Nancy Pelosi claims to be a serious Catholic. In the past she cited that background in defense of legal abortion. She said that her Catholic faith teaches her to call a woman’s abortion choices “sacred.” That statement led me to wonder if she might really be a Satanist, or belong to some ancient Aztec or Phoenician cult which sacrificed children.

Now I’m rethinking that. Because Ms. Pelosi latched onto President Trump’s description of MS-13 murderers as “animals” to trot out another shard from her Catholic heritage. She denounced the president’s statement, reminding us that every person still bears some “spark of divinity.”

Given her habit of digging among the rubble of the Faith she once accepted for shiny trinkets, I think we should conclude that Ms. Pelosi belongs to a Cargo Cult. Like those poor Pacific Islanders baffled by the “sky-birds” that descended through World War II, dispensing tinned meat and flashlights, Pelosi is confused. She sincerely believes she can cherrypick the doctrines of a complex, coherent creed for the parts that please her voters. So her “faith” seems no more grounded than that of those islanders who don’t venerate cargo, but instead worship Britain’s Prince Philip. Maybe when she retires, she can go live among them.

Jesus called people animals. (“You brood of vipers! how can you speak good, when you are evil?” Mt. 12:34)

That Pesky “Spark of Divinity”

Pelosi is right about that “spark of divinity” thing. We each of us have it, from those saved up in heaven to the damned in the pit of hell. But it’s also true that each of us in fact an animal (vertebrates in fact). Indeed, every day in a thousand ways the Darwinists among us insist that we are nothing but animals. We live in a meaningless universe that’s winding down toward heat-death. I find it hard to see, given that, why we must spare the feelings of those among us human animals who do things like this:

A man was murdered by MS-13 gang members who stabbed him more than 100 times, removed his head, and ripped out his heart, Maryland police say. …

“The victim had been stabbed over one-hundred times, decapitated, dismembered, and his heart had been excised from his chest and thrown into the grave,” court papers said.

Mr Lopez-Abrego was later arrested after being found in an apartment with two other suspected MS-13 members.

Pelosi might say that it’s not very “Christian” to call such people animals. The tiny problem with that? Jesus called people animals. (“You brood of vipers! how can you speak good, when you are evil?” Mt. 12:34) And they weren’t even terrorists or murderers — just religious hypocrites. Maybe she means that we need to be even more Christian than Jesus. That’s a common stance among progressive Christians today. They tell us that it’s not Christian to make exclusive religious claims; warn people of hell; denounce divorce; or insist that people shun “impure” acts and fantasies.

Now Jesus did all of these, so maybe He wasn’t quite as Christian as we’re meant to be. Perhaps He called each of us to exceed Him in holiness. You know, as a prelude to replacing Him on the throne beside the Father.

That must be it. So that’s the message preached in all those posh but emptying churches that dangle hemp rainbow flags for a few years outside their door before getting transformed into condos. Good to know.

Dehumanizing the Inhumane

The Stream’s Liberty McArtor doesn’t condemn the president. But she does warn of the danger in calling people animals. It can tempt us to treat them as nothing more than beasts, which can bring out the beast in each of us. Certainly that can be true in wartime. Listen to what one Englishman said of the Germans in World War I:

Kill Germans! Kill them! … Not for the sake of killing, but to save the world. … Kill the good as well as the bad…. Kill the young men as well as the old. … Kill those who have shown kindness to our wounded as well as those fiends who crucified the Canadian sergeant [a wartime myth]. … I look upon it as a war for purity. I look upon everybody who dies in it as a martyr.

The speaker? As Adam Hochschild reports, it was Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the Anglican bishop of London.

Duly noted. Perhaps we should avoid using “animal” as an epithet even for the worst of criminals. It’s unfair, really, to animals — most of which don’t engage in gratuitous cruelty comparable to MS-13’s. (Except for housecats, of course, but they might have picked that up from extended exposure to humans.)

A Modest Proposal for Finding Common Ground

So, I have an idea. It can bring Americans together. Let’s bridge the gap between Ms. Pelosi, her fellow Democrats, and the rest of us. Let’s start calling MS-13 and similar criminals “fetuses.” Or “products of conception.”

There’s nothing pejorative about that, now is there? Each of us was a fetus once. Even those cooked up in labs are still the “products of conception.” But that doesn’t mean we must be treated with kid gloves. Far from it! In fact, mere “fetuses” and “products of conception” get far less legal protection than the most hardened criminal alien from the worst narcoterrorist gang.

So I propose that we join together with Democrats in a bipartisan effort to deal with MS-13 and similar gangs. Turn them over to Planned Parenthood. Let that organization earn some of the half-billion dollars in taxpayer money that Republican Congress insists on shoveling to it by getting tough on crime.

If cops ID some violent criminal as a member of such a gang, they should bus him to the nearest Planned Parenthood clinic. Its trained professionals can use one of their standard methods for dealing with “products of conception.” These range from being dismembered with a scalpel to sucked into pieces with a high-powered vacuum, or injected with burning saline solution.

No Part of the Buffalo Goes to Waste

Of course, I think that Planned Parenthood will probably choose the scalpel. The organs of healthy adults will prove quite valuable on the market. This could help solve our organ shortage for those in need of transplants. No, selling these organs isn’t quite legal, but that never stopped them before.

This plan should appeal alike to feminists and to the toughest minded citizen concerned about violent crime. Who said that we conservatives don’t believe in compromise?