Religion
and the Court
Harriet
Miers’ faith tells
us nothing about how she will rule.
The
world will learn a lot more about Harriet Miers
in coming weeks, so we're not going to join
the pack already chasing her back to Texas.
But one strategy that the White House would
be wise to drop is its not-too-subtle promotion
of both her religion and her personal views
on abortion.
In
case you haven't heard, Ms. Miers
is an evangelical Christian who is personally
opposed to abortion. A main White House talking
point is that she fought to reverse the American
Bar Association's position supporting abortion
rights. We are supposed to believe — wink, wink
— that this means Ms. Miers is a judicial conservative who would oppose the likes
of Roe v. Wade. The National Right to
Life Committee has already endorsed Ms. Miers.
..
In
1987, following the defeat of Robert Bork and
the withdrawal of Douglas Ginsburg, President
Reagan was contemplating his next appointment.
On the short list leaked to the media were Laurence
Silberman and Mr.
Kennedy, both then appellate court judges. Judge
Silberman was a well-known
judicial conservative, but some right-to-life
activists worried that he might be personally
pro-choice on abortion.
Judge
Kennedy, on the other hand, was something of
a blank judicial slate. But he was a Roman Catholic
who let everyone know he was personally opposed
to abortion. "The right-to-life people
were solid behind Kennedy," the San Francisco
Chronicle quoted one conservative as saying
at the time. "They were gung-ho for him."…
And
we know how that turned out. Justice Kennedy
continues to be a devout Catholic, as most recently
described in a profile in The New Yorker. But
he was also one of the three Republican-appointed
Justices who fortified Roe in Planned
Parenthood v. Casey in 1992. ..
Meanwhile,
whatever Judge Silberman's personal views on abortion are, no one familiar
with his judicial record doubts that he would
have voted to overturn Roe in a New York
minute. To put it bluntly, the right-to-lifers
let religion and personal views on abortion
color their judgment about Judge Kennedy, and
they bamboozled themselves.
In
recounting this history, we aren't equating
Ms. Miers with Justice
Kennedy. We have no idea what Ms. Miers
thinks about Casey, or any other Constitutional
issue. The point is that what matters aren't
Ms. Miers's personal views on abortion or what church she attends.
What matters is what she thinks about the judiciary,
and specifically whether she believes it has
the limited, Constitutional role that the Founders
intended. The White House could help its credibility
if it focused on that question and stopped touting
her religious beliefs.
Opinion
Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/
editorial/feature.html?id=110007409
--
Spurning
America
Not
all of us cherish ties to past traditions. "America's business, professional, intellectual and academic
elites," writes Samuel Huntington in his
2004 book, "Who Are We?" have "attitudes
and behavior (that) contrast with the overwhelming
patriotism and nationalistic identification
with their country of the American public ...
They abandon commitment to their nation and
their fellow citizens, and argue the moral superiority
of identifying with humanity at large."
He
believes this gap between transnational elites
and the patriotic public is growing. Huntington
knows whereof he speaks: He's been at Harvard
for more than half a century.
This
gap is something new in our history. Franklin
Roosevelt spoke fluent French and German and
worked to create the United Nations, but no
one doubted that his allegiance was to America above all. Most Harvard professors in the 1940s, 1950s
and early 1960s felt a responsibility to help
the United States prevail against its totalitarian enemies.
But
in the later stages of the Vietnam War — a war
begun by elite liberals — elites on campuses
began taking an adversarial posture toward their
own country. Later, with globalization, a transnational
mindset grew among corporate and professional
elites. Legal elites, too: Some Supreme Court
justices have taken to citing foreign law as one
basis for interpreting the U.S. Constitution...
"A
nation's morale and strength derive from a sense
of the past," argues historian Wilfred
McClay. Ties to those
who came before — whether in the military, in
religion, in general patriotism — provide a
sense of purpose rooted in history and tested
over time. Secular transnational elites are
on their own, without a useful tradition, in
constructing a morality to help them perform
their duties.
Most
Americans sense they need such ties to the past,
to judge from the millions buying books about
Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson and other Founding Fathers.
We Americans are lucky to live in a country
with a history full of noble ideas, great leaders
and awe-inspiring accomplishments. Sadly, many
of our elites want no part of it.
Michael
Barone
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/
columns/michaelbarone/2005/10/17/171489.html
--
Classroom
Warriors
The
cultural left has a new tool for enforcing political
conformity in schools of education. It is called
dispositions theory, and it was set forth five
years ago by the National Council for Accreditation
of Teacher Education: Future teachers should
be judged by their "knowledge, skills,
and dispositions." What are "dispositions"?
NCATE's prose made
clear that they are the beliefs and attitudes
that guide a teacher toward a moral stance.
That sounds harmless enough, but it opened a
door to reject teaching candidates on the basis
of thoughts and beliefs. In 2002, NCATE said
that an education school may require a commitment
to social justice. William Damon, a professor
of education at Stanford, wrote last month that
education schools "have been given unbounded
power over what candidates may think and do,
what they may believe and value."
NCATE vehemently denies that it is imposing
groupthink, but the ed schools, essentially a liberal monoculture, use dispositions
theory to require support for diversity and
a culturally left agenda, including opposition
to what the schools sometimes call "institutional
racism, classism,
and heterosexism." Predictably, some students
concluded that thought control would make classroom
dissent dangerous. A few students rebelled when
a teacher at Brooklyn College School of Education
showed Michael Moore's movie Fahrenheit 9/11
in class and dismissed "white English"
as "the language of oppressors." Five
students filed written complaints and received
no formal reply from the college. One was told
to leave the school and take an equivalent course
at a community college. Two of the complaining
students were then accused of plagiarism and
marked down one letter grade. The two were refused
permission to bring a witness, a tape recorder,
or a lawyer to meet with a dean to discuss the
matter.
John
Leo
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/johnleo/2005/10/17/171490.html
--
Divided
They Fall
Elizabeth
Marquardt’s book, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of
Children of Divorce, tells the poignant
story of kids trying to make sense of their
worlds after divorce. Even when the parents
are conscientious and loving, the children still
struggle to resolve conflicts that are usually
an adult responsibility, not a child’s.
She surveyed 1500 adult children from
divorced families and conducted intensive interviews
with 71 others. The questions about family rules illustrates the divided inner
moral lives that many of these young adults
recalled from their childhoods. Of those
whose parents had a “good divorce,” only 58%
agreed that their “parents’ household rules
were the same.” By contrast, parents having the same set of rules was the norm for children
of 94% of happily married parents.
Small
children going between two households have to
devote energy and ingenuity trying to figure
out what to do. One parent is penny-pinching
and saves even small amounts of leftovers, while
the other parent thinks nothing of scraping
half a plate of food down the garbage disposal.
In one household, people ignore the phone during
dinner, while the other parent places a priority
on jumping up to respond. Children Between
Two Worlds have to ask themselves, “How
do we do things around here?” in a way that
children in intact families seldom do. As Marquardt
puts it, “When parents are married they have
to find some way of merging contrasting values
such as these, and some may never firmly sort
it out. But no matter how they handle it, the
disagreement about whether to answer the phone
during dinner is their responsibility, not their
child’s.”
Jennifer
Roback Morse
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/
columns/JennniferRobackMorse/2005/10/17/171499.html
