On Lila Rose and the Planned Parenthood stings

John Zmirak:

I was recently delighted by the sting operation performed against Planned Parenthood by Live Action, whose members posed as a pimp and a prostitute, intending to test the organization's willingness to enable the exploitation of underaged girls and expose its cynical disregard of the human dignity of women. None of this should surprise those of us who know the organization's history. I wrote a bit about this in my light-hearted moral manual (it makes a great gift for Lent!) The Bad Catholic's Guide to the Seven Deadly Sins, citing Planned Parenthood founder "Margaret Sanger's scathingly racist statements, and her program of eugenics -- which directly influenced Hitler, and led to laws in a dozen or so American states forcibly sterilizing or even castrating thousands of the 'unfit' who flunked primitive I.Q. tests." Of course, as I note in the book, Sanger's racism is rather beside the point: "Attacking an organization that kills tens of thousands of children every year because it might, just might, be a little racist is simply a joke. And in very poor taste -- like denouncing Hitler for destroying German typography."

What's worse is that Planned Parenthood's founding racism was mostly tactical:

Sanger had campaigned for sexual license for years before she discovered the handy "wedge" issue of Anglo anxiety over immigration and differential birth rates. A savvy political activist, she trumped up a minor panic over "dysgenic" births and "hereditary" criminality in order to break down the social taboo against even discussing birth control which prevailed among most Protestants before the Anglican Council of Lambeth broke the dam, and offered the first tentative approval of contraception in the history of Christendom. As Blessed Are the Barren shows in exhausting detail, Sanger used the tribal fear of displacement on the part of Protestant elites to undermine their theological position -- which they'd inherited from Luther and Calvin, and Augustine long before them. Odd as it sounds today, Sanger used racism to make birth control respectable.

And Sanger abandoned the race issue pretty readily, too. As the Nazi crimes against humanity were exposed after World War II, Sanger dropped her Klan hood like last year's hat, and donned the white coat of a futurist; she "discovered" that the reason why birth control was so urgently important was not the swelling ranks of dusky Sicilians and blacks, but rather the "population explosion." Without missing a beat, her organization shifted its rhetoric, and provoked another panic -- one which ironically enough, has helped contracept the white race to the brink of extinction. Experts like Paul Erhlich appeared on Johnny Carson predicting mass famines throughout the 1970s, and the collapse of civilization. Their warnings never came true -- but what did it matter? The "meme" had taken root, and pushed forward Planned Parenthood's agenda; indeed, it was the Rockefeller Commission's infamous report on population that helped sway Justice Blackmun to change his position on abortion, and write the decision in Roe v. Wade.

I'd be delighted if the recent expose of the squalid cynicism that underlies the day-to-day operations of Planned Parenthood helps Republican lawmakers defund this diabolical organization -- though I'm really not terribly hopeful. Too many liberal women with checkbooks remember how Planned Parenthood clinics helped them abort their way through law school, while too many racist right-wingers secretly hope that the organization's efforts will help keep the welfare rolls under control. I'll never forget the night I spent out with a group of so-called cultural conservatives, who confessed to me that they wanted to keep abortion legal in order to reduce the numbers, influence, and expense of the "underclass." Ever the tactful Irish Croatian from blue-collar Queens, I demanded of my hosts: "If you really believe that, why don't you just napalm the ghettos?" To which another, equally Ivy-educated (but post-Christian) right-winger said icily, "Because that wouldn't be as politically expedient." A chill ran down my spine, and I knew that I was in the presence of my enemies. (read the whole thing).

And this excellent analysis by Peter Kreeft:

Readers of the Gospels do the very same thing when they meet the Pharisees, who could put up strong arguments for a literalism and legalism about the Sabbath and against Jesus’ apparent disregard for it. I think we should have the same reaction to the critics of Live Action. These people are of course far, far better people than either Euthyphro or most of the Pharisees. (But remember Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, and Gamaliel!). But they are wrong, and wrong not just logically but “you gotta be kidding”ly.

Most of my students, however confused their abstract philosophical and ideological principles may be, are ordinary people of normally sane and fairly healthy consciences (except, of course if it has anything even remotely to do with sex). When they are confronted by a moral legalist like Kant who holds that all lying is morally wrong, they instinctively sense that he is wrong, though they cannot explain why—just as most students, when confronted by St. Anselm’s ‘ontological argument,’ instinctively know it is wrong somehow, though they cannot refute it logically. Similarly, most (though not all) pro-lifers instinctively side with Live Action even if they cannot answer the arguments of its critics. (Is it an accident that its critics are more Kantian than Aristotelian?)

Similarly, when we discuss Kant and the issue of lying, most of my students, even the moral absolutists, are quite certain that the Dutchmen were not wrong to deliberately deceive the Nazis about the locations of the Jews they had promised to hide. They do not know whether this is an example of lying or not. But they know that if it is, than lying is not always wrong, and if lying is always wrong, then this is not lying. Because they know, without any ifs or ands or buts, that such Dutch deception is good, not evil. If anyone is more certain of his philosophical principles than he is that this deception is good, I say he is not functioning as a human being but as a computer, an angel, a Gnostic, or a Kantian. He is a Laputan, like Swift’s absent-minded professors who live on an island in the sky in Gulliver’s Travels, and who make eye contact with abstractions but not with human beings.

But can’t we solve the problem of the Dutchmen and the Nazis by saying that all lying is wrong but the Dutchmen don’t have to lie to save the Jews because they could deceive the Nazis without lying by a clever verbal ploy? No, because effective deception by clever verbal ploys cannot usually be done by ordinary people, especially by clumsy Dutchmen. I know; I’m one of them. Our moral obligations depend on abilities that are common, not abilities that are rare

Besides, the Nazis are not fools. They would suspect clever prevarications and sniff out duplicitous ploys. They could be reliably deceived and deterred from searching every inch of the house only by an answer like “Jews? Those rats? None of them in my house, I hope. Please come in, and if you find any, please give them rat poison. I hate those vermin as much as you do.”

You promised the Jews to hide them from their murderers. To keep that promise, you have to deceive the Nazis. Physical hiding and verbal hiding are two sides of the same coin, whether you call it lying, or deception, or whatever you call it. What it is, is much more obvious than what it is to be called. It’s a good thing to do. If you don’t know that, you’re morally stupid, and moral stupidity comes in two opposite forms: relativism and legalism. Relativism sees no principles, only people; legalism sees no people, only principles.

The closest analogy I can think of to Live Action’s expose of Planned Parenthood is spying. If Live Action is wrong, then so is all spying, including spying out the Nazis’ atomic bomb projects and saving the world from a nuclear holocaust.