Planned Parenthood Dominatrix Cecile Richards sat defiantly before a congressional panel on September 29, making little effort to conceal her disgust at the perfunctory speeches made in front of her.  She exuded a fierce confidence that dwarfed the resolve of her Republican opponents, presaging the House’s passage the very next day of a gutted stopgap appropriations bill that, despite much fanfare, did not strip federal funding from Planned Parenthood.  The budget can was kicked down the road, to just “two weeks before Christmas,” as the President, who has vowed to veto every attempt to defund Planned Parenthood anyway, helpfully told us.

Richards, the daughter of late Texas Gov. Ann Richards, who famously informed us that George W. Bush was “born with a silver foot in his mouth,” has been president of America’s largest abortion provider since 2006.  Her previous employer is Nancy Pelosi, for whom Richards served as deputy chief of staff.  Today, Richards also sits on the board of trustees of the wildly left-wing Ford Foundation, which funds abortion and feminism in the First World and exports them to the Third.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), who as I write is mounting a campaign to succeed John Boehner as speaker of the House, chaired the meeting of the Oversight & Government Reform Committee which hosted Richards.  When he was not tearfully sharing his family’s personal experiences with cancer, his questions to the Ice Queen were largely rhetorical, and she remained poised, though not exactly graceful, as he and his Republican colleagues repeatedly cut her off as she tried to defend her ghastly organization.  Democrats on the committee used their time to praise her name, speak about their own personal experiences with Planned Parenthood (“Thank you for all you do!”), and scold the chairman and his colleagues for “beating up on a woman,” even as she stood over them with her boot firmly pressed against their throats.

“This is about money and politics, plain and simple,” said committee member Jim Jordan (R-OH).  If the “this” to which Mr. Jordan refers is the effort begun by David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress to expose Planned Parenthood’s practices of exchanging fetal parts for cash, then he’s largely correct.  The immediate aim of Daleiden’s campaign has always been to stop federal funding of Planned Parenthood.  That campaign has lost its first congressional battle, and there’s a reason: It was a morally jaundiced approach from the beginning.

Congressional Democrats are right to observe that the real goal of the campaign to defund Planned Parenthood is to destroy Planned Parenthood and thus reduce abortions and abortion providers in the United States.  It is a worthy goal.  But the GOP continues to speak out of both sides of its mouth, insisting (as many committee members did) that they only want to get to the bottom of potential violations of the law exposed in Daleiden’s undercover videos, while, in nearly the next breath, opining about how precious each unborn life is.  GOP committee members rehearsed various gotcha questions aimed at getting the Unflappable Sorceress to admit that, no, her organization doesn’t provide mammograms, and yes, she has a very high salary.  Yes, Planned Parenthood throws all sorts of money at left-wing politicians.  Yes, Planned Parenthood’s income far exceeds expenses.  Yes, abortion is the most profitable thing Planned Parenthood does.  Yes, it’s true that “no federal money goes to pay for abortions,” although that money can pay for everything else, including chocolate-fountain galas, first-class airline tickets, and lobbying efforts, freeing non-federal income to be spent on harvesting infant livers and brains.

The media, the DNC, President Obama, Hollywood, and the Americans who give life to their image don’t give a damn.  Besides, why throw away those icky products of conception when they can be used to save lives?

The finances of Planned Parenthood are no secret: That information is and has been available free of charge at guidestar.com on the organization’s 990 forms.  The reality of fetal-tissue research is no secret, either (ask Ben Carson), and it is fully protected by federal law—law endorsed by members of both parties.

But more significantly, the fundamental practice of Planned Parenthood—the killing of human life in the womb, barbaric in every method—is known to all.

Many of us who recognize abortion for the monstrous evil that it is were led down the primrose path over the summer, as each horrifying new video from Daleiden was released.  “Lila Rose had this to say,” and we all delighted in the delusion that, finally, this would change hearts and minds.  We winked at the necessary intermediate steps and assumed that our outrage at abortion, our gut-wrenching at tiny femurs and spines on light-drenched tables would somehow be shared by that great lumpen mass of live-and-let-live, I’m-personally-opposed occupiers of the “center.”  We fooled ourselves into thinking that the American middle didn’t really know what an abortion is, or at least that they would demand that no one be allowed to make a little extra off the sale of baby corpses.  Even after that anemic performance by the Oversight Committee, Facebook, blogs, and FOX abounded with victory stories, clips of Mia Love, and “you won’t believe what she got Cecile Richards to admit!”

Americans have jettisoned natural law as the basis for our society, and even the so-called right, including church leaders, can speak only of abstract human rights and religious freedom.  What remains is the rule of pure human will and propagandistic persuasion.  The left knows this, so they confidently politicize every moral issue, mocking all attempts to restore decency in American society as the mad ravings of Tea Partiers, the Religious Right, fundamentalist extremists who want to shut down the government and deprive poor minority women of basic healthcare.  The middle, with no transcendent standard to which they might appeal, tacitly agrees and, at the sight of dead baby parts, changes the channel or kills the browser.

Abortion has to continue in this country because it’s the sine qua non of the Sexual Revolution.  The left is absolutely certain of that, and deep down, the American middle knows it, too.  That it is a grotesque business is something that simply has to be ignored, like where quarter-pounders come from, because ultimately the status quo of American society cannot imagine life without it.