Ok, so the President of the United States addressed a meeting of Planned Parenthood and offered them a heartfelt “God bless you” for all their hard work.
The sentiments of the elected head of the government give a pretty good indication of the priorities of a society. John Hayward elaborates on this thought at RedState:
The abortion regime has done a lot of damage to those ideals of responsibility and sacrifice. A recent poll showed that many young people have come to view marriage as something to be put off until late in life, when everything else is squared away, but they see no reason to hold off on either sex or childbirth. That’s a terrible inversion of the way things work in a health society, and the results have not been liberating – on the contrary, they have eroded our independence, leading to more reliance upon government assistance.
Viewing pregnancy as a “mistake” or “punishment,” the way Barack Obama once described it, leads to a dehumanizing appetite for easy surgical correction.
In my view, a civilized society needs four things to survive, and the ruling class in the United States is currently turning up its nose at all four of them:
1) Energy – The prevailing view about energy is just that we use too much of it. We should stop using all the sources of energy that we know are effective and practical, and instead try to fulfill all our energy needs with windmills and heartfelt public service announcements.
2) Food – Just like with energy, we’ve decided that plentiful food is an affliction, rather than a blessing. The bad guys are the corporations that are really good at producing and distributing lots of food efficiently and cheaply. We want our food produced as locally and organically and inefficiently and expensively as we can possibly get it without unfreezing a caveman and putting him to work in a field with a stone plow. Soon, we’ll probably eschew farming altogether and decide that all the really cool people are hunting and gathering.
3) Trustworthy civil government – Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!!
4) Babies – Whatever you think of the civilization we have now, we’ve got to have a next generation to pass it on to, or else it’s all academic. Planned Parenthood treats the next generation the way a lawnmower treats an anthill, and the President and his party can’t say enough good things about them.
We are in a cultural death spiral (and yes, I have to pay Mark Steyn a $0.05 royalty every time I say that); the absolute religious devotion to abortion is just the most grotesque symptom of it.