MASSACHUSETTS MADNESS

How the mighty have fallen.  Massachusetts, once the home of John Adams, the “Atlas of American independence” and future President of the United States, is now led by Maura Healey, the state’s first lesbian governor and the chief executive who recently signed a bill protecting a woman’s right to abort her baby up to the point of birth.  At the signing ceremony a gaggle of females standing behind her desk applauded enthusiastically.  Meanwhile in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a crowd of ladies in pink voiced their enthusiastic support for Lindsay Clancy, who was on trial for strangling the life out of her three children -- Cora, Dawson, and Callan.   

Thirty years earlier the distinguished Democrat New York Senator and former Harvard Professor Patrick Moynihan, who was not a pro-life warrior, compared partial birth abortion to infanticide.  One can only imagine Abigail Adams cringing at the thought of her “remember the ladies” request to John being invoked by twenty-first century feminists to cheer unrestricted abortion as health care and to invoke inadequate medical treatment plus postpartum psychosis as a legal excuse for a mom carefully planning and carrying out the extermination of her three children over the span of eighteen minutes.

It at least makes sense that the same state that elected a governor who supports unrestricted abortion also devised an insanity defense putting the burden of proof on the prosecution rather than the defense.  In addition, Bay State prosecutors must prove not only that defendants know the difference between right and wrong but also that they can control their actions.  This virtually insuperable standard unique to Massachusetts resembles the obligation to prove a negative, to prove it twice, and to prove it “beyond a reasonable doubt.”  She’s “not” cognitively unaware of standards of right and wrong, and she’s “not” unable to control her actions.  Throw in the fact that the criminal act concerns killing three kids, and the prosecution’s task becomes akin to climbing Mt. Everest.

Governor Healey also recently signed the mendaciously labeled “Protect Act,” a law that further limits the sanctuary state’s cooperation with ICE and guarantees that illegal aliens are protected, as much as reasonably possible, from deportation.  Even before Healey’s new law the police department of Boston’s super-Woke Mayor Michelle Wu, the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, ignored ICE detainers on scores of illegals, among them aliens accused of arson, child abuse, assault, and drug dealing. 

Then there’s Ed Markey, the state’s octogenarian senator who proclaimed his support for a transgender bill of rights after easily defeating his forty-seven-year-old primary opponent with similar leftist credentials.  This eccentric topic became a campaign issue for Democrats thanks to Congressman Moulton’s ill-advised statement in 2024, "I have two little girls. I don't want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”  He added that “as a Democrat I'm supposed to be afraid to say that.”  Even after offering a groveling apology of sorts, the former marine would discover that fear was, indeed, warranted for his perfectly sensible statement in madly blue Massachusetts, a locale where “gender-affirming care” for minors is already a state constitutional right that extends to youngsters from other states who seek to cure their anxieties by mutilating their bodies.

One should remember that Massachusetts is also the state that continued to reelect Ted Kennedy to the Senate seven times even after the senator abandoned a car he had driven off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island, a car that still contained a woman who was not his then-pregnant wife.  Mary Jo Kopechne likely died of suffocation while Kennedy returned to the party cottage from which the two had left late that night.  The police were contacted approximately ten hours later, giving Kennedy time, if needed, to sober up, though he was never given an alcohol test.  The judicial slap on the wrist that followed for abandoning the scene of the accident didn’t deter the state’s highly educated residents from sending Ted back to the Senate a year later in 1970 with 62% of the vote.  A blow by blow recounting of the incident can be found in this 2018 Politico review of the film “Chappaquiddick.” 

Massachusetts lawmakers are currently considering a bill that would give Muslims a greater voice in state government and address areas of discrimination presumably perpetrated against that community.  The bill would create an eleven-member commission to work with state officials on areas of concern to Muslims such as education, civil rights, health care, employment, and, of course, Islamophobia.   When those familiar topics inevitably morph into madrasa lessons, community cutouts for sharia law, and employment standards  that reflect Muslim mores vis-à-vis pork, dogs, female attire, and the like, one wonders if even inveterate Bay State virtue signalers might find such concessions to “an oppressed minority” a “bridge too far.”

Recently a woman in Illinois who closely followed the Clancy trial has allegedly killed her two-year-old child by ligature compression of the neck in her basement, the same method and location of Clancy’s acknowledged victims.  Following the homicide the accused killer also inflicted on herself some perfunctory suicide cuts.  Fortunately, Illinois doesn’t require the state to prove what should be the defense’s burden, though the defense only needs “clear and convincing” evidence, not evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” that a perpetrator doesn’t know right from wrong.  While Massachusetts boasts that almost half its adults have college degrees and likely takes pride in the fact that it’s the most secular state in the union, perhaps a less ideologically enthralled and more religiously grounded jury pool in the Midwest might find it possible to believe a mother can actually be held legally culpable for strangling her child to death.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.

 

Talarico, With His Left Hand on the Bible

Calling Texas’s Democrat senatorial candidate James Talarico, even derisively, a “bible-banger” is a disservice to bible-bangers.  At least the latter take the book seriously, whereas Talarico uses it as a prop to further his far-left Democrat agenda.  His Wikipedia page even lists “opposition to Christian Nationalism” first among his political positions -- before the legalization of cannabis, expansion of the Supreme Court, and a two-state Palestinian solution that vilifies Israel for “atrocities” and “war crimes” in Gaza.

These priorities were foreshadowed by his education, which started as a University of Texas government major followed by a Masters of Education at Harvard.  Later, while serving in the Texas House of Representatives, he earned a Masters of Divinity degree from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, an institution associated with the Presbyterian Church USA.  This “mainline” Protestant group has seen its membership drop from over four million in 1965 to likely under one million this year.  It has achieved this “hospice” status, as the author of a recent First Things article notes, “by doing exactly what Talarico now proposes:  subordinating the claims of Scripture to the moral intuitions of secular progressivism and calling the result ‘the gospel.’”  Following Gavin Newsom’s lead vis-à-vis California, Talarico proposes to do for Texas and America what deconstructive theology has done for the PCUSA.

Talarico’s forays into theology are prime examples of Nietzsche’s atheistic critique, “The text has disappeared under the interpretation.”  It takes breathtaking arrogance or ignorance to cite the annunciation to Mary found in Luke 1:26-38 as a scriptural basis for abortion.  According to Reverend Talarico the fact that the angel Gabriel asks Mary’s “consent” prior to her conception somehow constitutes tacit approval of abortion since “creation has to be done with consent.”  Talarico prefaces this fatuous interpretation with the observation that Mary was “an oppressed teenage peasant girl living in poverty under an oppressive empire,” an unsupported assertion that shows where his ideological druthers lie -- much closer to Marx than Matthew or Mark. 

In truth (a word to which deconstructionists are allergic) even if Talarico’s notion of “consent” were accurate, the annunciation scene would only proscribe rape, not Democrat worship at the altar of abortion.  But in fact, prior to Mary’s “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word,” the angel had already announced that “you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.”  Yet miraculously, with his left hand on the most recent printout of Democrat talking points, Talarico manages to turn a “handmaid of the Lord” into an abortion advocate worthy of membership in Planned Parenthood.  Also ignored by the Lone Star divine is the history of early Christians saving exposed and unwanted babies in the Roman Empire and the all but universal Christian condemnation of abortion through the ages.  But apparently for Talarico, Henry Ford, and deconstructionists generally, history is, more or less, bunk.

As for Talarico’s God being “non-binary” based on the fact that the Genesis one masculine word for God in Hebrew (Elohim) is followed by a generally feminine word for “His” breath, wind, or spirit (ruach), this not-so-odd pairing stems ironically from binary-based linguistic principles in languages like Hebrew, Greek, and Spanish where nouns are usually designated either male or female.  More importantly, while languages may have non-sexual male-female gender designations, the Hebrew and Christian scriptures make it perfectly clear that God transcends human sexual categories.  And those human categories Genesis limits to two: “male and female He created them.”  Unlike the philandering Greek gods, the biblical God has no consort, creates by the word, and must not be imaged.  In short, God transcends any of the six human sexes Talarico absurdly asserts “science” has discovered.  One can only imagine what article of leftist faith the recent seminary graduate might deduce from the fact that Elohim has a plural masculine ending (im) regularly used with singular pronouns and verbs.

Talarico clearly criticizes Christians (smeared as Christian Nationalists) more than any other group.  The state rep even vilified this largely conservative cohort for using the bible (plus, I would add, common sense and reliable science) to oppose sex changes for minors.  Those who did so in the state capital, he thundered, not only harmed children, they also dishonored scripture for the sake of a “hateful amendment.”  Stated without leftist distortion, Talarico believes Christians harm children if they oppose their mutilation.  Instead, he embraces the faux science of propagandists who inundated our culture with the bizarre notion that even pre-teens are capable of evaluating the lifelong medical and psychological consequences of transition decisions.  In short, Talarico inverts biblical teaching and slanders Christians who seek to protect “little ones” from the ravages of a mass delusion.

On the other hand, Talarico expresses nothing but appreciation for other “beautiful faith traditions” that are “circling the same truth” as Christianity.  Even conceding that the major religions Talarico explicitly mentions are attempts to express in symbolism and ethical demands the nature of the cosmic “mystery,” it takes a sophomoric novice (or political shyster) to focus only on this grand generalization and to ignore the particulars of each religious tradition, including their historical impacts -- both of which are far from “the same.”  But Slick Jimmy would surely find a way to rationalize the Hindu caste system or the enduring violence and subordination of women that has characterized Islam from its inception -- likely by pointing to a verse in the New Testament that admonishes wives to obey their husbands.  No need to complete the sermon, “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25).

In short, Talarico comes off as an Elmer Gantry on political steroids, using scripture for the sake of a leftist creed that also includes DEI, abortions for transgenders, a “welcome mat” on the border, white skin racism, and green hysteria.  Indeed, he felt so confident about his Marxist-inspired version of reality that he used a middle school teaching position to indoctrinate young students on the dangers of climate change.  In his own words he “freaked them out” with the same existential fears long stoked by AOC.  So not only does Talarico support surgeons who mutilate young bodies, he’s also eager to manipulate their minds and emotions.  Would that Talarico were as respectful of their humanity (and of biblical texts) as he is of the wildly differing attempts to grasp the cosmic mystery he glibly embraces for political effect.

Richard Kirk graduated from Emory University’s school of theology in 1975, taught religion classes professionally from a literary-historical perspective, and is now a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.