The Kermit Gosnell decision

Kermit Gosnell has been convicted of murder. And the anti-abortion (or as they would have it, “pro-life”) people are happy with the results. But in fact, the Gosnell verdict was totally in conformity with what I, who oppose them, have maintained. A viable fetus is a real person. Some of these babies were, in fact, already born, not just “viable.”

My reply to the anti-abortion crowd has always been “if this is a baby, deliver it, then see if you can keep it alive.” In this case, several deliveries had been done, and then the babies were killed. So obviously, what Kermit Gosnell did was murder, under my own definition. And I agree with the verdict. But this says nothing about Roe v. Wade. Gosnell's attorney tried to invoke Roe, but the jury didn't buy it. And I think that no appeals court would, either.

Another unreasonable Gregory Kane column

Gregory Kane, the columnist at the Washington Examiner, who has been the cause of some previous posts on this blog, did it again today. He wrote a column excoriating fellow conservative Ann Coulter because of some favorable remarks she wrote about the late Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, in her new book, "Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America." Now, it is fair game for conservative Kane to say, as he does, that current Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas is closer to his ideas of what a Justice should be. But Coulter makes some valid points in comparing Marshall to Martin Luther King.

My bone to pick with Kane is where he says:

Coulter's thesis is that mob action is inimical, even dangerous, to a republic and that throughout history it's primarily the Democratic Party that has supported, encouraged or even benefitted from what Coulter derisively calls "the mob."

In Coulter's eyes, the street demonstrations that Martin Luther King Jr. led to end segregation were mob actions. Marshall, a lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People during the civil rights era, was anti-mob. Here are some passages where Coulter talks about Marshall, King or both.

"[John] Locke was concerned with property rights. His idea was that the government should allow men to protect their property in courts of law — as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall realized — rather than have each man be his own judge.

"One man who didn't like mob action even on behalf of civil rights was Thurgood Marshall. A skilled lawyer, he was redeeming civil rights for blacks the American way — by bringing lawsuits, making arguments, and winning in court.

"Thurgood Marshall had always disdained King's methods, calling him an 'opportunist' and 'first-rate rabble-rouser.' Indeed, when asked about King's suggestion that street protests could help advance desegregation, Marshall replied that school desegregation was men's work and should not be entrusted to children. King, he said, was 'a boy on a man's errand.'

"Redeeming blacks' civil rights could have been accomplished without riots, marches, church burnings, police dogs, and murders. Except the problem was, Democrats were in the White House from January 1961 to January 1969 and only Republican presidents would aggressively enforce the law.

"If Nixon had been elected in 1960, instead of Kennedy, we could have skipped the bloodshed of the civil rights marches and today we'd be celebrating Thurgood Marshall Day, rather than Martin Luther King Day."

My dear Ms. Coulter, I'd much rather celebrate Martin Luther King Day. Even if I agreed with your assessment of the relative worth of King and Marshall, the fact remains that, as Supreme Court justice, Marshall damaged the nation in ways King and his "mobs" never did.

It's as if Coulter never heard of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. Marshall was one of the seven justices who voted to overturn every state anti-abortion law in the nation. And he was one of the seven who presumed to tell a nation of then nearly 200 million people exactly when life does or does not begin.

It definitely does not begin in the first trimester of a woman's pregnancy, this less-than-magnificent seven concluded, kind of does in the second and definitely does in the third. I have grandkids that can cobble together a better definition of when life begins than that.

And Marshall was one of the justices who voted to overturn, temporarily, every death penalty statute in the land. One result of the noble intentions of Marshall and his cohorts was that a man named Kenneth McDuff, then on death row in Texas for multiple murders, was eventually paroled. McDuff went on yet another killing spree before he was convicted a second time and eventually executed.

A Thurgood Marshall Day? I'm sure the murderers of the country would love that one.

Of course, his first objection to Marshall is his support for Roe v. Wade which he, like many conservatives, thinks is a terrible decision; I think it a good one, because in "overturn[ing] every state anti-abortion law in the nation," he made it possible to save some real human lives. Kane, of course, agrees with the Roman Catholic Church in defining human life as beginning at conception; I've posted a few reasons why I think that is ridiculous.

But even someone who agrees with Kane on the Roe and McDuff decisions can hardly believe that King would have taken the opposite side. And we're not talking about comparing Marshall with Clarence Thomas here; we're talking about Marshall compared with Martin Luther King.

I think Ann Coulter is right on target in the comparison she makes. And let us remember King's near-treasonous stand on the War in Vietnam.

No, I've always considered Marshall a better representative of African Americans than King, and I applaud Coulter's comments which so appall Kane.

Supreme Court's bizarre decision

Unfortunately, the United States Supreme Court has fallen victim to the spurious reasoning that the National Rifle Association has spread about the Second Amendment. It invalidated the District of Columbia's gun control regulations. (See this site, though the post is in agreement with this stupid opinion.)

Though the opinion is stupid, it is the law of the land. Just as abortion opponents have to live with Roe v. Wade, we will have to live with District of Columbia v. Heller, the worst U. S. Supreme Court opinion since Plessy v. Ferguson. It means that it is going to be difficult to control gun violence, but of course there will be many further challenges to determine what can legally be done to control guns in this nation.

Fallacies of the “Pro-Life” Position

Recently I was reading an article on the Roe v. Wade issue in the “National Review,” a conservative (and Catholic-sympathetic) magazine, and it made me think about the topic.

People opposed to abortions call themselves “pro-life,” and their position seems to rest on a number of fallacies. I think some of these need to be made explicit.

First, one point they continuously make is that “life begins at conception.” Actually, it doesn’t. A sperm cell and an egg cell are “alive,” no less than is a fertilized egg. Biology points out that life comes only from life, and spontaneous generation was disproved many decades ago, even centuries ago.

But even if life began at conception, is it always improper to take a life? We eat meat, which comes from killed animals, and even vegetarians eat food which was produced by killing plants (which are certainly “alive” in any sense of the word)! So the question boils down to whether the taking of a human life is involved. And then the question arises as to what is a human being.

I have seen it claimed that what is created at conception is an “independent genotype.” And certainly it is true that the fertilized egg is different, genetically, from either sperm or egg, and also different, genetically, from either father or mother. But if what makes a separate person is an “independent genotype,” you are denying the personhood of an identical twin! This would mean that killing one of a pair of identical twins is no worse than amputating a leg. I cannot see any argument based on genotypic identity that would differentiate the two. So there is no way that this basis for characterizing personhood can fly.

It is to me quite obvious that the only way to define “a new human being” is to ask if it is capable of surviving without being connected to the mother’s body through a placenta. This is the “viability criterion,” and no other definition makes sense. So let the anti-abortion group assert that the fetus can be delivered and survive, and if this is so, it would be unethical to abort it.

The argument has been made that “what modern medicine can keep alive” continually changes. I do not deny this. But just as we do not try to keep alive someone who is incurably ill when he has passed a certain point, and this point changes as modern medicine improves, the point at which abortion is foreclosed by viability can change with time. This is not inconsistent.

Some people wish to impose their beliefs on others. Whether these are Catholics who want others to deny abortions based on Catholic definitions of “a human life” or others who want Catholic doctors to abort when it violates their scruples, this is wrong. But let the individuals involved make the decisions.

The South Dakota challenge to Roe v. Wade

The South Dakota legislature is passing a new anti-abortion law to challenge Roe v. Wade. Obviously, how the Supreme Court acts will merit watching. In particular, what will Justices Roberts and Alito do? They were chosen in part because their sentiments were anti-abortion, but both also are highly competent judges who obviously know what the doctrine of stare decisis is all about.

Perhaps some technical reason will be found to deny certiorari after lower courts (that are bound by Roe v. Wade) kill the South Dakota law, but that doesn't look to be in the cards. We really need to watch this one.