There’s A New Justice Headed to Town
With the recent nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the left has predictably lost its mind. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement announcement struck an ugly chord with the self-appointed defenders of civil liberties—at least those that enshrine the rights of infanticide, sodomy, and religious censorship. It didn’t matter who Trump was willing to nominate, since after Gorsuch’s nomination, it was clear that Trump wasn’t the left wing New York liberal that his neocon detractors had predicted. The left was going to protest anyone.
This should shift the balance of the court back toward what it was supposed to have been from the beginning: an institute of arbitration designed to settle the disputes in Congress, at the White House, and in the civil realm. While Justice Kennedy wasn’t quite as extreme in his views as the activists justices like Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sonia Sotomayor, his inconsistency on ruling and favoring of left wing policies—despite his conservative background—made him the left’s last hope on the bench. Larger than any single issue brought before the court is the preservation of the institution as a possible means of social reform, and that’s something the court has excelled at since the seventies. A more conservative actor that maintains the constitutionalism of the American pretenses would effectively end the extreme lengths of court activism promoted by liberal doctrine.
This wasn’t what the harpies in the media were up in arms about, though. What concerned them the most, amusingly enough, was Roe v Wade. Nothing riles up the liberal establishment more than the remote possibility that women won’t be allowed to get doctors to murder their children.
The ironic part is that Kavanaugh’s track record on abortion is mostly a clean slate. What few comments he’s given on the matter involve upholding the laws that are presently on the books—an appropriately noncommittal answer one would expect from a decent judge. Meanwhile, his career history reveals having worked closely with the Bush administration back in the day, as well as having been an assistant attorney to Kenneth Star during Clinton’s impeachment proceedings. In other words, the guy’s probably not the most socially conservative person around, but he seems to have some chops with law and he knows a few names. It’s business as usual on the Hill.
So what’s got these left wingers so mad? The usual suspect, naturally, is the fact that Trump Derangement Syndrome is alive and well, but there’s a deeper culprit even than that. The left knows that Roe v Wade is one of founding pieces of legalese that affirms the modern anthropology. Legal access to abortion is the legitimization of infanticide; any reasoning as to why it should even be legal is irrelevant. Every argument in its favor begins to the same premises: human life is expendable, the convenience of a living person always trumps the potential of those without a voice, and suffering never has any higher purpose. Abortion is one of the nihilist’s many antidotes to his own ideology.
Abortionists know, I think, that what they’re doing is a heinous crime against the nature of life. The most vocal ones certainly do; their transparent attempts to deflect the arguments into cases for women’s reproductive rights reveal their hand. It’s not so much that the abortion defender is familiar with the opposition’s mode of attack, and thus moves to outmaneuver him—no, the abortion defender already knows that his own position is indefensible. If he argues in favor of defending women’s rights, then he cares nothing for the woman that could be getting vacuumed out a womb and thrown in a garbage can. If he argues from an economic perspective, he’s admitting his own preference to use murder to reduce poverty or keep women in the workplace. And if he argues from the morality of forcing a woman to carry a rapist’s child to term, he’s spinning the fact that pregnancy is a natural process and placing the temporary trauma of confused new mother over the entire life of the child inside her.
Few arguments for abortion deviate from these general ones. The argument that it’s a random clump of cells is usually used as an afterthought in support of one of these previous three, irrelevant of it’s obvious falsity— “random” clumps of cells don’t grow up to be human beings. This is, however, the main crux of the argument used in its defense under Roe v. Wade; the court decided to label the unborn child “potential life”, a vague statement that conveniently masks what exactly differentiates “potential” life from “actual” life. As Aristotelian as it sounds, this carries only the veneer of reason, nor does it even satisfy the limits to abortion as defined by the court in the same ruling—separating by trimester when state-level legislation can decide the fetus can’t be aborted.
In fact, the ruling goes so far as to weigh it’s so-called “potential life” of the child against the presumably actual-life of the mother during later trimesters, which reveals that the court had neither the ability nor the interest in deciding what made an unborn child merely “potential life” in the first place. If it’s merely a “potential” person prior to birth, what is it about birth that guarantees its personhood? Likewise, if it’s merely a “potential” person prior to birth, why does the Roe decision grant states the right to prohibit third-trimester abortions? The implication behind the court’s usage of potentiality is that this “potential life” is inferior to actual life, which would grant the disposability of a child in favor of its mother. But then there’s no reason to grant special status to third trimester pregnancy. Either this “potential life” is inferior to “actual life” or it isn’t.
Under the guise of protecting liberty, abortion has become an excuse to exterminate the innocents to whom society is meant to owe the most.
In any case, it seems unlikely that the root of the controversial Roe v Wade decision will be overturned anytime soon. Kavanaugh, I expect, will not be one to approach the subject at all, but it will be interesting to see what his response will be when his back is against the wall. Given how much work has been done to normalize abortion in the past forty years, there’s simply too much at stake to prompt a wholesale reversal. The modern basis liberalism is built upon the impulsiveness of its consumers and a complete disdain for the future—both things that are made manifest with the legitimization of abortion. It’s possible we may see the decision itself be overturned in the next decade, which would return the blasphemous ‘right’ to prohibit child murder back to the legislative authorities of the states, but an outright nationwide ban would mean trouble for the entire liberal cause—both those on the left and the right.
