{"id":24526,"date":"2012-12-22T14:10:09","date_gmt":"2012-12-22T19:10:09","guid":{"rendered":"\/news\/?p=24526"},"modified":"2012-12-22T18:09:37","modified_gmt":"2012-12-22T23:09:37","slug":"honoring-robert-bork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/honoring-robert-bork\/","title":{"rendered":"Honoring Robert Bork"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>

\"bork\"<\/a>This week, America said goodbye<\/a> to Judge Robert Bork, a giant of originalist thought, a stalwart champion of the unborn, and an early casualty of modern liberalism\u2019s love for defamation.<\/p>\n

Nominated to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, Bork was met with an overwhelming smear campaign by Senate Democrats and the press, who attempted to paint him as a dangerous extremist. The attack was most infamously captured in the late Senator Ted Kennedy\u2019s tirade<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Robert Bork\u2019s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens\u2019 doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of democracy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The result: rejection<\/a> by a 58-42 vote, his surname becoming a synonym<\/a> for partisan character assassination, and the pro-abortion<\/a> Justice Anthony Kennedy casting two decades\u2019 worth of votes in his place.<\/p>\n

Though unable to shape the country\u2019s legal direction, Bork spent the rest of his life making valuable contributions to American policy and thought, exploring law, philosophy, and culture on the lecture circuit<\/a>, in print<\/a>, and as a judicial adviser<\/a> to Mitt Romney\u2019s presidential campaign.<\/p>\n

In the abortion chapter of Slouching Towards Gomorrah<\/a><\/i>, Bork demolished the constitutional legitimacy of the \u201cright to choose\u201d:<\/p>\n

The extra-constitutional individualism that undergirds the \u201cconstitutional\u201d right to abortion was made clearest in the joint opinion of three Justices in Planned Parenthood v. Casey<\/em>. These Justices, whose votes created a majority to sustain most of Roe<\/em>, invented a heretofore unheard-of constitutional right to \u201cpersonal dignity and autonomy.\u201d They attempted to explain the appearance of this previously unsuspected right by saying: \u201cAt the heart of liberty is the right to define one\u2019s own conception of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.\u201d Beliefs about such matters were said to define \u201cpersonhood,\u201d which is to be protected from state compulsion. It is not recorded that any American government, from the founding on, has ever thought it worthwhile to compel anyone\u2019s concept of meaning or of the mystery of human life. What this judicial grandiloquence means, aside from a right to have an abortion, nobody knows. But then hymns to radical individualism are necessarily murky and obscure. This particular one is known in the trade as \u201cthe mystery passage.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2026revealed that he too was a pro-life convert:<\/p>\n

For years I adopted, without bothering to think, the attitude common among secular, affluent, university-educated people who took the propriety of abortion for granted, even when it was illegal. The practice\u2019s illegality, like that of drinking alcohol during Prohibition, was thought to reflect merely unenlightened prejudice or religious conviction, the two being regarded as much the same. From time to time, someone would say that it was a difficult moral problem, but there was rarely any doubt how the problem should be resolved. I remember a woman at Yale saying, without any disagreement from those around her, that \u201cThe fetus isn\u2019t nothing, but I am for the mother\u2019s right to abort it.\u201d I probably nodded. Most of us had a vague and unexamined notion that while the fetus wasn\u2019t nothing, it was also not fully human. The slightest reflection would have suggested that non-human or semi-human blobs of tissue do not magically turn into human beings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2026and warned of abortion\u2019s broader implications for society:<\/p>\n

The systematic killing of unborn children in huge numbers is part of a general disregard for human life that has been growing for some time. Abortion by itself did not cause that disregard, but it certainly deepens and legitimates the nihilism that is spreading in our culture and finds killing for convenience acceptable. We are crossing lines, at first slowly and now with rapidity: killing unborn children for convenience; removing tissue from live fetuses; contemplating creating embryos for destruction in research; considering taking organs from living anencephalic babies; experimenting with assisted suicide; and contemplating euthanasia. Abortion has coarsened us. If it is permissible to kill the unborn human for convenience, it is surely permissible to kill those thought to be soon to die for the same reason. And it is inevitable that many who are not in danger of imminent death will be killed to relieve their families of burdens. Convenience is becoming the theme of our culture. Humans tend to be inconvenient at both ends of their lives.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Though the Democrat majority<\/a> in the 100th<\/sup> Congress means that Bork\u2019s confirmation would have been unlikely in any case, the left\u2019s success in demagoging him helped earn \u201cborking\u201d a permanent spot in their tactical arsenal. Since then, no lie has been too foul for a liberal to level against someone he disagrees with or for the press to unquestioningly magnify, too often getting their way by intimidating enough people into submission rather than by winning arguments.<\/p>\n

In the wake of Robert Bork\u2019s death, only one course can fully honor his memory: stand up to the brand of demagoguery that bears his name and delegitimize those who would personally destroy good people in the name of partisanship or ideology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A judicial giant, and a pro-life convert to boot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":54,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nHonoring Robert Bork - Live Action News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/honoring-robert-bork\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Honoring Robert Bork - Live Action News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A judicial giant, and a pro-life convert to boot.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/honoring-robert-bork\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Live Action News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/liveaction\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2012-12-22T19:10:09+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2012-12-22T23:09:37+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/march_group_photo_og-1-700x467.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"700\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"467\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Calvin Freiburger\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@liveaction\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@liveaction\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Calvin Freiburger\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/honoring-robert-bork\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/honoring-robert-bork\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Calvin Freiburger\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/#\/schema\/person\/6eb2bf94c8064b71953ba137bf413c4d\"},\"headline\":\"Honoring Robert Bork\",\"datePublished\":\"2012-12-22T19:10:09+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2012-12-22T23:09:37+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/honoring-robert-bork\/\"},\"wordCount\":906,\"commentCount\":4,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/#organization\"},\"articleSection\":[\"Politics\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/honoring-robert-bork\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/honoring-robert-bork\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/honoring-robert-bork\/\",\"name\":\"Honoring Robert Bork - 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