Posted on 04/19/2003 9:21:09 PM PDT by MHGinTN
Once in a while, I catch an episode of Law & Order, or Law & Order, SVU. I just happened to catch the L & O episode for Saturday, April 19th. It was one of their most brilliant, not for the actual story depiction or for Fred Thompson’s acting (my former Senator doing such a good job on the show) … the brilliance of the writers and nuance of the production came through at a much deeper level, touching upon a zeitgeist seldom acknowledged at this critical age of our American culture.
The story involved a Priest who murdered a pernicious drug dealer responsible for death and mayhem in the Priest’s parish. At first, the Priest was convinced he was acting on direction from God, received through prayer; not as a discernable voice, but as impulse resulting from the difficult balance between God’s laws, the human legal system, and an imperative to protect others endangered … he felt he was called to protect his Parish members from the drug dealer, and one man in particular who was determined to kill the drug dealer because he’d killed his son. The Priest took the man’s pistol and killed the dealer because the presence of the drug dealer was no longer tolerable. His plea before a jury was a ‘not guilty’ by reason of direction from God; not insanity, but presented as the sane act of a man convinced he acted at God’s direction to protect others. Controversial program to be sure, and L & O is known for such programs, presented in a nuanced way that defies a simplistic acceptance or rejection. But there is a much deeper message to be gleaned from the story, a message imminently important for our age.
Before defining the deeper message, there are two other pieces of the zeitgeist puzzle needed:
1) the murder of abortion doctors and the motive of those doing the deeds;
2) the United States’ liberation of Iraq.
How are these two seemingly disparate themes related to the television program? In a most fundamental way: through the concept of defense of a society and individuals of the society and justification because of a level of endangerment reach that is intolerable. The television episode was fictional, so let’s focus on the real world examples.
The murder of abortion doctors appeared justified to the shooters (although one tried first to claim he meant only to frighten the doctor, not kill him) because by killing the doctors, those serial killers would never kill another baby waiting to be born. Our liberation of Iraq appears justified because the murderous dictator of Iraq could not be stopped by the Iraqi people acting on their own, even though terrorizing of his own people had reach ‘intolerable’ (except to the Arab streets, but that’s grist for another essay). So, where is the deeper meaning to be found? Is there an equivalency? I don’t think there is equivalency, but there is a fundamental issue to be explored in both instances.
Our action to liberate the Iraqi people and end the threat from Saddam’s sponsorship of terrorists works on a level of cultures and the untold numbers of persons freed from proven endangerment, acting because of intolerance for the regime. Murdering one or two abortion doctors does nothing to achieve protection of individual human beings endangered across the whole culture. Killing a few abortion doctors is too precise an application of intolerance, not general enough to be justified. Allow me to reiterate that notion with an additional thought.
On the more fundamental level, it is the culture that will have to defend the right to life of the unborn, as a cultural manifestation of intolerance for the practice of killing the unborn, if the endangerment is to be ended through forceful suppression of the killing. So, why would I raise this connection between a television show episode, murder of abortionists, and the liberation of Iraq?… Because the deeper issue is sourced in the ending of previously tolerated behavior that is imminently endangering to individual human beings within the culture, here and in Iraq.
It is the turnabout--from tolerating behavior that endangers life, to intolerance of the behavior--that we must explore. And quickly, before our culture tolerates cannibalism of individual human life under the guise of enlightened medical practices.
Killing abortion doctors will not end abortion in its horrific reality as a convenience or for expedience. The culture/society must come to be intolerant of such wrong as abortion killing of alive human beings, in order to end the serial killing of babies waiting to be born; the society must come to be intolerant of killing the innocent because the society doesn’t want such wrong within the society.
Outlawing embryonic stem cell research that uses embryos created for experimentation or uses left over embryos from in vitro fertilization will not end the slide toward cannibalism. It is the culture, the society that must become intolerant of dehumanizing and cannibalizing nascent individual human beings.
Because the turnabout from tolerance to intolerance is so radical a paradigm shift, truth must be the vital component and raised to a level forgotten during the rise of liberalism and political correctness and touchy-feely tolerance of ‘alternate life choices’.
As a society, we have every right to stand up and tell our elected representative what we will no longer tolerate. As a society, if we are to do such a thing, the hidden methodologies and hidden motives must be made public for all the citizens to see and judge. Truth of the pain and slaughter that is abortion on demand must be made very public, along with the truth that the babies waiting to be born are individual human beings not non-human blobs of cells, real alive human beings not ‘potential’ human beings. To reject cannibalizing embryonic and fetal human beings, the citizenry must be told the truth of the paradoxes inherent in the misdirection and misinformation offered as ‘truth’ by those focused on exploiting for harvest the earliest age of individual human beings.
If you get the chance to watch the episode of L & O referred to above, notice how the writers nuanced the levels of controversy without having the entire program fall on one side or the other, and how the story raises the fundamental question of whom is protected by the so obviously illegal actions of the Priest, and to whom and at what levels the Priest must answer for his action. And finally, juxtapose the responsibility of the society to be intolerant of the drug dealers against the responsibility of the Priest to follow fundamental dictates from his boss and/or from the laws of society. In the end, if a the society tolerates the evils that men do, instead of being intolerant of same, anarchy and chaos result as more and more are endangered by those being tolerated. It is high time for intolerance of behaviors that kill, maim, and dehumanize, yet are protected through political correctness and 'liberal civility'.
Because the turnabout from tolerance to intolerance is so radical a paradigm shift, truth must be the vital component and raised to a level forgotten during the rise of liberalism and political correctness and touchy-feely tolerance of ‘alternate life choices’. Regarding the exploitation of early individual human life, there is a paradoxical manipulation of collective perception which undergirds the scieitists' efforts. The fundamental axiom of embryology (the science which the exploiters rely upon to do their manipulations of cells and embryos and fetuses and fetal body parts) is individual human life is a continuum that begins at conception. The truth of this axiom is what the scientists base all their following assumptions upon. The individuality of the conceived life must be accepted first in order to test for anomolies of a genetic nature with that continuum begun at conception. To create a clone of another individual, the first truth--that a new individual must be conceived which matches genetically the donor individual--must be accepted ... all experiments and cellular manipulations of nascent life are founded on the first principle, that an individual, unique lifetime begins at conception.
Here's the paradoxical assertion of the scientists: their first principle is that the continuum of an individual life begins at conception (continuum means a coherent whole where interruption of the continuing life will end the continuum), yet they choose to use that continuum truth to negate the earliest age along the continuum, asserting that they are not killing an individual human being, not ending a continuum already begun at conception ... but that is precisely what they are doing!
In the April 2003 issue of Scientific American, page 38, the Skeptic cloumn, Michael Shermer offers 'three laws of cloning', after constructing several strawman arguments designed to ridicule any effort to raise an alarm over the cloning trends. What the glib and insulting Mister Shermer fails to acknowledge is the most fundamental axiom of embryology offered above, and embryology is the science upon which these exploitations of earliest individual human life are all based! In essence, what Mister Shermer seeks to accomplish is tolerance for the cannibalism he favors, but wants to prevent society from having a clear understanding of the parameters of his desired exploitation. Perhaps he realizes that if society becomes aware of the degenerate truth of these exploitations (I would assume cannibalism is still considered degenerate in America), our society will be intolerant of this very endangering wrong and the sleazy liars pushing it as enlightened based on their value system. ... And that's what I mean by truth having to rise to a level of importance heretofore depleted in a too tolerant, too liberalized society.
The scientists wishing to exploit individual human beings are assuming we will tolerate their brand of cannibalism, if they can just get a few 'cures' out there before we come to realize the medical advances are based on cannibalizing individual human beings at the earliest age along their individual continuum of human life. The same demonically inspired tactic served to make abortion on demand a too tolerated 'institution in America', and more than 40 million individual human beings have been slaughtered because of that stealth tolerance and PC defense of same.
The time for INTOLERANCE has arrived. I don't intend to tolerate insulting lies and manipulations of the truth in order that scientists who see nothing wrong with cannibalism may achieve our tacit acceptance of that cannibalism so that the scientists can 'do their thing'. we have build enough nuclear weapons to wipe out civilization--some scientific achievement, eh!)--but it doesn't follow that we should use those weapons or continue building more! Science will soon be able to conceive and raise individual human beings without ever causing a woman to be pregnant, and these same scientists who will achieve these marvels actually accept cannibalism for it utilitarian value in serving their goals. I don't.
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Killing the unborn IS legal. Abortion doctors have a license to kill. Is Scott a doctor?
To soften the prosecutor's character representation, the writers added a scene at the end where the prosecutor tells of the suicide death of a Vietnam injured friend and his complicity in allowing the suicide at the time, and his feelings that he did the right thing in allowing his friend to take his life.
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