Our senses were assaulted earlier by the dark thoughts of Garry Wills. Now a rebuttal appears refreshingly in the LA Times.
..........Wills, confident that he has torn down the crucifix, attempts to place a statue of the Goddess of Reason in its place, but even there he fails. He argues the woman needs to be given the choice to decide when and whether she is carrying a fetus or a person. So, by some amazing act of cognitive voodoo, it is the woman's choice that decides when human personhood begins? Why then, restrict the woman's choice to the womb? Some philosophers, like Princeton's Peter Singer, have the courage of Wills' convictions, extending a woman's choice to end a life all the way through birth and infancy. Using his own argument, there is no logical reason Wills should deny a woman's right to infanticide. After all, qualified people disagree here too. In addition to Singer, no less a personage than James Watson, Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of DNA, has advocated infanticide in cases of neonatal imperfection or retardation. Wills himself takes potshots at the case of Terri Schiavo, who was obviously out of the womb. Any number of people would argue that simply making it out of the chute does not qualify one to claim that he or she possesses a human life. So, who is a person and when? If we had followed Wills' recommendation to let the mother decide, Terri Schiavo would certainly have fared better............
8mm
................................
There they go again! Like termites gnawing away at the foundation of a building, judicial activists are eating away at the foundations of representative government in America. The damage they cause threatens our ability to govern ourselves through our elected representatives and reallocates the delicate balance of powers which our forefathers were careful to distribute among separate branches of government. The most recent example of judges usurping legislative authority comes from Alaska where that state's Supreme Court, by a narrow 3-2 vote, struck down the 10 year old Parental Consent Act. The Act required girls 16 years and younger to get a parent's permission before receiving an abortion. Typically, such children can't go on a school field trip, join a sports team or attend an "R" rated movie without parental consent. Ah, but this case involved an attempt by the legislature to encroach on what the political left regards as its most sacred of rites, the right to abortion! And even though Alaska's House and Senate passed the Act by substantial majorities, it only took three paltry judges to torpedo the law. The judicial sages held that the Act encroached on a minor's "fundamental right to privacy" protected under the state's constitution. Parental rights, which the legislature sought to protect, were jettisoned by the Court. The Court held that a minor's decision to abort, unlike all other medical decisions, cannot be hindered by a parental "veto power.".....................................
Danger! Judicial Activists at Work!
8mm