The First of the New Lot . . .

Imagine you’re a policeman responding to a call, and you find yourself in a room where the naked bodies of infants who have obviously met a brutal end are scattered about.  What is your immediate reaction likely to be?  Horror, sadness, anger, disgust?  But then you remove a coat or dustcloth draped carelessly across a door and expose a sign telling you that this is after all an abortion clinic.  And immediately your thinking in the matter begins to rejig itself.  No longer a potential crime scene, but rather a proof of social progress; one to be met, not with condemnation, but with celebration.  Insist on regarding it as a crime scene and you are likely to find yourself in very hot water indeed.

What is at the root of this disjunction in reaction?  Is it a matter of people sitting down and rationally thinking things through?  Or is it an outcome of some third-party conditioning?  And how can the two opposed reactions continue to exist side-by-side?