Gardeners of Evil
Alan
Keyes
April
27, 2007
Shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court issued
its ruling in Gonzales v. Carhart (the case
that involved a challenge to the federal law restricting so-called partial
birth abortion), I received an email reporting the decision with a copy of
the ruling attached. Unlike many whom the media identify as leaders in the
pro-life movement, I felt no inclination to leap for joy at the news that the
Court's opinion upheld the constitutionality of the law.
In the first place, I have never been convinced that the legislative action
in question had much significance for the pro-life cause. I believe it was
mostly intended to provide cover for pro-abortion Republican politicians, who
could offer their vote for the PBA restriction as a fig leaf to cover the
shame of their supposedly pro-life supporters who put partisan politics above
their obligations of conscience. In the second place, it seemed unwise to
react to the decision before carefully considering the argument that produced
it.
Abominable affirmation
Having done so, I cannot join in, or even understand, the approbation which
others have expressed for this decision. It is in fact an abominable
affirmation of the Court's unconstitutional decisions in Roe and Casey. With
grotesquely meticulous care, the man whose pivotal vote preserved so-called
abortion rights in the Casey decision (Justice Kennedy) carves out an
exception intended to prove and strengthen the rules set forth in Roe and Casey.
As my good friend Judie Brown put it recently (at a Colorado Right To Life
dinner in Denver), Kennedy played the part of a skillful gardener, cutting
back the evil planted by Roe/Casey in order to strengthen and extend its
roots, hoping no doubt to make it harder to overturn in any subsequent
ruling. While allowing for a state interest in restricting one brutal way of
murdering the nascent child, he makes it clear that this restriction is
tolerable under Roe/Casey only because abortionists still have access to
other equally brutal modes of killing.
At one point, with what seems like dogged satisfaction, Kennedy describes
such an alternative in almost clinical detail, no doubt because he knows that
in doing so he implicates all the justices who join his reasoning in explicit
support for the right to use this alternative to kill the child, even though
it is just as horrendous as the one restricted by the "partial
birth" legislation.
Arcane logic
This reminds me of the careful logic that I'm told is often characteristic of
serial killers, psychopaths who follow arcane rituals in order to distinguish
their killings from anything so profane as ordinary murder. In like fashion,
Kennedy makes clear that the abortionists who rip the child limb from limb while
it is still within the womb are doctors helping a woman to exercise
her "right to choose" — while those who mangle the child when it
has emerged past a certain point are violators, subject to the
restrictive force of law. Though the child is in principle the same person in
both situations, the Court's glassy-eyed observance of its own fanatically
arcane and ritualistic logic is supposed to establish some invisible line of
demarcation separating one act of murder from the next.
This decision is not a harbinger of hope for an end to the Court-imposed
reign of terror in the womb. It is evidence of a legal elite gone mad,
hopelessly lost in the maze of its own psychopathic logic. We might think
them pathetic if we did not have to live in a nation whose conscience is
compromised and confused by the holocaust their insanity has unleashed.
Compromised abettors
After reading the text of the decision, my heart sank at the thought that all
four of the supposedly pro-life appointees to the Court had voted to accept
its lethal implication. Then I saw the saving grace of Justice Thomas's brief
but clarion concurring opinion, in which he stated simply that although he
voted for the decision's result, he continues to reject the Roe/Casey regime
it relies upon, in the conviction that "the Court's abortion
jurisprudence, including Casey and Roe v. Wade, . . . has no basis in
the Constitution." Justice Scalia joined in this morally and
constitutionally essential declaration.
But these two stood alone. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, the two
G. W. Bush appointees who supposedly offer hope for an eventual return to
constitutional sanity, were silent. They let the Gardener of Evil
speak for them, with the clear and tragic implication that they concur in his
mad, immoral effort to make Gonzales v. Carhart
the exception that firmly proves and establishes the murderous rule of
so-called abortion rights.
Since all things are possible with God, we must hope that events will
disprove this implication. As things now stand, however, Gonzales v. Carhart offers clear evidence that G. W. Bush's
appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court are the compromised abettors of
unconstitutional abuse that some of us feared they might be, rather than the
constituents of constitutional restoration for whom we still pray.
It points to the sobering probability that the Supreme Court now has a 7-2
majority in favor of persisting in its unconstitutional assertion of the
right to murder our posterity. It confirms the truth that I have long
asserted, that we cannot expect the restoration of the Constitution to come
from the usurping branch of the federal government whose ambitious members
have engineered its overthrow.
Ultimately up to us
If we want constitutional rule, we must act so that the other branches can
unite to restore it. We must elect to Congress and the Presidency only those
candidates who pledge to respect the constitutional imperative "to
secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,"
and to abide by the oath of office that requires them to use their
constitutional powers to that end.
We need representatives in Congress and the White House who will say
"yes" to the Constitution and "no" to the judges and
justices who discard it. And we need fervently to pray for God's help in
finding the courage, discernment, and faith to be the kind of citizens who
will vote for and support them, no matter what.
We will finally get the leaders America needs only when we resolve to become
the citizens of conscience and principle that we ought to be. For God and our
posterity, now is the time.
Published originally at RenewAmerica.us