Amy Coney Barrett and the Question of Sex

Try this one on for size. Regarding the pending Supreme Court fight:

Democrats understand that ideas matter. They also know that having apparently run out of appealing ones, they must find other ways to exert power. For them, these court fights are increasingly a matter of political life and death.

Of course, that is a misquotation. The real statement, from New York Times editorialist Michelle Cottle, goes like this:

Republicans understand that ideas matter. They also know that having apparently run out of appealing ones, they must find other ways to exert power. For them, these court fights are increasingly a matter of political life and death.

Call it a cheap shot on my part if you like. But it does not take too much mental exertion to see that Democrats, true to form, are preparing to declare all-out war on yet another Republican Supreme Court nominee.

They did it with Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh. The brain dead Democrats, having run out of ideas, unwilling to engage intellectually, are doing what intellectually challenged people always do-- they slander and defame. They engage in an orgy of character assassination.

One notes that Republicans have never, ever engaged in such appallingly bad behavior. They have never treated a court nominee in the way that Democrats treated, say, Brett Kavanaugh. Did you notice that Democrats have never shown the least inkling of shame over their attempts to destroy Kavanaugh... and his family.

Obviously, the Democrats cannot brand Amy Coney Barrett a serial sexual harasser. But, one can assuredly predict, they will try to make her appear to be a witch. And they will try to burn her at the stake.

Isn’t this what Sen. Dianne Feinstein intimated with her appalling remark at the hearings when Barrett was considered for an appeals court position:

The dogma lives loudly within you and that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for years in this country.

It is appalling to attack someone on the basis of religion, but that will in no way prevent Democrats for doing so. 

And yet, a light shines into the darkness. Many have remarked on it, but in case you missed it, Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman, a witness for the prosecution at the Trump impeachment hearings, wrote a column for Bloomberg, in which he pronounced Barrett, whom he knows personally, to be eminently qualified.

To Feldman Barrett possesses one of the great judicial minds of our time. Isn’t that something that we should look for when choosing judges for the Supreme Court? For the record, the same was true of Brett Kavanaugh.

Here are Feldman’s words:

I disagree with much of her judicial philosophy and expect to disagree with many, maybe even most of her future votes and opinions. Yet despite this disagreement, I know her to be a brilliant and conscientious lawyer who will analyze and decide cases in good faith, applying the jurisprudential principles to which she is committed. Those are the basic criteria for being a good justice. Barrett meets and exceeds them.

And also:

Elections have consequences, and so do justices’ decisions about when or whether to retire. Trump is almost certainly going to get his pick confirmed.

Given that reality, it is better for the republic to have a principled, brilliant lawyer on the bench than a weaker candidate. That’s Barrett.

And also:

To add to her merits, Barrett is a sincere, lovely person. I never heard her utter a word that wasn’t thoughtful and kind — including in the heat of real disagreement about important subjects. She will be an ideal colleague. I don’t really believe in “judicial temperament,” because some of the greatest justices were irascible, difficult and mercurial. But if you do believe in an ideal judicial temperament of calm and decorum, rest assured that Barrett has it.

Finally:

Barrett is also a profoundly conservative thinker and a deeply committed Catholic. What of it? Constitutional interpretation draws on the full resources of the human mind. These beliefs should not be treated as disqualifying.

Some might argue that you should want your probable intellectual opponent on the court to be the weakest possible, to help you win. But the Supreme Court is not and should not be a battlefield of winner-take-all political or ideological division.

For all I know, Feldman is trying to warn his fellow Democrats against going beserk and trying to destroy someone of the caliber of Amy Coney Barrett. 

As of now, the Democratic party line has it that Barrett will vote to overturn Obamacare-- which is on life support. This is consistent with the notion that Democrats will care for you, because they are the Mommy party.

Democrats are playing this meme for all its worth. They have discovered that suburban women like it, so they keep using it. They pair it with their notion that President Trump is responsible for the coronavirus death toll-- even though fully a quarter of the deaths have occurred in true blue states like New York and New Jersey.

But, behind it all lies abortion. You might imagine that a political party that was confident in its ideas, as Cottle suggested above, would happily be willing to propose legislation enshrining the right to an abortion. Why is that not the Democratic battle plan? Why are Democrats so hellbent on allowing the judiciary to decide the issue? All the while, they are whining uncontrollably about how much they love democracy, how democracy is threatened and so on.

One understands, and the point is worth underscoring, that the direct consequence of a possible overturn of Roe v. Wade would be that states would vote to define abortion rights, as they see fit.

And yet, perhaps we should ask ourselves why the modern definition of womanhood must necessarily include the right to end a pregnancy-- at will? How did it happen that pregnancy became the new “curse?”

As you know, the issue is intractable because hardliners on each side of the issue have staked out absolutist positions.

Some say never; some say always. Some say that no woman should ever have the right to an abortion. Some say that all women should have the right to an abortion at any stage of pregnancy.

If you were thinking that we ought to be able to arrive at a compromise-- the medium between always and never is sometimes. Apparently, such is not the case. Even the Krauthammer solution seems not to be appealing. It was, for the record, that no one ever holds a funeral after a miscarriage and that when a pregnant woman undergoes an ultrasound the physicians does not say: There is your fetus. In less technical terms, when a pregnant woman shows, no one says-- you’re carrying a fetus. Everyone says, you’re expecting a baby.

Feminists have cast the issue in terms of a woman’s absolute right to control her body. Obviously, this right is not absolute-- what if women decide to carve up their bodies with razor blades. And, dare we say, unless the woman produced said fetus with her physician, perhaps there ought to be some notion that she did not get pregnant all by herself.

And yet, one suspects that another issue is lurking over the abortion question. That is, as some feminists have stated, it is far easier for a man to walk away from the consequences of sexual congress than it is for a woman. I trust that I do not need to go into detail.

You might consider that to be a fact. You might think that you should try to accommodate it in your considerations about the reality of human procreation-- though it obviously also applies to all mammalian procreation. You might consider it one of the ways in which human men and human women are fundamentally different.

But, then again, you might consider it to be a gross injustice, a fault in God’s plan. Through this fact, God seems to have introduced a fundamental inequality between men and women. 

For those who consider it an injustice, the only way to right the wrong, to correct God’s mistake is, quite simply, to make it just as easy for a woman to walk away from the consequences of sexual congress.

It is less a question of free will, and more a question of imposing one’s will on reality. If such is your proclivity and propensity, abortion must be permissible on demand, whenever a woman wants one. It is the only way to show God who is really the boss, and also, to gaslight the world into thinking that men and women are not just equal, but the same.

Strangely enough, belief in God coincides perfectly with an acceptance of science. Who would have guessed?