Guest Entry – Vigilantism and the Supreme Court
This guest op-ed is by BJD, a Ph.D., historian, published author, pro-life activist, and avid Incredipete reader. It may not be reproduced in any form without written authorization. To obtain authorization, you may use the contact page on this website.
It’s front-page news when a “doctor,” a person who delivers the head of a baby and sucks out his or her brain, is shot to death.
Pro-choice people are appalled and want to paint the entire pro-life movement as “violent” and “lawbreaking.” Pro-life people think pro-choice people should have been appalled by the doctor’s violence, can’t help feeling glad that he’s dead, but are forced by the way the debate has been framed to issue statements condemning the act.
Here’s the problem.
A democracy, in the form of a representative republic, is perfectly designed to deal with serious, divisive, controversial issues like abortion. Democracy may yield a variety of answers and significant compromise, but this will be accepted because it was arrived at honestly and openly with everyone having a say – and because there will always be a chance to change it further.
But on this issue, there is no democracy, there is no representation, and our republic has morphed into a monarchy.
When Roe v. Wade was “decided” in 1973 and became the “law of the land,” seven unelected lawyers wearing robes and meeting in secret wiped out the abortion-related laws in all 50 states. Some of these laws were prohibitive, some were restrictive, but all of them had been passed by elected representatives and signed into law by elected governors.
When this question was removed from debate in the public arena, pro-life and queasy-about-abortion people no longer had any democratic way to weigh in on the issue. They were unilaterally stripped of their rights. Yes, they could “write their congressperson,” but what good would that do? It had been taken out of their hands as well. They could protest, but the kings on the supreme court were totally removed from public sentiment and pressure. They could practice non-violent civil disobedience, and they did. They were arrested and jailed and financially ruined, but still no change occurred because the supremes don’t have to listen.
Democracy provides an outlet. When something important to tens of millions of people is taken out of their hands, when no matter what they do they can’t get at the dictatorship and make any dent in an arbitrary, law-abolishing “decision,” when they think justice has been turned on its head, it’s inevitable that something is going to bubble over into an “eye for an eye.”
Controversial decisions left to the supreme court have a very poor record. They voted 7-2 in Dred Scott that black people were property and not equal human beings. That led to a bit of violence – the Civil War and 600,000 dead. The majority voted in favor of segregation of blacks, exclusion of Asians, and “relocation” of Japanese-American citizens to concentration camps during World War II. Liberals winced when they “voted” 5-4 to make George W. Bush president in 2000. One of the common threads in all of this is that nobody voted for any of these “justices.”
Abortion needs the light and heat of democracy. Abortion has been a controversial topic for millennia, and was so in various ways in America before the 1973 judicial fiat. The reasons for this controversy should be obvious to any thinking, open-minded person:
- First, we’re talking about a living being. Framing this issue around the question, “When does life begin?” is absurd on the face of it, because everyone acknowledges that the fetus (Latin for “little one”) is alive. Biologically speaking, there is no other answer.
- Second, we’re talking about something human. This fetus may grow up to be many different things, but un-human won’t be one of them. It’s not a question of religion alone – it’s a question of DNA.
So points one and two create half of the controversy – however small and vulnerable, we’ve got a living human being here. The first two questions, “Is this a living being?” and “Is it human?” are the starting point of the debate. The answers – clearly “yes” – should be enough to guarantee protection of this vulnerable life. If we could ever see a video of George Tiller performing a partial-birth abortion – and it’s interesting that we haven’t in a nation where you can see everything – abortion would instantly end.
And then there’ the other side:
- Third, people get pregnant who don’t want to, who tried not to, or who thought they wanted to and changed their minds. This can create anger, guilt, depression, and a host of other issues for the mother and other people involved.
- Fourth, children are challenging. It’s challenging to have them keep them, raise them, or give them up for adoption. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.
Points three and four create the other half of the controversy – however we got this “thing,” it’s a huge personal problem. We don’t want it and we don’t want to think about it. So another question, a different criterion, was added by “pro-choice” advocates facing points three and four: “When is the life viable?” or “When is this a viable being?”
But this is a trumped-up question that defines the word “arbitrary.” When is this fetus, this baby, viable? Birth? 12 weeks? 20 weeks? 28 weeks? At delivery? If we define “viable” as “able to function on its own outside the womb,” then no 3-year-old (or probably 10-year-old) is “viable.”
But others could take a different position. And that’s the beauty and power of democracy and debate and wrestling to common ground. We need to get this question back to the congress and president and states. We need to resolve this the American way.
The supreme court put the gun in the hand of the person who did to George Tiller what many states would have done to him before 1973. We need to put the guns away, by taking the biggest gun of all out of the hands of 7 arrogant people who thought they knew better than 300 million.
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
