Posted on 01/31/2006 12:54:25 PM PST by Jhohanna
SAN FRANCISCO - An appeals court ruled Tuesday that the federal law banning 'partial-birth' abortion is unconstitutional, saying the measure is vague and lacks an exception for cases in which a woman’s health is at stake.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Exactly. This procedure is nothing less than infanticide. It is gruesome beyond description. Every time I talk about this issue with liberals they tell me it is not true. This is not legal. They just cannot bring themselves to admit that their party approves of this procedure.
It's not a question of what I want.
It's a question of what people ARE, and what they believe to be true about the world, and about the universe.
There is no requirement that a judge be patriotic. Patriotism is not required by law or the Constitution.
And yet, we do expect men who serve as judges to not be utterly neutral and indifferent to the nation. We expect them to be patriotic. We expect their views about country to "contaminate" their legal thinking, to the point that they will not willfully issue a decision that they know will severely damage the United States in the face of its foes just because they think that, logically, the law demands it.
If you really believe in God, and really believe that God has stated a clear opinion, and that good and evil are determined by where you stand, you don't damn yourself to Hell in order to follow some human custom. Nobody would.
I think that the REASON Alito and Roberts oppose abortion, always have, is BECAUSE they are Catholic. That's where they learned it. They can dress up their opposition in legal robes and legal arguments, but the root of those arguments lies in what they believe life is, and where that belief came from. Of course a good judge is not going to stand up there and rule "Rome says..."
A good judge can find PLENTY of legal principles within American law to justify outlawing partial birth abortion.
But a good judge can also find plenty of legal principles by which to uphold abortion.
So, why the difference? The moral opinion of the judge. There are two sides to every case. Why the judge chooses one set of legal arguments which determine the outcome, as opposed the other, has to do with the moral scale within them. Devout men like Alito and Roberts didn't develop their own moral scales utterly independent of the religion they grew up with, and oh-by-the-way just happen to discover, as adults, that their independently-arrived-at positions just happen to coincide with Catholic teachings. They believe as they do BECAUSE they are Catholics. And that inflects everything else they do.
The same is true of committed Democrats, committed liberals, committed free marketeers, committed Jews.
So, do I think that judges "should" rule according to Catholic principles? Not as such. Do I think that devout Catholic judges WILL rule in ways that are predictably Catholic? Of course. They will rule justly, according to law, as they see it. But what they think "just" is, will be determined by their own inner scales of right and wrong. And in Alito and Roberts, those scales were PUT THERE by the Church as they grew up.
There is never anything so direct as "Benedict rules, and therefore I must..." You'll never hear a leftist say "Marx says, therefore I must..." either, but the behavior of leftists on any issue is utterly, dreadfully predictable. So is the behavior of devout Catholics on abortion. You know how they are going to rule. You just don't know the legal arguments they'll use to get to the foregone conclusion.
That's already out the window. You can kill an infant up until the head leaves the birth canal.
Call it a hunch, but my money says that SCOTUS will pass and decline to hear it.
The term health of the mother is vague. It could include the psychological health of the mother. Some women could claim that having a child might depress them. They would get depressed because the baby might put a severe strain on their lives and they could not go to graduate school, play tennis as often, have enough money to shopping etc.
This implies to me that the Vatican's position on ANYthing would have to take precedence, which is why I was asking to have that clarified!
Ostensibly, an officer of the court is not a free agent either, so why would you see the first sentence, hyperbole aside, as implying the second?
I'm not getting my hopes up too high just yet. Even if Roberts and Alito turn out to be as strongly pro-life as we had hoped, it will still be a 5-4 pro-abortion court. I don't expect anything to change much at the USSC unless and until Bush gets a chance to replace either Stevens or Ginsberg. Unless God is as disgusted and fed up with them as I am, I don't think it's likely that any of the other 3 pro-aborts will die or resign anytime soon.
I am a lawyer. Being a lawyer is about being a hired advocate for a position, not about being right in a transcendental sense. If the case is too morally repugnant, you don't take it on at all. What you can't do is simply suspend your whole belief system, do the opposite of what you believe to be the way the world is ordered, and expect to be any good at it.
And I don't suggest for a minute that Alito or anyone else would say outright "The Canon law trumps the Constitution."
Clear cases are not put before the Supreme Court.
If it's there, the question is open. How it comes out is determined by the inner scales of the men judging it.
When it comes to abortion, the vote of each justice now is utterly predictable...except Kennedy. Each operates based upon his (or her) own internal scale of what "justice" is. We know what Ruth Bader Ginsburg's scale is: it is the scale of the secular civil libertarian left. That's the filter through which she filters everything. At her confirmation hearing, she didn't say "I am going to judge everything according to the principles of the American Civil Liberties Union Charter". But everyone knew that is just how she would rule, because he whole life and career were built around that belief system.
Alito isn't going to say, or think, "I am a minion of Benedict". But we know what his scales are, we know how he is going to view right and wrong, and what's right and what's wrong, because just like Ginsburg, he has an institution to which he has shown deep committment.
I stated them perhaps too plainly, in a way that was overly (and needlessly) alarming.
The bottom line is that Alito and Roberts are not either of them unpredictable on the abortion matter. Their writings and public acts, and interpretations of the law, reflect what one would expect from the devout Catholics that they are.
Apparently the second circuit agrees with the nineth as well as a Nebraska case, and Judge Nepolitano on Fox is now saying they can't avoid it.
It's not the foot that's left inside, it's the head. They actually have to turn the baby around and deliver it feet first, then stop the delivery, and well, you know the rest. So, this is even MORE dangerous for the mother, as it ends up being a breech birth. EVIL! EVIL procedure!
She does have the right to choose her own fate - on whether to have sex or not. THAT'S where the choice lies. AFTER she's chosen to have sex, and gotten pregnant, well, she's already made her choice at that point. She has NO right to kill her baby after she's gotten pregnant - cuz her choice should be whether or not she should have sex.
Ok Sam, enough celebrating, time to go to work.
WHO is JRB???
Janice Rodgers Brown, of course :o)
That dissent should be read by all who question whether such a process should be allowed in any country that purports to value life and liberty as being "Creator endowed."
I don't know what's more frightening... your contention that SC justices DO decide the law based on their church, or that you believe they SHOULD do so.
Loyalty to anything beyond the US constitution and US laws doesn't belong on the Supreme Court... or ANY court in the US.
It'll be Justice Kennedy who holds the swing vote and he is opposed to PBA.
Can't be helped.
People, including judges, judge things based on how they see and understand them.
Judges apply the law, yes, but what they're applying is their understanding of the law, as seen through the prism of their own minds. Those minds contain the standards they use. What is right, what is wrong, what "rights" mean, and how things are balanced - these do not come from the bare text of any law, but from the actions of the human mind reading it.
Justice Alito and Justice Ginsburg are human beings. Human beings, not computers, judge cases. It is impossible to separate the human mind from the structure of beliefs that forms that mind. Why is killing people and eating them wrong? Vast cultures did so, for entertainment, without a shred of guilt either. We think it's a horror, and a judge judging such a case would probably apply a standard in judgment that the crime was particularly horriffic. But that's not purely legal. That's his judgment, saying that murdering somebody and eating him is particularly horrible, and deserves the maximum punishment.
What is it that makes eating people horrible, or torturing criminals horrible? Nothing but our value systems. That's what a religion is: an organized value system.
You suggest that it's "frightening" that judges judge based on their internal value systems - if those value systems happen to have been learned from a church. How else can any man judge anything?
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