Bork was more than happy to oblige. His originalist understanding of the First Amendment, he said, did not prohibit federal involvement with religion, including the use of federal funds to advance a religion. Therefore, he saw no problem with the Smithsonian's activities. When I asked whether he really thought it was the original intent of the framers of the First Amendment to fund pagan animal sacrifices, he waved me away and turned back to the crowd of sycophantic young neocons gathered around him—none of whom, suffice it to say, had any reason to be concerned about the use of tax dollars to fund federal activities that undermined Christian culture.

Those who mourn the Senate's failure to confirm President Reagan's nomination of Judge Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court make the undeniable claim that a Justice Bork would have been different from a Justice Kennedy. But the real question is how different, and in what ways? The Justice Kennedy of today is not what he always was, and a Justice Bork might not have been what Judge Bork seemed to be in 1987. Pointing to Bork's writings after he resigned his appellate judgeship in 1988 as evidence that he wouldn't have changed doesn't really work; it is easier to maintain one's ideological purity off the bench than on it. Just ask John Roberts, or, for that matter, Anthony Kennedy.

In many cases, there is no reason to believe that Bork would have voted differently from Kennedy. (For instance, in light of my conversation with the good judge, the 1993 case of Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah—one of Sam Francis's favorite examples of judicial tyranny—springs to mind.) On other issues, it's not clear that a Justice Bork would have had the opportunity to make the mark that both his supporters and opponents assume he would have made.

Specifically, on the matter of abortion, Justice Kennedy voted correctly in the landmark case of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), which set the stage for the Court to revisit Roe v. Wade in a case scheduled to come before the Court later that year. Both pro-life and pro-abortion activists were convinced that that case—Turnock v. Ragsdale, out of Chronicles' hometown of Rockford, Illinois—would lead either to significant restrictions on Roe or even to its outright reversal.

Turnock, however, was never argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. The "pro-life" George H.W. Bush administration, panicked by the possibility of Roe being reversed, strong-armed the state of Illinois. Just weeks before the Court was scheduled to hear Turnock, the Republican governor and the Democratic attorney general agreed to drop the case, and to create a statutory class of "lightly regulated" abortion clinics in Illinois, which became the model for many states across the country.

In the 23 years between the scuttling of Turnock and Judge Bork's death on December 19, 2012, only one other case raising an issue that would have justified revisiting Roe v. Wade has come before the Court—1992's Planned Parenthood v. Casey—and the justification for revisiting Roe in that case (and thus the chance to convince a majority to vote in favor of overturning Roe) was considerably more limited than in Turnock. Even if Judge Bork, in his Supreme Court nomination hearings, had not "so abased himself that he would present no threat to the ruling establishment" (as Tom Fleming wrote in the November 1987 issue of Chronicles), the George H.W. Bush administration would have deprived a Justice Bork of the best opportunity he would have had to try to forge a majority on the Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The real lesson of the Bork nomination hearings had little to do with the U.S. Supreme Court, and even less to do with how the Court might have ruled between then and now had Bork been confirmed, and everything to do with the left's ratcheting up of the Culture War, and the right's unwillingness to fight for what its leaders claim to believe. In that sense, the Bush administration's betrayal of the pro-life movement on Turnock v. Ragsdale is the true fruit of those hearings—and a Justice Bork, sadly, could have done nothing to prevent it.

Mr. Oliver writes that Roberts' opinion is "very narrow," but the implications of the opinion are not. And it's hardly a defense of Roberts to say that "he saw the writing on the wall that some form of universal health care is inevitable" and ruled as he did to avoid "damag[ing] the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, his Supreme Court in particular." Notice what's missing? Any concern for the constitutionality of the law itself.

Mr. Oliver is convinced that Chief Justice Roberts will do the right thing on "gay marriage"; Tom Piatak has already explained why that is by no means certain. But let's take it a step further: If Roberts ruled as he did yesterday because he "saw the writing on the wall" and wanted to preserve the "legitimacy" of "his Supreme Court," why does Mr. Oliver think that such concerns won't apply in the case of "gay marriage"?

A footnote: Mr. Oliver sees "gay marriage" coming before the Court in a case involving the Equal Protection Clause, but the first cases filed in federal court, and thus the first cases likely to come to the Court, invoked the Full Faith and Credit Clause. That's why I have argued—as far back as 2004—that there is a strong possibility that the Court will rule in favor of "gay marriage," and that, if it does, it won't be surprising to see at least one "conservative" justice join in the majority. If I had to predict which one, I'd choose the man who today was quoted as saying that he hopes that "his Supreme Court" will be remembered for doing "our job according to the Constitution, of protecting equal justice under the law."

Roberts portrays his decision as a check on federal power—if the Court had upheld the individual mandate under the Commerce Clause, it "would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority." But it's unclear whom he thinks he is fooling.

Silly me. I should have known the answer: He thought he'd fool the entire conservative movement. And it looks like he's right. Pretty much every mainstream conservative group or publication has offered a variation of this post at The Weekly Standard's website:

[T]he Roberts Court put real limits on what the government can and cannot do. For starters, it restricted the limits of the Commerce Clause, which does not give the government the power to create activity for the purpose of regulating it. This is a huge victory for those of us who believe that the Constitution is a document which offers a limited grant of power.

The author ignores the fact that "the Roberts Court" (that is, Roberts, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan) also expanded the power of Congress to "lay and collect Taxes" beyond anything ever claimed before. Rather than noting that Congress can now force any American citizen to purchase something he does not desire or need simply by levying a a tax on him if he does not,
he even tries to make lemonade out of Roberts' declaration that the penalty imposed by Congress for failure to purchase health insurance is "legally a tax":

Republicans can and will declare that Obama has slapped the single biggest tax on the middle class in history, after promising not to do that.

Who cares that Congress has just been granted total power over how you choose to spend your money—at least Mitt and the rest of the Republicans can start cranking out those campaign ads!

Those who want to provide cover for Chief Justice Roberts or for the Republican presidential candidate who has promised to "nominate judges in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts" will undoubtedly keep referring to the supposed limitation of the Commerce Clause. But that's a lot like applauding a murderer for not stabbing his victim with a knife because he blew him away with a cannon.

In the far-reaching implications of the ObamaCare ruling, however, John Roberts has revealed that he is no Sandra Day O'Connor but a latter-day Earl Warren. Today's decision not only upheld ObamaCare but provided the framework for an unprecedented expansion of federal power. If you've liked the Court's Commerce Clause decisions over the decades, you're going to love what the Court can do with Congress's power "to lay and collect Taxes."

The Syllabus of the decision provided by the Court cuts through the turgid text of Roberts' 59-page decision and tells us all we need to know: The individual mandate of ObamaCare could not be justified under the Commerce Clause, because the Commerce Clause can only regulate existing commercial activity, not compel individuals "to become active in commerce." But Congress and the President want to do precisely that, by forcing individuals without health insurance to purchase it, and so Justice Roberts (with a little help from the Obama administration's lawyers) found the justification elsewhere: Congress can levy a tax on those who refuse to purchase health insurance.

Roberts portrays his decision as a check on federal power—if the Court had upheld the individual mandate under the Commerce Clause, it "would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority." But it's unclear whom he thinks he is fooling. The administration's lawyers and Roberts turned to the power "to lay and collect Taxes" precisely because the Commerce Clause had already been stretched to the limit. With today's ruling, Congress has been given the green light to do something that even the most imaginative interpretation of the Commerce Clause would not allow: to compel the supposedly free citizens of the United States to purchase anything that Congress deems in those citizens' best interest—or to compel them to purchase one thing rather than another. All Congress has to do is to pass legislation levying a tax on those who, say, fail to purchase smoke detectors for their homes, or who insist on purchasing a car that runs on gasoline over one that runs on electricity.

On second thought, comparing Roberts to Earl Warren may be unfair—to Earl Warren, that is. Warren could only dream of writing decisions that would give the federal government this kind of power over the everyday lives of American citizens. Roberts has turned that dream into a reality—and into a nightmare for anyone outside of the ruling elite in Washington, D.C.

No, it's a pragmatic kind of addiction. It's my job, you see, to comb over the letters and reply cards and mailing envelopes that are developed by professional copywriters at four or five grand a pop, to ferret out ideas that might help us in our own direct-mail campaigns for Chronicles. Because, sadly, even the best magazine in the United States (and one of the best in the Western world) loses subscribers over time. And even in this age of electronic communications (at least until the promised Singularity arrives), the most efficient (though admittedly expensive) way to replace those lost subscribers (not to mention increase subscriptions) is to send out our own direct mail.

(You didn't think the readers of this website kept us in business, did you? By their own account, a majority of them are allergic to both the paper Chronicles is printed on and the paper used to print checks. But that's another story for a different day.)

Unlike most junkies, I'm rather disciplined about my addiction. As various direct-mail packages arrive at the office, I let them pile up on my desk. About once per month, a day or two after we send the latest issue of Chronicles to press, I clear away the last round of page proofs and settle in for a long afternoon of direct-mail bliss.

This month, I've been anticipating opening one particularly interesting piece of direct mail. There's nothing fancy about the plain white envelope, and, unlike many direct-mail packages, it doesn't rely on an additional ink color to catch the recipient's eye. The bold black sans-serif font provides a certain weight to the short message, presented in all caps:

DO YOU SUPPORT A WAR WITH IRAN?

IF SO, THROW AWAY THIS ENVELOPE.

Clever, that. In the guise of weeding out recipients who might not be interested in the contents of the envelope, that message really whets the appetite of the type of reader the publication—in this case, our good friends at The American Conservative—wants to attract. There's a lesson to be learned there, and I thank The American Conservative's well-paid copywriters for teaching it to me, free of charge.

Before I got around to opening the envelope to see what other lessons I might learn, however, one of our board members sent us a copy of the letter inside. And it turns out that, despite the promising outer envelope, The American Conservative severely overpaid its copywriters.

After all, what publication spends money on a direct-mail package to promote its competition? As any reader of our magazine (or even just of this website) will immediately realize, the following lines clearly describe Chronicles:

Only one magazine on the Right warned against the Iraq War before it started. (And warned about the housing bubble as well.) Only one magazine on the Right opposes war in Iran and empire-building around the world.

The only thing The American Conservative's copywriters forgot to mention was how to subscribe to the magazine that Patrick J. Buchanan, a subscriber to Chronicles since 1981 and a founding editor of The American Conservative, described as "the toughest, best-written, and most insightful journal in America." But their oversight is your gain:

For a limited time, you can receive 12 issues of Chronicles at the special low introductory rate of $19.95 by calling (800) 877-5459 and mentioning the code "AMCON."

That's over 65 percent off of the newsstand rate of $59.40—the equivalent of seven free issues. Have your credit card (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or Discover) ready when you call—and remember, this offer won't last forever!

P.S. It turns out there was one final lesson that The American Conservative's copywriters could teach us, though I'm afraid it was one they didn't intend: Remember that some of the people who receive your direct mail have long memories, and don't try to pull the wool over their eyes. You see, The American Conservative's direct-mail letter was signed by Wick Allison, the president of the American Ideas Institute, which underwrites The American Conservative. Back in 1991, when Chronicles and Pat Buchanan were opposing the first Gulf War, Wick, of course, was the publisher of National Review, which was beating the war drums for it.

When the Northern Illinois Women’s Center closed its doors for good in early January, after nearly 39 years of profiting from women’s exercise of their “constitutional right” to have an abortion, the death toll stood much higher than 58,000—perhaps as high as 70,000, according to Kevin Rilott of the Rockford Pro-Life Initiative.  Before NIWC founder and first abortionist Richard Ragsdale passed to his eternal reward in 2004, he estimated that he alone had performed 50,000 abortions from April 1973.

Yet how we regard that loss of life depends largely on what we think abortion is, and what we think abortion does.  The many local Christians who prayed outside of the Northern Illinois Women’s Center every day that it was open over the course of four decades, and the many other Christians who supported them with prayers and donations, regard that loss of life with the same sadness as we do the death of American soldiers in Vietnam.  And indeed, in that view, these children were the victims of a war, victims who had one distinct disadvantage over the soldier in Vietnam: They had no means or opportunity to fight back.  Whatever chance they had to emerge unscathed from the house of horrors known as “Fort Turner”—a majestic old public school converted over to the destruction of life—came entirely through grace by the prayers of others.

For those who believe abortion does not stop a beating heart, but simply solves a problem or safeguards a “right,” there can be little question of mourning over the tens of thousands of lives lost.  Even those who regarded the Vietnam War as just and necessary could view the loss of each American soldier’s life as a cause for grief, but in abortion, the child stands in for the enemy soldier, and even the best of us find it hard to mourn the loss of the enemy.  That is simply the way the world works: In war, lives are cut short, futures erased, so that others may continue to live.

Of course, not all of those who support abortion have taken part in the killing.  While the armchair warriors in the media and think tanks are more bloodthirsty than the average soldier, because they do not have to spend the rest of their lives remembering the faces of those their rhetoric has killed, the mothers who end the life of the children growing within their wombs are, like the soldier, much more likely than the abstract defender of “our way of life” to recognize what they have done, even if guilt compels them to continue to justify it as necessary.  The woman who proudly proclaims that she has had several abortions and would gladly have another reminds the normal person of the veteran who laments that he had but one tour of duty to kill for his country.

On Monday, January 23, ten days after the Northern Illinois Women’s Center announced that it would close its doors for good, and 39 years and one day after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade, our eighth child was born.  Because the anniversary of Roe fell on a Sunday this year, the organizers of the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., decided to transfer it to that Monday, as if it were, say, Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.  Interestingly, the supporters of Roe followed suit—a curious sign, on both sides, of how much of the battle over abortion has entered the realm of abstraction.

When, however, your child is born on the day that all of America is either celebrating or commemorating the right of mothers to kill their own children, abstraction is simply not possible.  To receive hearty congratulations on the birth of your child on, say, Facebook, offered by those who have spent the rest of the day expressing their gratitude for Roe and attacking those who acknowledge that life begins at conception, is profoundly chilling.

When did Clare Frances’s life begin?  Not when she emerged via C-section from her mother’s womb a week before her due date—a time when many states would still allow a “late-term” abortion to “save the life of the mother.”  Nor did it begin 15 weeks earlier, when she reached the point of viability—before which almost every state would have allowed her life to be ended to “preserve the health of the mother.”  Nor did it begin another eight or so weeks before, when Amy first could be certain that she felt Clare move.  Nor six weeks before that, when, at ten weeks’ gestation, we first heard her heartbeat, and when abortion is legal in every state for any reason.  Indeed, her heart had been beating since the 23rd day after her conception, a time when many a first-time mother is only just beginning to sense that her life is about to change forever.

Physically, Clare Frances’s life began at conception; but even that does not tell the whole story.  “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you“ (Jeremiah 1:5), and before she was conceived, Clare existed in the sacramental union between Amy and myself.  That, however, is a thought to develop in a different piece on another day.  For now, suffice it to say that if we reduce the beginning of life to a biological milestone, we will never understand just how destructive abortion truly is.

I first visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Wall, a few years after it opened, and found myself there frequently when I was a graduate student at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.  The impact of the Wall on visitors is often ascribed to the fact that the war remains close to us in time.  But I think there is something more to it.  Seeing those 58,261 names all brought together in such a small space distills the very real human costs of the Vietnam War.  The visitor standing in front of the Wall cannot escape the consequences of our actions in Southeast Asia.  And the very design of the wall gives the impression that this is just the tip of the iceberg, that behind and beneath each name lie mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and children and friends, all the lives that the fallen had touched, and those that they would have touched, had they survived the war.

Fort Turner is, in its own way, just the tip of the iceberg represented by the tens of thousands of children whose lives ended therein.  Might it, one day, become a monument to the war on the unborn, to the tens of millions of lives lost through legalized abortion, and to the hundreds of millions of lives affected by that loss?

Perhaps, but it will not be any day soon.  Just as the Wall could not be built until the war had ended and the nation had begun to come to grips with the destruction it had caused, so, too, we will never fully comprehend the horror of legalized abortion until we have moved beyond it.  Fort Turner, pray God, may remain shuttered for good, but its heart of darkness long ago outgrew its walls and is spreading throughout the land.

[This article first appeared in the March 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.  Click here to subscribe.]

Steve Jobs, the 55-year-old cofounder of Apple, Inc., who resigned as the company’s CEO on August 24, has never hidden his political views.  A vegan Buddhist who supported Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and Barack Obama and extended spousal benefits to the “domestic partners” of Apple employees, Jobs—in violation of contemporary business wisdom—has even inserted his political views into Apple’s advertising.  (Think of the grammatically incorrect “Think Different” campaign, which featured such liberal icons as Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Ted Turner, and Mahatma Gandhi.)  Reportedly a voracious reader, Jobs would probably not find much in Chronicles to his liking.  Yet for almost 25 years, every issue of this magazine has benefited greatly from technologies developed by Jobs at Apple and NeXT, the computer company he founded after leaving Apple in 1985.

Lest you dismiss these remarks as the ravings of an Apple “fanboy,” let me illustrate briefly what I mean.

Before Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh on January 24, 1984, Chronicles was put together the way most magazines were.  Authors sent their typewritten manuscripts (with corrections often handwritten in pencil or ink) by mail to our editorial office.  The manuscripts had to be retyped (incorporating the authors’ corrections) before they were edited, and after every round of editing.  To lay out the magazine, the text had to be typeset into galley form, and then cut and pasted (with scissors and glue) onto the page, and waxed to hold everything in place (and hide the cut edges).  The pages were sent to a prepress house, which tidied them up, inserted images and ads, and took pictures of the composed page (one piece of film for each color on the page).  “Bluelines” (essentially mimeographed proofs) were created from those negatives and returned to our offices.  Any necessary corrections to the bluelines entailed recomposing the entire page, shooting new film, and running new bluelines.  When the bluelines were finally approved, the negatives were shipped to our printer, where they were transferred to printing plates.  Any problems discovered by the printer on any of the plates required returning to square one on that plate.  (And each plate contained either four or eight pages of the magazine, so a problem on one page affected several others as well.)  The printer would provide the first hard copies in about ten business days after delivery of the final, problem-free negatives.

All of that began to change in 1984.  The Macintosh’s graphical user interface allowed programmers to create a “WYSIWYG” environment—“What You See Is What You Get.”  That, along with Apple’s LaserWriter printer (which accurately reproduced what you saw on screen), set the stage in 1985 for desktop publishing.

Today, authors send us their text as e-mail attachments (an innovative feature of Jobs’ NeXTSTEP operating system), mostly written in Microsoft Word (which made its first appearance as a WYSIWYG word processor when it was ported to the Macintosh in 1985).  Many of our writers now own a Mac, but some still use a PC running Windows, which got its start as an imitation of the Macintosh operating system, bolted on top of MS-DOS.

Aaron Wolf imports the text directly into Adobe InDesign and exports it for editing onscreen in Adobe InCopy.  Adobe’s first big break came in 1985, when Apple licensed Adobe’s PostScript language for use in the LaserWriter.  Aaron and I edit each article twice onscreen (30-inch Apple Cinema Displays connected to Mac Pros), before Aaron sends the galleys (as PDFs, via e-mail) to each author.  Aaron enters any corrections received from the author, Dr. Fleming, and proofreaders  into InDesign.  Along the way, he inserts images and ads directly into the layout.  George McCartney, Jr., who provides many of our covers, creates them on a Mac and sends them through e-mail and the web.

After a final reading of page proofs and the entering of any last-minute corrections, we export each page as a separate PDF (perhaps ten minutes’ work total, the time it took to wax a couple of pages) and upload them through the internet to our printer in Michigan.  The printer immediately provides a digital proof of the entire issue, and we approve it onscreen.  It goes into production the very next morning, and the printer provides hard copies after four business days.  The production process for a single issue has gone from almost three months to less than a month.  And a reader near the top of the mailstream can now read words written as late as one week before the issue arrived at his house, compared with six weeks or more in 1984.

So many of the advances that make our current production process possible happened so gradually that we sometimes lose sight of the revolution that took place in publishing over the last 25 years.  And Steve Jobs was there at every step of the way, through both Apple and NeXT.  Not only did the NeXTSTEP operating system become the basis for Mac OS X (and thus also iOS, which powers the iPod, iPhone, and iPad), it spurred the creation of Adobe’s PDF format (after NeXT adopted Adobe’s Display PostScript for its windowing system), the widespread adoption of e-mail (built into NeXTSTEP at the system level), and the rise of the World Wide Web, created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee on December 25, 1990, on a NeXT computer.

Without any one of these things, Chronicles as we know it today would be a different type of magazine.

Scott Richert and Aaron Wolf wax the final pages of the March 2006 issue on a PowerMac G5.

And it would be a much more expensive magazine, too.  Or rather, it might well have folded at several points in the past 25 years, had it not been for the reductions in cost occasioned by technologies that trace their roots back to Steve Jobs and Apple and NeXT.  Chronicles’ staff is a fraction of what it was in 1984: fewer editors; no typists and typesetters; no dedicated designer and layout person.  (At one point in 1999, even before all of these advances had made it to Chronicles, Dr. Fleming and I put out several issues without any additional in-house production staff.)  Hand-composed pages, film, and bluelines, along with the prepress services that they required, are things of the past; the PDFs that we send to the printer are now imposed directly on the plates.  Chronicles’ direct costs today are about 40 percent lower than they were when I became assistant editor back in September 1997 (and they were already much reduced then from 1984).

There are many more stories I could share, such as how the e-mail and PDF-viewing capabilities of the first iPhone allowed me to take my family on a much-needed vacation in August 2007, while still managing to supervise the production of three separate Chronicles Press books and make sure that they would arrive in Washington, D.C., in September in time for the John Randolph Club—a feat made possible by print-on-demand technologies that rely on the same advances that have made their way into Chronicles’ production process.  But I think you get the point: Whether you use a MacBook Air and an iPhone and an iPad or a Dell laptop and a Verizon Droid and an HP TouchPad, if you’re reading Chronicles, you’ve benefited from Steve Jobs’ efforts.  In a mere quarter of a century, he has revolutionized the publishing industry in a way not seen since the rise of moveable type.

I don’t mean to downplay the contributions of the tens of thousands of employees of Apple and NeXT (and Adobe and Microsoft) who acted as foot soldiers in this revolution—indeed, quite the opposite.  Over the last few years, as it became increasingly obvious that the day was coming when Steve Jobs would have to step aside as Apple’s CEO, Wall Street analysts cried doom and gloom, and institutional investors sold Apple short on every piece of bad news concerning its CEO’s health.

But those of us who rely on Apple products every day, and pay a bit more attention to the internal operations of Apple than the average person does, haven’t been overly worried.  Steve Jobs’ famed attention to detail and his desire for perfection did not stop with Apple’s products but extended to the company itself.  He was, as many ex-employees of Apple attest, a hell of a man to work for.  But those who continued to work for him, who were loyal to both the man and his vision, who recognized that his mercurial temper went hand-in-hand with his brilliance—those employees were indelibly shaped by him.  They have risen to the top ranks in Apple, and they took over the day-to-day operations on the world’s largest and most successful corporation long before Jobs stepped aside.  Thus, for those who rely on Apple products, there is nothing to fear, because Jobs’ faithful lieutenants have as little desire to change the company that Steve Jobs built as those of us who have dedicated our lives to Chronicles have to change this magazine.  As tech columnist John Gruber wrote on DaringFireball.net,

The company itself is Apple-like.  The same thought, care, and painstaking attention to detail that Steve Jobs brought to questions like “How should a computer work?”, “How should a phone work?”, “How should we buy music and apps in the digital age?” he also brought to the most important question: “How should a company that creates such things function?”

Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product.  It is Apple itself.

When the news of Steve Jobs’ resignation was announced on the evening of August 24, Apple’s stock immediately dropped seven percent in after-hours trading.  As I write this the next morning, it is down just a little over one percent from yesterday’s high, in line with the overall market.  That indicates institutional investors and Wall Street analysts are finally realizing what some of us small investors have long known: Apple succeeded because of Steve Jobs, but the company’s success no longer depends primarily on him.

In a world that too often values quick profits and “rock star” fame above solid products and hard work and loyalty, the fact that Steve Jobs could pull off such an orderly succession may, in the end, prove to be his greatest success.

This article first appeared in the October 2011 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. On October 5, Steve Jobs passed away, at the age of 56.

But now, five or six weeks later, I'm beginning to have second thoughts. After all, the arguments of those who supported Live Action seem pretty persuasive. Not those, of course, that claimed that the end (undermining Planned Parenthood and thereby saving babies) justified the means; but those that argued that the means themselves were perfectly justifiable.

It all seems so clear now that, in retrospect, I cannot understand why I missed it. Perhaps it can be chalked up to my post-Vatican II idolization of popes, which led me into the error of believing that the current Catechism of the Catholic Church, released under Pope John Paul II and compiled under the direction of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, could be regarded as an authoritative document. These three paragraphs made it all seem so simple:

"A lie consists in speaking a falsehood with the intention of deceiving." The Lord denounces lying as the work of the devil: "You are of your father the devil, . . . there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies" [paragraph 2482].

Lying is the most direct offense against the truth. To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead someone into error. By injuring man's relation to truth and to his neighbor, a lie offends against the fundamental relation of man and of his word to the Lord [paragraph 2483].

By its very nature, lying is to be condemned. It is a profanation of speech, whereas the purpose of speech is to communicate known truth to others. The deliberate intention of leading a neighbor into error by saying things contrary to the truth constitutes a failure in justice and charity [paragraph 2485].

Still, as the supporters of Live Action kept pointing out, even that postconciliar catechism noted that

No one is bound to reveal the truth to someone who does not have the right to know it [paragraph 2489].

True, as I responded, that statement comes in a section concerned with the sin of detraction—that is, revealing the sins of another person to a third party—and not with lying to a person in order to save babies, but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered: Why can't this principle be applied universally?

And that's when I had my revelation. Had not Our Lord Himself said, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set ye free"?

Think about it. What could truth mean in this context, other than moral truth? We know that abortion is wrong; we must act on that knowledge. To do otherwise is to fail to live up to our obligations as Christians.

But still—are there any limits on how we can act on that knowledge? Even the supporters of Live Action claimed that there are. Live Action's "lies" (as some of their supporters, such as Peter Kreeft, were willing to call them) or "justified deception" (as most of their supporters preferred to refer to Lila Rose's play-acting) were OK, but killing abortionists or even burning down a Planned Parenthood abortuary is not.

Now that I've seen the light, though, I think that they're missing the boat. Remember—Our Lord said that "the truth shall set ye free." But what does freedom mean, if not the right to do anything that we think is morally justified in order to advance the truth?

I'll admit: I still have certain qualms when it comes to murder or even to property damage. But until I saw the light, I had similar qualms about lying, and as some of those who supported Live Action pointed out, those qualms were nothing more than "scrupulosity." I wouldn't want to be accused of that again, so I'm scrupulously attempting to overcome my scrupulosity. In the meantime, though, I'll make sure to refrain from criticizing anyone who murders an abortionist or burns down a Planned Parenthood office, because such criticism of those who are just trying to do the right thing is not helpful—indeed, it might even amount to detraction, as one supporter of Live Action warned those of us who had mistakenly criticized them. (Actually, since he saw nothing wrong with Live Action's tactics—long before I came around—he really meant calumny, but, to quote the current occupant of the Oval Office, they're all "just words.")

Granted, the idea that we should be free to do anything that we think is morally justified has been misused by others, even by those who support abortion. But since we know the truth—abortion is wrong—we don't have to worry about whether any action taken on behalf of that truth might be wrong. We've been set free to act in whatever way we need to, in order to bring the scourge of abortion to an end.

And first and foremost among our actions, I've now become convinced, should be depriving those who have no right to the truth of that truth—even if we have to go out of our way to create opportunities to do it. Pro-lifers—no, even more broadly, Christians—have made a grave mistake. We have spent far too much time trying to convince others of the truth regarding abortion, not to mention the Truth of Christianity. And what has been their response? An obstinate refusal to acknowledge the truth!

Seriously—how many times can we be expected to try to convince the same person of the truth? Our Lord said we had to forgive our brother seventy times seven times; but He said nothing about the number of times that we have to expose our brother to the truth. That silence, as any Straussian knows, is significant. Clearly, it was Our Lord's way of signaling to those of us who know the truth that we have no obligation to expose those in error to that truth. They have chosen to deny the truth; who are we to deny them their moral freedom?

Moreover, it is at best naive to think that exposing inveterate sinners to the truth would make any difference. That's the fundamental difference between them and us, after all. We know the truth and act on it; they know untruth and act on it. Thus the best way to stop them is to play along with them, to respond to their untruth with untruth, so that they will continue to persist in their untruth, and we can then expose them to the world (or at least to those who know the truth).

If that seems a little close to detraction, then we simply need to look at detraction in a new light. While detraction is revealing the truth to someone who has no right to know it, those of us who know the truth by definition have a right to the truth. Simple, really—the truth has set us free to reveal the hidden truth about others to everyone who, like us, has a right to the truth. And we shouldn't worry that those committed to untruth might decide to do the same to us; after all, we have no hidden truths that we wouldn't want revealed.

There's only one thing that still bothers me—well, two things.

The first is that pesky line from Saint Paul—Romans 3:23, to be exact: "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." I'm not sure why, but every time I read it, I begin to wonder whether anyone, including those who do know the truth, has the right to know it. Surely, either Saint Paul was wrong, or Christ came to reveal the truth to a world filled with sinners who had no right to it, and that would have pretty radical implications for how we as Christians should act toward those who do not yet know the truth, or even toward those who have rejected it.

I'm pretty sure, though, that Saint Paul must have been wrong. After all, I've never sinned, much less obstinately persisted in doing something I knew was wrong, and if you've read this far without closing this webpage, I'm sure you haven't, either.

The second thing that bothers me is that word, lying. Unlike Peter Kreeft, I just cannot bring myself to embrace it. Nor, for that matter, do I find deception (even when modified with the adjective justified) much better. The Oxford American Dictionary says that to deceive is to "cause (someone) to believe something that is not true, typically in order to gain some personal advantage."

That sounds too self-serving to me. When I sign on with Live Action and, God willing, get the chance to record a video in a Planned Parenthood office with Lila Rose, I won't be doing it for personal advantage. Instead, I will be encouraging those committed to untruth to remain committed to untruth, all in the name of the truth.

So, after much thought, I have finally settled on the perfect word: fool. Yes, some dictionaries insist that it is a synonym for deceive, but in ordinary usage, it has a lightheartedness about it. Who gets upset when someone reveals that he was "just fooling you"?

It all seems so clear to me now, and I regret having wasted five or six weeks before coming around. Worse yet, I have so far blown the opportunity to fulfill my obligation to engage in almsgiving this Lent, by going out and committing acts of charity by fooling some Planned Parenthood employees.

But I'm not one to despair. Yesterday may have been the midpoint of Lent, but from Laetare Sunday to Easter 2011, there still three weeks left to go. And today is the first of a new month.

So let us not waste another minute. This April, fool for the truth. It's the best way you could spend the rest of this Lent. You can trust me on that—would I fool you?