Right you are Klavan on the Culture! Abortion is a perfect example of the tranformation of a fairly low level debate state by state into a national issue that haunts the nation year after year. As the Supreme Court succeeded so well in resolving the slavery question by the Dred Scott decision, so it has succeeded in resolving the abortion issue by the Roe v. Wade decsion. Of course that is if “resolve” means “transform an issue into a nation wide fierce controversy that will never go away until it is resolved through other means than the courts”.
Justice Scalia put it well in his dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992):
There is a poignant aspect to today’s opinion. Its length, and what might be called its epic tone, suggest that its authors believe they are bringing to an end a troublesome era in the history of our Nation and of our Court. “It is the dimension” of authority, they say, to “cal[l] the contending sides of national controversy to end their national division by accepting a common mandate rooted in the Constitution.” Ante, at 24.
There comes vividly to mind a portrait by Emanuel Leutze that hangs in the Harvard Law School: Roger Brooke Taney, painted in 1859, the 82d year of his life, the 24th of his Chief Justiceship, the second after his opinion in Dred Scott. He is all in black, sitting in a shadowed red armchair, left hand resting upon a pad of paper in his lap, right hand hanging limply, almost lifelessly, beside the inner arm of the chair. He sits facing the viewer, and staring straight out. There seems to be on his face, and in his deep set eyes, an expression of profound sadness and disillusionment. Perhaps he always looked that way, even when dwelling upon the happiest of thoughts. But those of us who know how the lustre of his great Chief Justiceship came to be eclipsed by Dred Scott cannot help believing that he had that case–its already apparent consequences for the Court, and its soon to be played out consequences for the Nation–burning on his mind. I expect that two years earlier he, too, had thought himself “call[ing] the contending sides of national controversy to end their national division by accepting a common mandate rooted in the Constitution.”
It is no more realistic for us in this case, than it was for him in that, to think that an issue of the sort they both involved–an issue involving life and death, freedom and subjugation–can be “speedily and finally settled” by the Supreme Court, as President James Buchanan in his inaugural address said the issue of slavery in the territories would be. See Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States, S. Doc. No. 101-10, p. 126 (1989). Quite to the contrary, by foreclosing all democratic outlet for the deep passions this issue arouses, by banishing the issue from the political forum that gives all participants, even the losers, the satisfaction of a fair hearing and an honest fight, by continuing the imposition of a rigid national rule instead of allowing for regional differences, the Court merely prolongs and intensifies the anguish.
We should get out of this area, where we have no right to be, and where we do neither ourselves nor the country any good by remaining.
And that is what liberalism is all about – you’re liberated to do whatever you want without consequence and thus you enslave yourself to the whims of the State. In rejecting God and His Law, the liberal replaces Him with the nanny State that bequeaths on man the “right” to murder our offspring. This is the essence of the liberal mantra for global population control and enviro-wackism. But until abortion is stopped, no liberal scheme for peace and prosperity will work.
The children of Israel and Judah sacrificed their children to Baal, Asteroth, Molech, and the other Canaanite gods. Today in Obama’s “Amerika” is no different. Nor will God’s response be any different. He is the same yesterday, today and forever.
A profound metaphor of the liberal “movement” was presented in “Slumdog Millionaire” where Salim’s brother would bring to adult gangsters (liberals, you liberals!) little boys whom they blinded to increase the “take” of rupees they could beg.
Liberals’ unworkable, destructive solutions to exaggerated or fabricated crises create greater misery and more (in addition to 45,000,000 killed in abortions) misery and dependent, desperate poor people.
Let’s go to the record . . . One-in-seven need food stamps; 18% (real) unemployment; unaffordable food/fuel prices; millions of foreclosures; dpressed housing prices; national bankruptcy; etc.
[…] The Right to Kill Your Kid – Donald R. McClarey, The American Catholic […]
Funny how in the same nearly 40 years we have had an increase in pornography (its mainstream now), sexual assault, child trafficking, recreational drug use, the enslavement of women (assuming you think man is most free in his or her own home and not in the workforce) and all sorts of other ills.
Could it be that someone has an agenda to separate us from our Maker and make us into slaves? Well at least we have a post-racist, post-partisan president who can save the world (assuming you exclude being safe in your own mother’s womb of course), right?