Letters to a Young Progressive: How to Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don't Understand (7 page)

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Authors: Mike S. Adams

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After the visits, SFLA filed two North Carolina Public Records Requests (under N.C.G.S. Section 132) in order to find out if the Planned Parenthood locations had reported the crimes. SFLA obtained and posted online documents showing that the crimes were not reported to authorities in either Charlotte or Winston-Salem—the respective locations of the two clinics where the sting operations occurred.
This is chilling when you stop to think about it. For years, the abortion lobby has claimed that the horror of rape justifies legal abortion. Now, it appears that the profitability of abortion justifies their toleration of rape.
Zach, over the past couple of weeks I have been pleasantly surprised by your willingness to think more deeply about the abortion issue, and to listen to some truths about its supporters. I was pleased to see that you recently “liked” some of my anti-abortion posts on Facebook. The fact that you’ve been willing to consider arguments on this issue from a conservative Christian—and even to take a public stand that will make you unpopular with your progressive professors and fellow students—gives me hope that you may also be open to discussion of some other aspects of “progressive” thought as well. But before we move on from the subject of abortion, I have one more point I want to make about it in my next letter.
LETTER 11
 
Punishing Abortion
 
Dear Zach,
Progressives often try to avoid tough issues by labeling conservatives as “insensitive” or “mean.” (It’s no coincidence that the progressive worldview is behind the current self-esteem movement in public education. It seems much more concerned with producing good feelings than articulating logically defensible positions.) This tendency is often on display when the issue of abortion comes up. You will soon find out that if you decide to speak out against
Roe v. Wade,
you often end up hearing this question: “Do you mean that you would actually seek to incarcerate women who have abortions?”
The question is meant to make you look bad, not to elicit an answer. But you should be prepared with an answer in order to effectively turn the tables on your attacker.
The fact is, even when people see the logic of the argument against abortion, they’re still hesitant about the prospect of outlawing it—because they don’t want to see desperate women thrown into jail.
So first, you might want to ask the following question, which will expose the question-begging nature of their inquiry: “If abortion kills an innocent human being, should it go unpunished?”
But then you need to provide a detailed answer—that is, if your adversary is willing to listen. My suggested response, in a nutshell, is harsh punishment for abortion doctors and a lesser punishment for women who have abortions. There’s a very good legal reason for drawing a distinction between the woman having the abortion and the abortionist performing it, which I will explain below.
Abortion is premeditated murder. In order to convict someone of murder in the first degree, however, the prosecutors must prove more than just premeditation. They must also prove willfulness and deliberation. Finally, they must prove that the defendant’s actions were the proximate cause of death.
Proving first-degree murder would be quite easy in the case of the abortionist. Let’s examine each element of the crime separately, as the prosecution must prove each individual element beyond a reasonable doubt:
1. Premeditation means that the killer consciously reflects upon the desire to kill before actually killing. The law measures such reflection in moments, rather than hours or days. Given that the doctor carefully prepares his instruments and frequently pauses between the individual actions that he must engage in to perform the abortion, proving premeditation should be quite easy.
2. Willfulness means that the killer specifically intended death, not just serious bodily harm. Obviously, abortion is done for the specific purpose of producing death. The doctor knows the unborn baby is alive and that at the end of the procedure he or she will not be. It is his desire to produce death, not injury. There is no real ambiguity concerning intent in the case of abortion. It would be easy for prosecutors to satisfy this element of first-degree murder.
3. Deliberation simply means that one has killed in “a cool state of blood” in the absence of anything the law considers to be provocation. Provocation occurs when the homicide victim did something to cause the deadly attack. A common example is being caught in an act of adultery by a jealous spouse. If one is killed under such circumstances, one is said to have provoked the killing. The killer was not in a cool state of blood and, therefore, did not deliberate. The killing is not excused but instead mitigated to a lesser degree, usually voluntary manslaughter. Obviously, no one can engage in an act of provocation against anyone while still inside the womb. Therefore, it should be easy for prosecutors to establish deliberation on the part of the abortionist.
4. Causation simply involves proving that “but for” the voluntary actions of the accused, the deceased would still be living. This is also very simple in the case of the abortion doctor. A pregnant woman walks in to her appointment at his office. Later the same day, a formerly pregnant woman walks out of his office. Remember that the procedure that ends the pregnancy always stops a beating heart. There is no real question that dismembering the baby is what caused the heart to stop beating and resulted in that baby’s death.
Sustaining a first-degree murder charge against a woman who gets an abortion would be more difficult. She does not perform the procedure so there is, for her, no direct action that results in the death of the baby. In other words, she does not actually commit the offense.
Still, as you will recall from our Trials of the Century course—specifically, from the Manson case—people can be held accountable for acts they themselves do not commit, as long as those acts are a part of a criminal conspiracy.
A criminal conspiracy, however, requires a meeting of the minds.
Zach, the mind of the abortionist and the patient do meet in the sense that they agree on the act of abortion. But they do not fully meet in most cases because the woman rarely knows what the doctor knows—namely, that abortion stops a beating heart and kills a clearly living and obviously human entity. For these reasons, prosecutors would be reticent to charge the patient under a conspiracy theory, and the jury would be unlikely to convict if such a charge came before them. Still, seeking an abortion would clearly be solicitation of a criminal act—a much lesser charge than conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.
If we do overturn
Roe v. Wade,
states would have the right to criminalize abortion and use solicitation statutes to discourage women from seeking abortions in the first place. So I would recommend the following in the case of abortion: 1) a murder prosecution for the doctor, and 2) a criminal solicitation prosecution for the patient.
There is nothing “mean” about punishing abortion. It’s exactly the other way around—we are being mean when we see that abortion is murder and then look the other way in order to impress others and enhance our self-esteem.
LETTER 12
 
The Law of Outliers
 
Zach,
You’ve been willing to take a public stand on the issue of abortion. Let’s move on to a hot-button topic that is getting to be even more likely to cause conservatives to be labeled as “mean” people and “haters”—gay marriage. Gay rights activists want same-sex unions to be legally recognized as marriage, and conservatives want to stick to the traditional definition of that institution. But let’s work our way around to that issue from a preliminary consideration of the reason for and importance of laws in general.
A fundamental understanding of laws differentiates adults from children. Any mature system of justice must make tough choices that place the interests of society as a whole above the interests of individuals. An example of such a choice is the decision to differentiate between the legal defenses of “mistake of law” and “mistake of fact.”
Imagine for a moment that a student picks up another student’s backpack as he is leaving class at the end of a lecture. Before he realizes he has picked up wrong backpack, he is apprehended by the police and charged with petty larceny—that is, taking and carrying away the valuable personal property of another with the intent to permanently deprive the owner of possession.
The student could raise a “mistake of fact” defense. He thought the backpack was his own, so he could not have intended to deprive the true owner of his property.
But imagine that the student tried to raise a “mistake of law” defense. In other words, he admitted he knew that the backpack belonged to another student, but he refused to acknowledge that he knew anything about the crime of larceny. Should the court recognize that as a legitimate legal option?
While courts are willing to accept, with some limitations, the “mistake of fact” defense, they overwhelmingly reject the “mistake of law” defense. The obvious reason for doing so is that such a defense would be subject to widespread fraud and manipulation by guilty defendants. That reason alone provides sufficient justification for the old maxim, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”
But there is an even better reason to reject the “mistake of law” defense. Put simply, it waters down the moral authority of the law to suggest that it should be contingent upon the subjective perceptions or feelings of the individual perpetrator. The law must be greater than ourselves if it is to hold us in check.
Proponents of gay marriage fail utterly to comprehend the idea that laws are made with society, not the individual, in mind. That is why they also fail to grasp the idea that law is predicated upon averages, not outliers. Interestingly, both libertarians and progressives suffer from this lack of understanding.
The government has an interest in recognizing a traditional marriage between a man and a woman, simply because it has an interest in seeing couples reproduce and then care for their young children. While traditional marriage is good for children, gay marriage is not. Any assertion to the contrary requires willful blindness toward the manner in which gay couples typically live—particularly gay males, who are notoriously promiscuous and unfaithful to one another.
Progressives sometimes directly attack the assertion that the government has a compelling interest in promoting marriage as an institution that is good for children. After all, they want the state to raise everyone’s children. Remember “It takes a village”?
But more often they try to undermine the link between marriage and childrearing by pointing to outliers—marriages in which couples choose not to have children or cannot have them because at least one partner happens to be infertile. But this argument only reveals the weakness of the progressive understanding of the law. Put simply, rules that are justified by the average case cannot be undermined by the exceptional case, otherwise known as the outlier. Thus the old maxim, “Hard cases make bad law.”
When the United States Supreme Court first took on a challenge to traditional marriage, there was little difficulty resolving the issue. The case,
Reynolds v. U.S.
(1879), involved a Mormon citizen convicted under a federal law prohibiting bigamy. Some familiarity with the origins of the Mormon religion is helpful in understanding the rationale behind the Court’s decision.
In the nineteenth century, Joseph Smith claimed to have been led (by the angel Moroni) to a set of tablets he would later transcribe into the Book of Mormon. Smith practiced polygamy—marrying over thirty wives in the course of his lifetime—and he established that practice among men subscribing to the Mormon faith. By the time Reynolds was arrested and convicted of bigamy, the Mormon religion was only a few decades old. In contrast, courts had been recognizing marriage as a union between one man and one woman for many centuries.
Clearly, Reynolds was not a victim of religious discrimination since the restriction of marriage to two persons of the opposite sex
predated
the birth of his religion. His legal arguments failed, and the Mormon practice of polygamy died along with his court case. Being good citizens, the Mormon minority conformed to the will of the majority.
The present political battle over gay marriage is not characterized by a serious discussion of the ramifications of abandoning the traditional definition of marriage. Logically, if we allow for gay marriage we must also allow for polygamous and even incestuous marriages. Remember that the argument used to rebut Reynolds’s claim of a right to have multiple wives was that society had long been ordered around a specific and narrow definition of marriage. That argument goes out the window once gay marriage is granted legal recognition.
Imagine for a moment that you are back in the schoolyard as a child in elementary school. It is the first day of a new school year at a new school, and you know none of your classmates. You are named one of two captains in charge of selecting a team to play basketball. If you have any intelligence, you will do your best to pick your tallest classmates, leaving the shorter students to be selected by the opposing captain.

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