Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 13, 1994 TAG: 9404140023
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Cal Thomas
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But morality cannot be separated from law, any more than the body can be separated from the mind and still maintain life. When judges seek to separate the two, they create an authoritarian elite in which judges themselves become gods, dictating from their own minds and experience what is right. This is precisely what has occurred in modern jurisprudence. It is instructive that Justice Blackmun, during his ``Nightline'' interview last December, singled out Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes for special praise. It was Hughes who said ``the Constitution is what the justices say it is.''
Harry Blackmun's name will forever be linked to Roe, a decision that remains not only a milestone but a millstone for America and American law. Like Roger Taney, who wrote for the majority in the Dred Scott case a century ago (in which he said that ``Negro slaves'' were less human than white people), Harry Blackmun's discovery of a ``penumbra'' in the Constitution that allows a woman to legally take the life of her unborn child will, as he has said, follow him to his grave. Yes, and beyond.
Justice Blackmun is not an evil man; he is part of an age in which a virus of immorality has touched us all. Still, he cannot wash his hands of personal responsibility for Roe, any more than Pontius Pilate could wash his hands of the decision he made 2,000 years ago.
Blackmun, so decisive on issues such as the death penalty - against for already-born criminals, but in favor for unborn innocents - waffled on Roe. Rather than making a firm decision about why the state should value human life at all stages (``to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men,'' wrote Jefferson), Blackmun tried to lateral the hot potato to others: ``When those trained in respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.''
It may have been the first instance in which the Supreme Court demanded that public and ``expert'' opinion be uniform. In Brown vs. Board of Education, public opinion was anything but uniform on the question of segregated schools. Surely that was more than a constitutional decision. It was the immorality of segregated schools, not the polls, that led the court to act.
Archbishop Roger Mahony of Los Angeles had it right when he wrote five years ago, ``We also need to reflect on the foundations of law in a just society. Belief in democracy does not mean that the truth, the good and the just are always what the majority says they are. To the contrary, our Bill of Rights means that some things in our democracy aren't up for a vote - like freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble, the right to petition government for a redress of grievances.
``Viewed from another angle, our democracy's laws are bounded by a higher law: all of us, as human beings and as citizens, are accountable not simply to civil law, but to concepts of truth and justice that stand in judgment on our laws, and on us. Jim Crow laws may have been duly enacted by legally elected legislatures, but they were morally hateful; they violated our common sense of justice, and were thus legally indefensible in the full meaning of `the law.'''
But we have lost this common sense of justice because we have expunged the law-giver from the center of our nation.
Justice Blackmun's legacy of abortion on demand will not be solved entirely by changes in the law - but by changes in the human heart. When sufficient numbers of us decide to live again by selfless principles instead of what suits us at the moment, then the stain of blood unleashed by Blackmun in Roe will be washed clean like the stain of slavery in the last century.
It takes time to turn a nation on moral issues. More than 100 years elapsed between the Emancipation Proclamation and the first civil rights legislation in 1964. The struggle to repair the damage caused by Justice Blackmun in Roe will be long, but principled people must not give up. They must continue to proclaim the truth about life, about alternatives to abortion and to the promiscuous sexual activity that is the cause of so many of our social ills.
Los Angeles Times Syndicate
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Justice Blackmun is not an evil man; he is part of an age in which a virus of immorality has touched us all.
by CNB