Legalities

What kind of a game are we playing here? Everybody wants to apply a different monicker to Rosie. Last week it was metallurgist. This week it is theologian, and then somebody else calls her a constututional law scholar. I think that the folks applying these nicknames are just trying to impress others. Other than that, I can't say much for Rosie either.

R M Kraus

Nice summary of the fever swamp over the PBA decision. Conservatives were told we were overreacting to Chuck Schumer's complaint about Bill Pryor's "strongly held beliefs" as crossing a line. Looks like we were right about that all along. And it didn't take long for that meme to repeat itself after last week's decision. The Left will refuse to see your logic about the voting pattern in Casey - they are in a hurry to yell "theocracy" any chance they get, as if that will resonate with average Americans. Actually, Geoff Stone ought to be embarrassed that he finds himself playing the same tune as Rosie O'Donnell. His constitutional analysis reached the same point as Rosie's, and I'm darn sure that Rosie's never read a Supreme Court case from start to finish. I can't wait to hear Pat Leahy denounce this latest anti-Catholic garbage. How long do you think I'll have to wait?

"Why not speculate that the five justices in the majority happen to like baseball--and therefore are more inclined to appreciate rules? That’s no less relevant or “telling,” as Stone put it, than their religious views."

This seems weak. It seems to me that Professor Stone's speculation is, at once, more relevant and less speculative and, therefore, much more telling than yours is.

Stone's speculation is less speculative than yours because it isn't speculation that the five Justices in the majority were Catholic, only that it was their Catholicity that made them decide as they did. As for your speculation, is it a fact that those same Justices are baseball fans? Perhaps. Perhaps not. You see? Whereas Stone's begins with an established fact and proceeds to a plausible speculation, yours begins with a speculation as well as ends with one. At least Professor Stone has a basis in fact (that the five in the majority were Catholic) for his speculation and so his speculation is nowhere near as speculative as yours is.

However, let us, for the sake of argument, assume that the five Justices in the majority were baseball fans and further assume that they are sticklers for the rules in the game of baseball, it seems much easier to believe that a baseball fan, especially a Roman Catholic one, might, in his judicial rulings, abandon his insistence on rules when it comes to abortion matters than to believe that a Catholic could vote against his Church's doctrinal stance on abortion. Baseball, after all, is just a game. The number of deaths during baseball games over the years is no doubt minuscule compared to the number of deaths during abortions and the rules of baseball probably were irrelevant to any deaths during baseball. Therefore, Professor Stone's speculation seems much more relevant to the outcome in this case than does your speculation

So then, not only is your speculation twice as speculative as Prof. Stone's, it is also nowhere near as telling.

You are right that Professor Stone's speculation is just that. It is just that Stone's speculation is much more relevant than yours and much less speculative.

Scratch an American academic, including many Catholic ones, and one discovers someone who has a problem with the existence of Catholicism.

Thank you, Ms Greenburg, for calling Stone on his pompous, self-serving bloviations.

From your comments above, I notice that Thomas is a convert to Catholicism and theis happened after he joined the court. So obviously, if one adheres to the Know-Nothing bigotry, he must have been a leftist, revisionist hereo before. Yeah, that's what I remember about Thomas, that time when he was a darling of the left, his pre-Catholic days.

Yes, I agree with the sentiment of this post. I'm glad Garnett responded as well.

If the majority depended on Catholic dogma for their conclusions, then mentions of their Catholicism would be legitimate. But they didn't.

It would be equally illegitimate to remark that the dissenters are Jewish and Episcopalian and rely on their religion for their conclusions.

It's also funny that Stone accuses (with no evidence) some serious heavy-weights of deferring to their religion. He is the intellectual inferior of at least Scalia and Roberts, to be sure. None of the justices -- either of the left or right -- need their religion to guide their constitutional conclusions.

"No, the five couldn’t possibly have legal views that that the Constitution doesn’t protect the right to a partial birth abortion."

Via the constitution, the people never gave the federal government the authority to regulate abortion, either. No one has been able to show me in Article I, Section 8 where congress (bipartisanly or not) derived it's authority for this act.

Excellent simple analysis, pointing out the obvious that so many seem to have forgotten. We have 3 branches of government, not an Oligarchy. The Supreme Court is to interpret the law based on it constitutionality, not on the opinions of the day, either in the populance or in international legal circles and opinions. Legislation is the role of Congress, and not that of the Court.

If the argument is that Catholic's are biased toward one ruling and cannot decide the issue objectively, couldn't another argument be made that WOMEN are too close to the issue and should recuse themselves from ruling on such cases?

“If men could get pregnant,”Rosie opines, “abortion would be a sacrament.”

I hate that line, perhaps Rosie should read "Lives of the Saints" to see what pain men (and women) suffered for their faith.

>Via the constitution, the people never gave the federal government the authority to regulate abortion, either. No one has been able to show me in Article I, Section 8 where congress (bipartisanly or not) derived it's authority for this act.

MM - the justices specifically said they could not address the question of a commerce clause challenge because it was not raised below.

I agree - not only is there no Constitutional right to an abortion, there is no Congressional power to regulate abortion either. The whole thing should be a state issue.

The "Subscribe to this blog's feed" does not seem to be working. Please fix. Thank you!

"You are right that Professor Stone's speculation is just that. It is just that Stone's speculation is much more relevant than yours and much less speculative."

A speculation cannot be more or less speculative, no more than a person can be more or less dead. A speculation can be more or less reasonable, but no, not speculative.

The fact that you are illiterate casts a shadow on the validity of your response.

Thank you for challenging the unfortunately common habit of some to characterize a justice and his or her entire capacity for reasoning based upon a singular personal characteristic. People are much more complex than that, and I think we should give judges on both sides of the political spectrum more credit--assuming that they are seeking to honor and follow the law and our Constitution.

"If states are going to be allowed to set up more roadblocks to safe abortions, then those states should also be forced to provide adequate monetary support for the child that's eventually born."

You're talking as if legal changes would have come about entirely apart from changes in attitude about the unborn. Really, such a scenario would signal that the unborn had come to be viewed as worthy of protection in law. Thus, abortions would be understood as very unsafe indeed.

The state does not currently reward parents for protecting their children -- to the contrary, it's a basic expectation. I can't imagine why it should be otherwise if the culture came to value unborn life too.

Medicine-Religion and Politics don't mix well.
The five practicing Catholics on the Supreme Court voted to uphold the ban on "Dilation and Extraction" passed by a Republican Congress, which was practicing medicine without a license, going against the advice of the American Medical Association and the College of Obstetrics. Moreover, in allowing the lack of concern for the health of the mother, makes the fetus responsible for her death if it occurs!
Or is it Congress that will be responsible?
Considering that the Justices are in charge of judging their own conflicts of interest, letting their religious faith influence a decision is not a long step. How much it takes to come to a judgment of letting a mother die in favor of a disabled fetus should be governed by logic and NOT the religious faith and politics of those who passed the law in the first place. Congressional action was based on politics, faith and partisanship, not good medicine, or common sense.

The problem with Stone's remark is that it is speculation which he puts forward as an assertion and settles on as a conclusion in one broad sweep.

No proof is offered. To me, he's just showing his contempt for a reasoning public. So he's a former college dean and provost at the U. of Chicago. That just causes me to hold U. of Chicago in less regard.

Besides, I'm not impressed with a lawyer, particularly a former dean and provost, who is so easily mortified.

“If men could get pregnant,”Rosie opines, “abortion would be a sacrament.”

As far as I can tell, it *is* a sacrament for the Democratic party, and for the likes of Rosie O'Donnell.

If you take the decision this week at its word, it is not premised on a belief that the Constitution fails to protect a right to choose abortion, but instead on the belief that the Constitution does in fact give women a right to make the ultimate choice as to whether to have an abortion, but that the State has such a strong interest in "protecting life" that it can secondguess, cajole, and intimidate women into making the better, "life protective" decision. To hold that position, one needs to have a moral conviction that the choice to have an abortion in all but the most tragic circumstances is an atrocious mistake (not to mention a fundamental distrust for women as autonomous decisionmakers). The fact that a majority of the Court now bases the law on such a bald and controversial moral position certainly should focus our attention on where the Justices in the majority get their sense of moral certainty. Interrogating their common religious tradition is a plausible place to start.

OK, AFMCA, based on your medical expertise, explain why banning this particular approach to pregnancy termination is problematic, given that there are other ways to handle it? This method is appealing to the industry because it is cheaper and there is less risk of an infant born alive.

You can have any opinion you want about Roe and Casey, and still agree with Sen Moynahan that this one is roughly equivalent to infanticide, without it being because you are Catholic (I am most assuredly not).

"By making this judgment, these justices have failed to respect the fundamental difference between religious belief and morality."

I tire of these all-knowing ones who continually think that just because a person has a belief or moral position based upon their religion it is invalid. It is entirely possible to view PBA as morally reprehensible and inhumane based solely upon scientific evidence of fetal development. What is the fundamental difference between believing that a viable fetus should not be subjected to indiscriminate destruction based upon its inherent humanity and personhood and reaching the exact same conclusion based upon a belief that the fetus has an immortal soul that is worth protecting? And are they both not moral conclusions worthy of discussion and action?

Ms. Greenberg is an extremely fair and objective journalist, perhaps one of the best mainstream journalists ever to cover the US Supreme Court.

I congratulate her for her excellent work, including her very informative recent book "Supreme Conflict", and I congratulate ABC News for its decision to hire Ms. Greenberg and to give her a blog in which she can address some of the absurd, extremist rhetoric that comes from such "illustrious cultural commentators" as Rosie O' Donnell. Keep up your great work!

Stone is off the mark. And Rosie is...well...Rosie. But the 5 justices in the majority didn't do themselves any favors by introducing another convoluted abortion decision into the Supreme Court's incoprehesible abortion jurisprudence.

This law (like so many before it) should not have been upheld because of its "morality", but because, as you alluded to, it was passed by the people's constitutional representatives and if the people don't like it, they can get new ones to do away with it.

When conservative justice couch the language of their decisions in terms of subjective judgments about morality, it makes it all the more difficult to return to a rational jurisprudence based on the principals of federalism and the separation of powers set out in the Constitution.

What a surprise!!
A member of the MSM who takes a balanced, objective view of a tenet of left-wing theology.

Ms. Crawford may, or may not, agree with the decision on partial-birth;I don't care.
I'm just impressed with the refreshing (for a member of the MSM) clear-headed analysis.

"If states are going to be allowed to set up more roadblocks to safe abortions, then those states should also be forced to provide adequate monetary support for the child that's eventually born." .....

The state does not currently reward parents for protecting their children -- to the contrary, it's a basic expectation. I can't imagine why it should be otherwise if the culture came to value unborn life too.
_________________________________

If the state takes the responsibility for deciding that "parents" must give birth to all fertilized eggs then mustn't the state also take on the financial consequences of that decision as well?

Prof. Stone skips right from speculation to conclusion. It's as if he didn't read the opinion, or if he did, he believes the majority to be bald liars and simply using legal arguments to justify a religious holding.

Also, if his theory is correct, why would (lifelong Catholic) Justice Kennedy have voted with the majority in Casey?

Catholics are 22 - 23 percent of the total population of the US of A. Yet Conservative Presidents have appointed 5 Catholics to the Supreme Court. If religion were a random factor in selecting Supreme Court judges you have 2 Catholic judges based on the per centage of Catholics in the general population. The present Supreme Court has 2.5 times as many Catholics as random selection would dictate. I could understand 3 Catholic judges but 5? Why do Conservative Presidents select Catholics? It surely isn't random.

As a Catholic, I am glad to see the Supreme Court Justices make decisions that are in accordance with our faith. I wish Ted Kennedy and John Kerry would do the same.

I am a Roman Catholic and a University of Chicago alumnus. I find it distressing, but not surprising, to hear that Provost Stone would once again allow his political beliefs to override any sense of what a prudent person might say. If he had made this remark about certain other faiths or minority groups, he would have been called upon to resign. I will be letting my alma mater know of my deep dissatisfaction with the provost's statements.

The present Supreme Court has 2.5 times as many Catholics as random selection would dictate. I could understand 3 Catholic judges but 5? Why do Conservative Presidents select Catholics? It surely isn't random.

Kim, maybe I'm not jaded enough in our rather cynical world, but maybe, just maybe, presidents choose their Supreme Court nominees based upon their potential to be good and fair jurists. That they happen to be Catholic is something that just goes along for the ride.

And oh, by the way, I don't think I would describe Justic Kennedy as a "conservative," even if he was nominated by President Reagan. His opinion in the Carhart case was extremely narrow and really did little to weaken the Casey decision (which he authored), which arguably puts the abortion license on stronger grounds in this country than Roe did.

"The present Supreme Court has 2.5 times as many Catholics as random selection would dictate. I could understand 3 Catholic judges but 5? Why do Conservative Presidents select Catholics? It surely isn't random.
Kim, maybe I'm not jaded enough in our rather cynical world, but maybe, just maybe, presidents choose their Supreme Court nominees based upon their potential to be good and fair jurists. That they happen to be Catholic is something that just goes along for the ride."

You don't need to be jaded or cynical to understand the statistics. If there was no selection bias toward Catholics the number of Catholics on the Supreme Court would be 2. It would be surprising but not out of the relm of possibility to have 3 Catholics on the Supreme Court. But when 5 Catholics are seated, which is 55% of the total SC, and the per cent of Catholics in the nation is 22% selection for Catholics is relevant.
Do you think that being Catholic makes you 2.5 times as likely to be a "good and fair jurist" as any other religion?

Mrs. Greenberg's observation are as astute and insightful as they are winsome.

Small correction to Jan's post regarding Thomas' faith. He has always been a Catholic. He in fact even attended a seminary to become a priest prior to going to law school. He started going to an Episcopalian church with his second wife. I am not sure what his status is now. I don't even know if there is a huge difference between a Catholic and an Episcopalian.

Sean:
"Why do Conservative Presidents select Catholics? It surely isn't random."

My recollection is that Bush 43 tried to select an evangelical before that nomination disintegrated on contact with reality (as is compellingly retold in Jan's book, BTW) and he nominated a 2d catholic. Bush 41 didn't nominate any catholics: Thomas converted long after his appointment. Reagan appointed two catholics out of four nominees, and I'm honestly not sure what Robert Bork's and Douglas Ginsburg's religions are. The same caveat to Reagan's nomination of the catholic Kennedy applies to Bush 43's nomination of the catholic Alito: Kennedy was not Reagan's first choice. So I'm not sure that your premise (that Conservative Presidents select Catholics) is right from the outset, which increases the odds that it's just an accident of history. My preferred next pick for the Supreme Court is Judge Sykes of the 7th Circuit, and so far as I know, she's a catholic, but I wasn't really aware of that when I first started looking at her work, and it didn't make any difference to me when I found out.

Jan, thanks for your great commentary. I appreciate your ability to see that Rosie's comments are about cynicism and conspiracy theories and not politics. Thank God she is not renewing her contract. I'm tired of her hate -- regardless of politics

The whole notion of saying it's bad to have five catholics on the Supreme Court when they are only 22% of the nation is absurd. If you stick with that twisted, sophistry line of reasoning, then what's that lead to to say about there being two jewish justices when they are only 1% of the nation?

It's also correct to say that Catholics are Christians and Christians make up 80% of the nation. So looking at it in that way, they are close to their proportinate share.

The truth is that this whole absurd complaint by the left about Catholics and partial birth abortion is nothing but the squeal of a losing pig (an especially fat losing pig at that).

"So I'm not sure that your premise (that Conservative Presidents select Catholics) is right from the outset, which increases the odds that it's just an accident of history. My preferred next pick for the Supreme Court is Judge Sykes of the 7th Circuit, and so far as I know, she's a catholic, but... "

An accident of history might, if you stretch coincidence to the limit, account for 3 Catholic Supreme Court Judges but 5 is far beyond anything accidental.

I assume that your desire to find this an accident of history, like my deep uneasiness, is caused by the implications of these numbers as well as the fact that all 5 Catholic judges were selected by Conservative presidents.

By the way, Thomas has always been a Catholic.

I did not know distinguished scholars believed that justices' votes should be analyzed

Kim, I guess I just don't understand your premise for why three catholics on the court might be accidental, but five surely can't be. Why not? I think that you're making the mistake of comparing the demographics of the court to society at large, rather than to the demographics of the pool of potential nominees. Consider it this way: suppose (and I have no idea if this is true) legal conservatives are disproportionately catholic. I mean, maybe George Kannar was right in that famous paper about Scalia that there's something about catechism that predisposes a person towards formalism, and legal conservatives are, in the main, legal formalists. Well if that's so, assuming that conservative presidents are going to pick legal conservatives, if the pool of possible candidates is disproportionately catholic, the nominees are going to be, in the aggregate, disproportionately catholic.

BTW, Justice Thomas might have been a catholic in his younger years, and has certainly converted (or reconverted, I don't know what the terminology is) since joining the court, but he was not a catholic when he was nominated, which is the relevant point. Per WP: "Raised Roman Catholic ... [Thomas] later attended an Episcopal church with his wife, but returned to the Catholic Church in the late 1990s[.]"

And a question to recommend what JCG says here: WHY did many of those same "pro-life" "religion driven" Justices (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia) vote and opine just this week not to overturn the DEATH sentences of 3 Texas criminals?

Ms. Crawford,

Your article has more than a couple of logical flaws (e.g. your assertion that Stone said that the justices could not possibly have voted how they did unless it was because they were Catholic; what he said was that their Catholic beliefs were the reason; there's a difference). But I hope others will point them out.

Sounds like the rest to court justices need some schooling that sucking brains out of fully developed infants is not just morally wrong, but disgusting. The Dem.'s do make abortion a sacrement of their relegion of relativism.

Quoth TD:
Sounds like the rest to court justices need some schooling that sucking brains out of fully developed infants is not just morally wrong, but disgusting.
Dismembering them in utero is equally so (and most of them aren't "fully developed infants"), but I don't see the same sense of outrage over the "approved alternative procedure".

And you wonder why so many people see "pro-life" as synonymous with hypocrisy... wonder no more.

When assessing the motives of these justices and considering the boundaries of church and state, one has to admit the truth that "correlation is not causation". So the catholic church is anti-abortion, and these justices who voted against to uphold this piece of legislation happen to be catholic. Instead of assuming that their catholicity determined their view on abortion, how about assuming that their human minds determined their decisions. Many secular arguments against religion view religion as the puppet master that determines practictioners' actions. Sure this happens, but how about the possibility that a person's choice of religion and person's sense of morality corollate to a particular human perspective on the world - A perspective that is not "religious" per se and can not be invalidated by arguments against the separation of church and state. There are many good non-religious arguments against abortion.

Aside:
Did you know that rampant infanticide (of especially female babies) contributed to the fall of the Roman empire? Their population dwindled and was finally overtaken. Abortion is not a progressive idea as proponents claim and I predict sometime in the next 100 years, there will be world consensus on the issue of abortion as there now is on slavery.

Reality Czech - actually, you do, but of course the Court has made it quite clear that hostility to abortion cannot be couched in legislation. As the opinion in Carhart points out, "[t]here would be a flaw in this Court’s logic, and an irony in its jurisprudence, were we first to conclude [in Stenberg that] a ban on both D&E and intact D&E was overbroad[,] and then to say [in Carhart that] it is irrational to ban only intact D&E because that does not proscribe both procedures."

DJ predicts that "sometime in the next 100 years, there will be world consensus on the issue of abortion as there now is on slavery." There is already something approaching a world consensus aboyt abortion that is considerably more restrictive than American abortion law. Interesting that Justices Ginsburg, Kennedy and Breyer, so solicitous of the opinions of other courts around the world when it suits them, remain absolutely silent the opinions of courts in other countries when those views cut against them, in Hudson last term, for example, or Carhart this term. Not a word about foreign law will you find in Justice Ginsburg's Carhart dissent.

Gunther Steinberg says:

"...going against the advice of the American Medical Association..."

do you mean the same American Medical Association that said partial birth abortion is NEVER medically necessary?

Jack wrote:
"do you mean the same American Medical Association that said partial birth abortion is NEVER medically necessary?"
No, that must be some other AMA, because the American Medical Assocation NEVER said such a thing. Here is the relevant portion of their policy on intact D&X, which can be found on their website:

"According to the scientific literature, there does not appear to be any identified situation in which intact D&X is the only appropriate procedure to induce abortion, and ethical concerns have been raised about intact D&X. The AMA recommends that the procedure not be used unless alternative procedures pose materially greater risk to the woman. The physician must, however, retain the discretion to make that judgment, acting within standards of good medical practice and in the best interest of the patient."

They certainly do note that there don't appear to be any instances in which intact D&X is the ONLY appropriate procedure. That doesn't mean that there are NO identified situations in which intact D&X is AN appropriate procedure. And while they recognize the ethical concerns inherent in such a procedure, it is still their policy that the physician, not some politician, retain the discretion to make the judgment.

So, yes Congress did ignore the advice of the AMA in passing the "PBA" ban.

I am not Catholic. But this opinon piece smacks of religious bigotry. Are you going start numbering the Presbyterian & Jewish Justices and start associating their rulings with there faith? If five catholics are to many, I suspect the Evangelicals want 3-4 seats of their own, maybe another to the fundamentalists.

You are on very dangerous ground. There was a reason the founding fathers inserted the "no religous test" to hold political office. You start down this road and every sect that has eight percent of the population will want their representative on the court.

Bigotry is always easy to spot when it is someone else's bigotry, but as many have learned over the years, the left in this country believe they are exempt from the bigotry charge. Change the word "Catholic" to "Jewish" and I believe even those on the left see this dark shadow.

Asking someone about their religion during confirmation is a religious test and is banned by Article VI, US Constitution, “…but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

I particularly like this idea from Jan's post: "Why not speculate that the five justices in the majority happen to like baseball--and therefore are more inclined to appreciate rules?"

I might stretch it out a little and make it an appreciation for group sports in general (baseball, football and basketball in partiular, at least for me). It's an interesting notion.

Group sports are all activities of extreme conflict and contentiousness, and like Jan said, they are played within rules, a fairly extensive set of rules, rules that for the most part have existed since the sports were founded.

Everyone grows up knowing the rules and everyone knows you have to play within the rules -- no matter what. That way everyone is better off and everyone knows it. Otherwise, the game would disentergrate into who knows what -- probably painful chaos, probably a brawl, probably a brawl that would spill over into the stands and then out onto the streets, and then who knows where it would end, or if it would end at all.

Chief Justice Roberts did say during his confirmation that he saw his role as being that of an UMPIRE. Good for the Chief. He's one extremely smart guy.

Yes, the more I think about it, Supreme Court nominees' appreciation of group sports should be a key criteria toward their accceptability. I don't understand how we got this far along in judicial history without having recognized that before. Thanks, Jan.

By the way, jogging (Justice Souter) is not a group sport. It's self-absorbed, a whole different dynamic.

Bill Snedden, the difference between "only" and "an" gets to the heart of "necessary", no? clearly then my statement was correct, and I am puzzled as to why you would attempt to make such a baldly petty and futile semantic argument to the contrary.

one last gasp for good faith; THE SUPREME COURT

I usually try to stay out of the more "tuned" women's debate about ABORTION..but the PBA seems right in there w/most fraudulent practices in the Medical Trade..the use of phony prescriptions and diagnosis's/phony Medical Degrees..Medicade-scams..I would think alot of this "stuff" could lead a women into ABORTION..since there is one side to the story with lots of evidence I can't see how the arguement continue's to surface as the "Seperation" where Church&State seem to offer really not much differance..leading things back towards the Supreme Court or such Leadership/I can only figure that the evidence of the actions surface in crime more than in the more exact(finger-pointing)that MEDIA-protege's angle for a days work..Leading or Finger-Pointing..seperation of Church/State..has really none of the angles that the "creepy" democracies wish for(in truth)..actions most often speak louder than words..the results seem a One Track Mind here also.

“If men could get pregnant,”Rosie opines, “abortion would be a sacrament.”

All but two Supreme Court Justices have been men. Using Rosie's reasoning, you'd think at some point the Court would have outlawed circumcision.

The question was asked, "The present Supreme Court has 2.5 times as many Catholics as random selection would dictate. I could understand 3 Catholic judges but 5? Why do Conservative Presidents select Catholics? It surely isn't random.

Perhaps it has to do with the traditional Catholic notion of Natural Law and that someone formed in Natural Law thought has a much higher probability of being an appealing jurist to a nominating conservative politician?

Below is the Gallup poll on the PBA issue at the time the PBA ban was passed by the congress. 70% of all Americans are for the ban. So it seems like the five justices who voted to uphold the ban are speaking for the vast majority of Americans, not just with Catholics.

Clearly the FORKED-TONGUE rhetorical sophistry from Rosie O'Donnell and Dean Stone is GOBBLYDYGOOP."

From USA Today:
"The January 2003 Gallup poll found that 70% favoured and 25% opposed "a law that would make it illegal to perform a specific abortion procedure conducted in the last six months of pregnancy known as 'partial birth abortion,' except in cases necessary to save the life of the mother.""

Here is a little quote to those who are quick to drop the "seperation of church and state" line.

"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."

--George Washington, “Farewell Address”

So in regards to all political matters, are we, in this day and age, going to require people to ignore their conscience only if it was formed based on religious beliefs and contradicts the liberal ideology of the day? I don't think so.

Joe

Joe M, people aren't required to ignore their consciences, that sounds like a deliberate stretch to take the argument to its nonsensical extreme.

However, the court IS requred to resolve conflicting law. That's a tough job, and they shouldn't muddy their judgments up by deliberately allowing popular opinion or their own religious beliefs to determine them. That IS the "activism" that so many on the right are always railing against.

and other Joe above, your quote includes "except in cases necessary to save the life of the mother". It would be interesting to see this survey's results if the question had said, "even if the attending doctor believed the mother would die." Then it would actually reflect this law.

For those who feel that 4-5 Catholic justices cannot be a random event, you need to brush up on your statistics. Essential to any statistical analysis is a sufficiently large sample. Nine is not. A batter with a .250 batting average is not necessarily going to get 1 hit in every 4 at bats. Some days he'll go 4 for 4.

Rosie has a several valid points.
Why is it that men assume the perogative to legislate a woman's fluid inside her body?
Why is it that men don't establish legislation about the semen in men's bodies?
Why did the citizens allow government leaders at every level of legislation (Executive, Congress, State, County & City) decide about how citizens procreate?
Why does government even give the Church leadership who are swimming in bankruptcy over pedophile judgements to influence legislation?
The answer to all the above questions:
Control.
And you call this Democracy?

Why do you care about this anti-American at all? Rosie clearly hates our government & our beautiful country. She prefers to blame the U.S. government for 9-11 (and everything else evil) than the terrorists! I find her disgraceful and repugnant. In my opinion, Rosie should kiss the ground she walks on, as she has been afforded a privileged life here. I am sure I'm in the minority, but I wish Rosie would pack up all her hate for the United States and move to another country!

Thanks so much to Jan Greenberg for so deftly pointing out the hopelessly flawed hyperbole, vicious, and bombastic rhetoric of Rosie O'Donnell.
Legal case aside, steel does not melt?
Goodness, how in the world is it possible to even have an automotive industry with that in mind?
It does not help anyone's - regardless of that person's position - case on legal matters, especially with regards to the USSC, when such hopelessly erroneous statements get made by that side.