Is the existence of pro-life Americans a “crime against women”? Is a woman “at her most powerful” when she lies down for a doctor to kill her unborn baby? That’s what feminist author and abortionist Merle Hoffman thinks. In case you dismiss her as a crank, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman appears to agree with her. He joined her in a lawsuit aimed at ordinary Americans who stand on sidewalks outside clinics urging women not to choose abortion.

Does such language strike you as creepy, even menacing? Is it troubling that one of America’s largest states is on board with such sentiments, and targeting free speech? It should.

The act of abortion positions women at their most powerful, and that is why it is so strongly opposed.

The Ideology of the New Totalitarians

A coherent ideology goads such angry, escalating attacks. It explains why left-wing state governments get behind them. And why you can count on quick cooperation between advocates of wide, divergent causes. In the recent anti-gun march, Planned Parenthood was a sponsor. At anti-Israel events, you’re certain to meet some vegans. At climate change panic rallies, you’ll meet LGBT activists. In part that’s just trendsniffers who like to network. But something deeper underlies it.

I’ve already written here that the now dominant leftist academic movement called Intersectionalism works much like a religion. It explains why evil exists and offers false redemption. The sect gathers believers for passionate, and sometimes frenzied rituals. (Like last week’s gun-grabbing rally.) It identifies who’s orthodox, and tries to silence heretics. Most importantly, it performs its own sacrifices.

Hunting Down Dissenters

For that, of course, it needs scapegoats. Jason Jones and I wrote here last week about how progressives find them. We pointed to the perverse power move called “Victimism.” It is

a method of political activism and control that perverts Christian ethics at their root. The Victimist who wants to wield power over others … identifies himself with the forces of justice. He will right the old wrongs. He’ll avenge those whose ancestors suffered in the past. What’s more, he will punish those who represent the old, onetime oppressors. That is, their innocent descendants, or those who simply share their race or sex.

Caught up in the Victimist temptation, today’s left weaves

a tissue of rationalizations for accumulating power, imposing collective punishment and scapegoating the innocent. White males must pay for the sins of their ancestors. Christians must be punished and marginalized because of events in the Middle Ages. Traditional families must pay for the self-loathing which sexual deviants suffer with. Europeans living in their own countries must be subject to violence and intimidation at the hands of Muslim interlopers who live on public welfare.

Abortionists Are Victimists

Fittingly, it’s on the abortion issue that Victimists out themselves most blatantly. It’s almost refreshing how shameless Hoffman is about admitting what she’s up to. She admits that abortion is “taking a life.” And she embraces that. She writes in her memoir:

Does the fetus not impede a woman’s tendency to maintain her own existence? Is it not an unjust aggressor, threatening the survival of the mother? Is not a woman’s choice of abortion an act of self-defense? … [T]hose who deliver abortion services have not only the power to give women control over their bodies and lives, but also the power — and the responsibility — of taking life in order to do that. Indeed, acknowledgment of that truth is the foundation for all the political and personal work necessary to maintain women’s reproductive freedom.

Just Ask the Aztecs

So yes, it’s human sacrifice. But sometimes that’s just what’s necessary to keep the sun coming up. Just ask the Aztecs.

The god that thirsts for blood in Hoffman’s case is feminism, of course. She continues:

The act of abortion positions women at their most powerful, and that is why it is so strongly opposed by many in society. Historically viewed as and conditioned to be passive, dependent creatures, victims of biological circumstance, women often find it difficult to embrace this power over life and death. They fall prey to the assumption, the myth, that they cannot be trusted with it.

Victimism Unmasked

Here is Victimism in its absolute molar purity: We will kill babies, knowing they’re babies, because it makes us feel powerful. We will scapegoat them with violence, and pro-lifers with the threat of imprisonment. And we will feel justified, even proud of ourselves.

There are some ideas you can’t argue with. They only respond to prayer and fasting.