Quick hits: this week’s signs of impending doom

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 14, 2022 | In Quick Hits

Although I try not to dwell on the increasingly abundant evidence that our civilization is nearing total collapse, there are some weeks when the stories floating across the news feeds make it difficult to ignore the signs. This has been one of those weeks.

• You may be—you should be—troubled by recent stories about FBI actions against peaceful pro-life activists. But you shouldn’t be surprised. In the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney reminds us that President Biden announced in July that he was forming an inter-agency task force to “protect access to reproductive health care.” While the official White House announcement focused on positive initiatives to promote abortion (“Supporting Providers and Clinics”), it was inevitable that ambitious law-enforcement officials, sensing a major shift in the political winds, would begin to treat pro-lifers as dangerous. Oddly, Carney reports, although the White House issued a press release about the new pro-abortion crusade, it “got near-zero press coverage”. He mentions that neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post nor Associated Press mentioned the creation of the Biden task force. (Just for the record, CWN did.)
• At the University of Notre Dame, a faculty member is offering to assist students in procuring abortions. She says she has the dean’s permission for her very public efforts. Spokesmen for Notre Dame aren’t saying anything.
• Jay Richards, writing for The Federalist, looks into the business of gender-reassignment surgery, and finds that it is booming. American hospitals are now billing nearly $2 billion for these procedures—many of them by taxpayers through Medicaid, others by insurance companies ready to underwrite what the doctors claim is “necessary” treatment—and expect their business to grow annually by over 10%, reaching $5 billion by the end of the decade. There’s an enormous amount of “ghoulish revenue potential,” Richards observes. Better yet—from the perspective of medics who make their fortunes by removing healthy organs and fashioning fake ones—the surgeries create another lucrative market in follow-up care (suppressing the body’s natural reaction to unnatural changes, and supplying hormones that the body does not naturally supply) and even reversing the procedures (for patients who regret what they’ve done).
• In National Review, Catherine Pakaluk offers a refreshing new perspective on how a government “family policy” could renew society. That’s the wrong way to think about the problem, she says. Government policies generally don’t help. Worse, they damage the institution that could and should help:

  A truly effective family policy would remove every competitor to the church now supported or funded by the state, especially the schools and educational institutions, welfare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, state pension programs and social security. Each of these is a hijacking of the legitimate tax authority of the government to fund things that are not legitimate functions of government. Rather, they are the moral obligations of the people of God.

• And if you’re still not convinced that our society is in trouble, try to explain the logic of this piece from Yahoo Finance: If you want to solve the shortage of diapers, kill off the babies.

Have a nice weekend.