Random Reflections: Rape! Incest! Jews!
Two members of the Democratic Party’s Goon Squad, or Boob Squad, or Doom Squad, or whatever they are — Tlaib and Omar to be specific — have been barred from entering Israel in what is obvious proof of the global Zionist plot. You see, they planned a trip to Israel that had as its sole objective the promotion of the radical Muslim agenda of denying Israel’s legitimacy and encouraging international punitive actions against it. For that — just that one little thing about making an official visit to a country for the express purpose of advocating its demise — the evil Jews have refused entry to two sitting members of the U.S. Congress. Unbelievable.
In response, another member of the Squad, the one who is youngest and imagines she is prettiest, has announced that she is boycotting Israel — a brave move, and one likely to cost the international Jewish conspiracy trillions of dollars and mountains of credibility, assuming they don’t have her assassinated.
To what extent was Israel’s decision to ban two anti-Israel Muslim radicals — er, I mean U.S. Congresspersons — from entering their country motivated by law and the assertion of national sovereignty, and to what extent was it another Netanyahu suck-up to “President Donald J. Trump,” designed to gain further favor and advantages from America’s Baby-Brained Mussolini? We’ll never know, but in the end, we’ll never feel indignant over anyone treating “the Squad” with disdain, regardless of motive.
In other news, Republican congressman Steve King has opened his mouth again, and many in his own party are sure this has to be the last straw. For he had the audacity to tell an anti-abortion audience that the moderate pro-lifers who allow for rape and incest exceptions are wrong, because rape and incest are desirable things!
Well, that’s what Liz Cheney and many other “reasonable” conservatives are telling us he said, anyway. What he actually said, after making the standard argument that allowing abortion of a fetus conceived in rape or incest is effectively punishing the baby for the sins of the parents, was this:
I started to wonder about this. What if [abortion for rape and incest] was okay, and what if we went back through all the family trees, and just pulled those people out that were products of rape and incest? Would there be any population in the world left, if we did that? Considering all the wars and all the rape and pillage that’s taken place?…I’d like to think every one of the lives are as precious as any other life.
I see nothing in that statement that looks at all like a justification or belittling of rape and incest. On the contrary, it seems more like an attempt at an honest reckoning, from a slightly more objective, philosophical perspective, of the ultimate meaning of even the worst things that have happened in human existence. Of course the wars, rapes, and pillaging were terrible things from the perspective of the lives of the people suffering through them. That is not the question. The question is whether it is possible to redeem even those most horrible occurrences in some way. The argument that the lives which directly resulted from those horrors ultimately became a part, perhaps even an indispensable part, of the universal human experience, such that few people alive today can say for certain they would be alive today were it not for some ancestor who happened to be the product of rape or incest, is actually a fairly interesting reflection, by the standards of a member of the U.S. Congress. (See the story above, by comparison.)
So to those who would prefer to keep the political and moral conversation on its current level of hyper-superficial, slogan-infested, politically correct posturing, I suggest that we could take King’s point — the one he was really making, not the one his pabulum-smeared critics claim he was making — much further, and make his case much stronger.
Think of the very earliest humans, in the age before there were enough of them, and before they had developed enough mutual understanding and good faith among them, to form anything like a community, i.e., a collection of distinct families sharing a geographical space in peaceful coexistence and expanding their numbers through interfamilial breeding. How was the race propagated in those earliest primitive times, before the first communities were formed? How could it have been propagated?
And if you are of a more literalist bent regarding the Book of Genesis and the origins of man, the answer becomes still more obvious and straightforward.
So King’s point, though perhaps insufficiently explained — which in this political climate draws immediate condemnation — is actually less forceful than it ought to have been. If we erased all babies produced through rape and incest from human history, it is virtually certain that none of us would be here today. I am not judging whether or not that might have been a better result, mind you. I am merely pointing out that King is not wrong.