Posted on 07/19/2008 5:08:23 PM PDT by Interposition
SCALIA THE ENEMY
by Judie Brown
Released May 28, 2008
It came as no surprise when a dear friend, Andy V. of Minnesota, wrote me concerning a comment Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made during an interview with Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes on April 27. Since I never watch network programming, which is, I presume, a blessing, I simply had no idea what the Catholic Scalia had said.
Perhaps you did, but in case you are uninformed, the following is from the transcript of that interview:
"What is the connection between your Catholicism, your Jesuit education, and your judicial philosophy?" Stahl asks.
"It has nothing to do with how I decide cases," Scalia replies. "My job is to interpret the Constitution accurately. And indeed, there are anti-abortion people who think that the Constitution requires a state to prohibit abortion. They say that the Equal Protection Clause requires that you treat a helpless human being that's still in the womb the way you treat other human beings. I think that's wrong. I think when the Constitution says that persons are entitled to equal protection of the laws, I think it clearly means walking-around persons. You don't count pregnant women twice."
If this shocks you, stay tuned – there’s more!
Paul Benjamin Linton, an attorney for a preeminent pro-life legal organization, Americans United for Life, pointed out years ago – six years ago to be exact – in an article published in First Things:
No present or past justice has ever taken the position that the unborn child is, or should be regarded as, a "person" as understood in the Fourteenth Amendment, including the late Justice White, perhaps the most eloquent critic of Roe v. Wade. And in the Carhart case, the Court refused even to consider Nebraska’s argument that a partially born child is a constitutional person. That question was rejected for review without dissent. So much for the naive notion of "forcing" the Court to take on the personhood issue.
But there is more than silence to indicate the justice's views. Dissenting in Casey, Justice Antonin Scalia stated, "The states may, if they wish, permit abortion-on-demand, but the Constitution does not require them to do so."
Clearly the bandied about statement that Justice Antonin Scalia is "pro-life" is not only false but misleading to the core.
Whether we examine Scalia’s stated position in light of his alleged Catholicism or in light of his personal opinion of the yet-to-be-born individual whose life begins at the point he is created – whether through the union of human sperm and human egg or some type of reproductive technology – the justice errs.
One might wonder why it is, then, that legal scholars like Clarke Forsythe, Americans United for Life president, insist that those who support personhood for the preborn are wrong and Scalia is somehow more accurate! Oh yes, my friends.
In his recent article, "A Lack of Prudence," Forsythe writes about those who took issue with Scalia’s agreement in the recent Supreme Court decision dealing with the Partial Birth Abortion law, Carhart v. Gonzales. He suggests that we do not respect the justice nor do we treat him with the charity that is due him. While I guess that might be the perception in some quarters, I have to ask how much respect Scalia is showing the teachings of his own Church when he makes it patently clear that it’s wrong to think that we should treat human beings in the womb in the same way we treat other human beings who, thank God, have escaped the womb!
Where is the respect for those lives that Scalia dismisses as if they were simply unworthy of consideration?
Not only is Scalia’s comment on Sixty Minutes flip and downright ridiculous, as a matter of fact, it is heretical.
Yes, I said his comment was heretical and I do know what that word means. I am not calling the Justice a heretic, I am simply saying that his comment is a stark departure from the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. If you wish to check for yourself and understand what the Church teaches, see this from Pope John Paul II in his May 24, 1996 address to those who attended the symposium "Evangelium Vitae and the Law,"
While distinguishing between the sciences concerned, and recognizing that the attribution of the concept of person is a philosophical issue, we must assume, as our starting point, the biological status of the embryo, which is a human individual having the qualities and dignity proper to the person.
The human embryo has basic rights, that is, it possesses indispensable constituents for a being's connatural activity to be able to take place according to its own vital principle.
Let’s say you are reading this and have little concern about what the Catholic Church teaches on the identity and status of the human embryo. You are of course entitled to an opinion on that, but what about the scientific evidence? As John Shea, M.D. wrote in his article "The Pre-Embryo Question,"
It was first demonstrated in 1980 by Jean Smith of Queen's College, Flushing, New York, that the human body has a shape from the moment of fertilization. This was confirmed by Richard Gardner, an embryologist at Oxford University, U.K., in 2002. Which side of the microscopic embryo will form the back and head are not left to later development as has been believed by embryologists, but are determined in the minutes and hours after the sperm and egg unite to form a new human being. The "newly fertilized egg has a definite top - bottom axis that sets up the equivalent axis in the future embryo." The early mammalian embryo is no longer a "featureless ball of cells."
The scientific verification of the human embryo as human being is available to anyone who has the desire to study the development of the human embryo and understand that he or she has unrepeatable characteristics from the beginning.
Among the many scientific presentations I have read, and understood as a non-scientist, is Professor Dianne Irving’s The Carnegie Stages of Early Human Embryonic Development.
Regardless of your preference – Catholic teaching or scientific fact – when examining the positions taken by a United States Supreme Court Justice who is allegedly pro-life, the above documentation makes it perfectly clear that Justice Scalia does not deserve that title. He may be conservative and yes, he may be a strict interpreter of the Constitution of the United States in the opinion of some, but he is not pro-life.
In fact, having thought about his most recent comments on 60 Minutes, I would venture to say he is one of the preborn child’s worst enemies.
As my late uncle who worked at McDonnell-Douglas (pre-Boeing) for 30 years once told me, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
The constitutional pro life debate has never been about forcing a constitutional recognition of the unborn child as a protected citizen. It’s about getting Roe overturned so the state legislatures or US congress can make that determination. Until Roe falls, there’s really nothing any of us can do about it unless you’re willing to start a war over it. And, if and when Roe falls, Scalia will likely be the one writing the opinion.
Not even close.
Judie didn’t intend to be tactful.
Inalienable human rights come from God. When man-made governments ignore God's will they become tyrannies. Resistance to tyranny is allegiance to God.
Just like slavery, abortion will be abolished in this country by force, and by war if necessary. Whether it takes forty years or four hundred years, legal abortion will be brought to an end in this nation. Those whose morality is too lukewarm to join the fight can get the hall out of the way.
So, do you feel that all pregnant women should be allowed to vote twice in elections?
Minors can’t vote, genius.
I agree with the Justice.
Biological information clearly shows that the child in the womb is a “parasite” - in the classic biology terms.
I believe a child in the womb is not a PERSON until it’s born .. or until it can survive on it’s own outside of the mother.
Scientific advances have made the child in the womb viable much sooner. However, if the mother is killed - the child cannot survive - unless by some miracle, it is removed from the deceased mother immediately.
But .. the child is a human being even before it’s born .. and should be protected.
I have to agree with Justice Scalia, because the issue is not limited to just the abortion debate. Were it so, I would be in agreement with the argument that a human fetus should be afforded the same right to life as a born person.
But it goes beyond abortion. Far beyond abortion.
For example, how many of us guffawed when “human rights” were granted to non-human primates in Spain, just a few weeks ago? Yet that argument, in the law, has more validity than granting human rights to a fetus.
Because what is the objective difference between an ape and a human? Their DNA is almost identical. Some have been proven able to communicate with sign language, with humans and with other apes. Both humans and apes are tool users. In the law you *must* make an objective difference, not just point out “the obvious”. Many apes are far more intelligent than many humans.
But apes can be used as slaves, medically experimented on, and at least in the US, they have no civil rights. No right to an attorney, habeus corpus, or even a right to life. They are expendable. And what if you modify DNA to create something very human like and intelligent, but what you call an ape, and your property?
As another example, if a man kills a woman in an ordinary homicide, the penalty is probably less than if he kills her and her born child. It then becomes two homicides. But if he intends to kill just her, yet she is pregnant, it was not an “accident” that he killed her fetus, but there is no way he could not kill her fetus, because it is dependent on her for sustenance of life.
Legally, this makes them one person. But it gets worse.
What if she is a criminal, convicted of a crime and sent to prison. If her unborn child is a person, they are an innocent person sent to prison. This is not a frivolous issue, as many nations refuse to imprison pregnant women, for this very reason, even continuing with the rationale *after* the child is born. That is, regarding a nursing mother and her infant as *still* legally the same person, until the infant is weaned.
It even overlaps into civil disputes, such as divorce. If a fetus is a person, legally a child, then consideration must be given as to who has custody. If the mother is regarded as unfit, can her unborn child be awarded to its father? And this is an easy one.
Fights are ongoing across the country over the status of frozen sperm and ova, and have been for years. A divorced woman who uses her ex-husbands sperm to conceive can often demand child support from him though conception was out of his control. If he dies, a born child can become his inheritor even if he gave nothing to his ex-wife. Can an unborn child become his inheritor?
Surrogate mothers also become a major problem if they are carrying a human being, because they cannot legally sell a human being, even to his biological parents.
It goes on and on. For Scalia to say otherwise would undermine decades of legal decisions totally unrelated to abortion. Instead, he wisely returns the decision to the individual States, most of which are more than glad to severely restrict abortion.
Scalia is not the enemy of any pro life conservative. Get a grip.
But first I want to make what I believe is an even more important point to consider:
We are engaged in a culture war with the left that has claimed more than 50 MILLION innocent lives since 1973, with 3,500+ new deaths each day.
We want to change the culture and “the laws” but it seems to only get worse.
WHY?
How do we change the culture?
The ONLY way we can is through education—beginning with kids at pre-K and lasting through high school.
Now public schools are lost. But private schools and especially Christian are not—yet.
But here is the problem. NO CATHOLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM that I have looked at teaches in any serious way what the Church itself has taught since the time of the Apostles on the sanctity of the life of the PreBorn. I’ve looked into many Protestant school systems and found the same thing.
Catholic and Protestant schools could have turned this culture around if they would have begun comprehensive Pro-Life education Pre-K through 12th grade. But I’ve found only a handful nationwide.
I’ve spent many years making this very program and it’s free at my website. Sadly, i’ve visited many school systems with no real success.
Unless and until a sizable number of future voters are steeped in the Traditional Christian teachings on the sanctity of life marriage and family we will not win. We CAN NOT win.
I go into more depth on this in THE MISSING KEY OF THE PRO-LIFE MOVEMENT with links to my free Respect Life curriculum which you can use at home or bring to your school and try having it used there. If you do I’d appreciate feedback.
The one positive I have is news through back channels that Judie Brown and all.org might be coming out with their own curriculum. If true that might really make a difference.
The last time I heard anyone defending judicial activisim with such passion, it was law professor who was only slightly right of Karl Marx and a student of the same persuasion.
It is ironic that you speak of tyranny, and yet that is what you are encouraging. If abortion is to be ended, it will be ended with the ballot box. Any other mode of eliminating abortion is destructive to the Constitution, undermines America, and destroys freedom.
Scalia is correct. If the Constitution were correctly applied, the states would have to power to ban abortion or legalize abortion on demand.
Nobody should get to vote on whether unborn babies deserve a right to live or not. You might as well say that we should have a vote to decide whether black people are human beings with rights.
When Godless liberal scum decided abortion should be legal, they didn't care what most people thought, and when their evil order is overturned, moral conservatives aren't going to put the question up to vote. We aren't going to give a damn what liberals want. We are going to impose our will on them like they have done to us for decades.
Payback's a bitch!
**but the Constitution does not require them to do so.”**
Telling words! Pro-life bump.
Welcome to Free Republic.
Now take a hike.
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