Roe v. Wade and deadly leftist illogic

First go after babies in their wombs, and now justices in their homes. The logic of attacking the justices comes inevitably out of the logic of Roe. As Aristotle showed us, logically valid reasoning based on false premises leads to false conclusions and wrong actions: "illogic" in practice. So we now see yet another result of the logic of Roe, and Casey even more. Here it helps to see its source — not from great sages like Socrates and Confucius, or prophets like Moses, Jesus, or Muhammad, but from the existentialist thought of Jean-Paul Sartre and his enamorata Simone de Beauvoir, French public intellectuals post–World War II. Sartre set out the principles, and Beauvoir applied them in her book The Second Sex, the wellspring of contemporary women's liberation.

In his "first principle of existentialism", Sartre skipped over plants and animals and compared humans to an inanimate object:

Consider ... a book or paper-cutter. One cannot postulate a man who makes a paper-cutter but does not know what it is used for. For the paper-cutter, essence ... precedes existence. Now if we conceive God as Creator ... the concept of man in the mind of God is like paper-cutter in the mind of the artisan. But in atheistic existentialism, which I represent ... there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and this being is man. ... This means, first of all, that man exists ... and only afterwards defines himself ... he himself will have made what he will be. Therefore, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it ... man is what he conceives himself to be ... after his thrust into existence.

Beauvoir, a better writer, put the same point succinctly: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." She did not say 'becomes more a woman,' but says simply "becomes a woman," because she is not really a woman from birth, even though born with a female body. Likewise, we are not born a human, but create our own essence. So what is a man at first? A sort of "locus of freedom" to choose and act — and, in acting, to create his own essence. This is the illogical but powerful idea still very much with us.

The most powerful and widespread result of Sartrism is in the area of s*xual morality. Sartre's "first principle" that "existence precedes essence" is a fundamental but usually unrecognized source of the s*xual Revolution of the 1960s, the mainstreaming of homosexuality in the 1990s, the endorsement of "gay marriage" by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015, the distinction between psychological gender and physical sex, and the consequent idea of one changing one's gender at will.

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