Senate confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court cannot come soon enough. From all that we have read, she is a brilliant choice. And a welcome one. Barrett clerked for the great Scalia for two years and considers him her mentor. That is heartening.

But no one should expect her to be a slam-dunk to overturn Roe vs. Wade. Stare decisis is a contentious issue. Celebrating her nomination as a pro-life victory is premature. And it fans prevailing hysteria that abortion is about to disappear tout court, that back alleys will be in business in the morning.

Barrett has said publicly that she has no intention of revoking precedent. That defuses pro-abortion objections while, at the same time, it sends an oblique caution to pro-lifers. The country needs her on the bench because she is—to date—an originalist. If there are challenges to Roe v. Wade, we would expect an originalist to decide on the legal merits of the case. (That is no easy task given law’s philosophical underpinnings.) Legal merit is a solemn matter of law to be addressed on juridical, not personal, grounds.

She is a jurist who has shown no ambition to legislate from the bench, as Justice Ginsberg clearly did. Our constitutional republic—what is left of it—cannot survive legislation from the bench. The Supreme Court is supreme only over other courts. It was never intended to be supreme over the legislative and executive branches of government. Barrett knows that. God bless her for it.

 

 

Are genitalia a new criterion of merit?

At the same time, it is disquieting that our political climate is such that President Trump was under pressure to announce in advance a woman would replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Is there now a woman’s seat on the court? There is already a “wise Latina” on the bench. Does that mean Justice Sotomayor is the first occupant of a Latinx seat? Is Justice Thomas’ seat destined to become the black seat—or more accurately, the Black seat? What next, an LGBTQ seat?

When lifetime court appointments slouch toward the primacy of race-and-gender considerations over jurisprudential ones, our country multiplies its risks. We have slipped far enough into the tyranny of diversity ideology.

Not only court appointments but all high profile posts are in danger of becoming Procrustean beds into which nominees must be made to fit. Joe Biden initiated the gonad game when he pledged to appoint a woman as his running mate. Not the best mind he could mind, not the finest public servant, but a sex. Genitalia before merit, please. Legal, administrative, or policy acumen? First, let us look between the legs.

 

Transgender ideology, a curse

We all winced back in January when Elizabeth Warren scraped the bottom of her campaign barrel with a promise to let a nine-year old transgender child interview her selection of a Secretary of Education. The child, Jacob Lemay, was transgendered before the age of five. Mimi Lemay, his/her mother, raced to the media with a compulsively long, self-justifying display of dual maladjustments: “A Letter to My Son Jacob on His Fifth Birthday.”

When did it become thinkable that any candidate could seek benefit from the tragic obscenity of a child deformed and denatured by technological and parental subservience to a demented trend? In a sane culture, Warren would have been driven from the campaign trail, vilified in mainstream media, and perhaps put under observation. But we are not sane. And no election will restore sanity to a people bent on suicide. The fault is in the soul.

 

 

“Men begin to die.”

Writing in the wake of World War II, Georges Bernanos did not share the optimism of the post-war era. In an unpublished essay written between 1946 and 1947, there is this:

Science did not lay the foundation of the modern world, but rather science in the service of speculation. The modern world isn’t simply the modern world—which would be enough to justify it—but only the present day word, one modern world among a great many others that might have existed if science hadn’t broken with conscience and indifferently served any master that came along.

Certainly it is true that no force is capable of arresting .  .  . the progress of the human spirit. But the human spirit doesn’t necessarily move in the same direction and toward the same goal. It moves in several directions at once, and if it slows down in one to hurtle forward in another, the balance of civilization is broken. Men begin to die.