File This Under Climaco Case - Road to the Middle Class

OK, I ADMIT it. When the New York Times gets in trouble, I enjoy it. The Germans, in their thoroughness, have a word for it: Schadenfreude. Or as some wag wrote: It isn’t enough for me to be happy. The rest of the world must be miserable.

I’m talking about the Climaco case, of course. Carmen Climaco makes her appearance in the coda of a long article in the Times Magazine about the criminalizing of abortion in El Salvador, “Pro-Life Nation” by Jack Hitt.

It’s a story that is bound to appeal to the upscale women readers of the New York Times Magazine. You see, if you get an abortion in El Salvador you could go to jail.

It’s all done in the best narrative style of the new journalism. We follow the story of “D.C.,” a “a tall and strikingly beautiful woman” after she had a botched abortion. There’s the examination in the clinic, the investigation, and finally, the court date.

[T]he judge began the proceeding, and he said I would go free, that what they were going to do was look for the person who had done this to me and that I had no reason to go to jail. I was so happy, so very happy.

What? No jail? That would never do. The NYT subscribers expect value for money.

So, in the sweep of a pen, we get the case of a real woman who went to jail for getting an abortion. It’s the story

of a 20-year-old mother named Carmen Climaco, whose abortion of a fetus estimated at 18 weeks had been recast by the prosecutor as aggravated homicide.

Now she’s in jail for 30 years.

Perfect! Outrage! And Bush is to blame!

Not so fast. As the Times Public Editor, Byron Calame, put it:

It turns out, however, that trial testimony convinced a court in 2002 that Ms. Climaco’s pregnancy had resulted in a full-term live birth, and that she had strangled the “recently born.”

You see, the autopsy determined that the baby’s “lungs floated when submerged in water,” a test done, presumably, to determine if the lungs had been inflated.

No doubt you’d have to look long and hard for an 18-week-old fetus that could sport that kind of lung.

The story shows why media bias is such a problem. It’s not just the bias. It’s the professionalism, the credibility, that gets lost in the haste to advance a political or cultural agenda.

If Jack Hitt had been an unbiased reporter he could have checked up on the Climaco story with one of his pro-life sources. “What’s this deal about this kid sent up for 30 years for a botched abortion,” he could have said.

You can imagine how quickly any pro-life activist would have tried to disprove that one.

But Hitt didn’t do that. And the multiple layers of editing at the New York Times didn’t either.

Now it turns up that the Times may be axing the Public Editor position.

What a surprise!

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Racial Discrimination

[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Sacrifice

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values

Pentecostalism

Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

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