Plato and Aristotle: Baby-Killing Assholes

When Justice Blackmun invites doctors to ignore their Hippocratic Oath, he cites Plato and Aristotle. "Most Greek thinkers...commended abortion, at least prior to viability. See Plato, Republic, V, 461; Aristotle, Politics, VII, 1335b 25."

You may be surprised to find out there's not a Plato Clause in our U.S. Constitution. If there were, we would be censoring all our bad speakers and leaving babies out in the cold to die. I do not know why Blackmun is citing Plato and Aristotle for any unenumerated right at all. Plato and Aristotle have zip, nada, nothing to do with our Constitution. It's not even close. Blackmun is like 2000 years off at least, and he's on the wrong continent. And if you're looking around for new ideas to bring into our Constitution, why Plato and Aristotle? That's not even Judeo-Christianity, man. They're pagan assholes.

Now Plato and Aristotle are really smart pagan assholes. We like Plato and Aristotle, and they have a lot of smart things to say. But they are still pagan assholes, living in a pagan asshole society. Which we discover when we check Blackmun's cites, and see what Plato and Aristotle are actually saying in the passages Blackmun is referencing.

Aristotle: "As to the exposure and rearing of children, let there be a law that no deformed child shall live..." Okay, stop. The first thing we notice is that he's not talking about abortion. He's talking about leaving babies out in the woods to die. That's what "exposure" means. Exposing them to the elements. Aristotle is defending infanticide. He's not just defending it, he's requring it. It's not like you get to choose whether to love your poor handicapped kid. No, it's mandatory Greek law. You got to kill them. "No deformed child shall live." This is the cite Harry Blackmun puts in Roe v. Wade, because Harry Blackmun, and I think I mentioned this before, is a dumb fuck.

Let's quote some more from Harry's Aristotle citation. "(O)n the ground of an excess in the number of children, if the established customs of the state forbid this (for in our state population has a limit), no child is to be exposed..." Okay, stop again. What Aristotle is saying that if the established customs in a Greek state forbid killing babies, then no child is to be exposed. But what he's also saying is that in his state, "population has a limit." In other words, kill away. Kill healthy babies. Aristotle is a population control nut. Too many mouths to feed? Leave your baby out in the woods. That takes care of that.

What about Plato? When we check Harry's cite, here is what Plato writes: "A man may not marry his daughter or his daughter's daughter, or his mother or his mother's mother; and women, on the other hand, are prohibited from marrying their sons or fathers, or son's son or father's father, and so on in either direction." Apparently, Plato is opposed to incest. Okay. And Plato also wants to kill the illegitimate offspring of any of these unions. There are "strict orders to prevent any embryo which may come into being from seeing the light; and if any force a way to the birth, the parents must understand that the offspring of such a union cannot be maintained, and arrange accordingly." So if you have sex with your father, or your daugther, or your grandmother, or your grandson, or vice versa, then you have to abort any child before he sees the light of day. And if he survives the abortion attempt, the child is still not allowed to live, but most be disposed of in the ancient Greek manner. Nice!