encouraging the turning in of neighbors for political power are encouraging evil in others, and I think this is much worse.
I’m convinced that the callousness that many people have about abortion—which you described in your post by reminding us that the justices are well aware of what abortion is—is due to those people having had personal experiences with abortion themselves. Either directly, or maybe indirectly through others that they are close to. These experiences make them shut their minds to it to protect themselves from the guilt it would bring.
That description you provided would literally be able to drive a normal person insane with guilt if they had caused that. This denial is a powerful force lurking below the surface of the abortion issue in this country. I think it’s what gives abortion proponents most of their zeal and power.
I certainly do think that hypocrisy is a virtue, in that without it we as fallen beings would have no ideals at all. I’m immensely grateful that the founders thought better than they lived.
But in a much smaller way I’m also happy to believe that Ginsberg lived better than she thought. I doubt she could have performed an abortion herself.
I don’t think I agree with you that theorists are more responsible than those who act out their theories. Ultimately people are responsible for their own actions. Aristotle deserves some blame for originating the idea of slavery as part of natural law but not as much as those who held thousands in bondage, whether or not they wrote against it. Marx was a sonofabitch but not in the same circle of hell as Lenin or Stalin.
As for the child sacrifice comparison, I’ll continue to defend the analogy to abortion. Modern progressives do regard abortion as a sacrament.
And I think you’re wrong to idealize premodern cultures. The carthaginians themselves understood their religion as a form of black magic. And before the christian revolution, of which the liberal enlightenment was just another cycle, clumps of cells comprising entire adult human beings were considered worthless. Roman slavery was less harsh than American slavery because the Romans felt no need to dehumanize their slaves because they had no concept of intrinsic human worth, only relative status.
It’s not enlightenment individualism that is responsible for abortion but post enlightenment scientism. Lockean liberalism views the individual as the seat of rights and dignity. Darwinist see the individual as an subject for experiments designed to change human nature. Just as the communists sacrificed millions to create the new Soviet man, progressives sacrifice millions to create the new gender-egalitarian person. Just like class differences and economic self interest the social consequences of sexual difference are intrinsic to human nature and can only be erased by ignoring human rights. Individualism is the cure not the disease.
Dennis,
Thank you for your response, I hope we can have an exchange of ideas.
Concerning RBG, your suggestion that she lived better than she thought is good advice. I do not know her heart, and her friendship with Scalia is evidence of a decent person.
The area of theorist versus behavior is dicey. If one is old enough, you can find a song to make your case, my choice is Steppenwolf’s “the Pusher”
“Gddamn the pusher”, says the song. To follow this analogy, the pusher doesn’t put the needle in your arm, he doesn’t steal from your family and friends, he doesn’t make you take your children to a drug house, but he has introduced you to a temptation that you cannot resist. Relying on my life experience, there are folks who don’t get hooked and some who break the grip of dope, but there are those who loose their souls and cannot break the grip once they are hooked. So are the theorists as evil as Lenin, I am torn, is Marx the Iago of the modern world? I am not sure I can make an argument that condemns the theorists as easily as I could condemn Lenin.
Abortion is the sacrament of feminism, we have heard that for a while. Well we could say that abortion is like baptism in that they are a public presentation of a belief or even a commitment. This does not make abortion a sacred act or an act acknowledging a duty to sacred aspects of a culture. Abortion is more like a Heidelberg scar; the difference is that to make it visible, one must make one’s abortion public by proclamation. All cultures from the most primitive contain the concept of the sacred. Modern life has destroyed this understanding, that there are transcend parts of reality which are so pure that we must act so that we do not contaminate that which is sacred. The sacred is beyond rational understanding, it is, it is a given.
Catch up later.
All cultures have sacred things because that kind of reverence is part of human nature. The question that separates barbarisn from civilization is where the human person stands in relation to the sacred. The post-1960s west, something more specific than and distinct from modernity per se, has only removed christian ideas of the sanctified human person to make room for pre-Christian notions of the sacred earth and sacred feminine. It’s hard to recognize what’s developing around us as a culture because of the speed at which it has developed out of the chaos but it bears all the markers.
In my view Christians and classical liberals are united in wanting to reorient the human need for sacred things away from their neo-pagan objects and back toward the human person. Attempts to drive a wedge between the two by blaming abortion on capitalism, “throw away culture,” or soulless modernity are, I believe, misguided.
Afternoon Dennis,
Following my claim, Bob Dylan, no not Dylan Thomas, “You gotta serve somebody”
“It might be the Devil, it might be the Lord”. I was going to the Univ of Cincinnati during the time that abortion was being leagalized in some states. One couple I knew went to NY, where it was legal. At that time, I don’t think we thought about this in terms of cultural change. The debate was around, does a woman have total control of her body, when do we consider life to begin, can men be part of the debate. My college friends and I had many debates, but we did not engage the issue as a fundamentally moral choice, it was a rights choice. My view is that man and especially Western man has made an idol of rights, and this idolatry is the fruit of our making god of ourselves. I think man has always wanted to supplant God, but in a secular, rational Western culture, he is given the freedom to push that further than he could in a tribe. The strength of tribal life is that obligations are clear, specified and iron clad. In that sense everyone knows what they owe others, and what is owed to them. As tribes were eclipsed by states, empires, nations, the network of obligations became blurred, in Roman times one could keep one’s belief in one’s own god, but you also had to acknowledge and accept Roman gods.
To return to RBG, I think she recognized that the Roe decision was divisive and she said that the court should stay out of those isssues that cause great cultural change. Of course when SSM was on the line she did not hesitate. I don’t think she was thinking that the court must lead the backwards people into the future, I think that she and the judges who supported Roe were just trying to make uniform the various state laws.