Let’s skip worrying about democracy in Ukraine, Crimea and Russia for a few minutes. And concentrate on democracy right here in America. Yet another federal judge overturned state laws banning the absurdity of same-sex “marriage,” in this case in Michigan. AP reported: “Federal Judge Bernard Friedman on Friday overturned Michigan’s constitutional ban, the latest in...
296 search results for: Roe+v.+Wade
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A Lawyer’s Lawyer
Judge John Roberts of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, whom President George W. Bush has nominated to take the place of retiring Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, is what we used to call a “lawyer’s lawyer.” He comes from Harvard College, Harvard Law School, the Harvard Law Review, a...
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A Perpetual Censor
When Supreme Court Justice Byron White announced his retirement from public life in March of this year, a shudder rippled down the spines of Washington conservatives. Previously, when one or another of the Court’s Nameless Nine had declared his intention to quit the pleasures of wrecking the laws and customs of local communities he had...
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Why Is Japan Dying?
It’s Jan. 22, 2016, the 43rd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade abortion decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that has killed more than 60 million babies here. But this year, let’s turn to Japan. Fortune magazine ran an article titled, “Why Japan’s Economic Troubles Should Worry the U.S.” It warned that the world’s third...
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Donald Trump, the Court, and the Law
Is Donald Trump a Burkean? Would Russell Kirk vote for him for president? Can a paleoconservative legal scholar imagine any benefit to a Trump presidency? Of course, the neoconservatives are piling on Trump. Most notable was National Review’s January 21 issue, “Against Trump.” “Trump,” say the editors, “is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would...
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Democracy and God
Since at least the 1960’s, federal judges in the United States have overturned a number of state and federal laws dealing, broadly speaking, with marriage, sexuality, and the family—most notoriously in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion. And numerous commentators have pointed out the constitutional absurdity of these decisions, based on no clear...
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The Politics of Life—and Politics
“If a woman of her own accord drops that which is in her, they shall crucify her and not bury her.” —The Assyrian Code, c. 2000 B.C. Ancient history is worth keeping in mind when confronting the claims of the pro- and anti-abortion and euthanasia camps, since both tend to couch their arguments in terms...
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Life and Death in a House Divided
The Supreme Court’s recent decision to review a Missouri abortion case has raised the spirits of the pro-life movement. In his appeal, Missouri’s attorney general asked the Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade, the landmark civil rights decision that made pregnant women and their physicians sole arbiters over who is born and who is not...
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A Third Way?
I went into the 2000 presidential campaign an enthusiastic supporter of Pat Buchanan’s bid for the White House as a third-party candidate. I emerged more convinced than ever that Buchanan would have made an outstanding president but skeptical that a serious right-wing party will be able to emerge, at least in the short run. I...
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Monument to the Myth
An Nea Grant has been awarded to an “artist” in Utah to erect a monument to the myth of a pre-Roe v. Wade “back-alley” abortion holocaust. Darin Biniaz, a 26 year old who has discovered that “art” is more profitable and less demanding than actual work, has received $2,000 to create a “sculpture” called “No...
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To Catch a Terrorist
The watershed U.S. Supreme Court decisions Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, we are told, “empowered women” to control their lives. In reality, they empowered the Police State and set the U.S. Imperium on a trajectory where it not only could deny the personhood of the unborn but could legally classify whole groups of...
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Faux Originalism
Is Antonin Scalia’s originalism—indeed, constitutional self-government itself—passé? The eternal temptation to read one’s own values into the Constitution beguiles even religious conservatives espousing natural law. The U.S. Constitution is the “supreme law of the land,” whose ultimate interpretation is entrusted, by longstanding custom if not by explicit textual direction, to the U.S. Supreme Court. Accordingly,...
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A Killing Privacy
Abortion is not something to discuss in polite company. Unlike a good, clean murder committed from natural motives such as revenge, envy, and greed, abortion is something slimy, more like a sex crime. Many parents must be tempted, from time to time, to commit mayhem upon their offspring. Such feelings are natural; but women who...
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A Third Way?
I went into the 2000 presidential campaign an enthusiastic supporter of Pat Buchanan’s bid for the White House as a third-party candidate. I emerged more convinced than ever that Buchanan would have made an outstanding president but skeptical that a serious right-wing party will be able to emerge, at least in the short run. I knew...
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Men in Black
The U.S. Supreme Court is like one of those dinosaur reconstructions at which children gape when they are taken to a museum. Not only is the Court today an imaginative reconstruction of something that no longer actually exists, it is so huge an institution that few Americans are able to take it in all at...
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The Heart of Darkness
When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, over 58,000 Americans had lost their lives over the course of almost 20 years. Whatever one may think of the justice or prudence of the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, only the most callous of souls regards that loss of life with complete indifference. When the Northern Illinois...
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Frozen Souls
Kelli Moye has become the pretty young face of America’s culture of death. Standing trial for the cold-blooded murder of her newborn daughter, she has provided us with a test case for Middle America. Should Roe v. Wade ever be overturned, states and municipalities will once again be free to pass legislation regulating abortion. How...
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Returning to Reality
And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost . . . On February 28, as Pope Benedict...
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Is There Hope for the Federal Courts?
In a radio address last year, President Clinton railed against congressional Republicans who were stalling on his nominees to the federal bench and had even threatened some sitting judges with impeachment. Their actions, he claimed, had endangered our tradition of judicial independence, and were an attack on the rule of law itself. The truth, of...
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Why Roy Moore Matters
Why would Christian conservatives in good conscience go to the polls Dec. 12 and vote for Judge Roy Moore, despite the charges of sexual misconduct with teenagers leveled against him? Answer: That Alabama Senate race could determine whether Roe v. Wade is overturned. The lives of millions of unborn may be the stakes. Republicans now...
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The Heart of Darkness
When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, over 58,000 Americans had lost their lives over the course of almost 20 years. Whatever one may think of the justice or prudence of the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, only the most callous of souls regards that loss of life with complete ...
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Thanks, Christine
The ugliness displayed by the media and Democrats during the fight over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court is yet another indicator of how far we have come from Hamilton’s conception of the federal judiciary as “the least dangerous branch.” Kavanaugh was nominated to replace Anthony Kennedy, who used his perch on the...
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Roe at 43: Defy It
Today, many souls are braving the weather in Washington, D.C., to testify to the truth that the United States is a rich gutter country that guts millions of babies, guts women, and has disemboweled herself in an act of worship before the god of Mammon. Steaming and bleeding on the ground before her staggering and...
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Last Best Chance to Capture Supreme Court
President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are on the cusp of making history. With Trump having named two justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, they have an opening to elevate a third justice to fill the seat of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, thereby securing the constitutionalism of the...
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Trump’s SCOTUS Nominee: Don’t Trust, Just Verify
As I wrote on the Day After the Election, it is incumbent upon America’s Deplorables not to sit idly by, content with a mere victory in a presidential contest, as if suddenly all of our problems are solved. The rabid mainstream media, still licking its wounds, is working 24/7 to undermine any agenda item that...
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Will Bishops Deny Biden Communion?
Last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops voted 168-55, more than 3-1, to provide new guidance for receiving Holy Communion. Behind the decision? Bishops’ alarm that the public religious practice of President Joe Biden is conveying a heretical message to the faithful and the nation. At Sunday Mass, Biden regularly receives Communion. Yet he...
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The Lone Ranger’s Legacy
After serving for more than three decades on the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice William Rehnquist died on Saturday, September 3, at the age of 80, having lost his battle with thyroid cancer. With Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s recent announcement of her retirement, there are now two vacant seats on the Court. Just over a...
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Angels to Govern Us
“If men were angels,” James Madison wrote, “no government would be necessary.” Or, “if angels were to govern men, no controls on government would be necessary.” Madison believed that men are about as good as they can ever be, and since no angels are available to rule, we need checks and balances. Thomas Jefferson added...
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Considering Judge Barrett
In one of the most important acts of his Presidency, on Sept. 26, 2020, Donald J. Trump announced his pick to fill the United States Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Amy Coney Barrett. The Supreme Court has recently been divided 4-4 in terms of judicial philosophy, with Justices Ginsburg, Stephen...
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Cajuns Uncaged
While many modern historians, liberal politicians, and media elites would like to think that the very concept of “state sovereignty” died when Robert E. Lee offered his sword to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, the people of one state recently gave state sovereignty a ringing endorsement at the ballot box....
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Bookshelves
COMMENDABLES Nightfall for Liberalism? by Richard John Neuhaus George Parkin Grant: English Speaking Justice; Notre Dame; $4.95 paper. “Liberalism in its generic form is surely something that all decent men accept as good-‘conservatives’ included. Insofar as the word ‘liberalism’ is used to describe the belief that political liberty is a central human...
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Leftists Bury Another Norm: Protesters Target Homes of SCOTUS Justices
Threatening protests outside the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices are the latest example of the left deciding to attack rather than persuade those who disagree.
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Abortion on the Rise
Abortion is on the rise in the United States—and has been since George W. Bush was first inaugurated President in January 2001. Current estimates of the number of abortions performed annually in America hover just above 1.3 million. What may astonish many of the “moral values” voters who reelected President Bush last November is that,...
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“I’m Liberated; Free at Last!”
Pat Buchanan has taken more punches than Chuck Wepner, hut unlike the Bayonne Bleeder, Buchanan has a good right hook (or is it now a left?) of his own. The year began with Buchanan defending his feisty anti-interventionist manifesto A Republic, Not an Empire: Not since the days of Arkansas Sen. William Fulbright, the one...
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The Post-Abortive Culture
The recent passage of the Texas Heartbeat Act, signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott on May 19, has resulted in feverish alarums across the land. These came after the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to block the law in late September, following an emergency application made by over a dozen Texas abortion providers and their...
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Polemics & Exchanges: October 2023
J. Douglas Johnson, executive editor of Touchstone Magazine, critiques Tom Piatak's column in the August issue, and Mr. Piatak replies.
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Our Constitutional Covenant With Death
“The compact which exists between the North and the South,” proclaimed William Lloyd Garrison in an abolitionist declaration of 1843, “is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” When the Southern states concluded that they were no longer bound by what their enemies regarded as a compact with the devil. Garrison and his...
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Another Thurgood Marshall?
When Clarence Thomas, our newest Supreme Court Justice, asked to be sworn in a week before the official ceremony, so he could go on the payroll early, it summed up the whole affair for me. Why are conservatives cheering his ascent to the judicial oligarchy? Yes, it’s fun to beat liberal senators, but not with...
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Do Androids Tweet…?
The America depicted in the news is every day coming closer to the dystopian future imagined by science-fiction novelists. I am not referring so much to the rising tide of violence and irrationality that has overtaken our society at all levels as to the systematic spiritual, intellectual, and social desolation of our public culture. One...
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Abortion: Fetus Liberation Fronts
It is hard to see that much good has ever come from any of the various declarations of the rights of man. Such a declaration did not save the French from either Robespierre or Napoleon, and the constitution of the defunct USSR practically glows with liberal enthusiasm for human rights. For some strange reason, though,...
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The Courage to Defy Prudence
On February 22, the South Dakota Senate, by a vote of 23-12, approved legislation banning nearly all abortions in the state. On February 24, the vote in the South Dakota House of Representatives was 50-18 (H.B. 1215). Twelve days later, Gov. Mike Rounds signed the measure into law. President Bush criticized the law as too...
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Judge Roberts
As the U.S. Senate prepares to consider President George W. Bush’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, there seems to be a certain ambiguity about Judge Roberts’ position on Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that made abortion-on-demand the “law of the land.” On the one hand, he is on record as saying...
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The Democrats’ Bait and Switch
Former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland told the Democratic convention that Barack Obama was an “economic patriot” and blasted Mitt Romney for being an “outsourcing pioneer.” That is certainly the theme of the Obama campaign in the industrial Midwest. Any television left on in Ohio for more than 15 minutes is likely to broadcast an attack...
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What Atheists Know
“When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.” —Flannery O’Connor In response to the charge of obsession with a “single issue,” pro-life activists contend that the abortion debate is really paradigmatic. As Joseph Sobran suggested...
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Robert Bork, RIP
Today brings the sad news that Robert Bork has passed away. The sadder news for America, though, came in 1987, when the Senate unjustly rejected his nomination to the Supreme Court. There is no doubt that, had Bork been confirmed, Roe v Wade would have been overturned in 1992 when the Supreme Court decided Planned Parenthood v...
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Five Votes
“Much law, but little justice.” —Thomas Fuller With five votes around here you can do anything,” Justice William Brennan told his law clerks, thus summarizing the quintessence of Brennanism. That constitutional law is not something derived from the text, structure, and history of the various provisions of the Constitution but rather a creation of the...
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My Vote Still Counts
Back in 2004, I was part of the 62% of Ohio voters who supported a referendum to amend the Ohio Constitution to define marriage as “a union between one man and one woman.” Last week, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decided, in a 2 to 1 decision, that my vote—and those of some 3....
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Restore the Constitution!
In recent years, American politics has been preoccupied with moral questions, or what are now called “social issues”: sexual immorality, sodomy, abortion, pornography, and recreational drugs. Some conservatives want the federal government to play a role in opposing these evils. Many libertarians, on the other hand, want the government, state and federal alike, to treat...
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Guns Incorporated?
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review McDonald v. City of Chicago, a case that presents the watershed issue of whether the individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment, established in 2008 in District of Columbia v. Heller, applies to states. Most Court observers agree that it appears very likely that the...
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Rediscovering Philadelphia
“There is no liberty if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers.” —Montesquieu The theme that unites the short, somewhat disparate eight chapters of this book is the use by the Supreme Court of unenumerated rights—that is, rights beyond those specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights—to invalidate state...