The Washington Post is carrying an editorial by Charles Krauthammer entitled
Judicial Insanity. In it, he basically takes DeLay to task for wanting to interfere with the independence of the judiciary at the same time as ripping the courts for their independence. It's one of those editorials that make me want to spit on the smarmy little picture of the author and the only thing that stops me is that I'd be spitting on my own computer screen.
One passage in particular really disturbs me though:
This is not just deeply undemocratic. It is politically crazy. Democracies work as stable social entities because when people are allowed to settle issues themselves by debate and ballot, they are infinitely more likely to accept the results when they lose. To deny them that participation is to risk instability and threaten social peace.
It was Ruth Bader Ginsburg who said that Roe v. Wade "halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue." Whenever such an obvious sociological truth is pointed out, proponents of judicial imperialism immediately resort to their trump card: Brown v. Board of Education and the courts' role in ending Jim Crow.
But Brown was different. The race cases were cases of a disenfranchised citizenry. The representative branches of government were legitimately superseded because they were not representative. Millions of blacks could not vote. Millions of blacks could not participate in civic life. The courts had to act to end this aberration and injustice, and, to their glory, they did.
Yes, well Roe v Wade was different too. Millions of women died from illegal botched abortions. Millions of women have died from child birth. Millions of women were having their right to equal protection and privacy violated. But I guess millions of women suffering doesn't matter to Krauthammer.
Why oh why do people think that we should have just waited for the public to accept abortion and allow legislatures to pass laws allowing it when it used to be allowed and it was the legislatures that banned it? Why should women be subject to the whim of the legislatures when men are allowed the right to medical privacy?
I think I might pull this article up on another computer, maybe at work, and spit on that little picture there.