It was nearly half a century after World War II that I got a glimpse of how deeply the "science" of eugenics had taken root even among individuals who felt sure they abhorred everything Nazism stood for.
A German exchange student and I were chatting in a college cafeteria when the subject of the disabled came up. As offhandedly as if he were ordering tater tots, he said that somebody who is going to be born with a disability should just be aborted.
In fairness, my German friend was appalled by Hitler, and mortified that Germany had been the Nazis' stronghold. If the word "fascist" or "Nazi" arose in conversation, he could not condemn it fast enough.
His actual beliefs, though, made it creepily plain that he was condemning words, or maybe concepts, but not necessarily the concrete actions that those words and concepts represented. He was like a child who despises a bad parent but grows up and acts the same way, having unwittingly absorbed the parent's patterns of behavior.
His notion that "flawed" babies should never see the light of day was in oblivious lockstep with the Nazi principle of destroying presumably lesser beings to give some master race extra elbow room. He thought nothing of supporting fascism, so long as he wasn't supporting "fascism."
In the same vein, syndicated columnist Ross Douthat recently wrote an agonizing takedown of one of the most glaring contradictions of abortion.
Abortion, in case you missed the memo, is today considered the ultimate in women's rights. Nothing is deemed more important to equality than the freedom to snuff out an unborn baby - er, a mass of cells - "on demand and without apology."
But what Douthat pointed out cannot be denied: Around the Third World - the rights of whose women first-world feminists claim to champion - abortion is often little more than sex selection. It is used to prevent the births of females, because in many cultures, female offspring are less prized than males.
So, which advocacy group gets the most "credit" for furthering the cause of women by promoting a procedure that signs a death warrant for part of Earth's potential population of women? NARAL? Planned Parenthood? Girls Inc.?
Take your pick. But the abortion wing of the women's liberation movement is stuck with a grisly catch-22 of its own making.
'Cause a court said so!
Was it Aristotle, Charo or another sage who observed that you can never be cynical enough to keep up?
Consider a recent "fact check" by The Associated Press.
Imagining he was correcting GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, an AP reporter challenged Bachmann's assertion that ObamaCare's mandate requiring the purchase of government-approved insurance is unconstitutional.
Quoth the jaded reporter, "Nothing is unconstitutional until courts declare it to be so."
Uh, not exactly.
Setting aside the particulars of ObamaCare, laws are unconstitutional based on - insert drum roll here - their violation of the Constitution.
When courts are behaving themselves, their purpose is to point out unconstitutionality, not to create it by whim, fiat, "evolving standards of decency" or whatever stylish claptrap passes for jurisprudence these days. By definition, if a court accurately declares a law unconstitutional, it was unconstitutional even before the court said a word - dating back to the moment it was enacted.
Of course the ruling will have a practical effect that the principle alone doesn't. But like the fundamentals of right and wrong, laws are constitutional - or not - quite apart from whether a court will acknowledge them as such.
Back to ObamaCare, its pep squad can line up any number of judges to give them cover for the theory that the individual mandate is rooted in some bedrock constitutional principle. But that doesn't make the theory fact.
At least we had better hope it doesn't. If a law's constitutionality exists only according to the views of judges - not as a reality above and separate from shifting judicial fashions - then we have a government of men and not of laws, and the events of 1776 and 1787 were in vain.