The paper this Saturday morning tells of a lawsuit filed in Iowa over a 1939 experimental program conducted at the state university in which researchers worked to induce stuttering in the speech patterns of children by abusing them. Setting out to prove that this speech defect is a learned behavior that can be created, these so-called scientists focused on 22 children from a state-controlled orphans home for their research.

For a period of six months, Dr. Wendell Johnson and his staff of pioneers in speech pathology brutalized these children verbally. “Some were subjected to steady harassment, badgering and other negative acts in an attempt to get them to stutter….” One of the children, 84-year-old Hazel Dornbush, said, “It was awful…We had nobody to lean on to help us out.”

The state of Iowa is shelling out nearly a million dollars to these victims. Those that are still alive. Those who can be found.

The program was kept secret for many years and only revealed in a 2001 investigative story published in the San Jose Mercury News. The university apologized, and two years later the lawsuit was filed.

Much too little, way too late, far too awful.

I don’t have the article in front of me, but perhaps readers have seen news reports this week coming out of some Asian country–Tibet?–where the authorities have passed a law making it illegal to be reincarnated without their approval. The law is directed at the Dalai Lama who, according to the thinking, has his soul pass from his body at death into a baby being born at the same time, somewhere. That child, after a laborious process of finding and identifying him, serves as the spiritual leader of those worshiping as they do.

The government wants to control the process. Which is what governments always want to do.

Much of the rest of the world shakes their heads at such business. Pass all the laws for or against reincarnation you wish; it changes nothing.

I keep thinking of that line from Romans 3:4, “Let God be found true, though every man be found a liar.” Or, in the less formal way of Eugene Peterson in “The Message,” “God keeps his word even when the whole world is lying through its teeth.”

The truth is not up for a vote.

Sometime in the past I recall hearing about the legislature of some state–Indiana, it seems–that once passed a law simplifying mathematics by determining that “hereafter Pi will be considered as 3.14.” Period. None of this business of 3.14159 and beyond, which we recall is the number by which the diameter of a circle must be multiplied by to get the circumference. No one ever forgets learning the formula for the area of a circle, Pi-R-square (I don’t have those symbols on this computer), pronounced “pie are square.” And the terrible joke of the college kid returning home to the farm and telling that to his father who responded, “No, son. Cornbread are square. Pie are round.” Groan. Sorry.

The point of that, before the bad joke intervened, was the very idea of a body of lawmakers thinking they can change the laws of nature by raising their hands.

But, lawmakers do that all the time. They pass laws and supreme courts issue rulings that would unseat the Almighty if they could. The Second Psalm describes this process vividly and tells us what God thinks of such. Notice particularly the line, “He who sits in the Heavens laughs; the Lord scoffs at them.”

The amazing thing is how people go along with such shenanigans, particularly when the ruling or the law suits their inclinations.

How in the world, for example, does one justify the taking of the life on an unborn human baby as a matter of law, even to the point of prohibiting efforts to protect the process and inform the “mothers,” and yet turn around and outlaw the killing of baby animals in the wild? What makes the baby seal or panda more precious than the baby human? What line of reasoning leads one to this absurd conclusion?

What are we thinking? What has caused us to lose our minds in this way?

Then, when serious and compassionate lawmakers do step up and courageously try to restrict abortion and protect the lives of the unborn, they find themselves in the odd situation of being attacked as a bunch of crazies, for their intrusion into the private lives of adult humans. “Take your hands off my body,” cries the pro-abortion activist to the pro-life advocate.

What the pro-lifer wants to say and hopes to state quietly and reasonably, perhaps to get the activist to reason this matter out, is simply: “It ain’t your body. That’s another human being alive inside your womb. It was not meant to be your choice as to whether it lives or dies.”

You are pro-choice? No problem. You had the choice to make earlier before the baby was conceived. Now, by plan or by default, you have made the choice and should stick with it.

We are past the time in this nation’s life when we allow researchers to experiment with the mentally handicapped, the ignorant poor, and orphaned children. Thank God we have grown more sensitive to such issues.

Let us pray the day will come soon when we shall look back on the liberal abortion laws we’re living under now as relics of a dark and shameful past.

Perhaps we will find ourselves wondering, “What were we thinking? Where were our brains?”

Where indeed.