Why is privacy critical to the woman who wishes to put an end to the life of her unborn child but expendable for the woman or girl who doesn’t wish to engage in intimate functions in the lady’s room with six-foot-tall persons with five o’clock shadows? (Try exercising “choice” in this matter, ladies, and get called a bigot.)
In one of her recent columns, the New York Times’ long-time U.S. Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse, who in her career has never tacked right of the 12th of Never, dilated on the subject of what is meant by “the legal mainstream.” The question is timely because Senator Chuck Schumer, and just about any prominent Democrat you can name, is claiming that Judge Neil Gorsuch isn’t in it. (Translation: He’s not a left geek.)
True to her living Constitution instincts, La Greenhouse says the mainstream will change and meander, carving new banks in response to changing times. To her, the importance of the 1987 Borking of one of the most distinguished legal minds to be nominated to serve on the Court was that it identified “certain principles as being correct and beyond debate: that contrary to Bork’s view, the Constitution encompasses a right to privacy that includes abortion.” Others, of course, took other lessons from that shameful episode and have given the Court’s privacy dodge in Roe v. Wade the horse laugh it deserves.
There’s that “beyond debate” again, which lefties inevitably bring out once they’ve made up their minds (and yours) on something. But let’s not linger on this but focus on the court’s highly eccentric grounds for turning what was a hateful crime into a right.
Privacy. Privacy? What on earth is the connection between ending a life and privacy? And if abortion can be sanctioned on the basis of privacy, what other former crimes cannot be put in play using the same lame excuse? If a woman can arrange the death of her unborn child under the color of privacy, can she not arrange the death of her husband on the same basis? What’s the difference? And what the ever-loving, blue-eyed hell does privacy have to do with any of it?
Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions has called Roe v. Wade “one of the worst colossally erroneous Supreme Court decisions of all time.” He reiterated this before the Senate Judiciary Committee, when he was being badgered by Senator Dianne Feinstein, and added, “It violated the Constitution, and really attempted to set policy and not follow law.”
He’s right, of course. A large fraction of American voters wanted abortion to be legal, so the Court cast about for a justification to support the pre-ordained conclusion. All they could come up with was the whopping non-sequitur of privacy. Even honest folks who believe abortion is a good idea would have been justified in asking the court in 1973, “Is that the best you could come up with?”
Linda is wrong. Roe v. Wade is not beyond debate or ridicule.
