By JACK KENNY
Watching and listening to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island incredibly grill Judge Brett Kavanaugh, line by line, over the contents of the latter’s high school yearbook, is to recall the words written by William Faulkner and revived a few years ago by Barak Obama. “The past is not dead. It isn’t even past.” And apparently, high school never ends.
And in the United States Senate, mendacity knows no bounds. Democrats cry there is too much at stake to allow Brett Kavanaugh, intelligent conservative and Jesuit-educated Catholic, to sit on the highest court in the land.
And while it is not exactly true that with Kavanaugh on board, the Supreme Court will surely vote to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that created a “constitutional right” to abortion, it becomes less certain that the court will continue to uphold it. The court will more likely permit incremental encroachments, such as state laws requiring parental consent for abortions on minors, requirements for doctors who work at abortion facilities, etcetera and so forth.
The federal constitution contains neither mandates nor prohibitions on what states may require regarding much matters. Nothing in the history or tradition of constitutional interpretation gives the Supreme Court power to dictate standards in that area. But the central “right” to kill infants in the womb as a personal “choice” has been too long established and too often reaffirmed by the court to make outright repeal likely at this time.
Nevertheless, the militant feminists and their stooges in Congress seem certain that putting Kavanaugh on the High Court would mean the death of Roe — just as they were certain 28 years ago that David Souter’s joining the Supremes would have the same effect. And we know what direction the little man from Weare, N.H., followed, to the delight of the champions of “choice.”
But please don’t perpetuate the myth that defenders of “choice” are motivated by a devotion to personal freedom and defending the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. The “right” to abortion is not in that document, nay, not even in the small print. It was discovered in the “penumbras formed by emanations” from other rights that are clearly affirmed.
Are the champions of “choice” notable for their defense of those rights? Name one. The right to keep and bear arms? Not so much. The rights to freedom of speech and to assemble to peacefully protest? Not if the speakers and protesters come within the “buffer zone” around abortion facilities that “choicers” have tried to establish. The right to one’s own property? Not if the exercise of that right disturbs the habitat or travel plans of an arroyo southwestern toad.
Most champions of choice would deny the individual motorist the choice of wearing or not wearing a seat belt. And most would deny the right of an individual to choose to purchase or not purchase health insurance.
On college campuses, enforcement of the “hate speech” and sexual harassment codes has pretty well eliminated freedom of speech and due process for the accused. Giving Judge Kavanaugh the benefit of a doubt concerning the highly dubious, unsubstantiated charges against him? Well, the junior senator from Hawaii has told the men of this country to “shut up,” the latest and most bizarre interpretation of the “right to remain silent.”
Indeed, those who claim most loudly to be for “choice” appear most determined to prove anew each day the truth of Ronald Reagan’s wry observation that today’s liberals (or “progressives”) are people who will “defend to the death your right to agree with them.”
When the smoke of rhetoric clears away, it is clear that there is only one right that matters to the “pro-choice” crowd: the right of copulation without procreation, pleasure without principle, sexual freedom without responsibility. Contraceptives for all and abortion on demand.
Leave the defenders of the old morality at the constitutional bypass, on the old road leading to such antiquated concepts as dignity and respect for the very processes by which life itself is generated. In this nation’s earliest founding document, we find deference to “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” and unalienable human rights “endowed by their Creator.”
None of that holds water any longer for the champions of “choice.” They know no authority higher than an HHS mandate of the federal government or the latest proclamation by the United Nations. Their authority and their doctrine were named in Jerusalem nearly 2,000 years ago: They “have no king but Caesar.”
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