For decades, our elected officials and political leaders have indulged the polite fancy that conservatives and liberals both have similar, good-natured wishes for America at heart, with but honest, good-faith disagreements about the best policy means to achieve those shared ends.

It’s time for that happy horsecrap to end.

In case you missed it, Planned Parenthood’s Senior Director of Medical Services was caught on tape (released today) essentially admitting to the sale (by Planned Parenthood affiliates) of aborted baby parts. Some troglodyte liberals initially suggested that the video was edited unfairly, a curious defense in light of the fact that PPFA wasn’t making this claim themselves. The full video was released this afternoon which indicates why – there is no way to interpret the full interaction in any other light. As LifeNews notes, some of the film’s “greatest moments” include highlights like these:

The buyers ask Nucatola, “How much of a difference can that actually make, if you know kind of what’s expected, or what we need?”

“It makes a huge difference,” Nucatola replies. “I’d say a lot of people want liver. And for that reason, most providers will do this case under ultrasound guidance, so they’ll know where they’re putting their forceps. The kind of rate-limiting step of the procedure is calvarium. Calvarium—the head—is basically the biggest part.”

Nucatola explains, “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”

“And with the calvarium, in general, some people will actually try to change the presentation so that it’s not vertex,” she continues. “So if you do it starting from the breech presentation, there’s dilation that happens as the case goes on, and often, the last step, you can evacuate an intact calvarium at the end.”

Planned Parenthood isn’t disputing at all that they are involved in this practice at all. Their defense is that it isn’t illegal – because they don’t charge a fee for the actual organs themselves, but rather essentially an administrative fee for finding the organs in the first place.

Well. I don’t really know the law in this area to know whether PPFA has found a valid legal loophole, nor do I give much of a damn. Here is what is relevant to me – a group that receives my tax dollars is in the business of performing abortions and selling (technically or not, it amounts to the same thing) the discarded body parts of unborn babies.

And here is the problem – a pretty significant part of the country is essentially okay that this is happening. How do I know this? Because a sufficient mass of people in America sent back to office essentially the same cabal of Congresscritters who couldn’t vote to defund Planned Parenthood in 2011, and furthermore re-elected the President in 2012 who campaigned in their favor. Get it? Forget taking actual legal action against Planned Parenthood, we (as in, the people who vote in elections in America), cannot even muster the will to elect politicians who will stop our tax dollars from going towards it.

What do people possessed of basic human decency have in common, politically or culturally, with the portion of America that can watch this video and either be actually glad about what it contains, or dismiss it with a shrug of the shoulders and a hearty “meh”?

Nothing at all, and it’s time we stopped pretending otherwise.

If the First Lady of the United States could say 8 years ago that for the first time in her adult life she was proud of her country, then I suppose I can say that for the first time in my adult life I’m ashamed of my country. If the price of being publicly loyal to it pretending that I’m basically okay with sharing a national identity with the people who have allowed this monstrosity to continue unchecked since 1973, or that my disagreements with people who are okay with the sale of baby parts are “mere politics,” then count me out of this ridiculous charade.

It’s increasingly apparent that resolution of the current conflict cannot be managed competently by our elected betters in Washington, and I don’t know that this is necessarily a bad thing. Any consensus position reached with the servants of Moloch or through “good faith” dispute with them can only inevitably result in us continuing to turn away and pretend that monstrosities like the one uncovered today are not regularly happening right underneath our nose.

I close here with an excerpt from Richard Selzer’s Mortal Lessons, on his reflections upon stumbling upon a horror he witnessed one day in the street:

All at once you step on something soft. You feel it with your foot. Even through your shoe you have the sense of something unusual, something marked by a special “give.” it is a foreignness upon the pavement. Instinct pulls your foot away in an awkward little movement. You look down, and you see . . . a tiny naked body, its arms and legs flung apart, its head thrown back, its mouth agape, its face serious. A bird, you think, fallen from its next. But there is no next here on 73rd Street no bird so big. It is rubber, then. A model, a . . . joke. Yes, that’s it, a joke. And you bend to see. Because you must. And it is no joke. Such a gray softness can be but one thing. It is a baby, and dead. You cover your mouth, your eyes. You are fixed. Horror has found its chink and crawled in, and you will never be the same as you were. Years later you will step from a sidewalk to a lawn, and you will start at its softness, and think of that upon which you have just trod.

Now, you look about; another man has seen it too. “My God,” he whispers. Others come, people you have seen every day for years, and you hear them speak with strangely altered voices, “Look,” they say, “it’s a baby.” There is a cry. “Here’s another!” and “Another!” and “Another!” And you follow with your gaze the index fingers of your friends pointing from the huddle where you cluster. Yes, it is true! There are more of these . . . little carcasses upon the street. And for a moment you look up to see if all the unbaptized sinless are falling from Limbo.

Now the street is filling with people. There are police. They know what to do. They rope off the area, then stand guard over the enclosed space. They are controlled, methodical, these young policemen. Servants, they do not reveal themselves to their public master, it would not be seemly. Yet I do see their pallor and the sweat that breaks upon the face of one, the way another bites the lining of his cheek and holds it thus. Ambulance attendants scoop up the bodies. They scan the street; none must be overlooked. What they place upon the litter amounts to little more than a dozen pounds of human flesh. They raise the litter, and slide it home inside the ambulance, and they drive away. You and your neighbors stand about in the street which is become for you a battlefield from which the newly slain have at last been bagged and tagged and dragged away. But what shrapnel is this? By what explosion flung, these fragments that sink into the brain and fester there? Whatever smell there is in this place becomes for you the stench of death. The people of 73rd Street do not then speak to each other. It is too soon for outrage, too late for blindness. It is the time of unresisted horror.

Later, at the police station, the investigation is brisk, conclusive. It is the hospital director speaking: “. . . fetuses accidentally got mixed up with the hospital rubbish . . . were picked up at approximately eight fifteen a.m. by the sanitation truck. Somehow, the plastic lab bag, marked HAZARDOUS MATERIAL, fell off the back of the truck and broke open. . . it is a freak accident.” The hospital director wants you to know it is not an every day occurrence. Once in a lifetime, he says. But you have seen it, and what are his words to you now?

He grows affable, familiar, tells you that, by mistake, the fetuses got mixed up with the other debris. (Yes, he says other, he says debris.) He has spent the entire day trying to figure out how it happened. He wants you to know that. Somehow it matters to him. He goes on:

Aborted fetuses that weigh one pound or less are incinerated. Those weighing over one pound are buried at a city cemetery. He says this. Now you see. It is orderly. It is sensible. The world is not mad. This still is a civilized society.

There is no more. You turn to leave. Outside on the street, men are talking things over, reassuring each other that the right thing is being done. But just this once, you know it isn’t. You saw, and you know.

And you know, too, that the Street of Dead Fetuses will be wherever you go. You are part of its history now, its legend. It has laid claim upon you so that you cannot entirely leave it – not ever.