Supreme Court writer Linda Greenhouse has a New York Times column this morning indulging in the lazy argument that those who favor pro-life policies wish to impose their religion through the law. Because of pro-lifers we are, in short, “lurching toward theocracy.”
“Republican politicians used to offer secular rationales for their anti-abortion zealotry: They claimed that abortion hurt women or that abortion procedures demeaned the medical profession,” Greenhouse writes, adding,
I could go on with this list, but these examples are sufficient to raise the question for those of us not on board with the theocratizing of America:
The answer is that we did. Our silence has turned us into enablers of those who are now foisting their religious beliefs on a country founded on opposition to an established church.
She enumerates the Catholic justices on the Court, and while she notes that two of them voted the way she would have preferred on the Texas Heartbeat Act, she fails to acknowledge that this undercuts her case. She admiringly cites former New York governor Mario Cuomo, who pioneered the incoherent notion that a politician could “personally oppose” abortion because of his religious beliefs while prudently refusing to “impose” his own morality on the populace. This argument makes no more sense now than it did when Cuomo debuted it in 1984.
For one thing, all laws impose some vision of morality. Laws against theft, murder, and slavery similarly echo the theology of several major religions — and are based on a certain notion of right and wrong, ie., morality — yet few would oppose those laws on the grounds that they improperly inject religion into public life. This argument rarely arises in the context of any law other than those regulating abortion, and it would be dismissed out of hand if it did. It functions merely to silence abortion opponents without addressing their actual arguments.
Meanwhile, only ignorance or intellectual dishonesty could explain Greenhouse’s refusal to acknowledge that the central arguments against Roe v. Wade and legal abortion are not religious in nature and are shared by any number of non-religious Americans. Roe is an anti-constitutional travesty. It’s bad law. Legal scholars across the political spectrum and with divergent views on abortion have said as much. Arguments in favor of striking down the Court’s groundless and unworkable abortion jurisprudence have nothing to do with religion.
Likewise, one need not be religious to acknowledge biological reality: The unborn child is a distinct, living human being. Abortion therefore is an act of violence. It is a procedure that, when successful, kills that distinct, living human being. It should be obvious that attempting to restrict or abolish such a procedure does not require imposing God or religion on other citizens; it doesn’t even require belief in God.
Greenhouse is far from the first commentator to insist that opposition to abortion stems from a desire to impose one’s faith on others. It’s a highly unoriginal argument most often advanced by zealous abortion-rights activists, who disparage their opponents in lieu of defending their own position — and Greenhouse should know better than to indulge in it.
The above comes from a Sept. 9 story in National Review.
This abortion fanatic would accuse abolitionists of trying to impose their faith on others too. Thankfully our laws are based on the 10 Commandments, and even when we get it wrong, Dred Scott, Roe, we fight to fix it.
Classic example of the phenomena of ‘darkening of the intellect.’ Obviously high IQ, heavy hitter intellect that is so encapsulated into her insular group’s ‘think’ that she can’t even cogitate the incoherency of abortion. She’d, I’m sure, be shocked that the best arguments for the existence of God as acknowledged by orthodox Christians are void completely of ‘theology’. But the members of her bubble are heartbreaking in their intellectual impoverishment.
Linda Greenhouse is a secularist Jew. That’s fine by me; it’s her business. But as such, she insists that American society be a completely “naked public square”, in the words of Richard John Neuhaus. Meaning that any law embodying a moral value judgment is impermissible because it infringes on the personal freedom of those who don’t subscribe to that value. The article debunks this speciously selective argument [applicable mostly to any restriction on abortion] by listing the LAWSl against theft, fraud, perjury, rape, etc. etc. which have been enforced in American law since the Constitution was ratified. ALL these laws were based on moral values normative for the Constitution’s framers.
Come clean, Linda. You’re nothing but a shill for unlimited abortion of to-be human babies, and try to disguise this by appealing to “women’s reproductive health care [?] and a “personal freedom” not circumscribed by any responsibility for prior actions.
Linda Greenhouse is a secularist Jew. That’s fine by me 1 Thessalonians 2
We must stop engaging in the same argument year after year. Expose them for what they are engaged in. It’s a ritualistic sacrifice that goes all the way back to Babylon. it’s a Cabbalist ritual.