Even though Matt Walsh passes on a reasonable definition of decent – “morally upright and respectable” – I have to dissent from his main point that If You Still Support Planned Parenthood, You Are Simply Not a Decent Person.
The problem, of course, is deciding what “decent” means, which leads us to determining what “morally upright” means.
As far as I can tell, the first thing most people think about decent people is that they write their grandparents on their birthdays, teach their kids to say please and thank you, pick up litter, salute the flag, do their jobs, mow their lawns and weed their gardens, vote, are hospitable, help neightbors in need, go to PTA meetings, more or less obey the speed limits, quarantine scatalogical language and sounds, cheer at patriotic events, respect and sometimes join the police and military, pay their bills on time, and the list (which is in no particular order) goes on.
If you say someone is not decent, they will go to that list and give proof that they do too fit the definition. I have had conversations that have followed just that path.
“There’s more to morality than just mowing your lawn,” I hear you say. Like what? “Like, like … respect for life, for Christ’s sake! When a Planned Parenthood worker pulls the brain out of a baby who is moving his limbs, that’s murder! Can’t you see it?”
Actually, yes, I can see it. But decent people don’t see it that way. I know, because I’ve talked to them. I can’t see their logic, so I won’t try to defend it, but I know they see it that way because they tell me they do, and they are indignant that I would impugn their basic human decency.
And not only do they dissect live babies, they blow them to bits and smash them in rubble with rocket-propelled grenades or Hellfire missles or other bombs. They burn their lungs with white phosphorus or their bodies with napalm. They maim them before they’re conceived with depleted uranium and Agent Orange. Or they just shoot them – oops!
For me to question their moral uprightness in these matters is to question their basic human decency. They are, after all, simply decent people trying to make the world a better place.
(I’m reminded of the unofficial motto of the prisoners at the prison in The Shawshank Redemption: “We’re all innocent here.”)
So I will relegate decency to the morgue for victims of what C. S. Lewis called “verbicide” and try to find another word for what I used to call “basic human decency”: leaving people and their property alone and telling the truth.
The kind of people who would surrender their “products of conception” to Planned Parenthood are not my people. When they do raise children, those children will stand for everything I stand against (and would want my descendants to stand against) – and worse, they will stand against everything I stand for – so the fewer of them there are, the better.
I can’t stop the Shiites and Sunnis from killing each other, nor can I stop the communists and their enemy du jour from killing each other, but every time they do, it’s one less enemy for me. Same for the baby-killer crowd, liberal and conservative.
I consider this small compensation for being forced to pay for the killing, but of course, both those who kill babies in the eastern hemisphere and those who kill them here in the United States consider my desire simply not to have to pay for those killings an assault on their decency.
Let me add, of course, that if they’d like to hear my ideas for how they can get what they really want out of life, I’m happy to tell them how to do it. One of the the first steps involves not killing babies. But once again, decent people kill babies. If you don’t believe me, just ask them.
Matt, maybe decency isn’t such a good thing.
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