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.
Scalia isn't saying the fetus doesn't deserve protection under the law, he IS saying, however much I may disagree with him, they don't deserve EQUAL protection.
It would be interesting to hear him further qualify that statement.
But to say Scalia is THE ENEMY, in the same way pro-choicers are is ridiculous.
I didn't appreciate his calling pro-lifers, anti-abortionists, though.
To cyberant, human personhood is slated for somewhere around seven or eight years after birth, depending upon learned ability to forage.
You can crap all over this nation's Christian heritage all you want and equate Christian conservatives with the Taliban, but that just exposes you for what you are: a worthless piece of garbage who will fight on the side of the baby-killers and do everything you can to make sure that abortion continues to be protected by the corruption of the law.
You don't know what freedom is.
You don't know your ass from a hole in the ground.
Scalia is NOT the enemy.
Please.....
- John
A rather short-sighted hit piece against one of Roe’s greatest adversaries. I question the motives of the entire rationale behind the piece.
I don’t know about any of the other geniuses on this thread, but I welcome anyone’s opposition to Roe, for any reason.
To insist on not just ideological purity, but absolute obesiance to every single tenet of your personal belief, whether they are relevant or not, is a recipe for being a permanent tiny minority, and for keeping the abortion mills permanently in business.
I watched the 60 minutes interview when it aired. Yes, I found Justice Scalia’s comments disturbing when I heard them. Definitely not what I expected of him. His son is a priest. Perhaps he can set dad straight.
Scalia is very good friends with Ginsberg fwiw.
Of course they cannot care for themselves.
A child in the womb is connected to it’s mother .. phyically. Therefore, it cannot claim personhood until it no longer is connected to it’s mother - physically.
Emotional bonds are something totally different.
Scalia says: “I think when the Constitution says that persons are entitled to equal protection of the laws, I think it clearly means walking-around persons:
If that is what Scalia said then anathema to this devious Demagogue!
I fear for all of us...”walking around” or not
BTW-The Orthodox Church has a definite, formal and intended attitude toward abortion. It CONDEMNS all procedures purporting to ABORT the embryo or fetus, whether by surgical or chemical means. The Orthodox Church brands abortion as MURDER; that is, as a premeditated termination of the life of a human being.
In the final analysis only the mother can prevent an abortion, not the Constitution nor the politician. If the same effort was made to convince the mother not to have an abortion as is spent to make abortion a 4-year cicada that peaks every Presidential election, it would be great. Preventing abortion should not be a political issue.
Preventing abortion should not be a political issue.
But the Secular Left made it such in 1973. The rabid secularists must be fought on every front, political too.
You said: What shocks me is people who thing that killing unborn babies is just fine and dandy, apparently that includes who ever wrote this article.
I think you missed the entire position of the author of the article. It was written by Julie Brown, who is the head of the American Life League, one of the major pro-life activist organizations in the world. She is 100% pro-life and in no way does she think killing unborn babies is “fine and dandy”.
It has always been assumed that Christian ideas and principles form the foundation of Moral Law and Moral Law form the foundation of the laws of the United States and the individual states. When other people’s religious practices came into conflict with Moral Law, Moral Law, not the practices of other religions, was always supreme.
People were free to believe as they saw fit, but they could not practice their beliefs when those practices ran contrary to morality they had to live by the Christian based laws of the United States.
Notice that I used the past tense because the secularists have infested our courts and institutions of government...resulting in a holocaust of the unborn among other inhuman practices.
he is pro life, but he is also pro constitution.
There should be no “but”.
Pro life and Pro Constitution are natural partners but the secularists have infested, perverted, and undermined our institutions including the Constitution.
Scalia is NOT the enemy, but “pro-lifers” like you could be one of the “pro-lifers” enemies.
In his role as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Scalia is called upon to correctly interpret (not construe) the plain meaning (what it meant when it was written) of the U.S. Constitution; NOT the plain meaning of his own philosophy, or your philosophy, or some religious creed, including not his own. He has always understood that and always explained it very well.
His own opposition to the Roe v Wade decision has been made clear by him and others; and that opposition is very simple: Nothing in the U.S. Constitution MANDATES that the states MUST legalize abortion. And, as he was explaining in your lead quotes, by the same Constitutional reasoning, the U.S. Constitution also does not MANDATE that abortion MUST BE outlawed by the states.
As much as he has opposed the judicial activism in Roe V Wade, he would also oppose a judicial activism that sought to not only end the mandate of Roe V Wade but sought as well to impose the opposite dictum - that states CANNOT permit abortion.
His position says the same to both camps that applaud that kind of judicial activism - if you want the Constitution to say something then change it, don’t appoint judges to re-write it for you.
“Having said that, this nation is founded upon the United States Constitution. Not based on the say-so of the Pope in Rome.”
Our Founders wrote the Constitution based on Natural Law, just like Catholicism, or the Pope in Rome.
Amendment V
“No PERSON (emphasis mine) (snip)..nor be
deprived of LIFE (emphasis mine), liberty, ..”
My Webster dictionary right beside my computer says: person 1: human being. If a preborn baby is not a human being, what then?
So let’s take a look at this ultrasound:
http://www.cwcobgyn.com/images/4dpics_3.jpg
Sure looks like a human/person to me. How about some common sense, judges?
First, we did vote to decide that black people were human beings with rights. These votes are known as the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.
Second, every right created or enshrined or recognized in the Constitution achieved that status through a vote. I believe that many rights are created by God, but that doesn’t mean a government recognizes them. So, even with these God given rights, you have to win a vote for them to be recognized.
Third, you are never going to get a court that is willing to create Constitutional rights for unborn children unless the view of the country radically shifts. Right now, the majority of conservatives do not want a pro-life version of Roe (ie an unfounded court decision which creates rights that do not exist in the Constitution), instead they want to be able to resolve the issue of abortion through debate, education, and voting.
Seeing how most conservatives don’t support your goal, it is impossible for you to achieve your “victory” with the country in its current state. For this to happen, you need to shift the voters radically right.
For the sake of assumption, let’s say that the country takes a radical step right, why would you want the court to interpret a right into the Constitution? If you only get a court created right out of your now radically right shifted public, your victory is only secure until different judges are appointed. If on the other hand, you voted and amended the Constitution, your victory would be much more secure (additionally, it would be Constitutionally legitimate).
Finally, you are advocating a tyranny of judges, the same as most of the left. While this can lead to decisions that benefit your cause, this also leads to decisions that hurt your cause (if you don’t believe that ask the left what they think of DC v. Heller). Additionally, if judges run the country, we will have decisions that are out of line with the beliefs of the citizens, that can’t be easily changed, and that last only as long as that certain judge sits on the bench.
The Constitution was not written to solve all of our problems and to resolve all of our disputes. The Constitution was written to place bounds on the government and to create a basic outline of rights. Just because the Constitution doesn’t apply to a situation doesn’t make the document defective or uninspired. It is because the Constitution doesn’t apply to every situation that we can amend it to enshrine our morals and beliefs in the document.
The majority of us want to see the end of Roe and abortion. However, we will not win this battle in the courts (with the exception of maybe getting Roe overturned), but rather through the political process.
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