Posted on 07/06/2005 8:00:51 AM PDT by rhema
What do the nomination of a replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor, constitutional law, and moral chaos have to do with one another? A good deal more than you may think.
In Federalist 2, John Jay wrote of America that "Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people -- a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs . . . ." Such a people enjoy the same moral assumptions, the cement that forms a society rather than a cluster of groups. Though Jay's conditions have long been obsolete, until recently Americans did possess a large body of common moral assumptions rooted in our original Anglo-Protestant culture, and expressed in law. Now, however, a variety of disintegrating influences are undermining that unanimity, not least among them is the capture of constitutional law by an extreme liberationist philosophy. America is becoming a cacophony of voices proclaiming different, or no, truths.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed that "If each undertook himself to form all his opinions and to pursue the truth in isolation down paths cleared by him alone, it is not probable that a great number of men would ever unite in any common belief. . . . [W]ithout common ideas there is no common action, and without common action men still exist, but a social body does not."
Contrast Tocqueville with Justices Harry Blackmun and Anthony Kennedy. Blackmun wanted to create a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy because of the asserted "'moral fact' that a person belongs to himself and not others nor to society as a whole." Justice Kennedy, writing for six justices, did invent that right, declaring that "At the heart of [constitutional] liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." Neither of these vaporings has the remotest basis in the actual Constitution and neither has any definable meaning other than that a common morality may not be sustained by law if a majority of justices prefer that each individual follow his own desires.
Once the justices depart, as most of them have, from the original understanding of the principles of the Constitution, they lack any guidance other than their own attempts at moral philosophy, a task for which they have not even minimal skills. Yet when it rules in the name of the Constitution, whether it rules truly or not, the Court is the most powerful branch of government in domestic policy. The combination of absolute power, disdain for the historic Constitution, and philosophical incompetence is lethal.
The Court's philosophy reflects, or rather embodies and advances, the liberationist spirit of our times. In moral matters, each man is a separate sovereignty. In its insistence on radical personal autonomy, the Court assaults what remains of our stock of common moral beliefs. That is all the more insidious because the public and the media take these spurious constitutional rulings as not merely legal conclusions but moral teachings supposedly incarnate in our most sacred civic document. That teaching is the desirability, as the sociologist Robert Nisbet put it, of the "break-up of social molecules into atoms, of a generalized nihilism toward society and culture as the result of individualistic hedonism and the fragmenting effect of both state and economy." He noted that both Edmund Burke and Tocqueville placed much of the blame for such developments on the intellectual class -- in our time dominant in, for example, the universities, the media, church bureaucracies, and foundation staffs -- a class to which judges belong and to whose opinions they respond. Thus ever-expanding rights continually deplete America's bank of common morality.
Consider just a few of the Court's accomplishments: The justices have weakened the authority of other institutions, public and private, such as schools, businesses, and churches; assisted in sapping the vitality of religion through a transparently false interpretation of the establishment clause; denigrated marriage and family; destroyed taboos about vile language in public; protected as free speech the basest pornography, including computer-simulated child pornography; weakened political parties and permitted prior restraints on political speech, violating the core of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech; created a right to abortion virtually on demand, invalidating the laws of all 50 states; whittled down capital punishment, on the path, apparently, to abolishing it entirely; mounted a campaign to normalize homosexuality, culminating soon, it seems obvious, in a right to homosexual marriage; permitted racial and gender discrimination at the expense of white males; and made the criminal justice system needlessly slow and complex, tipping the balance in favor of criminals. Justice O'Connor, a warm, down-to-earth, and very likeable person, joined many, though not all, of these bold attempts to remake America. Whatever one may think of these outcomes as matters of policy, not one is authorized by the Constitution and some are directly contrary to it. All of them, however, are consistent with the left-liberal liberationist impulse that advances moral anarchy.
Democratic senators' filibusters of the president's previous judicial nominees demonstrate liberals' determination to retain the court as their political weapon. They claim that conservative critics of the Court threaten the independence of the judiciary, as though independence is a warrant to abandon the Constitution for personal predilection. The Court's critics are not angry without cause; they have been provoked. The Court has converted itself from a legal institution to a political one, and has made so many basic and unsettling changes in American government, life, and culture that a counterattack was inevitable, and long overdue. If the critics' rhetoric is sometimes overheated, it is less so than that of some Democratic senators and their interest-group allies. The leaders of the Democratic Party in the Senate are making it the party of moral anarchy, and they will fight to keep the Court activist and liberal. The struggle over the Supreme Court is not just about law: it is about the future of our culture.
To restore the Court's integrity will require a minimum of three appointments of men and women who have so firm an understanding of the judicial function that they will not drift left once on the bench. Choosing, and fighting for, the right man or woman to replace Justice O'Connor is the place to start. That will be difficult, but the stakes are the legitimate scope of self-government and an end to judicially imposed moral disorder.
You are badly misreading my statement. I just said that Bork is as wrong on his end as the liberals are on theirs. Telling me how wrong the liberals are on their end obviously does not then refute my statement. They are both authoritarian, but with a capital A. They merely quibble over what ends their authoritarian ends should reach.
That creepy Ralph Neas in back on TV. YUK!
I recall seeing Bork interviewed about Ginsberg and he said he thought she would make a wonderful SP justice or words to that effect. I nearly gagged when I heard him say it.
I guess Ginsburg pulled the ultimate deception. Her "rulings" were "moderate" and when appointed she unleased her radical liberal views on America.
lol
If the GOP fails on this crucial test, they will prove they no longer deserve to govern, and won't, for long.
Clue.. the republicans are not governing NOW, the democrats are.. If they were, the democrats would guard their words.. They don't.. Its the republicans that guard THEIR words.. for fear of not appearing bi-partisan..
Which is an invention of democrats who are NEVER bi-partisan unless they would lose anyway.. The demos rule the roost.. Republicans = chickens, Democrats = roosters.. and the metaphor don't stop there either.. Bush is a lesbian chicken not a fighting cock.. I wanna see a cock fight.. not a bunch of lesbian chickens clucking in a bass octave.. trying to appear like a COCK.. but laying socialist eggs..
You fail to distinguish between right and wrong. Refusal to distinguish between right and wrong is called licentiousness. Licentiousness is the fundamental Left characteristic, sometimes called nihilism or moral relativism.
Perhaps you can relate to the Red Queen, whom I paraphrase, "The words 'Right and Wrong' mean what I say they mean, nothing more, and nothing less."
You are a Leftist, lad.
Although Mr. Bork makes some good points, I disagree with him on a fairly fundamental level.
The court, and the country, IMO, are not becoming more "liberationist," but more controlling. In other words, if sodomy is to be allowed, it is not because it is a natural right, with which we are endowed by our Creator, but because our government, in its munifiscence, has decreed that it be so.
What I am trying to say is that our moral chaos is a specific result of the ever increasing responsibility for our lives taken by the state and the thus inevitible ever decreasing responsibility for our lives taken by ourselves. It's what must happen in a socialist top down country. Or fascist country, for that matter, if that's where we are headed.
Moral Absolutes/Homosexual Agenda Ping.
Bork is a genius. I love that man. It is disgusting, crying shame and tragedy he wasn't made a justice. I hope to God that Bush - and every single Republic [and any Democrats who aren't moral anarchist traitors] involved with the process - reads this article and takes it to heart.
Says it all.
Freepmail me if you want on/off this pinglist.
*sigh*
I fear you have nailed it. It just goes to show you what having the MSM in your pocket, unlimited chutzpah, no soul, no conscience and an aggressive game plan can do for you - even if you continuously lose elections!
So he's not perfect. A big not perfect. But he's right about everything else I've ever read.
What? He supported her???
Gack.
I am a libertarian; I haven't made any misrepresentations in that regard. Moreover, I regard freedom as an absolute end unto itself. Better to die free than to live a slave.
At long last... justification for my own private Manhattan Project.
Uh oh... I think I hear G-men rummaging through the Garage
Generally Libertarianism is outgrown. Not always, of course.
I think yarddog is confused (sorry yarddog!). She was a member of the ACLU. He wouldn't have said that...
After posting my comment, I figured before I got all bent out of shape, I just check the facts. Who knows, he might have made a polite general comment.
Her view and his are diametrically opposite on almost everything.
Well I am easily confused but this was not one of those times. He did mention that his judicial philosophy was different from hers, but that is like saying, "I don't agree with those who want to destroy America but I support them".
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