On late Friday night, Central Daylight Time, the state of Texas, through its elected representatives, sent to Governor Rick Perry for signature a law placing Texas’s abortion policy to the left of Sweden’s and France’s. This was done after a rent-a-mob (in fairness, partially populated by Austinites still surprised they live in Texas) managed to postpone this event by screaming and jeering at the elected representatives once, and then coming back the next time with feces, urine, and bricks, in the event that someone in Texas thought Austinites and rent-a-mob lefties should be allowed to participate in civil discourse.

It was, needless to say, an emotionally charged moment. Pro-lifers thrilled to successfully passing a law requiring that abortion facilities be at least as clean as veterinary facilities, requiring abortionists to have the same admitting privileges most doctors get routinely, and eliminating the murder of viable in-utero children except in the always-exploited cases of life, health, or life-endangering (to the child) deformity.

In other words, Texas accomplished, substantively, very little. Children with Down Syndrome will still be marked for death, and women really upset about their third child will still be able to have her offed. Most of what this bill did was narrow down the number of abortions performed on viable children to ones an abortionist can weasel his way into doing and make certain women who come in to have their children executed won’t end up with sepsis.

The popularity of such a measure should be self-evident and shared by the Left, who like to pretend they’re agonized about slaughtering children up until a few days after they crown. Of course it was not, as large swathes of progressives, sharing gleefully in the advanced outlook that drove their movement to happily embrace eugenics until two decades after the Nazis were consigned to the ash-heap of history, demanded that babies be slaughtered and women die of infections.

And that brings us to the Associated Press.

I have worked in AP-member newsrooms and had AP-member clients, and my general impression is that almost everyone I knew and know associated with those entities would have been throwing bloody tampons at Texas Senators if given a chance on Friday night. Nevertheless, the same group that brought us style selections such as calling pro-lifers “antiabortion forces” and pro-choicers “pro-choice advocates”, on the thin excuse that the former are really unconcerned with life and the latter just being aw-shucks honest, had heretofore pretended to be neutral.

They didn’t fool anyone, but in civil society, we deliberately tolerate each others’ lies in order to get along. So it has been that Catholics, Evangelicals, actual Republicans, Orthodox (not the ordinary Greek Orthodox in America, they’re Episcopalians with more incense), Anglicans, golly, let’s just say it, Christians, and other pro-lifers have pretended that AP reporters are neutral conveyers of facts rather than interested partisans. This lets pro-lifers who should know better talk to reporters who would gut them on general principle, and everyone is able to avoid open violence, or at least pretend to converse with each other.

On Saturday morning, the AP dropped the mask:

Texas Sen. Wendy Davis, who filibustered abortion bill weeks ago, gives closing remarks: apne.ws/1aAU8VN -JM #StandWithWendy—
The Associated Press (@AP) July 13, 2013

For those of you sane enough to avoid Twitter, #StandWithWendy is a hashtag created by the ACLU and other left-wing groups to support Texas State Senator Wendy Davis, who is toying with the idea of trying to expand the Hispanic vote for Texas Democrats by launching a full-throated campaign in favor of infanticide. It is also a proxy for “we oppose the Texas bill.”

That tweet, as the indispensable Mollie Hemingway noted, was subsequently deleted without explanation after it had kicked up a mild firestorm.

The deletion raises as many questions as the original tweet. Is the sentiment in the tweet Associated Press policy? Was whoever ran the feed authorized or instructed to include the hashtag? If it was just SEO for the AP, why not use any of the dozen of tags used to generally refer to the bill? Who ordered the tweet deleted? Why?

Does the Associated Press stand with late-term abortion?

These are questions enterprising news organizations should ask the AP. They are questions that go to the meat of bias, quiet and open, in our news media, and the dangers that arise from it. How, for example, can the supermajority of Americans who oppose second- and third-trimester abortions trust AP wire pieces on the topic, if the AP believes as official policy that the supermajority of Americans are stone-age savages in need of re-education?

In order for civil society to survive, we must either knowingly lie to each other and agree to accept those lies, or be honest. The AP is doing neither. It must now pick, or else be treated as yet another group of mere Democratic partisans.

So let us ask again:

Does the Associated Press stand with late-term abortion?