Our Struggle For The Soul of Our Nation [Must Read]

The Witherspoon Institute ^ | January 22, 2009

[Steelfish]

Public Discourse: Ethics, Law and the Common Good

Our Struggle for the Soul of our Nation by Robert George

(Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is a member of the President's Council on Bioethics and previously served on the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.)

January 22, 2009

In remarks delivered yesterday at the Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life, Robert P. George reflected on the history of the pro-life movement and offered advice for its future.

Thirty-six years ago tomorrow, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its infamous decision in Roe v. Wade and its companion case Doe v. Bolton. In the name of a generalized “right to privacy” allegedly implicit in the Due Process Clause of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, seven justices created a license to kill the unborn.

These men probably had no idea that they were unleashing a struggle for the soul of the nation. Five had been appointed by Republican presidents—two by Eisenhower, three by Nixon. Four of these five were regarded as “conservative,” “law and order” judges: Warren E. Burger, Potter Stewart, Lewis F. Powell, and Harry Blackmun. All no doubt believed that legal abortion was a humane and enlightened policy, one that would ease the burdens of many women and girls and relieve the enormous cost to society of a high birth rate among indigent (often unmarried) women. They seemed blithely to assume that abortion would be easily integrated into the fabric of American social and political life.

They were wrong on all counts.

They were wrong about the Constitution. As William H. Rehnquist and Byron White, the two dissenting justices in the case, pointed out, it is absurd to claim that a right to feticide follows from the constitutional injunction that “no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” If the Constitution can be read to imply anything about abortion, it is that unborn human beings are, like everyone else, entitled to “the equal protection of the laws.” At a minimum, Roe and Doe were an outrageous usurpation of the constitutional authority of the people of the United States to shape law and policy through the institutions of representative government.

The Roe justices were also wrong to imagine that legal abortion would prove to be enlightened or in the slightest respect humane. On the contrary, the policy imposed by the Court has proven to be an unmitigated disaster. In the thirty-six years since Roe and Doe, abortion has taken the lives of more than fifty million unborn victims—each a distinct, unique, precious human being. It has done immeasurable moral, psychological, and sometimes physical harm to women who are so very often, and in so many respects, truly abortion’s “secondary victims.” It has corrupted physicians and nurses by turning healers into killers. It has undermined the moral authority of the law by its injustice. It has abetted irresponsible—even predatory—male sexual behavior. Far from reducing the rate of out-of-wedlock births, particularly to poor women, illegitimacy has skyrocketed in the age of abortion. Now the abortion license has metastasized into widespread elite support for deadly embryo experimentation and even, in my home state of New Jersey, to the express legalization of the horrific and grisly practice of fetal farming—the creation of human beings by cloning or other processes for the purpose of harvesting their tissues and organs at any point up to birth for experimentation and transplantation.

[nathanbedford]

Thank you, Professor, for posting this clear statement. It is good to see a factual presentation of this kind. I can find no misstatement in it.

The author touches upon the great cleft in America reflected by and perhaps instigated by the consequences of Roe V. Wade. So now the count has grown to 50 million dead. If one asked the Band of Brothers who liberated Nazi concentration camps what they thought about an America that barely a half a century later would have conducted a Holocaust seven times as terrible as that conducted by the Nazis, they would have dismissed their interrogator in pity for his Derangement from reality. But this holocaust is just one of many conducted in many countries.

What is the universe count of dead babies?

Small wonder that this holocaust tells us why the battle against everything that Obama represents must be unremitting. Hitler killed only 7 million and would not surrender. Why do we think American leftists boasting 50 million dead babies can be reasoned with?

[Jubal Madison]

Very good article.It boggles my mind as to how we, the American people allow this to continue. Have we become evil? Or do most people just not care? For the life of me I cannot get my mind around it. Maybe I’m just simple, but I understand right from wrong.

[advance_copy]

Do you realize you’ve chosen your FReep name after the founder of the KKK?

[GOP Poet]

bookmark

[nathanbedford]

I will be happy to discuss the nom de plume and avatar with you after you have had an opportunity to read my about page.

[advance_copy]

Well, it could be worse. You could have picked Albert Pike. Yet Forrest was an effective Confederate officer. Though, as you note on your page, not near as much as Thomas Jackson (nobody came close to Stonewall Jackson, ever, period). Nonetheless, Forrest did some pretty awful things by any standard, including by the standards of the 19th century. One could rank him at the level of Saddam Hussein; Nathan Bedford Forrest was a rotten man.

[nathanbedford]

Nonetheless, Forrest did some pretty awful things by any standard, including by the standards of the 19th century. One could rank him at the level of Saddam Hussein; Nathan Bedford Forrest was a rotten man.

But your comments reveal the you have actually read the about page which is gratifying and more than other critics can claim. I am with you in your comments until you get to the quoted portion above.

I certainly would not rank Forest anywhere near Saddam Hussein. You might place him more accurately near someone like Emmon de Valera whom, if you support the Irish Free State, you judged to be a patriot and, otherwise, as a terrorist.

It is interesting to reflect that John Brown was regarded to be a terrorist in the whole of the south and in the border states but after he was "martyred" in the song about his corpse, he was regarded elsewhere to be a patriot. In this context, there is also the matter of who gets to write history-or the war songs?. I am not allowed to sing, the Horst Wessel song, here in Germany.

Should it be more heinous to be the founder of the KKK rather than to be the founder of Planned Parenthood? The National Organization for Women? Who is responsible for more deaths? Who was the more "rotten"? If Forest is culpable for his actions, although he is not to be excused because Margaret Sanger or Saddam Hussein are more culpable, is not worthwhile nevertheless to regain control of history? Of our culture? Of our political discourse?

If you permit the ostracism of this name and avatar, can you sleep well assured that our precious Stonewall will not be next? As I observed in my about page, who will be safe this side of the cross?

Terrorist or patriot, military genius or "rotten man," there was also the matter of repentance to consider. Is that also to be expunged from our discourse?

[strongbow]

He was certainly a terror to the Northern army. Wasn’t one of his principles, “the firstest with the mostest”? In other words get in fast, hit hard fast, and move out fast. In today’s world he would be the commander of a elite delta force team.