Lady Justice's new blindfold

Two unrelated news stories have been in the headlines in recent weeks. In one, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, surprised by the reaction to a law he signed to protect the citizenry from government infringement on their exercise of faith, bowed to pressure and had the state legislature “fix” the law. In the other, a Colorado woman tricked a pregnant woman into her house through a Craigslist ad, sliced a 7-month-old unborn baby from the woman’s body, and brought the dead baby to a hospital, claiming it as her own.

A Washington Post article on the Colorado incident lingers long on the agony of the woman doing the slicing, and not on the agony of the victim, ending its almost wistful report with the cloying sentence, “She wanted, perhaps, to be a mother.” Cases of barbarous ripping babies from mothers’ bodies are not chronicled in so friendly and understanding a way in Scripture:

“And Hazael said, ‘Why does my lord weep?’ He answered, ‘Because I know the evil that you will do to the people of Israel. You will set on fire their fortresses, you will kill their young men with the sword and dash in pieces their little ones and rip open their pregnant women’” (2 Kings 8:12, ESV).

Boulder County District Attorney Stanley L. Garnett, when asked whether the female assailant would face murder charges for the killing of the viable unborn child, apologetically replied, “Now I understand that many in the community—and heaven knows I’ve heard from a lot of them—would like me to file homicide charges. However, that is not possible under Colorado law without proof of live birth.”

The similarity of two seemingly disconnected news items is the lack of moral nerve on the increase in contemporary society, which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had noted almost 40 years ago in his commencement address at Harvard University:

“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately. … Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. …”

Blindfolded Lady Justice has represented impartiality in judgment since ancient Roman times. But the irony is that law itself may be coming to represent actual blindness in ours. Solzhenitsyn unpacks the paradox:

“Every conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the ultimate solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right. …”

The way it works: The law of the land allowing abortion gives cover to weak-willed leaders who are happy not to have to revisit the unpopular issue of life’s beginnings again, or to wrestle with their consciences afresh as new atrocities arise. Will not the same kind of legalistic cowardice become the ignominious shield of those too lily-livered to fight for religious liberties in Indiana and across the land?