<p>I would like to know why Roe v. Wade is always played as the be all and end all of the qualifications of a supreme court justice.</p>
<p>Laura, because you know “lots of people” who died (a number that I feel safe in assuming is not actually “lots”) does not mean you can speak with authority on anything. Also, this is not an article (post #11). No one wants Bush to have “unlimited power”. Your phone calls are not being listened to. I feel that you are misguided.</p>
<p>Browninfall - if it’s true that 30% of Americans don’t want Alito confirmed, that means that a majority of Democrats don’t want him confirmed. (I’m taking the obvious leap of logic that the 30% are also democrats)</p>
<p>The Dems in Congress would be listening to their constiuency (the majority of it, anyway) if they vote to deny his nomination.</p>
<p>Soccer guy- the media plays up the Roe v. Wade issue. The congressmen and women who object to Alito are basing their objections on more than that. The biggest issue is Alito’s philosophy regarding presidential power vs. congressional and judicial power. It appears from previous statements and rulings that he puts the executive branch above the other two brances of government, and would do so in the future. You can see how that might be of concern to one of those branches - especially in light of current events.</p>
<p>Re: Roe v. Wade.</p>
<p>Please, before commenting upon it, read the decision. Then read Sandra Day O’Connor’s Casey decision, in which she describes Roe as being on a collision course with itself. </p>
<p>Other countries have sane abortion laws - mostly because they are laws - you know, actual legislation. They don’t have the controversies that we do. They also don’t have the insane pregnancy rates. Perhaps some people realize that, in the wake of Roe, we’ve chosen for ourselves a barbaric form of birth control and deemed it a fundamental right. </p>
<p>One of the basic standards for overruling precedent is lack of functionality of that precedent. No one can really think that Roe works. The courts have wrestled with what it means. It is very difficult for seven justices, writing about the case before them, to implement what is in effect legislation that affects everyone in the country. We have an unalienable right to abortion in the first trimester… unless there’s an undue burden, but we don’t even know what that is; we have state regulation in the second and third trimesters, but that’s limited by various other clauses… does anyone stop to think that there’s a better way to make this policy?</p>
<p>AriesAthena, I’m going to slice through the Gordion Knot: I’ll probably have to stipulate all the defects you ascribe to Roe v. Wade. But the overarching picture is that the drive to overturn Roe v. Wade is part of a larger agenda of many that includes restricting/eliminating birth control (other than abstinence) and restricting/eliminating sex education (except for abstinence-based). The would-be American ayahtollahs are not content to live their narrow sectarian beliefs for themselves as is their right, though I have pity for their children, they wish to impose their will on the rest of us and up with that I will not put.</p>
<p>My hand will be steady in opposition and with any luck at all by my hand I will help drive these would-be ayahtollahs back into the darkness with the vermin and cockroaches where they belong. Like vermin and cockroaches, they will never go away but they’ll keep looking for cracks to slip through.</p>
<p>Dad, nice try to hang the most extreme radical tag on anyone against abortion. It’s BS.</p>
<p>
An orgasmatron statement, if I’ve ever heard one. Get him in an MRI for one of these tests.
<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/science/24find.html?_r=1[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/science/24find.html?_r=1</a>
Oh–Strunk & White, too.</p>
<p>Worrying about the “ayahtollahs” eliminating things like birth control is about as productive as worrying about the far-left nutcakes who want to eliminate the military. It ain’t gonna happen.</p>
<p>Barrons: by their fruits so ye shall know them. It’s a continual fabric: against abortion, against birth control, against, sex education, against teaching of evolution. The activist corps is of one mind. It matters not if a few individuals here and there. And the numbers far outweigh FF’s implied equivalence with the nutcakes who want to eliminate the military; among the dozens of people I know who are anti-Bush, anti-Bush’s Iraq policy who believe so.</p>
<p>tut tut TD - once again violating CC rules of conduct. Such incivility from someone who tries so hard to maintain the image of a suave, urbane intellectual. But, then again images are just that.</p>
<p>Wow! Sounds like those pleasure neurons are firing today, TD…Don’t get yourself pulled over for PUI. :)</p>
<p>When all else fails, go with the ad hominem attacks. Right out of the Dems playbook. Very classy and very predictable.</p>
<p>The Dad, you are quite frankly full of it. If I attibuted every anti-meat anti-fur anti-growth, anti-car, anti-business, anti-Israel, anti-gun, pro-tax, pro-socialism, etc. thought to every Democrat, I’d sound as dumb as you.</p>
<p>OK, OK, let’s make this useful for science. Everyone needs to take their laptops to the local MRI, and check their brains’ pleasure centers for activity. Now would be the time.
</p>
<p>I think we can all agree that there is something downright insane about eliminating birth control - returning to a pre-Griswold era.</p>
<p>I really do, however, think that there are shreds of truth in what a lot of the uber-conservatives are saying. Your generation raised my generation - and it’s kind of sad to see the long-term effects of the sexual revolution. People use evolutionary biology to give a pass to men and pretend that they can’t restrain themselves (which is complete insanity - there is no rational reason why men and women would have different sexual drives, because there is the exact same chance of pregnancy when a man has sex and when a woman has sex. It’s not like women always get pregnant but men sometimes get women pregnant; let’s also not forget that prehistoric families did not follow the nuclear family model that arose during the mid-nineteenth century. Much more likely was that all members of a clan were provided for - to do otherwise would be certain death. But I digress.). We teach young men that condom use is the beginning and end of sexual responsibility. In the rush to encourage women’s sexuality, we are turning women into men - instead of teaching men the “women’s” values of sex as an act that brings people together - something that is less special the more it is done. You’re never going to hear a liberal telling a young man that he can’t sleep around and then make love to his soul mate. </p>
<p>A lot of the pro-abortion movement highlights how little we value women as mothers - in the same way that American businesses do not value women as mothers. </p>
<p>I hang around with a lot of conservatives. Many of them have some wonderfully refreshing thoughts: that no one said that abstinence is easy, but that’s not an excuse. Most of them are not against birth control per se. They don’t want it taught in schools. In some respects, there is some cognative dissonance there… but it’s also because, as always, liberal policy makers are too busy laughing at conservatives to figure out how to speak to their values. If I were a sociologist, I would probably characterize high school sex ed as being on a “Pre-marital sex, promiscuous, anti-pregnancy with overtones of physicality” model (or something like that!). Basically, modern sex ed is taught based on a few presumptions: that teaching abstinence does not work at all; that the kids are going to have sex before marriage and need birth control; that they will be having sex with partners who are likely infected; and that they will have sex with multiple partners throughout their life times. How about teaching them the same “stuff” (i.e. condoms v. the pill v. whatever) with a different slant? Would it kill liberal policy makers to point out that even those people who wait for marriage aren’t going to want a baby per year for 30 years? Would it really hurt them to point out that we teach children about sex ed because married couples use contraception? But nooo… God forbid that the liberal left re-frame sex ed as something useful for anyone, even those repressed enough to wait until marriage. </p>
<p>Maybe I’m biased. Maybe I’m totally not looking forward to telling the boy I’ve been seeing for a week that certain things aren’t happening. Maybe I feel like taking over/under bets on being dumped at the time. Maybe I’m cynical - but the current liberal agenda stinks. Its extremism is the cause of the backlash. </p>
<p>Barrons: I’m a vegetarian. 
</p>
<p>(One more comment: it cracks me up that the left has more compassion for a scallop than a baby.)</p>
<p>Browninfall, your party and your president do thinks like morph Max Cleland into Osama bin Laden, Swift Boat John Kerry, and accuse anyone who doesn’t click their heels and salute Bush in the name of state security as being soft on terrorism…and you have the nerve to critique <em>my</em> rhetoric? G’wan with ya.</p>
<p>Barrons, nice try but no dice. Show me any Democratic-supporting organization comparable to Focus on the Family, Family Research Counsel, etc., with leaders like James Dobson, Ralph Reed, Pat Roberston, etc., who are a mainstay of the electoral machine for the Democratic party as they are for the GOP. Got news for you and Browninfall…as you would have done, so is going to be done to you. One of these days you’re finally going to reap the whirlwind. You guys really think that you’re going to be in power forever…all the “mandate” propaganda must have been internalized very deeply.</p>
<p>Aries, your response is coherent and literate. But (no surprise), I disagree at several key points. Certainly I believe in sex education that says “To have sex is okay. To not have sex is also okay.” And to couple physical responsibilities with emotional ones, knowing that there is wide range of attitudes among both sexes with respect to the latter. There may be problems with sex-ed…I don’t know…but “abstinence based” sex ed, promoted by the conservatives, is the imposition of a narrow religious belief on everyone…and an imposition of ignorance as well. </p>
<p>The conservative phalanx is attacking on all fronts, from encouraging pharmacists not to fill birth control proscriptions, to sabotaging the FDA approval of “morning after” pills, to assuming that all young women live in Ozzie and Harriet-style familes where parental permission is required for an abortion (aka “incest protection provisions”) etc. And they think that nobody has noticed.</p>
<p>It is entirely possible to have a liberal attitude about sex and still value women…in all ways. Many conservatives start with motherhood and then stop there, with a large majority having the stay-at-home ideal not only for themselves but to be imposed on others by making childcare, working conditions, etc., as difficult as possible. </p>
<p>Conservatives have the right to live by any set of sexual values they wish. But they and their ayahtollahs have no right to impose their values on the rest of us. You may not like the current cultural norms. You don’t have to adhere to them. I like to think there’s room for independence in all spheres.</p>
<p>Btw, Aries, I think you might lose a bet on your notion about everyone agreeing that they don’t want to go back to pre-Griswold. You might want to gather responses from your fellow conservatives on where they stand about access to birth control.</p>
<p>What it really boils down to is how quickly and eagerly people will throw away their rights (and the rights of everyone else) to grab and retain extreme power.</p>
<p>It’s nothing new in history. </p>
<p>Americans have always thought we are above that; that the concept of an imperial presidency and a complete lack of checks and balances is unthinkable. It just proves what a young and naive country we really are.</p>
<p>We are close to changing the most fundamental bases of our democracy. And clearly, the radical right has nothing to lose right now but only to gain. The only time they’ll regret it will be at some point in the future when they are no longer the ones in power.</p>
<p>Sadly, Americans are really no different from anybody else. Once in power there is an overwhelming urge to stay in power no matter the cost; squash dissent, engage in corruption, control the media, practice deceit and secretiveness as main policies, use extremely divisive partisanship tactics, torture and illegally imprison real and imaginary enemies, and conquer through brute military force.</p>
<p>Sorry to sound dramatic, but this stuff really scares me. I sincerely fear for the future of our great country.</p>
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</p>
<p>Right, because the GOP and its supporters [is</a> far above mudslinging.](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Horton]is”>Willie Horton - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>It’s hard being a liberal nowadays. Out of power in the place that it really matters. Sure, there’s the NYT and academia, but in DC where it really counts the liberals have lost the hold on power that they had for decades. They’re angry and obviously very frustrated. As a result they say sillier and more mean spirited things. Alito will be confirmed and, who knows, President Bush may get a chance to appoint one or two more. It’s all very unnerving to the liberal crowd.</p>
<p>Of course, some Repubs sling mud, but let’s be serious they’re pikers compared to the Dems. Look at the over the top remarks that come out of the mouths of the left on a daily basis. How many times can a liberal call Bush “Hitler” or the “Gestapo”? And “liar”…that one’s a favorite. It’s gotten to the point that all it does is elicit nothing more than a yawn from not only conservatives but your average Joe as well.
I mean it’s “Hitler” or “liar” all the time. Since no one pays any attention except other liberals, the liberals are mad.</p>
<p>At least three more years of hell…probably more…and now even moving to Canada isn’t an option! Disconcerting indeed.</p>