Monday, September 28, 2020

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?

 

14 comments:

JPL17 said...

Phenomenal post, Stuart. Feminists' hysterical insistence on a woman's unfettered right to abortion all the time any time, for any reason or no reason at all, is indeed an attempt to show God who's boss. Most attempts like that end badly.

David Foster said...

"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."

But in most actual societies, this isn't really true. In the US, the man will in most cases be liable for 18 years of child support. In many countries, courts and social pressures would traditionally have required the man to marry the woman. Sometimes in England, a combination of child support and whipping (for both man and woman) was required.

Exceptions typically involved either great power differences (the Earl and the chambermaid) or situations where the man was in a traveling profession and couldn't be found.

Giordano Bruno said...

Feldman sounds like a liberal of the 1980 variety. That's nice. His reasonable exhortation will make no difference and have no impact on this upcoming spectacle.

Qualifications are just window dressing. This is an excavation operation to dig up as much dirt as humanly possible to destroy the candidate and humiliate them in public. This is why entities like Fusion GPS exist and what intelligence-gathering agencies do in their spare time. If they get enough dirt, the candidate withdraws. If they don't, the candidate prevails. And the votes have nothing to do with qualifications either. It's all leverage and money and horse-trading.

The Democrats should relax. Roberts has already defected, you can see it in his face. The social pressure on the rest will be continuous and unrelenting. They will come around to the thinking of the cathedral because the cathedral is all around them; there is no 'outside the cathedral' unless you have something outside time. Mr. Beelzebub said that the greatest human weakness was our suggestibility.

The conservative court majority will wither away and not even know it ever existed. Doubt me? Look at Catholicism itself. See a difference between Catholic 1980 and Catholic 2020? They never knew what hit them. 40 years of unrelenting suggestion.

Our republic is not what people think it is, and it does not operate the way we were taught.

Stuart Schneiderman said...

Heavens, DF, I was talking about basic biology, not the laws that exist to protect women-- which certainly exist. And then there is always the question of identifying the father-- which, until very recently was not self-evident.

trigger warning said...

Despite the fact that reliable sources lead me to admire Barrett's legal mind and support her as a SCOTUS nominee, I must admit that Mitch McConnell's naked hypocrisy is simply awesome (in the old school sense). I hope this turns out not to be a political blunder on the scale of Reid's "Nuclear Option". But it does seem a perfect opportunity for a cameo appearance of MacMillan's alleged observation about "Events, dear boy, events".

The most laughable aspect of the nomination, which, at root, is a perfect example of Trumpian thumb-in-the-eye politics, is the near-universal hypocrisy of the broader political class on both sides of the aisle, who were for/against late nominations before they were against/for them. You can't buy this kind of entertainment.

Regarding abortion - the poisoned root of all SCOTUS fights these days - I doubt very seriously that Barrett and the SCOTUS will overturn Roe (although they might well find a way to limit it in some way that ultimately has no practical impact). Naturally, if they did overturn, the legal status would simply revert to pre-Roe regulation by the states. Abortion, however evil a practice to me personally, is a train that has left the station. In my personal opinion, Roe has turned out to be the most divisive decision since Dred Scott.

Giordano Bruno said...

Trigger, when the nation eventually bifurcates (formally), the federal sanction of abortion will be among the core justifications for dissolving the bonds that previously united us. It is top of the list among the irreconcilable differences between traditional America and nihilistic America. It cannot be bridged or papered over. That is why federalism offered a built-in compromise, and why Roe imposed as federal law was such a terrible idea.

There might have been a point of national compromise many years back, with restrictions on the practice, but the left wants termination for any reason, any time. No religious person can permit this. We are at an impasse.

I am hoping the mass migration that is happening helps reorganize the nation into something more governable as two entirely separate entities. There will be no reconciling force that unites us as previously. Money and inertia will hold it together for a while longer. Dems plan to flood the gates with immigration and settle this with superior numbers to erase the red/blue distinctions. I'm for an acrimonious, but ultimately peaceable, divorce. But

Leftism is the scorned, bitter, drunken wife in this breakup; she's all in, never mind the consequences.

Anonymous said...

///////

"The Democrats should relax. Roberts has already defected, you can see it in his face. The social pressure on the rest will be continuous and unrelenting. They will come around to the thinking of the cathedral because the cathedral is all around them; there is no 'outside the cathedral' unless you have something outside time. Mr. Beelzebub said that the greatest human weakness was our suggestibility."

///////

To Hell with "suggestibility".

How about NSA grade, multi-year domestic surveillance system, put to use on Congress members, Supremes( including the afore-mentioned Mr Roberts), Mr Trump (and family members) and Mr Flynn(and family members).

Brennan, Comey,Clapper and others, and...wait for it....the head Russia!Russia!Russia! investigator, Robert Mueller...are the subject of a book called "the Hammer".

Whistleblower Dennis Montgomery , a network systems contractor with high level security clearance(s) discovered extensive abuses and attempted to notify the FBI.

"The Hammer" was a US Gov surveillance system designed to protect "the Homeland"(ugh) after 9-11.

Mueller provided the computers to house it, and the (outward-facing, national security) system was moved to Fort Washington,MD and put to use spying on domestic enemies of the Obama administration.

A good and timely read before the election: five bucks at Kindle.


"The Hammer is the Key to the Coup" - Mary Fanning and Alan Jones
Aug 19, 2020


https://smile.amazon.com/HAMMER-Coup-Political-Crime-Century-ebook/dp/B08GCC689D/ref=sr_1_1?crid=M5QD6SU7HOB3&dchild=1&keywords=the+hammer+is+the+key+to+the+coup&qid=1601072241&sprefix=The+Hammer+%2Caps%2C205&sr=8-1

prompted by FBI Staff
texts/emails from JAN 2017,made public in the Flynn Trial this past week, Scott Adams had this observation...

Scott Adams(twitter entry from 25SEP20)

"@ScottAdamsSays:

Now I understand why Biden is the Democratic candidate despite being so obviously incapable. The plotters need a cover-up guy who has the same exposure they do. This isn't an election so much as an escape plan."


///////

"Roberts has already defected, you can see it in his face".

Can you say "It's a fee, not a tax."?
Can you say Affordable Care Act?

- shoe

David Foster said...

Stuart..."basic biology"...of course, I understand that: my point is that in a society...in *our* society, in particular...the argument often made that women are the only stakeholders in issues involving reproduction is really not valid.

BruiserP said...

If you had read Rodney Stark's Victory of Reason you would not have to ask your last question. The only reason we have science is our belief in God and his creation of a world subject to discovery through the power of reason. Let the aethisist howl.

Giordano Bruno said...

Shoe, great link.

I agree with you. I have no doubt that the surveillance state, run by sophisticated AI, is bearing down on everyone with any visibility or connection to power at any time. Anyone who can be subjected to leverage will be subjected.

And yes, I think damn near everyone selected for the positions of power is either compromised, or will be, or is in on it. I think the USSCI, for example, is tightly controlled. They can block the POTUS appointments. They forced Wray on him because Wray is swamp.

Imagine guys like Jeffrey Epstein. Now imagine thousands of Epstein's at all levels and in many guises. Now go international. That's just the feeder teams that sully and smear you. They are going through your entire digital past to arrange the timeline. The hit on Trump, for example, was a sophisticated off-the-books effort using 5-eyes along with the media and our entire intelligence apparatus. It took money, organization, planning, and was undoubtedly run from within our government. My guess is Obama and Brennan are ground zero. This has CIA all over it.

Yes. Biden has complete exposure and knows what happens if he loses. Ukraine is the tip of the iceberg. He's 100% corrupt.

Sam L. said...

"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." This ALSO applies to Sen. Nancy!

Anonymous said...

I am afraid that triggerwarning is selling stale goods.

First, it is disingenuous to suggest that a President cannot take an action in the last few few weeks of his legal term that he can take in the first few weeks. But,folks who make this argument should have the courtesy to define at what point in the term a President must forgo his responsibilities and privileges. I suppose this should be an itemized list and timeline, that covers all eventualities, including national defense.

Second. It is just a bit hypocritical to admonish McConnell, who is simply following--at least in small part--the play book of Harry Reid. I wouldn't know whether you found Reids' precedent shattering actions to be as abysmal as you do McConnell's; but, you would know.

Anonymous said...

"My guess is Obama and Brennan are ground zero".

Amen, brother.

"Insurance policy".

"[Trump's] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!" Page texted Strzok in August 2016.

"No. No he won't. We'll stop it," Strzok responded.

"If we dont win this, we'll all hang".
(paraphrased, supposedly debunked by Snopes...originally attributed to "I'm with Her".)

It's my turn!".(also "I'm with Her")

- shoe

trigger warning said...

It might be disingenuous, had I suggested it. But I didn't.

And I could caution you about using Harry Reid as a moral standard. But I won't.