Would anyone have dedicated their lives to building Communism if its partisans had been candid about what it entailed? Lenin won power by promising “peace, bread, and land for the peasants,” not “gulags, purges, and famines.” Even Hitler came to power with talk of economic renewal, national pride, and a peaceful Europe led by its “natural” hegemon, Germany. The death camps were dreamed up in secret, beneath the fog of war, once resistance was seemingly futile.

On our own shores, Hugh Hefner sold the Sexual Revolution as a blessed respite from frustration, hypocrisy, double standards and repression. While the Playboy Foundation spent millions working to strip away any protection for the lives of unborn Americans, its public face was always a charming seducer in a tuxedo, not a blood-spattered abortionist — killing over and over and over again, a million times a year.

So Hillary Clinton has chosen to sell us her new America wrapped in a lovely latex mask of inclusiveness and compassion. His name is Tim Kaine, of Virginia. There is just so much to love about Mr. Kaine, just enough genuine virtue to quiet millions of consciences, to ease that sick feeling we have in our guts about the woman he chose to serve. He is a “moderate” Democrat. A lifelong Catholic who did missionary work in impoverished countries. His son is a Marine. He is quite unlike his mistress, whom millions of even liberal voters see as a crabbed and misanthropic elitist obsessed with accumulating money and power in secret.

What should we Christians think of Mr. Kaine, who first won office as a pro-lifer, until it blocked his rise in Democrat party politics? May we hide under that frayed 1980s poncho, the Seamless Garment? Can we pretend that stripping a million Americans per year of legal protection from murder is something Mr. Kaine can redeem by purchasing an indulgence?

How would we even price them? Should we say that for each 1,000 children whom his allies kill and dismember, then sell piece by piece for profit, he will increase the school lunch budget by another $1,000,000? Perhaps the many Jesuits who make it their calling to serve as courtiers and apologists for the abortion lobby could invent something like “carbon credits,” and set up an exchange through Georgetown’s credit union.

Mr. Kaine repeats the yellowed talking points of Teddy Kennedy, Mario Cuomo, Joseph Biden and Nancy Pelosi, insisting that he is “personally opposed” to abortion, but sees no role for the government in restricting it. Let’s do a thought experiment. For each of the following issues, let’s see if we can imagine what such a stance would mean. Would we accept it if Mr. Kaine worked closely with organizations that promoted and profited from any one of the following practices, while claiming that deep in the secret recesses of his pristine, virtuous heart he really opposed them:

• Slavery.
• Jim Crow segregation laws.
• Psychiatric conditioning to “cure” homosexuals.
• Mandatory sterilization of Americans whose IQs are lower than 80.
• Laws permitting marital rape.
• Medicaid funding for female genital mutilation.
• Child labor in American mines and factories.
• Dog-fighting as a televised sport.

Every time Mr. Kaine repeats his politically convenient pro-choice stance, plug in one of those other issues, and roll it around in your mouth. See how it tastes.

As a Catholic who considers human life the first and most critical issue, with freedom a very close second, I can cut some slack to secular atheists and agnostics who don’t see what’s wrong with abortion. Their worldview tells them that life is cheap, man is a mutant, and we should grab what pleasure we can before our skulls fall to rot with Darwin’s. That’s an ugly view of life, but at least it makes sense. I feel profoundly sad for people who see their own lives this way; they’re like a primitive tribe that forgot why cannibalism is wrong, which proudly shows a visiting missionary their jewelry made out of human fingers.

But when a highly educated Christian, himself a former Catholic missionary, slaps on such a necklace because it will help him win elections — that’s something else entirely. Tim Kaine’s is the face of a man who knows better, who by his own admission realizes exactly what Planned Parenthood is doing, and who they are doing it to: innocent children, who hide in the womb as each of us, and as the baby Jesus, once did. It should be the safest place on this fraught and fallen earth — but in America, it has become a killing field. Not because of men like Lenin, like Hitler, or even like Hugh Hefner.

Because of men like Senator Kaine.