Roe’s Birth - and Our Republic’s Death

Rarely is there anything worth reading in the NY-Al Jazeera Times, but this was ok.

David Brooks, in the NY Times:

“Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th Century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since.

When Blackmun wrote the Roe decision, it took the abortion issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that’s always existed on this issue.

These legislative compromises wouldn’t have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate,” rather than forced on the society. Instead, Blackmun and his concurring colleagues invented a right to abortion, and imposed a solution more extreme than the policies of just about any other comparable nation.

Religious conservatives became alienated from their own government, feeling that their democratic rights had been usurped by robed elitists. Liberals lost touch with working-class Americans because they never had to have a conversation about values with those voters; they could just rely on the courts to impose their views.

The parties polarized as they each became dominated by absolutist activists. Unable to lobby for their pro-life or pro-choice views in normal ways, abortion activists focused their attention on judicial nominations. Dozens of groups on the right and the left have been created to destroy nominees who might oppose their side of the fight. Each nomination battle is more vicious than the last as the methodologies of personal destruction are perfected.”

Forget for one second whether or not abortion should be the law of the land – Roe v Wade was a bastardization of our Constitution and a bypass of the citizens of the nation.

Only thing is – liberals do not care about the Constitution. – Hank Dagny