Suffering the "slings and arrows" of the under educated.
For a lot of those who call themselves "Republicans" the history, the starting point, and what will be the future of the party is lost. They've confused their religious vigour with intellectual rigour. A common mistake. If you use Professor Hill's method you may be able to make noise, but is it music?
My son tells me that I should be less of an elitist and more of a red neck. I've tried to remind him that fruit falls down, not up. I don't think he gets it...yet. He will, but he's a bright boy. And there are many bright boys and girls out there for whom the presentation of political parties, per se, are unintelligible. My heart goes out to them. There is an internal collision between people who want to limit or restrict your freedoms in both parties that to view an internal consistency in prior beliefs as antecedent to political action is, if not murky, at least not practicable.
I've been a Republican as long as I can remember. The tocsin beat of Majority Rules while the Minority Suffers is understandable to me. The Golden Rule of America was held within the Bill of Rights. (Lotsa caps, but, hey, it's Stylebook kinda caps!)
The keystone of America was, while being in the minority, you and I still had rights. The most important of these rights, held within the plain words of the First Amendment were freedom of speech and freedom of religion. As a Republican in the '60's it meant that the Supreme Court might find that ensuring the implementation of your Constitutional Rights might mean a decision like "Miranda". While it might make the life of a criminal easier (read any contemporaneous comentary) anyone attempting to encroach upon your constitutional rights would find the Supreme Court stood as a countervailing force requiring the government to show why someone should have their freedoms as enunciated by the Constitution infringed.
That those freedoms enunciated by the Constitution and it's Bill of Rights were in fact the law above all other laws, as intended by the Framers. That is, until Roe v. Wade. The setup is in the first cite by Justice Blackmun, "[The Constitution] is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar or novel and even shocking ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States." From whence the walls of justice surely fell, just as they fell at Jericho.
The current conversation about the acceptability of justices faced by the Senate's confirmation process is framed within the context of "established law", code for acceptance of Roe v. Wade. But the first citiation in Roe v. Wade by Justice Blackmun is from the dissent of Justice Holmes in Lochner v. New York. That is to say, those who would today expect conformance with past judicial decisions to defend the trainwreck of Roe v. Wade would have us believe that Justice Blackmun was wrong to make his decision based upon an earlier dissent, from 1905. Or, that disagreeing with stare decisis is only important for decisions you agree with. A sort of logical inversion to the citation of Lochner.
But the argument of logic only appeals to the educated. What the demagogues (3.1.1) want is a division between belief and feeling and logic and law. And to show that logic and law are lesser in value. The important thing is, when circumstances are truly bad, the people will do the right thing. So, for the majority of those who decry the decision made in Roe v. Wade, the argument has been made that killing the unborn is wrong. That the decision, qua Roe v. Wade, should be overturned because killing babies is wrong.
The point is, Roe v. Wade should be overturned because it was a bad decision. It relied upon an interpretation, as outlined in the above mentioned citation, that did neither establish "whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States" nor whether certain penumbras existed. It is in Griswold v. Connecticut that we first find the phrase " the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations". But nobody argues about Griswold. Griswold, according to Justice Douglas, "The association of people is not mentioned in the Constitution nor in the Bill of Rights. The right to educate a child in a school of the parents' choice - whether public or private or parochial - is also not mentioned. Nor is the right to study any particular subject or any foreign language. Yet the First Amendment has been construed to include certain of those rights."
Little spoken of in either case--Roe v. Wade or Griswold--is the dissent of Justice Steward. And remember, without dissenters like the Great Dissenter Justice Holmes, we wouldn't be blessed with the current court's ability to either see past or see into the mere limits of language. According to Steward,"In the course of its opinion the Court refers to no less than six Amendments to the Constitution: the First, the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth, the Ninth, and the Fourteenth. [381 U.S. 479, 528] But the Court does not say which of these Amendments, if any, it thinks is infringed by this Connecticut law."
What a great dissent. The Court speaks for the Majority, but never tells us why or how. Continues Steward,"What provision of the Constitution, then, does make this state law invalid? The Court says it is the right of privacy "created by several fundamental constitutional guarantees." With all deference, I can find no such general right of privacy in the Bill of Rights, in any other part of the Constitution, or in any case ever before decided by this Court."
Killing babies is wrong. In Oregon, making abortion a crime would be wrong. But then, abortion has been decriminalized since 1967, years before Roe v. Wade. But the decision to have an abortion is a private decision, one made between a man and woman, family, a priest. The state has no rights here. It has only the right to criminalize the decision or not. In Oregon, we decided that the private decision should be simply that. If Roe v. Wade were reversed today it would not affect the law of Oregon. We have had our vote.
And if Roe v. Wade were reversed, I would support an annual debate on the issue of whether or not abortion should be a criminal act. I wouldn't vote to make a woman who had an abortion a criminal. Neither would I hide her action under the cloak of acceptability of "Women's Rights". There is no umbrella that makes the death of an unborn fetus anyone's first choice or protects one from either the scorn or hatred of the act itself. But for those of you who choose to make the Republican party the party of hatred for women who choose to make the most horrible of all decisions criminal out of religious piety, you will continue to drag us to the Left, where the Majority must be obeyed. Even though you are in the minority.
Private choices made privately are the soul and essence of the Republican Party. If there is no right to privacy, ala Steward, where can we look to law for direction? If you read law you might be interested in this bit, "Those people who want to rely, as the title of this panel suggests, on the 10th Amendment, would do well to read it. In fact, I brought it with me. It is very short. It says, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited to it by the states are reserved to the states, respectively, or to the people.
"Now there are two points to be made about that language. The first is that it doesn't tell you what powers were delegated. If a power got delegated the 10th Amendment certainly did not de-delegate it. One has to figure out what powers are delegated, but you can't figure that out by reading the 10th Amendment over and over."
So the law is clear and unclear. What is clear is that there are those who call themselves Republicans who apply only one test to others. It is most often exhibited as a religious test. And for those for whom the test is an ethical test, it supports a tautology more reminiscent of religious belief than free inquiry. That tautology is whether to criminalize the act of a woman aborting her baby. The Lefties in the Republican party want to make sure abortion is a criminal act. The true Republican who sees this decision as beyond the pale of inquiry from the political animal, the Leftist, the one who must control the decisions of others, asks simply for the dignity in privacy that such an act must have. The words of Justice Steward hold no Golden Rule for the religious conservatives who wish to dominate the pary of freedom and choice. "But we are not asked in this case to say whether we think this law is unwise, or even asinine. We are asked to hold that it violates the United States Constitution. And that I cannot do." (Griswold v. Connecticut)
Is abortion horrible? Yes. Is it desireable? No. Has either of those opinions/beliefs/facts made abortion either less likely or more likely? For those who fight from the view of the religious conservative, it doesn't, nor will it ever, matter. For them the fight is to control what you will do. They are fairly convinced about what they would do. And it is in that instant that they transform themselves from being on the Right to being on the Left.
Hangups
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