I finally found a reason to applaud Glenn Beck when he decided to suspend someone called Tomi Lahren from The Blaze.
Okay, I know who she is. Though I’m not sure any of us really need to.
Lahren is another overnight internet sensation in a world of conservative punditry that increasingly craves the young, the blonde and the beautiful to massage the message. At 24, Lahren apparently has learned everything she needs to and knows better than anyone twice her age so we should all just shut up as she gets on with her endless monologues.
You know, whether they come from the left or the right, I’m sick of these self-appointed twenty-somethings spouting off with such a damned sense of entitlement that insists we have to listen to them.
Her remarks on abortion this week apparently did it for Beck, who is probably weary anyway from listening to Lahren’s endless diatribes that focus on everything in the world that offends her sheltered life.
Calling pro-life conservatives “hypocrites” really did reveal how profoundly shallow is Lahren’s ideological stream.
But it’s par for the course in punditry these days.
To begin with, I have long been fed-up with some libertarians who should really be calling themselves libertines because they are just a lot of pot-smoking sybarites in search of a political label that offers them some form of philosophical cover. I’ve had it with conservatives who think you can endow any alternative lifestyle with the trappings of traditional values and label it as a “conservative” alternative lifestyle because it has kept you out of prison.
But to suggest that aborting millions of babies every year has something to do with anti-statism is not only caustically ludicrous, it is demonstrably untrue. Wherever abortion thrives, you will find overdeveloped government. In communist China, abortion actually became state policy and a means of population control. In the Soviet Union, abortions were rampant and encouraged.
You will always hear some feminist declare that an abortion was difficult to procure in Nazi Germany but only if you were deemed to be a “master race” Aryan; for those whom Adolf Hitler deemed racially, genetically, morally or intellectually unfit, there was every opportunity for an abortion — women received them even if they didn’t want one.
But this is about choice, right, and it has something to do with individual liberty and a woman deciding what she wants to do with her body?
Well, if that body didn’t contain another life, I might be inclined to agree. But it does. So I don’t.
Abortion to liberals — and unfortunately to many libertarians — is what eugenics was to many in the intelligentsia, both left and right, about a century ago. The idea that we could perfect the human race through an applied Darwinian unnatural selection was so appealing to people who viewed the program as not only rational but liberating. “Why should we allow laws, convention — and especially religion — to limit the human potential when we can just do whatever the hell we want because God is dead anyway?”
Guess what? That’s not the resentful cry of rugged individualism but of an unbridled statism that views the individual — and the fetus — as of little consequence.
I defy a pro-abortion libertarian — or wherever she wants to peg herself on the political spectrum this week — like Lahren to explain why the sanctity of human life is something grounded in statism; in fact, it is rooted in the Bible and remains the foundation of the Judeo-Christian culture that remains the single most stabilizing factor in the life of this nation.
Abortion, even in the United States, is driven, promoted and justified by the state, from the endless propaganda that the government has produced over the decades to the malaise of the indirect taxpayer funding of abortion through an abortion-referral agency like Planned Parenthood.
Being pro-life is being anything but subsisting as a hypocrite; rather, it is the very soul of consistency. It means you believe in the life of the innocent unborn child even though it might be easier to dismiss that unborn child as something less than human because the birth of that child might cause some inconvenience or dislocation.
It may not be hypocritical but it is sure as hell annoying when people like Lahren think for a moment they have any right, any authority or any business defining the ideological suitability of real conservatives.
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