Posted by
Tracey O'Donnell on Friday, October 12, 2007 2:18:31 PM
If you enjoy being ridiculed by liberals, try objecting to one of their foolhardy social engineering projects on the grounds that it will lead by a “slippery slope” to something that even they might reject.
The only slippery slope they have ever heard of is the one where if you teach abstinence in sex-ed programs, everyone will die of AIDS within the week.
Maybe this week’s news can wake a few of them up to reality. On Monday alone, and just in New York, we were treated to the news of a teenage boy allegedly murdering his infant daughter (after having given away or sold her clothes, said the neighbors; She arrived DOA in a diaper), and a Queens woman selling her newborn to, thank God - or at least the NYPD – an under cover police officer. This, one day after news reached the States of a pair of Chilean teenagers offering their as yet unborn child up for sale on the internet on a website called “quebarato” – how cheap. Indeed.
How cheap is young life? Most of the comments posted on Chilean blogs about the Internet sale lamented the ignorance of the teenagers. If they had only known about contraception or the morning-after pill they wouldn’t have had to get themselves into such a jam.
But there were plenty of things they weren’t ignorant of. Even a thousand kilometers south of the capital in a developing nation, sixteen-year-olds know that a baby cuts into your partying. Besides, they wanted to buy a car. This is what the young father had to say for his actions.
How does a boy develop such a moral hierarchy – putting stepping out above stepping up? If you believed in a slippery slope, you might cite the influence of “pop culture:” television, movies, music, videos, games and advertisements that celebrate superficial pleasure as an end in itself. You might notice that the beautiful young people on our screens satisfy all their whims and pay no cost. But since that whole philosophy is just something conservatives drag out to stymie progressive ideas, it couldn’t have affected this young man, could it have?
Some of the newscasters who alerted us to these sad cases expressed shock and disgust at what had happened. They must have felt sure that their listeners would feel likewise. And surely anyone would. But why should we be shocked if some people take to its logical end the instrumentalization of human beings that is everywhere around us? If the law allows a girl to kill her unborn child, mightn’t she reasonably think that she does him a favor by merely selling him?
Was it such a stretch of the imagination for these people to think of their children as merchandise? Babies have been treated as consumer goods for some time now. Everyone has a right to one but no one has a duty to one. Anatomy be damned. Having progressively accepted abortion in all its many guises, and the myriad manipulations of the human person from the Petri dish to the custody court to the hospice bed, it is disingenuous to claim now that we never meant for it to come to this.
We can hardly remember when we took the first step. Such is the slippery slope: it is hard to get one’s footing and look back uphill. Go ahead: laugh.