The case called Planned Parenthood v. Casey was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1992. At the time there was some thought that it might be the vehicle for overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that made abortion a constitutional right. But Casey only made things worse: it reaffirmed Roe, and added an...
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Sophistory
Two thousand fifteen was the year that we Americans broke history. By “breaking history,” I do not mean something like “breaking news,” or “breaking records,” or even “breaking the Internet” (though the Internet certainly played a role). Yes, the “historic moments” of the Summer of #LoveWins and #HateLoses—the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v....
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The Spanish Civil War and the Battle for Western Civilization
After a lengthy legal battle concluded in September, Spain’s Supreme Court gave its approval to the socialist government’s plans to exhume and remove the remains of General Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen, where they have lain since his death in 1975. The controversial general led Spain’s Nationalist forces to victory over their...
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Ten Days That Shook the Presidency
What a difference a week can make. Saturday, Sept. 26, was among the best days of the Trump presidency, or so some of us thought watching the president introduce in the Rose Garden his sterling candidate for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court. The academic and professional credentials of Amy Coney Barrett, 48,...
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Affirmative Agitprop
The University of Michigan is now the scene of the most important battle over affirmative action since the Bakke case at Stanford, settled so inconclusively some 25 years ago by the Supreme Court. There is absolutely no question that Ann Arbor’s undergraduate and admissions policies are based on a principle of racial preference that, in...
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There’s No Right to Sleep Outdoors
Supreme Court arguments on Monday suggest the Court will rule 6-3 or 5-4 that municipalities can ban sleeping on public property. The ruling will affect the entire nation.
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Peaceable Kingdoms
“The consent of all nations is the law of nature.” —Cicero On the Law of Nations is a powerful brief in favor of what the United States Supreme Court in 1900 declared to be “the customs and usages of the civilized world.” (In Paquete Habana, the highest court declared international law to be “part of...
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Something Rotten in the State?
When does a political deal become a bribe? At the 1952 Republican National Convention, California’s favorite son, Gov. Earl Warren, released his delegation reportedly in return for Ike’s promise that he would give Warren the first open seat on the Supreme Court. In September 1953, Chief Justice Fred Vinson dropped dead of a heart attack....
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Putin’s Got Problems, Too
Before the first Trump-Biden debate, moderator Chris Wallace listed the six subjects that would be covered: The Trump and Biden records, the Supreme Court, COVID-19, the economy, race, and violence in our cities, and the integrity of the election. According to a recent Gallup survey, Wallace’s topics tracked the public’s concerns—the top seven of which...
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On Segregation and Education
I enjoyed Samuel Francis’s lucid analysis of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education (“Forty Years After,” May 1994), but I take exception to his argument that “the only feasible moral defense of the Brown decision today is not that it replaced force with freedom, but that it replaced one kind of...
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Outgrowing the Past
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Kelo v. City of New London, a chill wind blew across the rural South. The Court upheld the decision of the city fathers of New London, Connecticut, to grant a private development corporation the right to condemn a middle-income residential neighborhood, evict the property owners,...
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An Undereducated Admiral
Since there are no pressing global issues that cannot wait until next week, I’ll devote my column to a book I’ve just finished reading. Its title, Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans (Penguin, 2017), and the reputation of its author—retired admiral James George Stavridis, who ended his career as NATO Supreme...
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Of Death and Diapers
Our Endangered Children: Growing Up in a Changing World by Vance Packard; Little, Brown; Boston. Who Will Take the Children? A New Custody Option for Divorcing Mothers—and Fathers by Susan Meyers and Joan Lakin; Bobbs-Merrill; Indianapolis. Secular liberalism is the supreme doctrine of the sovereign self. As such, its failures are particularly obvious at the...
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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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Wimin’s Work
The women’s movement is in considerable disarray. While most self-described feminists are concerned mainly with job prospects, equal pay, and abortion rights, the radical wing of the movement is busy advocating everything from witchcraft to lesbianism. This was never more apparent than at NOW’s recent convention. While most delegates were content with denouncing the Supreme...
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A Hallucinogenic and Unrepentant Rant
Christine Blasey Ford, the accuser in the infamous 2018 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has written an unrepentant and incoherent book while showing no remorse for the ordeal she caused others and the nation.
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The Harvard Way of Life
She’s more likely than not to win confirmation to the Supreme Court. Thus, the really big question about Elena Kagan is blunter: How and when does the United States as a whole get out from under the sway of an alien enterprise such as her university, Harvard? That the Kagan nomination positions one more Harvard...
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America: The Movie
Another of those alarming clashes between solid democratic values has arisen, as the Supreme Court has agreed to rehear arguments relating to Citizens United v.Federal Election Committee. In the weeks before the 2008 Democratic primaries, Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit group and creator of an uncomplimentary documentary called Hillary: The Movie, had wished to broadcast...
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Christmas, That Winter Festival
When the Supreme Court declared Christmas a secular occasion, to be celebrated for its lowest-common-denominator cultural value in the public schools, I expected serious Christians to protest. Here a powerful public body officially secularized what for the history of Christianity has represented a most sacred moment. But so deeply have the forces of secularization, organized...
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Liberty, Justice, and Abortion For All
Last June, the Supreme Court decided that the ObamaCare individual mandate passed constitutional muster under Congress’s taxing power. It left undecided a host of other issues that are now being litigated in the lower courts. Under the HHS mandate that followed ObamaCare, employers with 50 or more full-time employees must offer health-insurance coverage for sterilization...
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On Thomas Szasz
On New Jersey In your January issue, you published an article (“Our Platonic Guardians“) on “Justice” Wilentz of the New Jersey Supreme Court by a Hamilton Township attorney named Gregory J. Sullivan. As a lifelong resident of the Garden State, I can only reaffirm what he has written. And add: what this state needs is...
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More Observations and Lamentations on the Way We Are Now
Are you enjoying your New American Century? You may as well enjoy it. It is all you are getting instead of your “peace dividend.” Justice Ginsberg has recently invoked the laws of some foreign states in justification of her Supreme Court decisions. The Founding Fathers and subsequent generations would have found this impeachable and treasonous. ...
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Stealth Candidates
I have no desire to defend President George H.W. Bush or his execrable appointment of David Souter to the Supreme Court, but I was confused by the chronology of the Turnock v. Ragsdale case laid out by Scott P. Richert in the February issue (“Robert Bork, R.I.P.,” Cultural Revolutions). In December 1989, when that case...
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Fueling Culture Wars
“Discrimination” is one of today’s buzzwords, and laws and regulations prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation are fueling some of the sharpest skirmishes within America’s culture wars. A New Jersey Supreme Court ruling against the Boy Scouts’ ban on homosexual Scout leaders has gained the most publicity of late. But a public feud between one...
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Off the Hook
Officer Laurence Powell is off the hook, at least for now. Dealing a severe blow to the civil rights establishment and federal police power, the Supreme Court has overruled the Ninth Circuit Court’s motion to stiffen the sentence handed down in the federal trial of Powell and Stacey Koon, who were found guilty of violating...
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The Royal Prerogative
The Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo v. City of New London has disclosed one of America’s dirtiest secrets: In this country founded, so we are told repeatedly, on the liberal trinity of rights to life, liberty, and property, our claims to property are as tenuous as the liberty of Christian parents with children in public...
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Where Trump’s and Bibi’s Interests Clash
On Monday, President Donald Trump designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, the first time the United States has designated part of another nation’s government as such a threat. Iran’s Supreme National Security Council responded by declaring U.S. Central Command a terrorist group. With 5,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and 2,000 in Syria,...
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Joe Biden, the New Brezhnev
Leonid Ilych Brezhnev presided over the irreversible decline of the USSR during his 18 years in power, initially as Secretary-General of the Soviet Communist Party and later also as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. He was two years younger than Joseph Biden is today when he died in 1982, but – just...
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Kim Jong-il, the Leader from Hell
Kim Jong-il, the North Korean “Dear Leader” (as well as Secretary-General of the Workers’ Party of Korea, Chairman of the National Defense Commission, Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, etc, etc.) is dead at 69. The news that the diminutive leader of the most unpleasant despotism in the world is no longer going to regale us with his...
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Who Wants This War with Iran?
Speaking on state TV of the prospect of a war in the Gulf, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei seemed to dismiss the idea. “There won’t be any war. . . . We don’t seek a war, and (the Americans) don’t either. They know it’s not in their interests.” The ayatollah’s analysis—a war is in neither...
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Is Iran Taking the China Road?
Is the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, a RINO—a revolutionary in name only? So they must be muttering around the barracks of the Iranian Republican Guard Corps today. For while American hawks are saying we gave away the store to Tehran, consider what ayatollah agreed to. Last week, he gave...
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Two Centuries of Resolve
This year is the bicentennial of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, the foremost formulations of the compact theory of the United States Constitution. By 1798, the Republicans faced an 11-year losing streak. Federalism had reigned supreme in American politics from the end of the Revolution. Even before the institution of the government of...
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Doll Studies
In 1954, the Supreme Court held in Brown v. Board of Education that the state-sponsored segregation of children in public schools was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, and thus unconstitutional. The Court reasoned that segregation “generates a feeling of inferiority . . . that may affect their [black children’s]...
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Re: Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame
Tom, I’m pretty optimistic about the lawsuit filed by Notre Dame and 42 other Catholic organizations. Filing essentially the same case in multiple federal district courts increases the possibility of getting the right result out of at least one, and getting mixed results will kick this issue up to the Supreme Court. So it seems likely...
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‘War Between the States’
Judge John Roberts can rest assured that his Supreme Court confirmation will go very smoothly, judging from the weak 11th-hour attacks the left is mounting against him in the media. A “shocking” discovery about his record appeared in an August 26 report in the Washington Post that took issue with a phrase Roberts used while...
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Hillary vs. The Donald
In a Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump race—which, the Beltway keening aside, seems the probable outcome of the primaries—what are the odds the GOP can take the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court? If Republicans can unite, not bad, not bad at all. Undeniably, Democrats open with a strong hand. There is that famed...
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Dreams of My Daughters
President Barack Obama surprised even battle-hardened pro-life Americans with his official remarks on the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that has, since 1973, littered garbage dumps across America with the corpses of 50 million babies, 32 percent of them African-American. In a White House press release praising the landmark case...
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Sex and Marriage in San Francisco
The California Supreme Court, in striking down the state’s ban on same-sex “marriage,” has issued a declaration of independence from the human race. Progressives have inevitably compared it to the legalization of interracial marriage, but the same progressives just as inevitably will hail the legalization of cross-species marriage as the next giant step for mankind. ...
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Justice for Tommy
Harvard’s Cass Sunstein recently complained that conservatives’ slippery-slope arguments about the left’s latest push to codify and enforce radical equality are intellectually “lazy.” Sunstein and his followers give the example of conservative opposition to gay marriage, which often includes the observation that “the Supreme Court shouldn’t force states to recognize same-sex marriages because, if it...
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Functionally atheist government schools
A couple of times in my writings for Chronicles I’ve mentioned “functionally atheist government schools.” That’s what they’ve been since the early 1960s, when several U.S. Supreme Court edicts effectively banned any mention of religion, or anything approaching religion, from public schools. I remember sitting in my 6th grade class at Elliott Elementary School in...
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Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Bush
Thank God for Republican presidents who appoint strict constructionists to the U.S. Supreme Court. Otherwise, the Court today might have upheld ObamaCare.
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SCOTUS hateus
There are some real stunners in today’s convoluted ruling from the Supremes regarding Arizona v. United States. Here are some of my favorites: “As a general rule, it is not a crime for a removable alien to remain in the United States.” “Federal governance is extensive and complex.” “Removal is a civil matter, . . . ” . ....
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Sex and Marriage in San Francisco
The California Supreme, in a recent decision striking down the state’s ban on same-sex “marriage,” has issued a declaration of independence from the human race. Progressives have inevitably hailed this latest break-through, comparing it to the legalization of inter-racial marriage, but the same progressives just as inevitably will hail the inevitable legalization of cross-species marriage...
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Boogaloo Down Broadway: The Charade of Liberal Change
Here it is 2008, and everything else is old news. The provisional and absentee ballots, recounts, scores, and statistics of 2000-2007 are all in the history books, along with Afghan and Iraqi elections and constitutions, insurgencies, hurricanes, disgraced mayors and governors, and Supreme Court, lobbying, earmark, wiretapping, and energy and cartoon ruckuses. Since Barack Obama...
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The Beauty of Holiness: Building for Eternity—December 2005
PERSPECTIVE The Beauty of Holinessby Thomas Fleming Fixing our gaze. VIEWS The Romantic Reactionby Joseph PearceTranscending the divide. The Loving Lookby Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.A cure for the epicure. Conservatism as Medicineby Claude PolinNature versus the state of nature. Pugin and the Gothic Dreamby James PatrickTheology in the architecture. NEWS Did the Supreme Court Destroy Property...
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Is a New US Mideast War Inevitable?
In October 1950, as U.S. forces were reeling from hordes of Chinese troops who had intervened massively in the Korean War, a 5,000-man Turkish brigade arrived to halt an onslaught by six Chinese divisions. Said supreme commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur: “The Turks are the hero of heroes. There is no impossibility for the Turkish Brigade.”...
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Our Constitution and Theirs
We here at Chronicles are Constitutional Fundamentalists. We swear allegiance to the Constitution of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, and not the Constitution of Warren, Brennan, and Souter. We do not believe that the Constitution is a “living document” that must be altered by successive Supreme Court justices to keep pace with the times. The Constitution...
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Change and Its Consequences
Last October I journeyed to Moscow by invitation for a conference on conversion from military to civilian production. Upon arrival, my colleague, Professor Constantine Danopoulos of the political science department at San Jose State University, and I were informed that the meeting had been shifted to December to coincide with the Congress of the Supreme...
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Fool’s Mate: America’s Strategic Failures—June 2005
PERSPECTIVE The Suicide Strategy of the Westby Thomas Fleming Turkish bizarre. VIEWS The Emerging American Empireby Douglas WilsonMammon versus Allah. The Rise of Chinaby William R. HawkinsSeeing is believing. Transforming the Middle Eastby Ted Galen CarpenterWashington’s high-stakes gamble. Getting Europe Straightby Srdja TrifkovicSlouching toward Eurabia. NEWS Why Russia Does Not Fear an Iranian Bombby Wayne...
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The Sepulcher as Political Symbol
Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy; by Guy P. Raffa; Harvard University Press; 384 pp., $35.00 The bones and dust of the Roman poet Virgil were jealously guarded by the people of Naples. In the Middle Ages they refused the request of an English scholar to allow the poet’s bones and dust to leave their resting place. The...