Are you a good person?

Do you think killing is wrong, unlike the rest of the country?

Do some of the most controversial and complex political issues strike you as very simple moral matters? As obvious, even… but everyone else just doesn’t grasp it?

Maybe they’re “overthinking it?”

If this sentiment describes you, you certainly aren’t alone. Millions of Americans feel as you do (though often on opposite sides of the same issue). So many issues seem simple in principle… but somehow, in the whole tangle of politics, the corrupt or the morons somehow keep getting the upper hand. It’s kind of baffling.

We must live in some kind of upside-down, clown world…

Fortunately, there is a simpler and more probable explanation, which is that perhaps we are missing something. Perhaps we are thinking too narrowly, too solipsistically. Perhaps we are misinformed.

George Bernard Shaw tells us that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world, and the unreasonable man adapts the world to himself, and concludes that all progress therefore comes from unreasonable people. This makes being unreasonable almost sound desirable… but it’s an open question just how desirable are the ends pursued by unreasonable people who never bothered to understand the world in the first place.

How well do you understand the world?

Those enjoined by theology to be humble seem to become inexplicably filled with a holy spirit of righteous certainty when certain issues come on to the political table, chiefly among those being abortion. “Of course it is wrong to kill one’s own child!” they say, gesticulating meaningfully toward famous theologians and Greek words like “telos” and such things. “Therefore it should be banned. Abortion is murder, and we don’t allow murder.”

It’s so simple and straightforward!

I hope my priming has already made you suspicious of your own inner monologue, if the most heated and controversial subjects seem solvable to you by simple slogans like “abortion is murder”. If not, I must be blunt — you probably don’t belong in politics. In fact, you probably should not be trusted with power of any kind.

You probably aren’t the sort of person who would read this anyways: the cover image seems too scandalous, compared to the moral dignity of politics (yes, the image was selected intentionally, for its deterring effect). And the sheer length — over 8,000 words — seems excessive.

Thankfully, that kind of self-certainty will actually preclude you from ever acquiring power — all appearances of those who you believe are your moral allies to the contrary — because power has its own kind of logic, quite apart from morality. One can adhere to morality, and also wield power, but not while conflating the two.

What is “Morality?” anyway?

To understand the tension between morality and political power, perhaps we should begin by deconstructing another popular slogan.

Maybe the most misunderstood sayings in these kinds of conversations is the old adage “you can’t legislate morality.”

On its face, this seems false. Obviously. (It’s so simple!)

One can certainly draft bills and pass laws which are informed by one’s own notions of what is desirable, what is good, what is bad, and what is evil. Notions of morality can certainly inform legislation.

But what legislation cannot do is change people’s hearts.

There are many different ideas about what morality is. Some people are utilitarians, who think morality has to do with maximizing pleasure, or, at least, minimizing harm and suffering. Some people are deontologists, who think that morality is all about universalizing principles. Some people are divine command theorists, who insist that morality came from God.

There are nihilists, who think “value” is nonsense, and you’re better off just doing what you feel like. This is an almost infinitesimally small number of people, but utilitarians, deontologists, and divine command theorists are fond of accusing everyone outside of their own framework of nihilism. (If you think the world is absolutely full of nihilism, you should consider whether you might be committing this oversight).

There are also virtue-ethicists (like myself), who believe that “morality” is a sensible term in talking about “right action,” but that moral systems are always necessarily incomplete, or even misleading, and moral action follows best from becoming a virtuous, competent person.

In all four (or five) of these schools of thought, morality is about doing the right thing, but it isn’t only doing the right thing. Ultimately, our moral character is judged by our actions as a kind of concession, because others cannot see our hearts. If someone is forced into some action, it no longer strikes us as “moral” (or “immoral”). If an alcoholic is kidnapped and held hostage in their friends house for three weeks, where his friends prevent him from touching any kind of alcoholic beverage, we might consider the outcome — the breaking of his alcoholism — is “good,” but it would say nothing of the moral character of the man. He had no choice.

We might, however, have some thoughts about the morality or immorality of his friends…

By analogy, perhaps the friends in this hypothetical example “legislated morality” in the sense of using force to do what they believed was good… but they did not “legislate morality” in the sense of making other people moral.

And they also did something else: through the use of force, they entered the psychology and the domain of politics.

Law, Power, and the Problem of Politics

No matter what may appear simple and obvious to the lay moralist, politics is not the same thing as morality. Both concern “action,” but whereas morality concerns the intention and behavior of an individual, politics is about the acquisition, retention, and dispensation of force.

Political force has a few dimensions to it. The most obvious of these is the raw concentration of guns and where they are pointed — basically, the military and the police. But these guns do not control themselves. There is a magical force called “legitimacy” which commands the guns.

This legitimacy could also be called “the Moral Law,” which is critically not the same as “morality,” but is rather the psychological of agreement between the ruled and the ruler:

The Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

There is an old Roman saying, that to the wise, religion is false; to the people, religion is true; and to the politicians, religion is useful. You cannot grasp “the moral law” as it applies to questions of power and politics until you see beliefs (and not only religious beliefs) in terms of their usefulness.

This is very importantly not to say that one should have no beliefs. The point is that if you insist on only looking at beliefs in terms of truth, and not recognizing the emotional effect of these ideas on others, you will not find accordance with the people, and your access to political power will forever be closed off to you.

And perhaps that is for the best (at least in some cases) because political power has its own nature…

If you have not seen CGP Grey’s “Rules for Rulers,” I highly recommend taking the 18 minutes and 12 seconds to listen through.

In many ways, it’s a kind of simplified introduction to Machiavellian political science. Contrary to the suspicions of the tin-foil-hat brigade, power isn’t actually held by some club of cozy elites, shmoozing and conspiring together. They probably do shmooz and conspire (and much worse) together, but always with a hidden dagger, ready to stab their allies in the back for a small advantage.

That’s what power rewards.

When Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, and described the Ring of Power as having its own, corrupting nature, he wasn’t making the story up from whole-cloth. His version was set in its own Catholic universe, but the story comes from Plato’s Republic, where we learn of the Ring of Gyges.

The Ring of Gyges turns its wearer invisible when twisted a particular way. Gyges used the ring to murder the king and seduce the queen, punishing his enemies with impunity, and generally, to acquire and consolidate more power to himself. But had Gyges himself not found the ring… might someone else have taken it, and used it for good? Like a Boondock Saint in Boston? Plato’s character Thracymachus asserts that they would not, that everyone wants to be a tyrant, and they only pretend to be good because they do not have power. And Nietzsche echoed the sentiments of Thracymachus in Thus Spake Zarathustra:

Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock. The hangman and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice. Verily, their souls lack more than honey, and when they call themselves ‘the good and the just,’ do not forget that they would be Pharisees if only they had power.

Nietzsche’s ‘target demographic’ is a little narrower than Thracymachus’. Thracymachus believed the desire was universal, whereas Nietzsche is speaking only of his “tarantulas.” But these tarantulas just so happen to be precisely the demographic that rears its front legs with venomous assertiveness when matters like abortion are brought up.

But, of course, the problem isn’t necessarily the people in charge. It’s what’s required by power in order to remain in charge. That’s what CGP Grey describes, and what Tolkien depicted… and also what Plato depicted, not just in the myth of Gyges or the argument with Thracymachus, but the entire construction of the “Just City,” which was (among many, many things) a kind of rhetorical exercise in how totalitarianism seems to arise by necessity from the pursuit of power in politics.

Loosely speaking, morality is a matter of intention (this point is arguable in virtue ethics, but we don’t need to get into that here). As a matter of intention, it is personal, and has nothing to do with consensus. But politics is all about consensus. That’s where Sun Tzu’s version of “the moral law” resides.

Now you know everything you need to know about why the left has been so successful over the last 150 years. It is not because they’re inherently smarter or better at organizing. It’s because broadly speaking, they construct their ideology based upon what is convenient for power.

This doesn’t mean they’re unbeatable in politics — far from it. Nor am I trying to imply that the right doesn’t do this. But you might notice a pattern among the “right-wing” candidates that beat the left…

Have you ever heard of a RINO?

The issue is not that they’re selling out financially, that they’re corrupt, or “secret democrats” or anything. That may all be happening too, but it isn’t necessary to give birth to a RINO — a “republican in name only.” It’s much simpler: the acquisition and retention of power itself requires compromise.

They have to pay homage to immigrants.

They have to speak flatteringly of women and minorities.

They have to touch the wall.

Or in some other way, they have to build a coalition which will legitimize their power.

You cannot bring a refined, strong, intelligent moral position into politics because, as David Foster Wallace said, “people tend to be really similar in their vulgar and prurient and stupid interests and wildly different in their refined and moral and intelligent interests.” A common message only appeals to a common people, but people aren’t common. Even Christians aren’t a common people.

If you’re a Christian, go visit a Unitarian church.

If you happen to be a Unitarian, try to be sincere about your love of diversity for a change and go observe an SSPX Latin Mass (I recommend removing your rainbow COVID mask before going inside).

Politics requires unity, but people are not unified. If you ever wondered why politicalspeak is vague, ambiguous, or seems wishy-washy, now you know why. It isn’t an accident. People are different, and care about different things. You can’t care about everything in a way that truly paces your constituency — it literally isn’t possible. You can only appear to… but you also must appear to, because if you don’t you will be outcompeted by those who do.

Why Anti-Abortion Will Always Lose

Now that we understand politics a little better, it should be obvious why the hard-stance on banning abortion will never win, politically.

In America, there are essentially three camps on the question of abortion: there are those who think it is inherently evil, always, and should be banned (the Christian right); there are those who treat it like a religious rite of personal transformation, and is not only permissible, but good (the Marxist left); and finally, there are those who think abortion is always tragic, but there are some cases where it is permissible, or at least, should not rightfully be someone else’s call.

The majority of the public sits in the third position. While this public is disgusted by women who “shout their abortions” as if it was some point of pride, it’s hard to feel threatened by strangers who are, quite literally, killing their own side. Even though they have a surprising amount of influence, the second position is easy for The Public to ignore.

But the first position comes with a lot more attached to it. The absolutist position on banning abortion has explicitly religious underpinnings, which feels not only like an imposition on bodily autonomy (it isn’t, but it feels that way), but also like a violation of the non-establishment clause. If Christians defend themselves from this charge by saying “well, America was always a Christian nation…”, they are doing themselves no favors because — aside from not being exactly true — it seems to lean into precisely what people fear. You don’t have to hear very many sneering comments to the effect of “every knee shall bow” and other cryptic affirmations of revenge fantasies from Revelation to get a kind of taste of the tarantula venom welling up behind the veneer of “compassion.”

It doesn’t matter whether or not this psychology is “theologically correct” or not. Yes, we all know that Jesus commanded forgiveness. But at least a few Christians are sinners too, and aren’t always freed from the passions as the saints.

And, more importantly, politics requires an outgroup to blame and punish.

It was another great Catholic mind who gave us this point:

The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.

Carl Schmitt

When Carl Schmitt wrote The Concept of the Political in 1932, Germans opted for a different enemy… but the selection of an enemy was what made Schmitt’s political party (Hitler’s Third Reich) politically viable, and, in fact, extraordinarily successful.

Obama was politically successful on the back of demonizing “old.” This was a marvelously conceptual enemy, which allowed even older citizens to jump on the bandwagon of “hope and change.”

Trump rose on a demonization of immigrants. He of course never actually demonized legal immigrants, but his emphasis on the problem of immigration tacitly created the necessary dynamic for political success.

And, of course, the pallid husk of a body that was once Joe Biden — practically dripping with formaldehyde — was able to win power in 2020 because of one of the most intense demonization campaigns since 1930’s Germany.

For anti-abortion to be politically useful and viable, it has to have an enemy. The smart activists will try to narrow this as forcefully as they can, to only abortion doctors, but it won’t work. Because at the end of the day, if abortion is murder, then every mother who ever had an abortion is a murderer — a murderer of the worst moral kind, in fact, because their victim was not only innocent, but their own child. It’s unavoidably implicit in the claim. And these women have to become enemies for the movement to gain political traction.

Men feel a deep antipathy to making “women” into an enemy. As Jack Donovan has said, there’s no honor in even competing against women — if you lose, it’s humiliating; if you win, you’re an asshole. There is always a sexual subtext to male-female dynamics, which makes conflict with women feel like evolutionary suicide. Even if women did not have a vote, men who care about their own mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters will feel compelled to defend their women — will, in fact, find righteous energy and motivation to destroy anyone who might threaten or even dishonor their women.

This is not to say that in some hypothetical future, abortion might not wind up criminalized. With the overturning of Roe v. Wade (which even progressive Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg believed was a terrible opinion), we might see more states adopting firmer laws banning the practice in most cases. This is because there is localized consensus (political power) on such things, but any expansion will be because the right is far from the only side that over-plays its hand. The left is not just more tyrannical, but is essentially tyrannical, and every so often, Public is forced to face the ugly underside. And so Public will tolerate, as a concession, the overreaches of the right — not because they like it, but because the other side seems more dangerous.

But if there’s anything that can give the Democrats a run for their money in terms of creating fear among moderates, it’s abortion.

For those who might have forgotten, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health — the decision that overturned Rove v. Wade — was decided in June, 2022, and was almost certainly the single biggest contributing factor in the Republican failure to perform in that year’s mid-term elections (even above the Republican infighting and self-sabotage).

Following Your Conscience

When I speak to Christians about the issue of abortion, I get a very strong sense that many of them understand this problem. They recognize that abortion is not just a hill they are willing to die on, but a hill they will die on, politically.

Some even understand that in fact, a strong push to ban abortion is probably the only political scenario that guarantees that the left holds on to power in the present climate.

Nevertheless, something feels deeply wrong about abstaining from an important issue like abortion because you’re worried about losing. It feels like a compromise with your soul and with your most deeply held beliefs. It feels like cowardice.

They seem to feel a kind of compulsion to martyrdom… and when it’s framed like martyrdom, is it even a bad thing?

After all, of what use is the whole world if you lose your soul?

If the aim is not protecting children, but the preservation of the sanctity of your own soul, perhaps this kind of political martyr-suicide makes sense. The push to ban abortion outright will almost certainly result in leftists retaining power, and brainwashing — if not chemically castrating or sexually abusing — as many children as they can get their hands on, as a small part of their broader plan for consolidating and systematizing power. Everything we’ve seen politically in the last decade or three supports this conclusion.

Does that mean that the Christian — or the non-Christian — who deeply opposes abortion on moral grounds ought to keep their mouth shut?

Absolutely not.

What I have tried to show so far is the distinction between politics and morality. One can hold, speak on, and act upon deeply moral beliefs without bringing it into the domain of politics.

Perhaps you’ve heard the story of the North Wind and the Sun. The two elemental forces have a dispute over who is stronger, and so they decide to have a contest. Spotting a man walking below, they agree that whoever can make the man remove his coat is the strongest. The North Wind comes down and blows and blows and blows, with all his might. But the man only wraps his coat up tighter.

When it is the Sun’s turn, he simply shines down with pleasant warmth, and in the kinder weather, the man takes off his coat voluntarily.

The call to follow one’s conscience does not require one to emulate the North Wind.

(Why do you think I write posts and do podcasts, rather than running for office?)

Back in 2017, my wife and I were attending church (I was still trying to be a believer at that time), and the pastor gave a sermon on abortion — specifically on the evils of abortion. He was quite vocal in his opposition to killing the unborn… and yet, most of his condemnation was reserved for the church community. ‘Why’, he asked, ‘do so many women feel so desperate that they resort to this horrible, tragic option? Where is the community that’s supposed to be there, and make her feel safe and secure enough to bring a new human being into this world?’

I believed at the time — and still believe now — that what that Pastor was advocating was a more essentially Christian approach to the problem. It was not deferring responsibility for the state of the world to the state, with the naïve belief that the state somehow ‘represents us’ (imagine believing that in 2024), but taking it on personally. And in taking on that responsibility personally — which is to say, morally — it avoids the corrupting logic of power latent in politics.

If there is one thing I wish to persuade Christians of, it is that there is no contradiction between holding a strong personal belief and not wishing it to be enforced by law.

The law has only one legitimate purpose — to resolve disputes between citizens so as to avoid blood feuds. It has been employed for other purposes, and some might argue that these other purposes have done good, but they have not escaped the corrupting logic of power. Or, more precisely, of political power. Lord Acton could have been more precise, since outside of politics, power not only doesn’t corrupt, but seems actually to complete, even to heal. Power can become an expression of joy, and makes certain expressions of love possible.

Outside of politics, it is weakness that corrupts… which is one reason — besides the syncretic diversity spoken of by David Foster Wallace — that political power attracts the weak and the vengeful.

But if the old fable is to be believed, the Sun is still stronger than the North Wind. And at the end of the day, politics is less a driver of change than it is a symptom of existing sentiment. Where existing consensus does not exist, politics is powerless to enact change; where it does exist, politics is largely superfluous.

“Jurisdictional Creep”

This has been a lot of abstract talk about theory — how does it apply to abortion specifically?

After all, isn’t killing still wrong?

We ban murder — if we allow parents to kill their own child, how do we justify prohibitions on murder?

Isn’t that an invitation to anarchy?

We have to get through one more concept before we can address abortion specifically, and that is the question of jurisdiction.

I mentioned in passing before that the source and the sole legitimate purpose of the law is the resolution of disputes between citizens, so as to avoid blood feuds.

This comes not only from mythology, but from established judicial philosophy:

It is commonly known that the early forms of legal procedure were grounded in vengeance. Modern writers have thought that the Roman law started from the blood feud, and all the authorities agree that the German law begun in that way. The feud led to the composition, at first optional, then compulsory, by which the feud was bought off.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, The Common Law (1881)

Well, perhaps I am stepping beyond present judicial opinion when I say that conflict resolution is the “sole legitimate purpose” of law, since laws presently exists (in great number) that go well beyond this purpose. Amusingly, virtually everyone agrees that we have too many laws, and that the labyrinth of legal paperwork has not only gone too far, but has created a very pleasant, warm, damp environment for the black mold of corruption to grow and to thrive. Conflicts of interest and conspiratorial manipulation thrive in the muddy waters of legal ambiguity. And yet… everyone still wants to use the power of the law to impose their own beliefs on others and to enforce these beliefs.

As a matter of fact, this might be a good working definition of what “politics” is: the appropriation of power aggregated for the purpose of resolving disputes, and its application to purposes beyond dispute-resolution.

What we call a “prohibition on murder” actually began as a system for paying the “blood price.” This system was not designed to enforce justice, but to limit justice, since “justice” was — to quote one source — “an eye for an eye.”

Of course, the Code of Hammurabi and Exodus were not actually the source of this notion. They merely explicated an understanding of justice that is universal to all of humanity. The significance and necessity of vengeance go as wide as the Dugam Dani people of New Guinnea, who live in perpetual coexistence with the blood feud, at least as late as 1963 — more or less as our own ancestors in the Near East and Mediterranean and Eurasian steppe lived 3,000 years ago.

Outside of the law, justice is vengeance.

Within the law, justice is the law, so that we can avoid the cycles of vengeance.

But the law is constrained by jurisdiction. Without a constrained jurisdiction, those with the power of the law become tyrants.

Every assertion of law is, at the same time, an assertion of jurisdiction over the domain pertaining to the law. A law which mandates people pay taxes, for example, asserts a general kind of jurisdiction over the people who pay taxes. Those who do not pay what they owe are turned into criminals. But a German does not become a criminal when he does not pay taxes to the American government. The German is outside of America’s taxable jurisdiction.

And jurisdictions have limits — at least, in free societies they do. We say we have things like a right to be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Metaphysical questions about “rights” can make this confusing, to the point that the very idea of “rights” seems dubious. But the whole idea comes into clear focus when rights are understood as constraints on the jurisdiction of the state. There are certain places they can’t go, certain things they can’t do, and they lose they legitimacy (or, at least, they’re supposed to) if they do.

So when a state makes a law prohibiting some action, or imposing some levy or fine, in a place where they lack jurisdiction, the outcome can go one of two ways: either the law winds up being challenged and declared illegitimate, or the state acquires — by acceptance of the law — a new domain of jurisdiction.

One obvious and concerning example of this is, of course, privacy. It is well-established that the United States Government, via the FBI, NSA, and DHS, have been surveilling and spying upon American citizens without warrant, through the use of FISA courts, in direct opposition to the clear meaning of the fourth amendment. This began under George Bush with the Patriot Act, was expanded by Obama, continued under Trump, and appears to have been expanded even further under Biden. That’s almost 23 years of precedent. That may not be long enough to establish a “tradition” that public courts will respect, since most Americans are still not aware of the scope and scale of the intra-national espionage. But it does create a normalizing effect, which is in tension with the written word of the Constitution. The law, in other words, is pushing the jurisdiction of the state into your home (without warrant), and into your computer and cell phone. This expansion of jurisdiction, once accepted by the public, creates a foothold by which the state can claim legal authority to regulate other aspects of this new domain, which has been granted to them.

One ancient legal doctrine which has been under threat in the past several decades has been the idea of “castle doctrine,” which holds that:

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the crown. It may be frail – its roof may shake – the wind may blow through it – the storm may enter – the rain may enter – but the King of England cannot enter.

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chattham, 1763

Castle doctrine is usually invoked in cases of self-defense, but the principle is broader: it asserts sovereignty within one’s own home. This underlying understanding conjoins the self-defense cases with the fourth and also third amendments to the Constitution. It is also a cousin to the true meaning of the “freedom of speech” protected by the first amendment, which is the prohibition of prior restraint — the government can punish you for what you say, but they cannot prevent you from saying it — and also the prohibition of compelled speech. Here too, there is a kind of common ancestor of an idea behind both principles: sovereignty over one’s own mind. And as with Castle doctrine, sovereignty is a zero sum game: if an individual has sovereignty over some domain, the state does not.

So what about family?

No one has as much vested interest in a child as their parents. Not only is this biologically true, but the biological truth entails a different kind of vested interest inherent in the parent-child relationship: parents have every reason to care about the well-being of their child independent of their own interests. No other kind of relationship between the child and another person (no, not even priests) has this feature.

It goes without saying that exceptions exist: that some random people really do just love other people without reason (usually high quantities of hallucinogens are involved).

And some parents are unpardonably awful.

But… what happens when we say “something needs to be done about these bad parents”?

If you guessed “jurisdictional creep,” congratulations, you are correct.

In May, 2023, in my own state of Washington, Governor Jay Inslee signed Senate Bill 5599 into law. The stated purpose of the bill was to protect “youths and young adults seeking protected health services,” which is a euphemistic way of saying they want to help children under the age of 18 undergo sex-transition treatments if they wanted to. But “protect” is a strange word… who, exactly, are they protecting these children — or these services — from?

From the parents.

What the bill actually does is amend a previous code which required youth runaway shelters to report the whereabouts of the child to the parents. The majority of the text is the same, but they add the clause “If there are compelling reasons not to notify the parent, the shelter or organization must instead notify the department.” It then goes on to enumerate what might qualify as a “compelling reason,” and there are only two kinds: (1) abuse or neglect, and (2) “When a minor is seeking or receiving protected health care services” (the bill then immediately defines its euphemism by another euphemism: “‘Protected health services’ means gender affirming treatment…”).

The effect is a very subtle assertion of jurisdiction over the child. By right, by nature, and by interest, the proper stewards of the child are their own parents — except, of course, in cases where the parents abdicate this duty to the state. But this bill specifies certain kinds of circumstances in which the parents don’t really know what’s best for the child. What’s best for the child, it turns out — and this was to my surprise — is experimental castration based on some extremely dubious sociological and philosophical theories about how gender works.

But perhaps the state is right, and I am wrong. And after all, it is the state’s job to sometimes protect children, even from their own parents…

…or is it?

Let us return to where we started this section: killing. Christians often point to the decalogue as their source for the prohibition on killing… but what it really prohibits is murder. In fact, Exodus even gives an early notion of a kind of castle doctrine:

If a thief is caught breaking in at night and is struck a fatal blow, the defender is not guilty of bloodshed.

Exodus 22:2

It’s not the best castle doctrine ever, since the next verse voids it in the daytime. But it’s something: killing a thief who has broken into your home at night is not murder. A man has final sovereignty and jurisdiction in his own house, at least at night. Note that this does not require or even recommend that he kill the thief — indeed, the prohibition of killing thieves during the daytime seems to imply that it is better to not kill the thief. Nevertheless, it is permissible, because a man in his own home has final jurisdiction.

The Sanctity of Life

Does granting the permissibility of killing the unborn pose a kind of legal threat to our prohibition on murder?

On its face, not really… at least, not any more than the permissibility of killing a thief undermines the sixth commandment.

In fact, what Exodus22:2 does is demonstrate that a prohibition on murder is semantically redundant: “murder” is just “killing that is wrong.” “Murder is wrong” is actually a tautology — it adds nothing, but as is often the case with tautologies, it can give the illusion of having found a kind of bedrock of moral certainty. Nothing is asserted beyond “things that we decide are wrong are wrong.”

But maybe there’s more to it? After all, an unborn child is not like a thief in the night…

Isn’t life — especially innocent life — sacred?

For Christians, there are theological reasons to believe that life is sacred because we bear god’s image. To kill another human being is, in many ways, to participate in a kind of likeness of the crucifixion of Christ. Perhaps homicide is not so far removed from deicide.

(Except, of course, in cases where an image of God is trying to rob your house at night).

But not everyone is Christian, and not everyone holds human life as sacred universally. What does it mean to “hold life sacred” anyways? Does it mean we must protect it at all costs? Must we, for example, protect people from themselves?

Consider the issue of suicide. Is a victim (and also a perpetrator) of the “sin” of suicide “innocent,” in the manner of the unborn? The suicidal man need not have hurt anyone else to have arrived at his state. Because of the obvious suffering which motivates the desire, people tend to be a lot more tender and careful around this subject. We might try to be a good friend and talk him out of it, or — perhaps wiser — simply be there for him. In extreme cases, we might intervene more forcefully, and attempt to protect him from himself.

But this runs its own risk, in killing the dignity of the individual.

C.S. Lewis — another Christian theologian — immortalized this concern perhaps better than anyone else:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock, 1970

This kind of “curing against one’s will” — or ‘protection from ourselves’ — may, in the end, protect a life, but if there was any “sanctity” there before, this kind of imposition de-sacralizes it. Nothing “made in the image of God” can be treated like an infant, imbecile, or domestic animal in such a manner. To respect the sanctity of life, on this theological ground, or on any other ground, also requires a respect for their autonomy and sovereignty over those domains in which they have domain.

Perhaps this is how God feels, watching humans manage the earth over which he granted dominion…

The point is that if life is sacred because of our creator, it is a theological point, and not a legal point. What is sacred in the law is not life per se, but the right of revenge. This is not to say the law condones vengeance — quite the opposite. The law itself emerged as a kind of solution to, and sublimation of, vengeance. But this sublimation only works if the sacred right of revenge is given its due respect. When it is not — when murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and thieves are given a slap on the wrist and sent back out on the street — we make heroes out of men like Gary Plauche (on who’s anniversary of justice I happen to be writing this post).

If life was inherently sacred, then Jeffrey Doucet (the “victim” of Plauche’s vengeance) would still be protected. He would still be an “image bearer of God,” or something. But no one says that. Everyone applauded Plauche. Perhaps one could make a case that his vigilantism was morally wrong — in fact, his legal defense more or less made the case, arguing that in his state of rage over finding out his son had been molested, he could not tell right from wrong. But this was, of course, apologetic dishonesty. Plauche said years later he regretted nothing, and would have done the exact same thing.

They say that hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue. Perhaps “temporary psychosis” is the compliment legalism pays to justice. But that’s only because legal procedure isn’t justice, and we all know it.

Plauche’s son, Jody, was under Gary Plauche’s jurisdiction. Jeffrey Doucet violated that, and so Gary fulfilled the sacred right of vengeance.

Again, outside of theology, and in law alone, it isn’t life that is sacred, but vengeance.

That doesn’t mean you can’t believe life is sacred. You can. You’re perfectly in your rights to believe that. You can even go around and try to persuade people of that (as I’m trying to do here, in the other direction).

But I insist that my own life not be held sacred.

The problem with holding other people’s lives sacred is that it expands one’s own jurisdiction over them. You become your brother’s keeper. Cain, of course, did not have jurisdiction over his brother — that’s why his question “am I my brother’s keeper?” is petulant as well as dishonest.

But parent relationships with children are different because parents are their children’s keepers. Abraham was within his jurisdiction when he offered his son Isaac as a sacrifice. Jephthah was within his jurisdiction when he actually did sacrifice his daughter as an offering to God.

The sanctity of the parent child relationship is not negated by killing; it is so sacred that it even grants the power of life or death.

This is the story of The Children Act by Ian McEwan, an immensely underrated novel about a judge who winds up saving an adolescent Jehova’s witness from his own religious family. The boy had leukemia and needed a blood transfusion to survive, but his religious parents refused, saying it went against their religious teachings. The judge overrules the parents and has the hospital provide the transfusion anyway. As a result of the transfusion, the boy begins to doubt his faith, and even calls his parents hypocrites. But eventually the boy returns to his faith, and even identifies the judge with Satan, for tempting him away. His leukemia returns, and by choice, he rejects treatment — this time as a legal adult — and dies on his own terms, in a faith in which he finds more meaning than in the care and protection of the state.

Some things are more important than life, and it isn’t the jurisdiction of the state to tell families, within their own domain, and in conflict with no other citizens, what is objectively important.

This may sound extreme. But I wish to remind you that politically and legally speaking, death isn’t the only thing that might threaten parental rights over their own children. Richard Dawkins famously argued that labeling a child as “Christian” or “Muslim” is a form of child abuse. Lawrence Krauss took it even further, arguing that even teaching children Creationism is child abuse.

And if you recall, “abuse” is one of those words from SB6699 that permits the state to step in and take the reigns of stewardship from parents, at least in Washington state. The state has an obligation, you see, to protect children.

That’s one of those unintended consequences of holding too tightly to notions of the “sanctity” or even the “dignity” of life, without considering other equally sacred things like the parent-child relationship.

(As a bonus, careful readers who’ve grasped this notion of jurisdiction in conjunction with “sanctity” will now understand why the United Nations seems to care so laboriously about “protecting human rights”).

Abortion and Skin in the Game

So let us all bring it back to abortion.

Banning abortion is a legal undertaking, and the law is constrained by appropriate jurisdiction. The desire to ban abortion is legal purportedly comes from a sense of duty, to “protect innocent life,” but we do not have jurisdiction over these other families. To assert such jurisdiction violates the sanctity of parental rights, which — if our society is as anti-Christian as some worry it to be — would likely be a pyrrhic victory at best.

Aside from the more inherent harm of imposing upon the decisions of other parents, of course

Around the world, we see nations doing things we disagree with. Some struggle to feed and clothe their citizens. Some endure corruption, street violence, and natural disasters with insufficient preparation. Worst of all, some don’t even educate their women!

Barring the last one (which was unironically floated as a kind of public relations justification for the war with the Taliban) none of these are treated as cause to entangle ourselves in their affairs, martially or otherwise.

Why is that?

The legalistic answer is, of course, “jurisdiction.” But the moral reason that we respect these boundaries of jurisdiction are two-fold. First, other peoples sometimes have different ideals, different beliefs, and different values than we do. If we wish for them to respect our ideals, it is required that we also respect theirs. Second, we do not have skin in their game. We do not know the people, their context, the fine details and complexities of their state as they understand themselves, nor do we share in their gains and losses. Without skin in the game, legal jurisdiction creates a divergence of interests, and sometimes even perverse incentives.

Both of these reasons also apply to the abortion discussion.

No matter how much you claim to care about the “innocent life” of someone you never met, you have no skin in the game. You don’t know their beliefs and values. You have no jurisdiction. In fact, one could almost argue that the people who actually do have skin in the game with tough decisions like abortion have a right to not be addressed by the disconnected, especially the disconnected and righteously self-certain.

Again, this does not mean that you should not have an opinion, or should not attempt to persuade people on this topic.

In my own estimation, abortion seems tragic, and the people who celebrate the right to have an abortion are sick (often clinically so, if rates of mental health problems among liberal women are anything to go on). I think if they changed their mind on many of these issues, their lives would actually improve dramatically. I don’t think arguing that abortion is wrong is likely to stop any abortions (and bombing clinics — like the howling gales of the North Wind — only generates more energy and resources for their side).

But I do think that speaking to people about the existential significance of legacy and of creating life — how literally no other accomplishment in life comes close to that of making another human — might talk some people out of something they might later regret.

That’s what I tried to do, anyway.

But again, this is a moral position, not a legal one. When law is involved, you invite the ring of power into your life, and into whatever kind of “movement” you might have. You create an enemy — or perhaps enemies. You change yourself. Very likely, you change your moral or theological beliefs, based upon what is politically viable.

And the powers and institutions you create in politics can and will be used against you, because politics by its nature seeks to escape the constrains of ideology: beyond those boundaries is more power. The competition for power demands this. And the nature of power wants leftism to win, because the political philosophy of the left was forged in the image of power. The greater the size and scope of the state, the greater the force behind this desire — behind power itself.

A Final Note to Christians

The whole point of this essay is to illustrate how the call to ban abortion is the call to bring law into an essentially moral and theological domain. It is not not a moral desire, but a political one — a desire of power.

This is not to say that none who seek to ban abortion have good intentions. I’m sure at least a few of them do. The rest of us, however, are entitled to doubt the purity of their motives, as well as the goodness of the secondary and tertiary effects down the road.

And given the self-righteous moral certainty behind many of these activists, ordinary people have additional reasons to be on their guard against Christians in politics. We are not on any kind of cusp of theocracy — far from it (we were arguably much closer in the mid-90s). But the emergence of theocracies is a pattern of history. Someone blithely asserts “murder is wrong,” as if that mantra singlehandedly resolves some complex legal and moral problems we face, is guaranteed to be an unthinking foot-soldier for nascent theocracy, at the very best.

Perhaps they have felt mocked, oppressed, and politically disenfranchised for decades. Then they hear someone like Stephen Wolfe or Adrian Vermeule talk about the “common good,” and smell the presence of a recipe for political power — here is how we can turn the tables! They smile the giddy vengeance fantasies of 1 Corinthians 1:27 and Philippians 2:10-11 to each other, and sometimes have the gumption to say it directly to those they plan on oppressing.

If you are a Christian and think these are not revenge fantasies, you are deluding yourself. At the very least, you have no idea how precisely like revenge fantasies they sound to everyone else.

The aspiration for absolute abortion bans in politics is a sign of a latent theocratic desire, of Christian dominion over the state, and even over the parents in relation to their own children. It makes you into an enemy.

And you aren’t going to win.

I don’t mean that theologically — if Christianity is true, then of course you’re going to win (at least in the end). And if Christianity isn’t true… well, at least you believed something, right Pascall? What I mean is, you aren’t going to win, politically, because this world is the enemy of your kingdom.

It happens, incidentally, to be an enemy of sorts to me as well — which doesn’t make us friends, but it could make us allies of a sort.

But if you do pursue power, you make yourself an enemy — not only of weird pagans like me, but of all sorts of people who don’t share your beliefs.

Don’t for a moment imagine that their opposition to you makes them “the world.”

When you seek the power of the state, you become “the world.”

When Jesus says “if the world hates you, know that it hated me before it hated you,” he is speaking of the authorities, specifically the Pharisees, and the culture dominated by the Pharisees. He is speaking of earthly power.

Believe it or not, Christians are not the only ones who oppose “the world” and earthly power. If you take on earthly power, and lots of other people begin to resent and hate you for it, don’t imagine that’s any kind of proof that you’re following Jesus’ teachings. You just became the world.

And normal, decent people will hate you for it, just in the way that they hate either Trump or Biden.

And I’ll be among them.

So if you have strong, moralistic beliefs which you derive from your theology, by all means, put forward the arguments for those beliefs. Spread them. Live by them, and attempt to persuade people of them.

I’m not saying that to be glib and condescending. I probably share your opinion on abortion, though we probably disagree on the grounding for why abortion is wrong. We probably both agree the world would be a better place if there were fewer abortions.

But short-sighted, solipsistic obsession with one subject, and the desire to use political power to enforce this idea, regardless of the consequences, is not wise and it is not moral. If anything, the belief that your linguistic tautologies give you the right to make decisions on behalf of other people’s families makes you guilty of hubris.

These issues are complex because we live in a complex world. I personally believe in objective evil, but evil seems — like the Laveyan Satanists who promote it — relatively powerless and irrelevant. Most conflicts are between flawed-good and flawed-good, with a variety of diverging and competing standards for “good.” Politics is a dirty game of competition between these forces, but as the scale of the competition increases, the dirtiness also increases. Beyond a certain level, it isn’t even about the cause anymore, only about power.

It has to be.

Perhaps your religion and your theological morality is so good that it can overcome these otherwise universal laws of power and politics. Maybe your leaders are so wise and so just that they will be immune to the pressures that corrupt other humans 10 times out of 10. I’m not trying to convince you that your religion is false (here anyways), or that it isn’t capable of miracles.

But I do hope I’ve been persuasive that the matter isn’t simple, and that morality isn’t some kind of neat, clear, and simple answer to the problems of politics — with abortion as much as with any other issue. Don’t fall for the “political catnip” and cede more power to your enemies, on the misguided notion that you have to die on this hill or else you aren’t a good person. Martyring yourself on that hill doesn’t make you a good person. It only makes you easier to control to the left, and more obnoxious to everyone else.