So, today President Trump's nominee for Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett, is up before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
And, as they say, it is another high-stakes nomination battle, because for liberals everything is hanging in the balance, including abortion and homosexual marriage.
Do you understand, liberals, why having the Supreme Court legislate from the bench is a very bad strategic idea, however cool it may seem from a tactical standpoint?
Do you see how it is rather a bad idea to impose your moral agenda with a Supreme Court majority and then find yourself desperate to maintain that majority by fair means or foul a generation down the road?
No, I didn't think you did.
My standard illustration of this is the Washington State initiative process. Back in the Eighties, if you can believe it, Washington State had a vocal religions right movement that put an initiative on the ballot to restrict abortions. The initiative went down to defeat, and abortion has not been heard from since then in Washington State. Because a vote of the people is dispositive.
It is telling that a cult of personality has grown up around the career of the departed Justice Ginsburg. Really? A cult of personality around a judge? It is telling because in the Anglo-American tradition a judge is a deadly boring crosser of "t"s and dotter of "i"s. Judgeology is about comparing two pieces of legislation and determining how to deal with the contradictions between them. Or about evaluating a piece of legislation in view of the dictates of the Constitution.
Of course, the educated elite always has an inside track in the judiciary. That is understood. But when the educated elite acting through the judiciary imposes its cultural will on the rest of the nation, that is not good.
The point is that when you want to change the law on abortion you need to persuade the nation. Now my belief is that there are two things to consider on abortion. The first is how far the criminal law should go. Is it OK to terminate the life of a newborn child? Nearly everyone will say No. Is it OK to take a drug in the first month of pregnancy to cause a spontaneous abortion? Nearly everyone will say OK.
But whatabout abortion as a moral question? I'd guess that a lot more people would be queasy about abortion as a moral question than as a criminal question.
That is why we have a separation of church and state. The state is all about what we will oppose with police and judges and jailers. The church is all about voluntary moral communities that say Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not, but without the police and judges and jailers to back it up.
As a profound sexist I say that the criminal law is a boy thing: police with nightsticks, judges with the power to send you to jail, jails with doors clanging shut on your freedom. And I say that the moral law is a girl thing, with its naming and shaming and shunning, the "I can't believe she did that," or "Much as I hate to say it..." or "I can't even!" with which women dispose of each other in the community of women.
But I realize that we are a country mile away from my liberal neighbors having even a glimpse of a view of all this. They believe the liberal Zeitgeist and that's all. For them, RBG is a cult figure, because. And, of course, there is the perceived need of a professional woman to control her fertility. If you have a career, you plan your family to fit in with your career trajectory.
But whatabout non-professional women that don't feel the need to control their fertility, that would prefer a moral framework where everyone from husbands to society at large is morally and physically committed to raising every child conceived?
So, the moralization of the Supreme Court is just one in a growing avalanche of liberal errors, liberal conceits, liberal follies, the belief that you can actually plan society like a garden.
I believe that life is much more like cleaning up after mistakes, and that the sooner you realize you made a mistake, the better.
But in real life, as Anthony Trollope shows in his short novel Linda Tressel, the last thing people are willing to do is recognize they made a mistake. Especially when they have strong religious and/or ideological beliefs.
And when you push ahead with your religious or ideological agenda and damn the torpedoes, the only question becomes how big the butcher's bill will be.
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