Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Alito and the Constitution

(Reprinted from the issue of December 15, 2005)

I don’t often agree with E.J. Dionne Jr., the pro-abortion Catholic columnist of The Washington Post, but every now and then he provokes thought. On December 6 he made some interesting points about the confirmation battle over Samuel Alito.

He noted that Alito and his conservative backers are trying to play down his 1985 letter arguing that “the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.” As if Alito had just been saying whatever it took to get a job in the Reagan administration, and maybe didn’t really mean it.

Of course nobody is dumb enough to believe that, certainly not the Democrats. It also implies that Alito was merely being cynical then and may be behaving cynically now. What kind of recommendation is that? Has the 1987 Bork battle made conservatives permanently afraid to avow their principles in public?

Even more interestingly, Dionne cites his fellow liberals’ qualms about Roe v. Wade. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has written that the Supreme Court overreached in that decision, and Dr. Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago has recently written that it rested on “shaky constitutional foundations.”

He added, “With its ambitious ruling, not at all firmly rooted in precedent, the Court allowed pro-life citizens to think that they had been treated with contempt — as if their own moral commitments could be simply brushed aside by federal judges.”

So not even liberals can pretend that the Constitution required so radical an extrapolation — or “penumbra,” if you like. It was entirely arbitrary. So why are conservatives who say so accused of being “out of the mainstream”?

Honest liberals may favor legal abortion but deplore the “shaky” reasoning of Roe. But I have yet to hear of anyone who opposes abortion who thought that Roe, however regrettable, was legally sound. It was a terrible abuse of judicial power, though “progressive” to the sort of liberal who thinks that the only good fetus is a dead fetus.

But just as Chief Justice Roger Taney said, in his notorious Dred Scott opinion, that “the negro has no rights the white man is bound to respect,” the Democrats now rally around the infernal doctrine that a human fetus has no rights any other human being is bound to respect.

And today’s Republicans want to pretend they haven’t made up their minds about it. If Alito takes this position, his confirmation will deserve to be defeated.
 
Forgotten Prophet

Writing in The American Conservative, Thomas Woods recently wrote an eloquent tribute to a great conservative of the last generation, Robert Nisbet. Nisbet was a profound thinker and a fine writer, and this is a good time to be reminded of him.

I knew Bob Nisbet slightly, and despite his august reputation as a sociologist he was a charming and sociable man, often appearing at conservative gatherings. Because he wasn’t at all combative in person, it took me a long time to realize how deeply he disagreed with most of us “movement” conservatives of the Reagan era.

But I found out when I read his little book The Present Age, published in 1988. He died a few years later, and I often wish I could tell him how that book changed not only my mind, but my habits of thinking. I still reread it often. Its wisdom is especially prophetic in the Bush era.

Learned in history, Nisbet realized how completely America had changed. He wrote that if the Founding Fathers could see their country now, they would be most alarmed by its bureaucratization — and most especially its thorough militarization and its habit of intervening all over the globe.

Our entire way of life has been absorbed not only by big government, but by a form of big government that is specifically oriented to ever-imminent warfare.

This isn’t just a matter of size and scale; even our moral habits have been transformed.

“Government by deception, by flat lying, grows apace in America. Prior to Franklin Roosevelt deliberate lies by chief executives, or indeed public officials of any considerable consequence, were few and, when detected, deemed reprehensible. Presidents before FDR were charged with everything from sexual immorality to blind political stupidity, but not with calculated deception of the public,” wrote Nisbet.

That has changed. We now accept official lying as normal. It may disgust us, but it has ceased to shock and outrage us.

Every page of the book is full of such bracing observations. You could say the same of Nisbet’s other books, but The Present Age is the one to start with.
 
Boo-Hoo of the Week

Andrew Sullivan is Mr. Gay Catholic in the American media, so we should have expected his anguished reaction (in Time magazine) to the new Vatican statement on the ordaining of homosexuals. If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.

Once again the Church has failed poor Andrew. You’ll recall that a few months ago he announced that he has ceased to attend Mass because of the Church’s stubborn homophobia. I don’t know if he’s still boycotting the sacraments, but it seems a bit of an overreaction. Maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s odd to skip Mass and then complain that you aren’t allowed to celebrate it.

Sullivan has a clincher, though: Under the new rules, the “proudly gay” Catholic chaplain of the New York City Fire Department, who died on 9/11, would never have been ordained!

“What the new Pope has done is conflate a sin with an identity,” Sullivan writes. “He has created a class of human beings who, regardless of what they do, are too psychologically and thereby morally ‘disordered’ to become priests.”

And this, he instructs the Pope, is contrary to the “message of Jesus,” which “was always to ignore the stereotype, the label, the identity,” et cetera. As in the case of the Good Samaritan, you know.

“The new Pope,” Sullivan goes on, “has now turned that teaching on its head. He has identified a group of people and said, regardless of how they behave or what they do, they are beneath serving God.... They are the new Samaritans. And all of them are bad.”

This is a pretty free paraphrase. The statement said nothing about a “group.” It spoke of an individual condition or disposition that is deemed disabling for the priesthood.

Why is this so hard to understand? My personal opinion is that the Church should also refuse to ordain young men who are inordinately given to self-absorption and self-pity. All of them are bad.


In this crazy world — and it’s getting worse every day, as I’m sure you’ve noticed — SOBRAN’S offers a feeble peep for political and cultural sanity. If you have not seen my monthly newsletter yet, give my office a call at 800-513-5053 and request a free sample, or better yet, subscribe for two years for just $85. New subscribers get two gifts with their subscription. More details can be found at the Subscription page of my website.

Already a subscriber? Consider a gift subscription for a priest, friend, or relative.

Joseph Sobran