Friday, November 11, 2005

Abortion: It's killing us all.

Jane Galt over at Asymmetrical Information has a lot of posts on abortion. She links to this post, which puts my "Aggressive Conservative" name to shame (the title of his post is called "Why Roe V. Wade Must Be Overturned, Encased in Lead, and Sunk to the Bottom of the Marianas Trench There to Lie Forever Among Tubeworms and Busted Russian Submarines").

A little excerpt:
"Roe V. Wade has had a disastrous and insidious effect on the highest judicial process in the country. It has hijacked an entire branch of the United States government, which means we only have two left. It has reduced all public discussion of constitutional law to one word: ABORTION. The grand legacy of John Marshall, John Jay, and Oliver Wendell Holmes is now represented by a single lump of tissue: ABORTION. The evolution of judicial thinking in the greatest nation on earth has been stopped dead by ABORTION. The vitally important democratic function of reviewing and choosing suitable candidates for the greatest court in history has been gruesomely hewed down to a single splinter: ABORTION. Blind-folded Justice is almost mute; she can only croak the word ABORTION.

Socrates, what is truth? ABORTION. Conan, what is best in life? ABORTION. What's the atomic weight of Germanium? ABORTION. What is the very meaning of existence itself - what single word breaks the silence of those infinite spaces that filled great Pascal with dread? ABORTION, ABORTION, ABORTION, ABORTION, ABORTION...

Now this is a sad state for this once-great court to have fallen to, and makes me wonder if we don't need another court to assume the neglected responsibilities of the current one. Then the Abortion Toggle Switch could be moved to some remote corner of the public's attention, and the various abortion partisans could play their endless game of Keep Away without buggering up the entire constitutional process.

However, this would require amending the constitution itself, with all attendant fuss. The simpler course is to push for Roe V. Wade to be overturned, so that the Supreme Court can get out of the abortion business. And stay the hell out of the abortion business, forever. At once the Pro-Choice legions arise in anguish, complaining that they will never be able to survive the savage Darwinian environment of American politics without the protection of Roe V. Wade. Well, cry me a freaking river. It's about time that you gelatinous sob sisters learned to paddle your own canoe. If you haven't got the guts to make it in the real world, you'll have to use something other than the United States Constitution as an artificial life support system."

Wow. Read the whole thing. Like I said, it puts this blog's name to shame. Some might think it funny, and it is, but it's also very very hard-hitting. I also should note that his insight is precisely the same as Justice Scalia's dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which he wrote:
"Not only did Roe not, as the Court suggests, resolve the deeply divisive issue of abortion; it did more than anything else to nourish it, by elevating it to the national level, where it is infinitely more difficult to resolve. National politics were not plagued by abortion protests, national abortion lobbying, or abortion marches on Congress, before Roe v. Wade was decided. Profound disagreement existed among our citizens over the issue -- as it does over other issues, such as the death penalty -- but that disagreement was being worked out at the state level. As with many other issues, the division of sentiment within each State was not as closely balanced as it was among the population of the Nation as a whole, meaning not only that more people would be satisfied with the results of state-by-state resolution, but also that those results would be more stable. Pre-Roe, moreover, political compromise was possible.

Roe's mandate for abortion on demand destroyed the compromises of the past, rendered compromise impossible for the future, and required the entire issue to be resolved uniformly, at the national level. At the same time, Roe created a vast new class of abortion consumers and abortion proponents by eliminating the moral opprobrium that had attached to the act... Many favor all of those developments, and it is not for me to say that they are wrong. But to portray Roe as the statesmanlike "settlement" of a divisive issue, a jurisprudential Peace of Westphalia that is worth preserving, is nothing less than Orwellian. Roe fanned into life an issue that has inflamed our national politics in general, and has obscured with its smoke the selection of Justices to this Court, in particular, ever since. And by keeping us in the abortion-umpiring business, it is the perpetuation of that disruption, rather than of any Pax Roeana that the Court's new majority decrees.

In truth, I am as distressed as the Court is -- and expressed my distress several years ago... about the "political pressure" directed to the Court: the marches, the mail, the protests aimed at inducing us to change our opinions. How upsetting it is, that so many of our citizens (good people, not lawless ones, on both sides of this abortion issue, and on various sides of other issues as well) think that we Justices should properly take into account their views, as though we were engaged not in ascertaining an objective law, but in determining some kind of social consensus...

What makes all this relevant to the bothersome application of "political pressure" against the Court are the twin facts that the American people love democracy and the American people are not fools. As long as this Court thought (and the people thought) that we Justices were doing essentially lawyers' work up here -- reading text and discerning our society's traditional understanding of that text -- the public pretty much left us alone. Texts and traditions are facts to study, not convictions to demonstrate about. But if in reality, our process of constitutional adjudication consists primarily of making value judgments; if we can ignore a long and clear tradition clarifying an ambiguous text, as we did, for example, five days ago in declaring unconstitutional invocations and benedictions at public highschool graduation ceremonies; if, as I say, our pronouncement of constitutional law rests primarily on value judgments, then a free and intelligent people's attitude towards us can be expected to be (ought to be) quite different. The people know that their value judgments are quite as good as those taught in any law school -- maybe better. If, indeed, the "liberties" protected by the Constitution are, as the Court says, undefined and unbounded, then the people should demonstrate, to protest that we do not implement their values instead of ours. Not only that, but the confirmation hearings for new Justices should deteriorate into question-and-answer sessions in which Senators go through a list of their constituents' most favored and most disfavored alleged constitutional rights, and seek the nominee's commitment to support or oppose them. Value judgments, after all, should be voted on, not dictated; and if our Constitution has somehow accidently committed them to the Supreme Court, at least we can have a sort of plebiscite each time a new nominee to that body is put forward...

...By foreclosing all democratic outlet for the deep passions this issue arouses, by banishing the issue from the political forum that gives all participants, even the losers, the satisfaction of a fair hearing and an honest fight, by continuing the imposition of a rigid national rule instead of allowing for regional differences, the Court merely prolongs and intensifies the anguish.

We should get out of this area, where we have no right to be, and where we do neither ourselves nor the country any good by remaining."
And Jane keeps blogging, musing about abortion-supporters:
"I am amazed that half the chattering classes really purport to believe that the single most important issue facing the courts is whether or not ten or so low-population states will, or will not, be allowed to outlaw abortion. More important than civil liberties? More important than towns condemning any old house they feel like it to build a strip mall? The highest cause in the land, the only one that really matters, is making sure that nothing interferes one iota with the free and unfettered scraping out of uteruses from sea to shining sea?"
Jane, you'd be surprised how many people support evil when they have their entire lives invested in it. They might never even have an abortion or know someone who would. But those who worship at the altar of abortion know that if they give it up, they're giving up the Sexual Revolution. They need that. It's their 20-something fantasy that they hold onto, whether they're actually 20-something or 50-something. Scalia is right that the Court is being destroyed by abortion. But so is the country, and our humanity. Roe v. Wade must be overturned. But even more important, abortion must be attacked from every side. Now that the abortion debate was brought to the national level, it should be finished at the national level. It's not enough to hope like Scalia or Jane that returning it to the states would settle the matter. Like its victims, it will not die unless we destroy it. Abortion should be outlawed entirely, with a Constitutional amendment. I want to bury Roe and its legacy into the ground, for good. And its supporters should be shunned for their support of a murderous ideology of sexual fanaticism and amoral narcissism.

No question about it, abortion is today's slavery debate. Slavery consumed the politics of the young Republic for nearly 70 years before the Civil War. How long will abortion consume the politics, and the people, of America? And like slavery with all its evils, I think it will see its red day before the end. In fact, that would probably be the BEST outcome we can hope for (since it's naive to believe that the abortion-worshippers won't give up without a real violent fight). Because the alternative outcome is complete and utter surrender, and the masses of people giving in and accepting abortion and all its logical consequences: cloning, euthenasia, genetic manipulation, legalization of all sexual deviancies, and state sanction and monetary support to allievate the obvious social problems that are caused, war of the clones, war of the genetically superior over the inferior and their eventual enslavement or holocaust, economic dislocation, poltiical persecution of Christians, the end of parenthood and the family, the rise of nihilism, mass suicides, and the depopulation and eventually moral hollowing-out of the West - leading to Islam's resurgenace in the world and its ruling power of Terror.

If any of that happens, it's all because of abortion. Abortion is a maggot-worm that has wriggled its way into the heart of humanity and is killing us all. You'd think that the widespread practice of murdering innocent babies worldwide wouldn't cause our modern-day philosophers to think twice about this matter, that perhaps maybe Barbarity and all its horiffic glories aren't so chic.

It's going to be a long, long winter...

UPDATE: Amy Wellborn notes a positive piece on the Mirror of Justice blog by Greg Sisk about the good that would happen from overturning Roe. It's a good mirror to my aggressive mood here.

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