Tormented rationalizations for lying…

Last updated on: December 30, 2014 at 4:25 pm by Mark Shea

Tormented rationalizations for lying… 2014-12-30T16:25:26-07:00 Mark Shea

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…are liable to lash out and punch you in unexpected places.

So, for instance, those who argue that since killing is permitted in war, lying to Planned Parenthood is permitted don’t seem to realize that the logic goes in a very unpleasant direction. Namely, if it’s okay to lie to your enemies because this is “war” then it’s okay to kill them too. Some “prolife” people have already followed this logic to its fatal conclusion.

Me: I think people need to realize that this is “war” only in a metaphorical sense. Otherwise, they are inviting, by their rhetoric, more murders of abortionists since, as some put it, “Any law may be broken to save a life”.

No. Really. Some people are actually saying that. Take, for instance, this stunning piece of “You might want to rethink that” rationalization for lying in this amazing “anarchy for life” argument, which adds blasphemy to the mix:

A priest consecrates the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ acting “in Persona Christi”, with the intention of Christ. Lila Rose approaches the abortionist acting “in persona aborted and unborn” whose souls are enlivening her actions. In the covenant of the human being’s rational, immortal soul, all permission is granted. Any law may be broken to save a life, but there is no law broken by Lila Rose any more than a firefighter who enters a burning building and seizes a frightened child and carries her to safety. Will you then say that the firefighter laid hands on the child unlawfully? No, Lila Rose is actually saving the abortionist’s immortal soul and preventing him/her from going straight to hell. Now, that is doing God’s work “in Persona Christi”. Something about paying thithes on mint and ignoring and disobeying God, our Father in Heaven. Get real.

“Any law may be broken to save a life”. Really? Any law? i can break the moral law against blasphemy or child molestation or rape simply to save my own skin? If a psycho commandeers a restaurant and tells the terrified patrons they must rape one of the kids or he will murder a hostage “any law” can be broken in order to save that hostage, including the law against rape? Really? If the Emperor bids me to blaspheme Christ and worship Caesar I can break the first commandment in order to save a life?

I realize what the commenter is {recklessly) saying: the law was made for man, not man for the law. But the main thing to realize is that she is saying it recklessly and without regard for the consequences of her thinking–which is exactly what Live Action and their ardent defenders are doing (which is particularly ironic since, in fact, none of these “stings” have saved a single life, but have helped PP raise more money).

Nor does the commenter’s recklessness stop there. Because in wildly concocting the theory from thin air that Live Action’s lies are just like priests acting in persona Christi, it doesn’t seem to occur to this reader that the inevitable corrollary of her claim is that a priest acting in persona Christi is, therefore, lying about representing Christ. This is an… inadvisable… way to proceed. Particularly since the Live Action people do *not* claim to be acting in persona foetus. They did not walk up to the door of Planned Parenthood and claim to be unborn babies or to be acting on their behalf or in their place. They claimed to be pregnant and seeking a sex selective abortion and they then tried to get a PP worker to help them kill their baby on those grounds.

Think about that: What LA did was, in effect, urge somebody who is already complicit in grave sin to sin, if possible, even more mortally. Comparing “tempting somebody to sin mortally” to consecrating the Eucharist is grotesque. Calling it “actually saving the abortionist’s immortal soul and preventing him/her from going straight to hell” is, in fact, the polar opposite of what is being done. LA’s sting is, very simply, tempting the clinic worker to damn herself.

Someone will say, “The PP worker probably would do it anyway, so tricking them into doing it is okay.” Um no. “Temptations to sin are sure to come; but woe to him by whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung round his neck and he were cast into the sea, than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin. Take heed to yourselves; if your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him; and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.” (Luke 17:1-4). When your brother or sister sins, you are to rebuke him, not tempt him to sin even worse. Nowhere in the length and breadth of Christ’s teaching will you find a shadow of a hint that you can fight sin by leading your brother into temptation and then nailing him when he succumbs to your temptation. Not that temptation and accusation are not biblical, of course. It’s just that the character in the Bible who is known as the Tempter and the Accuser is not Jesus but Satan. Indeed, even with Judas Iscariot, whom Jesus *knows* will betray him, you see Jesus repeatedly trying to get Judas to repent, not hurrying him down the road to Hell since he’s already a mortal enemy anyway.

This illustrates a huge point: It is one thing when the evildoer’s will to evil is allowed to happen in respect for his freedom after all attempts to warn him and call him to repentance are exhausted (“One of you is a devil/One of you will betray me/What you do, do quickly”). It is another thing to present yourself to the sinner (and, by the way, for all we know, the PP clerk’s culpability may be minimal due to ignorance, trauma, or who knows what else and her conscience may still be as open to the Spirit as Abby Johnson’s was) and deliberately *tempt* them to commit a mortal sin. It is like offering a bottle of whiskey to an alcoholic and saying, “What the hell. He’s a drunk anyway. So what it if destroys him? It’ll really expose how the alcohol industry ruins lives!”

I am increasingly amazed that as the meager emotional dividend of schadenfreude for Live Action’s stunts now yields to Planned Parenthood actively crowing over turning LA’s “stings” into fundraising tools, Christians just double down and ignore it while laboring to defend lying for Jesus with more and more grotesque rationalizations. And now we’ve reached this nadir: that the sort of thing fundamentalist atheists used to say to condemn the “mumbo jumbo” of the Mass (“There’s no difference between a con man lying about his identity and a priest saying that he stands in persona Christi“) is now being said by “faithful conservative Catholics” to defend lying! The energy is all driving toward finding rationalizations for lying and for tempting somebody to damn themselves. What in God’s Holy Name does that have to do with the gospel of Jesus Christ? Especially when no lives are, in fact, saved and PP benefits.

For benefit they do, a fact to which apologists for LA are blind. Prolifers who support this point exclusively to commentary from within the prolife bubble, slap each other on the back that Planned Parenthood has been “exposed” (meaning “prolifers who already know that PP is a disgusting organization have had their convictions ratified”) and do not stop to ask whether the huge percentages of undecideds out there share their certitude that the videos prove a thing. Still less do they pay attention to the uses made of LA’s tactics by PP and its supporters, who do not, in fact, say, “Curses! My evil plan would have worked if it hadn’t been for those darn kids and their hidden camera” but instead gin up the troops and make lucrative converts of undecideds with the fact that LA is documentably on record as lying. Does PP lie too? Of course! All the more reason not to hand them a sword with “I lie to PP” writte on it, because they will happily shout “LA lies about PP too!”

So: even good ends don’t justify evil means. But who can explain why anybody in their right mind would continue to justify evil means when the good ends turn to crap in their hands and actually benefit PP? (Combox comment from HuffPo article linked above: “After seeing the unedited video I just e-donated more to PP than I was planning to this year.”) Dumb, dumb, dumb. It’s like prolifers who support and rationalize this stuff are so impatient to land a Hulk Smash! punch on PP that they are coming to care more about having an emotionally cathartic experience of schadenfreude than they are about actually doing what it takes to win the prolife struggle by the boring means of prayer, honest witness, and argumentation. They want something fast and sexy, not the plodding practice of the virtues and the same old stuff.

Madness.

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