Content provided in partnership with
One vote shy of tyranny
Human Events, Jul 7, 2000 by Jeffrey, Terence P
It is instructive to imagine how James Madison might react if Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer could be taken back in time and placed on the floor of the first House of Representatives, when Madison, who served that House as speaker, was preparing passage of the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution.
"Mr. Madison, this Mr. Stephen Breyer. He will serve as a justice of the Supreme Court 200 years from now. In the year 2000, he will write a decision declaring that your Constitution guarantees the right of a doctor to yank an infant feet first from its mother's womb, spike a scissors in its skull and suck out its brains."
- Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »
Perhaps Madison would inquire if his interlocutor were mad. Or, perhaps, he would save his breath and simply motion for the Sergeant at Arms to have him removed.
Mr. Breyer's time-travelling escort might never have time to add: "And Mr. Breyer will also declare, in a minority opinion that loses by a single vote, that a privat association of Americans, constituted for the specific purpose of teaching boys morality and clean living, must be compelled by the government to hire self professed homosexuals."
'Live-Birth Abortion'
When Madison and his fellow Founding Fathers thought of tyranny they thought in terms of an arrogant British king who taxed them without their consent, closed down their colonial assemblies, and sent red-coated British regular to live in their towns and coy fiscate their guns. In 1776, that was enough to point Americans toward reconstituting their government with an eye toward strictly limiting the power any one man or agency could wield over the people.
Conservatives have long recognized that the federal judiciary routinely overreaches the limited authority granted to it by the Constitution. But the decisions issued by the court last week in Stenberg v. Carhart, in which it declared partial-birth abortion a constitutional right, and Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, in which it fell just one vote short of forcing the Scouts to hire avowed homosexual scoutmasters, should ring in the night like the alarm bells of Lexington. The forces of judicial activism have advanced through the Constitution, they have laid waste its basic principles, and now they are mowing down the fundamental rights it was erected to defend.
The court is progressively abolishing the right to life in America. It started 27 years ago by legalizing the killing of unborn babies inside the womb. Now it has legalized the killing of unborn babies outside the womb, but still in the birth canal. All the moral and constitutional barricades already have been crossed. The only barrier standing now between the court and legalized murder of any sort is the court's own discretion. On the issue of life, five American judges have presumed to replace God.
Justice Antonin Scalia, the court's most plain-spoken defender of truth, filed an appropriately scorching dissent. Refusing to employ the euphemism "partial-birth abortion," he correctly argued that the inescapable consequence of the court's anti-constitutional pro-infanticide majority was "to give live-- birth abortion free rein."
With justified contempt, Scalia swept aside the arguments of the other justices, in both the majority and minority who sought to argue the finer points of legalized "live-birth abortion," not within - the context of the Constitution itself, but within the context of the court's most recent legislative act on abortion, the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Casey, said Scalia, was not based on any language in the Constitution, and was `principled in origin:' Casey and Stenberg both, he declared, were `policy-judgment-- couched-as-law."
"And those who believe that a 5-toy vote on a policy matter by unelected lawyers should not overcome the judgment of 30 state legislatures have a problem, not with the application of Casey;' said Scalia, "but with its existence. Casey must be overruled."
The majority opinion in Stenberg is one long ugly lie, replete with gruesome details of human dismemberent.
It suggests, for starters, that forbidding abortion in America would "condemn many American women to lives that lack dignity"as if human "dignity" is somehow achieved by giving mothers the option to kill their babies.
It repeatedly refers to the executed child as "a potential human life." This is a form of perjury: a false statement, willfully delivered in our highest court by the judge himself. What distinction can be made--other than their relative location in physical space-between a baby executed by a doctor as its feet dangle out of its mother's womb and its head rests on her cervix, and the same baby whose head slips all the way through the cervix before the doctor can stick a scissors in its brain?
The babies look the same, squirm the same, share the same 48 chromosomes, and are equally alive. What marks one as an actual, and the other only as a "potential," human life? Nothing, of course.
Stephen Breyer based the opinion of the Supreme Court on a calculated, patently ludicrous misstatement of fact designed to justify the cold-blooded execution of an innocent child.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Autos
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »