Eminent Domain

I took a break from reading and ended up on YouTube. I kill way too much time on that darn website. Anyway, I found a bunch of video clips about the Supreme Court's recent Gonzales v Carhart decision. Some are actually pretty interesting. Note that I said "some."

Here's the This Week roundtable with George Stephanopoulos, George Will, Cokie Roberts, and Sam Donaldson. Donaldson wrongly says that Kennedy changed his vote from Stenberg. Cokie's offended by Kennedy's paternalist streak. George Will points out that Roe's original trimester scheme would've been screwed if the human gestation period was a prime number of months. You know, I never thought about it that way. Justice Blackmun really lucked out that "9 months" could be broken down into even sections.


Here is the rundown from Fox News. They hit the highlights of the case, have two talking heads from a pro-life and pro-choice group, and video of former Justice O'Connor is the reddest of outfits.


This video is from an outfit called Pro-Life News. This fellow was at the Court when the decision came down and has some video of the protesters. The music is painfully bad.


Ahh, The View. I think that this is probably the worst show on television. Maybe that's just the Y chromosome talking, though. Rosie O'Donnell is her usual self. She brays on about "the mother's life is at risk" (3:00 mark), and then gets slapped down because there is an exception in the ban for the life of the mother (there is no health exception in the ban though). She quickly switches gears to the "they're comin' for Roe!" line in order to cover her mistake.

Then she accuses the 5-vote, all-Catholic majority of breaking down the separation between church and state with their ruling. There's a lot of that going around lately. We all know that only a Catholic Justice would sign on to a decision that limited abortion rights... well, maybe a Lutheran from Shorewood would sign on too... or maybe an Episcopalian who played for the Lions would agree as well. Hmm, I'm pretty sure that those two weren't taking direction from the Vatican.

In any event, I hope Rosie realizes two things: 1. Justice Kennedy supports abortion rights (just not unlimited ones) so Roe isn't going anywhere, and 2. there are many people who reject the idea of a Constitutional right to an abortion based solely on the text and history of the Constitution, not based their religion.

It's always interesting to watch people talk about the Court, especially lay people. It can be depressing at times, but I'm always curious to see what they have to say.