The Democratic Party’s press auxiliary obsesses over a story advanced by an anonymous woman claiming that Georgia Republican U.S. Senate nominee Herschel Walker paid for her abortion.
Can you imagine how they might have covered it if he had refused to pay for the abortion?
As it stands, the feeding frenzy includes such headlines as “‘Pro-Life’ Herschel Walker Paid for Girlfriend’s Abortion” (the Daily Beast) and “Anti-abortion extremist Herschel Walker is a raging hypocrite. Surprised?” (the Guardian). Stephen Colbert, in homage to the get-well card Walker’s anonymous ex displays as evidence, sent his own get-bleeped card to Walker during his late-show monologue. On The View, Ana Navarro observed, “The hypocrisy just strikes you in the face.”
For the first time in history, liberals object to subsidy for abortion. Are they hypocrites, too?
What decision made by Walker, once he was faced with an ex choosing to terminate, would pass muster with abortion enthusiasts?
The idea of the same partisans who now are slamming Walker for inconsistency praising him for consistency in not paying for the abortion strikes as a psilocybin-propelled fever dream.
Bad if you do, cad if you don’t.
For the first time in history, liberals object to subsidy for abortion. Are they hypocrites, too?
The offense involves neither paying for nor refusing to pay for an abortion but publicly supporting laws restrictive of the procedure. They do not hate him because he allegedly paid for an abortion. They hate him for taking a pro-life position.
Balk at paying for the abortion at your own risk. When Damone, for instance, failed to come up with the cash to pay for Stacy’s abortion in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Stacy and her friend Linda vandalized his car and locker by graffitiing upon them a vulgar term.
Maybe Herschel, who won the Heisman Trophy a few months after that movie’s premiere, saw it and figured to avoid the grief and just pay for a procedure over which the law gave him zero power. Or maybe this all amounts to a Marc Elias production as fictional as Mr. Hand’s eating Jeff Spicoli’s pizza. We do not know. We do not even know the name of the woman making the accusation because the same journalists who are prying open Walker’s private life shield the accuser’s. Let no one say the people shaming others possess no shame. The hiding proves they do.
If a pro-life man’s paying for an abortion amounts to terrible hypocrisy, what of pro-choice women birthing people demanding others pay their medical bills at the clinic? Last week, pro-abortion women used the occasion of the 46th anniversary of the Hyde Amendment, which blocks federal funds from paying for the killing of unborn children, to skip work for a protest called “A Day Without Us.” They do not even want to go Dutch on their abortions but instead want strangers to pay for them (and their bosses, presumably, to pay for their hooky) through taxes.
This latest scandal seems, like Herschel on the goal line, over the top. Are the abortions of female candidates for office now fair game, too? If that’s “sexist,” then it seems less so than labeling it sexist. The precedent set here — with desperate times for Democrats calling for desperate measures — feels like a bad one, assured to unleash further destruction upon our politics in the future.
If our passions cloud clarity, philosophers, people with wisdom well beyond mere scribes, speak clear-mindedly on this issue. One of our best, a man named Dave Chappelle, takes the position of Sen. Raphael Warnock on the question, but with a twist. After endorsing a woman’s right to choose abortion, Chappelle explained: “Ladies, to be fair to us, I also believe if you decide to have the baby, a man should not have to pay. That’s fair. If you can kill this motherf***er, I can at least abandon him. It’s my money, my choice.”
Chappelle’s fellow philosopher, the late Solomon mixed with Socrates named Norm Macdonald, weighed in as sagaciously on the question of hypocrisy.
When a friend tells him that “the worst part about Cosby was that he was a hypocrite,” Macdonald meekly responds, “I don’t think that was the worst part.”
“To me the worst part was the raping,” he opined, “way up high. Then the second would be the drugging. Then the third would be the scheming. But, anyways, hypocrisy would be way f***ing down the line, like on the fourth page or some s***. Like, I’m no expert, but I think probably most rapists are hypocrites.”
One gathers that most men and women involved in abortion are, too. Even most people who believe the procedure should remain legal admit the moral atrocity of it. Nobody likes to advertise their worst moments, save for the prideful who admit these moments without ever admitting any act by themselves to be the “worst” anything. For some, sins become sacraments once they commit them.
How does one devoid of morals commit hypocrisy? By secretly attending Bible study? Only people with standards can violate them.
And that leads us to a third philosopher, albeit a philosopher perhaps more known for his one-liners than Mr. Chappelle or Mr. Macdonald. François de La Rochefoucauld weighed in on the Walker matter about 350 years ago, observing, “Hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays virtue.”
It certainly beats vice’s paying a compliment to vice.
