Blog | Subscribe | Free Trial | Contact Us | Cart | Donate | Planned Giving
Log In | Search
facebook
rss
twitter
  • CURRENT
    • Fall 2022 PDF
    • SUMMER 2022 ARTICLES
    • NEWSworthy: What’s Happening and What It Means to You
    • Blog
    • INSISTING ON LIFE
    • Pastoral Reflections
    • About Us
    • HLF In The News
    • LIBERTY TO DO WHAT? Hadley Arkes and Rusty Reno join George McKenna June 1, 2022 in New York
  • DINNER
    • GREAT DEFENDER OF LIFE DINNER 2022
    • HOST COMMITTEE Great Defender of Life Dinner 2022
    • Great Defender of Life 2022 Dinner Ticket
    • Great Defender of Life 2022 STUDENT or PREGNANCY CENTER STAFF Ticket
    • DINNER JOURNAL ADVERTISING 2022
  • ARCHIVE
    • Archive Spotlight
    • ISSUES IN HTML FORMAT
  • LEGACY
    • Planned Giving: Wills, Trusts, and Gifts of Stock
  • SHOP
    • Cart

BLOG

0 Comment

“The Law is a Ass”

12 Oct 2021
Brian Caulfield
abortion, humanity, roe v. wade
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

You may recognize the fractured English in my title as the considered judgment of Mr. Bumble, the selfish, scheming, self-satisfied character in Oliver Twist. In true Dickensian style, he lives up to his name as his petty plots while working as parish beadle backfire, leaving him and his nagging wife penniless in the workhouse where he once cruelly ruled over Oliver and other orphans. Throughout the novel, Bumble turns a blind eye to the suffering he causes others, but he does have a keen sense of the circumstances that impinge on his own person, and in the quote cited above, holds forth with a bit of common wisdom. When informed that in the eye of the law he is more blameworthy for his wife’s theft than she is, due to the fact that the law supposes a wife acts under her husband’s direction, he responds:

“If the law supposes that … the law is a ass—a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience.”

Bumble had married a widow for the value of her few household items and the coal and candles the parish provided in charity, not suspecting how cold and dominating she would prove to be. When confronted by Oliver’s benefactors, Mrs. Bumble confesses that she had taken and sold items from Oliver’s mother after she died, thus disposing of evidence of the boy’s high-birth father. Mr. Bumble approved of the sale but had no part in the theft, and on this fact he is willing to accuse his wife and save himself.

Yet amid his pathetic self-pleading, Bumble has a point about the law, and Dickens, in his genius, elicits a speck of sympathy for this unlikeable character through words that ring true. The law must not be arbitrary, lacking connection to human action, motivation, and circumstance. It must take into account human nature and relationships, and be based on what is just or unjust. In short, the law must articulate the truth about humanity and neither dismiss wrongdoing nor demand the impossible from the model citizen, the average man.

As St. Thomas Aquinas says in his Summa Theologiae: “the law belongs to that which is a principle of human acts, because it is their rule and measure. Now as reason is a principle of human acts, so in reason itself there is something which is the principle in respect of all the rest: wherefore to this principle [i.e., reason] chiefly and mainly law must needs be referred” (I-II, q. 90, art. 2).

With this in mind, let us imagine for a moment what Mr. Bumble, if he lived in our own day, might say about current abortion law and jurisprudence. Certainly, he would observe that the regime of abortion on demand through all stages of pregnancy is unconnected to the experience of the many women who seek the procedure, not so much to get rid of a child but because they have no support from the father and much encouragement from the culture of death. Bumble might also contend, with even more assurance, that abortion laws are totally oblivious to the reality of the child in the womb, the main victim of abortion. He might put it this way:

Don’t talk to me about quickening or trimesters or viability or, save us, potential life. I can see straight with mine own true eyes, even if the law can’t, mind you, that there’s a live child in the ultrasound. There’s no need, to anyone’s reckoning, to philosophize or temporize about it, I say. It’s as clear as day, as clear as the teeny nose of his face, that that’s a baby, a child, the proper fruit of the womb. Check your medical books, that’s the best of what I’ll say, and lay it to your own wits to figure about the rest of it.

But that’s not all. I can also hear him saying that Roe v. Wade is very far from being “the law of the land,” as abortion supporters contend. In his unique Bumble-speak, he might continue:

Law of the land is no way of saying it, I’ll let you know, because it is no law at all. It is, what we all may say, a decision of seven justices at a particular moment in time that masquerades as law, and talks a lot of nonsense about being a law that can never be touched or changed or turned by any ‘nother court, or even by the true law passed by a elected legislature. Here I will repeat for those who don’t have sense of eye or mind, Roe is not the land’s law, cause it is no law at all.

Admittedly, Mr. Bumble is not a model for the culture of life, famous as he is for punishing poor Oliver for asking for “more” at the common workhouse meal. The beadle evinces no sympathy for any of the orphans under his charge or for anyone else who falls under his questionable care. Yet sometimes an ass can speak true of another ass, and when he does his wise words may hold a special force, given their surprising source. After all, a donkey, guided by God, spoke the truth to the selfish prophet Balaam and stopped him from cursing the Israelites (Num 22:28-30). So let us take a lesson from the few good words and one keen insight of Mr. Bumble regarding the law and apply it to our nation’s illicit abortion regime. Such law is “a ass,” indeed, far removed from human “experience” and modern science.

327 people have visited this page. 1 have visited this page today.
About the Author
Brian Caulfield

Brian Caulfield writes from Connecticut, where he works on the canonization cause of Blessed Michael McGivney, founder of the Knights of Columbus.

Social Share

  • google-share

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Comments will not be posted until approved by a moderator in an effort to prevent spam and off-topic responses.

*
*

captcha *

Get the Human Life Review

subscribe to HLR

Recent Posts

Minnesota passes one of nation’s most permissive abortion laws

01 Feb 2023

Hit and run violence after Roe: Can't we talk about the morality of abortion?

28 Jan 2023

Abortion activist attempts to expose crisis pregnancy centers—and fails

17 Jan 2023

CURRENT ISSUE

Anne Conlon Anne Hendershott B G Carter Brian Caulfield Christopher White Clarke Forsythe Colleen O’Hara Connie Marshner David Mills David Poecking David Quinn Diane Moriarty Dr. Donald DeMarco Edward Mechmann Edward Short Ellen Wilson Fielding Fr. Gerald E. Murray George McKenna Helen Alvaré Jane Sarah Jason Morgan Joe Bissonnette John Grondelski Kristan Hawkins Laura Echevarria Madeline Fry Schultz Maria McFadden Maffucci Mary Meehan Mary Rose Somarriba Meaghan Bond Nat Hentoff Nicholas Frankovich Patrick J. Flood Peter Pavia Rev. George G. Brooks Rev. Paul T. Stallsworth Stephen Vincent Tara Jernigan Ursula Hennessey Victor Lee Austin Vincenzina Santoro W. Ross Blackburn Wesley J. Smith William Doino Jr. William Murchison

Pages

  • Issues
  • Human Life Foundation Blog
  • About Us
  • Free Trial Issue
  • Contact Us
  • Shop
  • Planned Giving
  • TOPICS
  • GREAT DEFENDER OF LIFE DINNER

Follow Us On Twitter

Tweets by @HumanLifeReview

Find Us On Facebook

Human Life Review/Foundation

Search our Website

Contact Information

The Human Life Foundation, Inc.
The Human Life Review
271 Madison Avenue, Room 1005
New York, New York 10016
(212) 685-5210

Copyright (c) The Human Life Foundation.