Today (January 22) marks the 45th
anniversary of the US Supreme Court’s (SCOTUS) landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion-on-demand in America …
as a woman’s right (never mind the unborn child). Since then, it has resulted in an all-out
assault on the family.
After Roe v. Wade, plaintiff Norma McCorvey, became a Christian and
revealed that she had not been gang-raped … as her legal team had claimed –
which means this ruling was based on a lie.
So was the companion case of Doe
v. Bolton. Plaintiff Sandra Cano
said her attorneys tricked her into signing a statement seeking an abortion … something
she says she did not want. In 2005, she
told a congressional hearing, “Doe v. Bolton is based on a lie and deceit. It needs to be retried or overturned.”
But the deceptions didn’t begin with
Roe and Doe. The SCOTUS’s creation and
abuse of a “right to privacy” … not found anywhere in the US Constitution … was
hatched in a series of cases in the mid-1960s and early ’70s.
Here’s how they pulled it off:
In Griswold
v.Connecticut (1965), the SCOTUS struck down a Connecticut law forbidding
contraception sales even to married couples. The justices could have done so on the grounds
that it was an anachronistic law that few observed or enforced. Instead, they chose to create a constitutional
“right to privacy” … basing it on the sanctity of marriage and grounding it in
the heretofore unknown “penumbra” of constitutional rights. “We deal with a right of privacy older than
the Bill of Rights – older than our political parties, older than our school
systems,” wrote Justice William O. Douglas in Griswold. “Marriage is a coming together for better or
worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred,” said
Douglas. Ironically, the
four-time-married Douglas went on to do as much as any justice to demolish
protections for life, marriage and decency.
If the SCOTUS had stopped at Griswold’s
celebration of marriage, it might even have shored up the status of the family
in the nation’s laws. The SCOTUS “could have
filled the gap left by the Founding Fathers [who made no mention of family in
the Constitution] by serving as the starting point for a new family-oriented reading
of the Constitution,” wrote the late Michael Schwartz in The Supreme Court of the United States versus the American Family. “But that is not how constitutional
interpretation developed, wrote Schwartz.
Instead, the justices engineered the most consequential bait-and-switch
in legal history: They shifted the moral capital of the “sanctity of marriage”
to unmarried relationships and then to individuals and finally to “marriages” …
without even a bride.
In 1972, another contraception case
made it to the high court. Bill Baird,
who went on to run abortion clinics, challenged a Massachusetts law against
selling birth control devices to unmarried couples. In Eisenstadt
v. Baird, the SCOTUS dishonestly appropriated Griswold’s recognition of the
sacredness of marriage. In Eisenstadt,
the SCOTUS threw the right of privacy as an expression of the sanctity of
marriage and priority of the family over the state overboard, and made privacy
a purely individual right.
The very next year (1973), in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the SCOTUS once again misused the “right of privacy”
established through the sanctity of marriage in order to strike down all state
laws against abortion. The radical
nature of Roe and Doe went even beyond establishing a “right” to abortion – It launched
a legal revolution against the family. “The
legalization of abortion represents an extreme form of imbalance in the
relation of the individual to the family, permitting one family member to kill another,”
Schwartz wrote, “and it marks the first instance in our legal history since the
Roman Republic that intra-family killing has been tolerated by the public
authority.”
Using more legal sleight-of-hand, the SCOTUS
obliterated fathers’ rights to have a say in whether their sons or daughters
were aborted. And in another series of cases,
the SCOTUS created “children's rights” … including the right of a minor girl to
obtain an abortion without the consent of her parents or in some instances
without even notifying them.
By 2015, after reducing families to an
afterthought, the SCOTUS was ready in Obergefell
v. Hodges to create a new constitutional “right” to same-sex ‘marriage’ –
the final assault on the family.
With the “right to privacy” and
individual autonomy firmly established, people also began to assert the “right”
to kill themselves or assist others to do so. By 2017, several states – California, Colorado,
Montana, Oregon, Vermont and Washington (plus Washington, DC) had legalized the
brave new world of physician-assisted suicide … which is ripe for abuse.
My friends: We need to re-establish a
culture of life in America … by these terrible wrongs that are based on lies
and deceit. A good start would be
overturning Roe v. Wade.
Rev.
Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.
Chaplain
(Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army
Pastor, Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel
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