Much has been made of Chuck Schumer’s gangsterish threats against Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — and much should be made of it. The Supreme Court’s seizure of legislative power in such decisions as Roe and Obergefell — along with the explosive intrusiveness of the Administrative State — are at the heart of our current divisions. When the people are stripped of power by courts creating make-believe rights or by unelected bureaucracies churning out unappealable regulations, the people have no peaceful means of self-governance and are bound to resort to rage, threats and finally violence. Chuck Schumer is only an example of what is happening to us all.
But some attention should also be paid to the rest of the pro-abortion rally at which Schumer spoke.
When he stepped down, he was followed to the podium by an activist, who shouted, “Let’s hear it for Senator Schumer! Let’s hear it for all the people who have abortions! Let’s hear it for our trans folks who have abortions!” With each shout, the crowd cheered.
This was a concise and perfect little representation of leftism’s underlying philosophy: materialism, the idea that there is nothing to life but matter.
In a materialist world, the new life growing inside a mother is just a “clump of cells.” Let’s hear it for anyone who clears that clump away. A person’s body can be refashioned to look like a different sex, and if it looks like a different sex, well then, that must be what it is. Let’s hear it for a girl who’s a guy who clears away a clump of cells. Hurrah. So much for safe, legal and rare.
It’s a monstrous worldview that breeds a world of monsters.
At the same rally, an actress named Busy Philipps spoke — or shrieked, I should say, in the sort of voice a person uses when she is trying to drown out the voice of her own conscience.
“There I was,” she said with defiant anger, “sitting in Los Angeles in my beautiful office! Of my own late night talk show! Soon, I would be driving my hybrid car to my beautiful f—in’ home! To kiss my two beautiful and healthy children and my husband who has taken the year off to parent so I could focus on my career! And I…” And here she really started screaming. “…I have all of this — all of it! — because — because — because — I was allowed bodily autonomy at fifteen!”
Or, translated out of materialism into the language of real life: “I killed my baby and look how rich I got!”
Ms. Philipps is physically a pretty woman, but it would be hard to describe how ugly she was during this screed. Find the video and see for yourself. One can only wonder if somewhere under all that self-hating rage, some still-human part of her understands that, under her own materialist rules, she too is just a clump of cells, her fate contingent on the desires of people more powerful than herself just as her baby’s fate was contingent on hers.
If you doubt anyone could treat a grown woman as Ms. Philipps treated her unborn child, take a look at a piece that appeared in the New York Times a few days ago, an article that declared “If American women earned minimum wage for the unpaid work they do around the house and caring for relatives, they would have made $1.5 trillion last year.”
By “unpaid work” they meant “routine housework, shopping for necessary household goods, child care, tending to the elderly and other household or non-household members.”
But, of course, this is absurd. The people who do this sort of work for money do, in fact, get paid. The waitress, the baby sitter, the at-home nurse. They all get their money. But the mother who makes a home, whose interplay with her child makes him human and gives him the ability to negotiate the world, whose love for her parents eases their decline — there’s no money for that because it’s priceless.
The left is so infected with materialism it has become like Oscar Wilde’s cynic who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
So enjoy your life, Ms. Philips. I just hope that you don’t one day find yourself standing in the way of, say, your husband’s career and hybrid car and beautiful f—in’ home.
Because if you do, you’re f—ed.