The Supreme Masters of Sophistry: Unable to Admit the Fifth Commandment Exists

Fasten your seat belts. This is going to be quite a long ride, shall we say.

All right. Enough the poetry. I am prosaic, not poetic.

The Supreme Masters of Sophistry were at it again on Wednesday, December 1, 2021, as they heard oral arguments in the case of Thomas Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, et al. v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, et al. After having read the entirety of the official transcript found on the website of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, my only real, substantive comment about this mass of sophistic verbiage is summarized in the title of this commentary: “What is difficult or opaque about Thou Shalt Not Kill?”

The Court’s entire exercise on December 1, 2021, was both completely unnecessary as it was a predictable consequence of a Constitution that admits of no higher authority for its interpretation other than the words of its own text, which are as malleable in the hands of atheistic legal positivists, whether admitted or not (Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, an apostate from the Catholic Faith), and just plain legal positivists (Associate Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer) as Sacred Scripture is in the hands of Protestants of any variety and, of course, in the hands of Modernists of any size, shape, or description, including the Jacobin/Bolshevik Modernist named Jorge Mario Bergoglio or his immediate predecessor, the Girondist/Menshevik named Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI.

As has been noted so many times before on this website as well as in my college teaching career, in the pages of The Wanderer, Christ or Chaos when it was a printed journal from 1996 to 2004, The Remnant, Celebrate Life, and Catholic Family News, no human being, whether acting individually or collectively with others in the institutions of civil governance has any authority to dispense with the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. We are duty bound to observe those binding precepts lest we imperil our eternal salvation and also imperil the common temporal good of our communities and nations, which depend upon the right ordering of souls in accordance therewith.

Men whose souls were rightly formed and informed by the Catholic Faith and who lived in a nation whose laws are rightly ordered in light of First and Last Things as in exist in the nature of things and/or have been revealed to men positively by God in Divine Revelation and entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church for their infallible explication and eternal safekeeping would never be engaged in arguments about the nonexistent “legitimacy” of willful murder, including the chemical and/or surgical execution of the innocent preborn, or contraception, or sodomy or any other of the myriad number of moral perversities that have arisen precisely as a consequence of the Protestant Revolution’s overthrow of the Divine Plan that God instituted to effect man’s return to Him through His Catholic Church. Behold the follies of vain, proud, and arrogant men and women who have come to the forefront because their nations make no room for Christ the King and His true Church, leaving them the playgrounds of the adversary and his minions, who never cease to prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls nor to cease to tickle the itching ears of their fellow men with fables designed to lead them into hell individually and to lead their nations into ruin.

Even though I will concede that there is a possibility that, despite my own firmly-held belief to  the contrary, the decision in Roe v. Wade might be reversed in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, although I think that Chief Justice John Roberts Glover, Jr., will do everything imaginable to keep it in place while upholding the Mississippi statute limiting the surgical execution of most—but not all babies—after the fifteenth week of baby’s development inside the sanctuary his mother’s womb, the premise for such a reversal will be fallacious and thus dangerous. The fallacious premise upon which Roe v. Wade might be reversed as a result of the Supreme Court of the United States of America’s decision in six months in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is that the Constitution is “neutral” or “silent” about abortion, thus making it a matter for the people to “decide,” whether through an electoral plebiscite, the provisions of individual state constitutions or legislation enacted by the elected representatives of the people in state legislatures.

Wrong.

Wrong.

Wrong.

Wrong.

Wrong.

Although I have made an argument on purely constitutional grounds alone that preborn life is protected by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment’s provisions that no one shall be deprived of his life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, meaning that the Constitution is not “neutral” about the direct, intentional taking of innocent human life, the fact remains that no human institution of civil governance has any authority to permit, whether entirely or on a “limited” basis, the surgical execution of the innocent preborn. That is, neither the people nor their elected representatives have any authority to squat about the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment other than determining what penalties should be applied to those who violate them. Period. End of discussion.

Governments founded on secular, naturalistic, religiously indifferentist principles perforce must degenerate over the course of time to the point where sentimentality, irrationality, emotionalism, and utter sophistry pass for legal argumentation and jurisprudential reasoning.

Consider the case of one Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor while she was questioning the counsel for the State of Mississippi, Scott Stewart, who is the Solicitor General (the chief litigator) of the State of Mississippi:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: I -- I -- I don't see how it is possible. It's what Casey talked about when it talked about watershed decisions. Some of them, Brown versus Board of Education it mentioned, and this one have such an entrenched set of expectations in our society that this is what the Court decided, this is what we will follow, that the -- that we won't be able to survive if people believe that everything, including New York versus Sullivan -- I could name any other set of rights, including the Second Amendment, by the way. There are many political people who believe the Court erred in seeing this as a personal right as -- as opposed to a militia right. If people actually believe that it's all political, how will we survive? How will the Court survive?) (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

An Interjection Number and Quite Relevant Digression

It is important to remember that Judge Sonia Sotomayor, some might recall, was nominated by then President Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, not because she was an expert in constitutional law but because she was dedicated to using the Constitution of the United States of America as a sort of carte blanche for social engineering according to the perceived “needs” of “real” people.

Come with me now into the Christ or Chaos Wayback Machine for proof of this very important point that gets to the heart of Justice Sotomayor’s arrogant, hostile line of questioning of Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart. Here is what Caesar Emeritus Obama/Soetoro said on May 26, 2009, when he nominated Judge Sotomayor to replace the completely pro-abortion David H. Souter, who was an appointee of the “pro-life” George Herbert Walker Bush in 1990:

First and foremost is a rigorous intellect -- a mastery of the law, an ability to hone in on the key issues and provide clear answers to complex legal questions.  Second is a recognition of the limits of the judicial role, an understanding that a judge's job is to interpret, not make, law; to approach decisions without any particular ideology or agenda, but rather a commitment to impartial justice; a respect for precedent and a determination to faithfully apply the law to the facts at hand.

These two qualities are essential, I believe, for anyone who would sit on our nation's highest court.  And yet, these qualities alone are insufficient.  We need something more.  For as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience."  Experience being tested by obstacles and barriers, by hardship and misfortune; experience insisting, persisting, and ultimately overcoming those barriers.  It is experience that can give a person a common touch and a sense of compassion; an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live.  And that is why it is a necessary ingredient in the kind of justice we need on the Supreme Court. (Remarks of Caesar Obamus.) 

Barack Hussein Obama's use of "respect for precedent" has nothing to do with a respect for the words of the Constitution of the United States of America in the things that appertain to Caesar and thus are within the realm of men to determine for themselves, keeping mind, as men must do at all times and in all circumstances, the greater honor and glory of God and the good of souls. No, Obama's invocation of a "respect for precedent" (stare decisis, "let the decision stand") has everything to do with "respect" the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973. Although Judge Sotomayor has ruled infrequently in cases involving abortion--and none involving any direct challenges to the core findings held by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton), the fact that Obama went out of the way to mention "a respect for precedent" is a very good indication that he considers her to be a "safe pick" to continue David Souter's legacy of blood on the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

It is also interesting to point out that, apart from referring to his own duties under the Constitution and the fact that he had consulted with "constitutional" scholars and that Judge Sotomayor had herself dealt with "constitutional" issues in her years as a Federal judge, Caesar Obamus did not make one single reference to the Constitution itself. Why should he have done so? After all, a document that admits of no higher authority than the text of its own words as the foundation of social order contains the seeds of its own dissolution into irrelevancy as "experience" trumps "logic" and any consideration of an objective morality founded in the precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. This kind of subjectivism is one of the major linkages between the errors of Modernity and those of Modernism, as will be explored yet again, if ever so briefly, at the conclusion of this commentary.

Caesar Obamus's invocation of the penultimate legal positivist, Oliver Wendell Holmes (I always preferred Oliver Wendell Douglas of Green Acres), is quite a telling commentary as Holmes believed the majority had the "right" to enforce its "will" upon the minority by "force" if necessary. He made this abundantly clear in the case of Buck v. Bell, May 2, 1927, in which he wrote a thoroughly utilitarian opinion justifying a compulsory sterilization law that has been passed by the state legislature of the Commonwealth of Virginia:

The judgment finds the facts that have been recited and that Carrie Buck 'is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization,' and thereupon makes the order. In view of the general declarations of the Legislature and the specific findings of the Court obviously we cannot say as matter of law that the grounds do not exist, and if they exist they justify the result. We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 , 25 S. Ct. 358, 3 Ann. Cas. 765. Three generations of imbeciles are enough. [274 U.S. 200, 208]   But, it is said, however it might be if this reasoning were applied generally, it fails when it is confined to the small number who are in the institutions named and is not applied to the multitudes outside. It is the usual last resort of constitutional arguments to point out shortcomings of this sort. But the answer is that the law does all that is needed when it does all that it can, indicates a policy, applies it to all within the lines, and seeks to bring within the lines all similarly situated so far and so fast as its means allow. Of course so far as the operations enable those who otherwise must be kept confined to be returned to the world, and thus open the asylum to others, the equality aimed at will be more nearly reached. (See the text of the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of  Buck v. Bell)

Oliver Wendell Holmes's view of law was indeed based on "experience" and not "logic." He used the discredited, diabolical precepts of utilitarianism (public policy must be based upon the "greatest good" for the "greatest number" even if "traditional" concepts of morality are violated in the process) and the sort of Social Darwinism that was near and dear to the heart of the woman who started the Birth Control League, Margaret Sanger (whose motto was, "More from the fit, less from the unfit; that is the chief issue of birth control"), as the foundation for his decision in the case of Buck v. Bell. Indeed, Holmes's overt rejection of the Natural Law as the foundation of jurisprudence (legal reasoning) and the civil law in favor of legal positivism extended quite explicitly to a rejection of the inviolability of innocent human life under of cover of the civil law, as Holmes made clear in a 1918 essay against the Natural Law in the Harvard Law Review:

The most fundamental of the supposed preexisting rights—the right to life—is sacrificed without a scruple not only in war, but whenever the interest of society, that is, of the predominant power in the community, is thought to demand it. Whether that interest is the interest of mankind in the long run no one can tell, and as, in any event, to those who do not think with Kant and Hegel it is only an interest, the sanctity disappears. I remember a very tender-hearted judge being of opinion that closing a hatch to stop a fire and the destruction of a cargo was justified even if it was known that doing so would stifle a man below. It is idle to illustrate further, because to those who agree with me I am uttering commonplaces and to those who disagree I am ignoring the necessary foundations of thought. The a priori men generally call the dissentients superficial. But I do agree with them in believing that one’s attitude on these matters is closely connected with one’s general attitude toward the universe. Proximately, as has been suggested, it is determined largely by early associations and temperament, coupled with the desire to have an absolute guide. Men to a great extent believe what they want to—although I see in that no basis for a philosophy that tells us what we should want to want.

Now when we come to our attitude toward the universe I do not see any rational ground for demanding the superlative—for being dissatisfied unless we are assured that our truth is cosmic truth, if there is such a thing—that the ultimates of a little creature on this little earth are the last word of the unimaginable whole. If a man sees no reason for believing that significance, consciousness and ideals are more than marks of the finite, that does not justify what has been familiar in French skeptics; getting upon a pedestal and professing to look with haughty scorn upon a world in ruins. The real conclusion is that the part cannot swallow the whole—that our categories are not, or may not be, adequate to formulate what we cannot know. If we believe that we come out of the universe, not it out of us, we must admit that we do not know what we are talking about when we speak of brute matter. We do know that a certain complex of energies can wag its tail and another can make syllogisms. These are among the powers of the unknown, and if, as may be, it has still greater powers that we cannot understand, as Fabre in his studies of instinct would have us believe, studies that gave Bergson one of the strongest strands for his philosophy and enabled Maeterlinck to make us fancy for a moment that we heard a clang from behind phenomena—if this be true, why should we not be content? Why should we employ the energy that is furnished to us by the cosmos to defy it and shake our fist at the sky? It seems to me silly. (Natural Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes)

One of the many paradoxes found in a system where a nation's constitution and civil laws, whether passed at the Federal or state levels, do not explicitly acknowledge the primacy of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as these have been entrusted to the infallible teaching authority of the Catholic Church, is that it spawns competing teams of naturalists and positivists to vie with each other as to whether they will be bound by a "strict constructionist" approach to the interpretation of the words of the United States Constitution or bound only by a general, Rousseauean sense of "experience," referred to quite specifically by the legal positivist Barack Hussein Obama, that was described as follows by the late Father Denis Fahey in The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World:

Rousseau carries on the revolution against the order of the world begun by Luther. Luther’s revolt was that of our individuality and sense-life against the exigencies of the supernatural order instituted by God. It was an attempt to remain attached to Christ, while rejecting the order established by Christ for our return to God. Rousseau’s revolt was against the order of natural morality, by the exaltation of the primacy of our sense-life.

The little world of each one of us, our individuality, is a divine person, supremely free and sovereignly independent of all order, natural and supernatural. he state of Liberty or of sovereign independence is the primitive state of man, and the nature of man demands the restoration of that state of liberty. It is to satisfy this-called exigency that ‘Father of modern thought’ invented the famous myth of the Social Contract.

The Social Contract gives birth to a form of association in which each one, while forming a union with all the others, obeys only himself and remains as free as before. Each one is subject to the whole, but he is not subject to any man, there is no man above him. He is absorbed in the common Ego begotten in the pact, so that obeying the law, he obeys only himself. Each citizen votes in order, that by the addition of the number of votes, the general will, expressed by the vote of the majority, is, so to say, a manifestation of the ‘deity’ immanent in the multitude. The People are God (no wonder we have gotten used to writing the word with a capital letter). The law imposed by this ‘deity’ does not need to be just in order to exact obedience. In fact, the majority vote makes or creates right and justice. An adverse majority vote can not only overthrow the directions and commands of the Heads of the Mystical Body on earth, the Pope and the Bishops, but can even deprive the Ten Commandments of all binding force.

To the triumph of those ideals in the modern world, the Masonic denial of original sin and the Rousseauist dogma of the natural goodness of man have contributed not a little. The dogma of natural goodness signifies that man lived originally in a purely natural paradise of happiness and goodness and that, even in our present degraded state, all our instinctive movements are good. We do not need grace, for nature can do for what grace does. In addition, Rousseau holds that this state of happiness and goodness, of perfect justice and innocence, of exemption from servile work and suffering, is natural to man, that is, essentially demanded by our nature. Not only then is original sin nonexistent, not only do we not come into the world as fallen sons of the first Adam, bearing in us the wounds of our fallen nature, is radically anti-natural. Suffering and pain have been introduced by society, civilization and private property. Hence we must get rid of all these and set up a new form of society. We can bet back the state of the Garden of Eden by the efforts of our own nature, without the help of grace. For Rousseau, the introduction of the present form of society, and of private property constitute the real Fall. The setting up of a republic based on his principles will act as a sort of democratic grace which will restore in its entirety our lost heritage. In a world where the clear teaching of the faith of Christ about the supernatural order of the Life of Grace has become obscured, but were men are still vaguely conscious that human nature was once happy, Rousseau’s appeal acts like an urge of homesickness. We need not be astonished, then, apart from the question of Masonic-Revolutionary organization and propaganda, at the sort of delirious enthusiasm which takes possession of men at the thought of a renewal of society. Nor need we wonder that men work for the overthrow of existing government and existing order, in the belief that they are not legitimate forms of society. A State not constructed according to Rosseauist-Masonic principles is not a State ruled by laws. It is a monstrous tyranny, and must be overthrown in the name of "Progress" and of the "onward march of democracy.’ All these influences must be borne in mind as we behold, since 1789, the triumph in one country after another or Rousseauist-Masonic democracy. (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World.)

Thus, good readers, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s concern about the “political” survival of the Supreme Court of the United States of America if the Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade is reversed is purely emotional as Sotomayor believes that decisions that reflect her own personal predilections are infallible and thus irreversible whereas those that do not are completely fallible and reversible.

Translation: Yes, to unrestricted baby-killing.

Yes, to sodomy and all its seemingly endless perverse mutations.

Yes, to vaccine mandates.

Yes, to the surveillance state.

Yes, to anything the ever-mercurial false opposite of the naturalist “left” desires in the name of the “people,” a collectivity to which Communists of all varieties have always appealed to justify and then to codify their own totalitarian control.

Those decisions are “principled,” of course, in the mind of Sonia Sotomayor. Those that are not, of course, are “political,” disregarding the fact that, as one of the three branches of the government of the United States of America, the Supreme Court of the United States of America is indeed a political institution, and it is one that has been composed of justices who have long followed election returns.

This  which is why, following the nefarious Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s threat to pack the Court with justices who would uphold his unconstitutional, statist New Deal schemes, the case of National Labor Relations Board v. Jones and Laughlin Steel, which upheld the National Labor Relations Act, reversed a decision of only two years previously, Shechter Poultry Corporation v. United States, concerning the power of administrative entities to regulate an ever-broadening definition of what constituted “interstate commerce.” The justices of the Supreme Court of the United States of America had declared, quite correctly, of course, Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) to be unconstitutional.

Even though Roosevelt’s did not get his court packing legislation through Congress, the threat of doing so produced his desired results in NLRB v. Jones and Laughlin Steel.

My word, the Supreme Court of the United States of America was roundly criticized in the 1800s for various decisions. Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson both decried decisions made by the Court under the chief justiceship of John Marshall (1801-1835). Infamously, of course, the decisions of Warren Court (1953-1969) set the stage for the placing matters that are beyond the ability of mere humans to “decide” (contraception, abortion) into judicial footballs that permitted elected members of Congress to hide behind the justices’ black robes. Sonia Sotomayor doth protest a bit too much about “politics.”

One can see that Justice Sotomayor’s line of questioning is based solely on the outcome she desires that is in accord with a “right” invented arbitrarily by seven men and justified in a jurisprudential “throw in everything, including the kitchen sink” approach taken to legal positivism by the late architect of the Supreme Court of the United States of America as a veritable Temple of Doom, Harry Blackmun.

This is how Mississippi Solicitor General, who argued the case for his state’s attorney Lynn Fitch, replied to Justice Sotomayor’s first line of questioning:

MR. STEWART: Justice Sotomayor, I -- I think the concern about appearing political makes it absolutely imperative that the Court reach a decision well grounded in the Constitution, in text, structure, history, and tradition, and that carefully goes through the stare decisis factors that we've laid out. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Brief Interjection Number Three:

With all due respect, Mr. Stewart, how about saying something like this:

Madam Justice, the Court has never had any kind of authority from the true God of Divine Revelation to create a “right” to kill an innocent baby out of whole cloth. God is a majority of One. The Fifth Commandment, whose precepts are written onto the very flesh of human hearts, is clear: Thou shalt not kill.

Obviously, Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart did not argue in this manner as it is not possible in a nation that makes no provision for the Social Reign of Christ the King for immutable moral truth that exists in the nature  of things to be defended as the only means to understand the proper role of law and the binding limits upon men and their elected or appointed officials in upholding that which is not subject to human debate, modification, or repeal. It is also quite possibly the case that Scott Stewart would never even think to make such an argument as posited above. Naturalism (or secularism) has such a grip on the minds of even well-meaning men that they wind up arguing on the adversary’s terms, which in this case means accepting the legitimacy of contraception and of “exceptions” to the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment.

Back to the colloquy between Justice Sotomayor and Solicitor General Stewart:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Casey did that.

MR. STEWART: No, it didn't, Your Honor, respectfully.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Casey went through every one of them. You think it did it wrong. That's your belief. But Casey did that.

MR. STEWART: Well, Your –

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: And you haven't added –

MR. STEWART: Sorry, Your Honor.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: -- much to the discussion in your papers as to the errors that Casey made, other than "I disagree with Casey."

MR. STEWART: Well, Justice Sotomayor, maybe I can -- I can highlight two. Casey gave one paragraph to the workability of Roe. It then adopted the undue burden standard, which is perhaps the most unworkable standard in American law. It gave about three paragraphs, if memory serves, to reliance, which doesn't account for the last 30 years and the changes that have occurred since Casey. It did -- it -- it gave a brief factual view to things that have changed since Roe. Those, of course, are not going to take account of the last 30 years of advancements in medicine, science, all of those things.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: What are the –

JUSTICE ALITO: What is –

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: -- advancements in medicine?

MR. STEWART: I think it's an advancement in -- in knowledge and concern about such things as fetal pain, what we know the child is doing and looks like and is fully human from a very early –

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: You know –

MR. STEWART: I'm sorry.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: -- in -- in regular cases, courts decide whether science fits the Daubert standard. Obviously, the -- under the Daubert standard, the minority of people, a -- a gross minority of doctors who believe fetal pain exists before 24, 25 weeks, it's a huge minority and one not well founded in science at all.

So I don't see how that really adds anything to the discussion.

MR. STEWART: Well –

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: That a small fringe of doctors believe that pain could be experienced between -- before a cortex is formed.

MR. STEWART: Well, I -- doesn't mean that there's been that much of a difference since Casey.

MR. STEWART: We -- we pointed out as an example, Your Honor, of where Roe and Casey improperly preclude states from taking account for these things. And they should be able to be concerned about the -- about a fact of a -- a -- an unborn life being poked and then recoiling in the way one of us would recoil.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Sir, I -- I don't. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Brief Interjection Number Four:

For heartless, soulless people such as Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor have such darkened, deadened hearts that they must look at an innocent baby in his mother’s womb as a non-person even though each baby has his distinctive DNA from the moment of his conception and, though dependent upon his mother before birth for his nutrition and hydration as he will be until he is old enough to feed himself, is a unique human being made in the very image and likeness of God. Such cold cruelty is foreign to the nature of a woman.

While admitting full well that the ravages of the vestigial after-effects of Original Sin and of one’s Actual Sins can make turn any person, whether a man or a woman, into an unfeeling ideologue who is so fixed in a rejection of the Ten Commandments that he or she has no problem with the systematic destruction of a fellow human being whose only crime is having been conceived as a natural consequence of the gift that God has given to human beings to beget new life, the anti-Incarnational civil state of Modernity has produced a species of men who hate God and His laws, and who recoil only at the suggestion that there is a God Who commands, a God Who is ready to forgive but also a God Who will be unsparing in His Divine Judgment upon those who deny the humanity of His little ones and who do so with an arrogant abandon. This hatred of God becomes manifest in the way such heartless, soulless monsters deal contemptuously with those who believe that the binding precepts of the Ten Commandments and the Natural Law always apply to all men in all circumstances and that no human law, executive action, or judicial decision is above the Divine Law.

This having been noted, however, the whole matter of fetal pain is completely irrelevant to the simple fact that innocent human life is inviolable from the moment of conception of until death. Period. That well-meaning people such as Scott Stewart believe that it is necessary to discuss fetal pain and embryonic development is but a consequence of trying to argue about moral truth without making reference to the fact that there is a law above human law that binds the consciences of all and is the foundation of a just social order.

Moreover, arguing about fetal pain to someone as heartless and soulless as Sonia Sotomayor means nothing even on a natural level as ideologues will always refer to the demigod of “science” to claim that anyone who asserts the humanity of a preborn baby is on the “fringe” and is thus not a credible source of “science” and thus can be dismissed as “irrelevant” with impunity.

This is nothing new as efforts in 1984 by Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who had presided over 70,000 surgical abortions between 1970 and 1973 before quitting for purely scientific reasons after having been one of the leaders of the pro-abortion movement of the 1960s, to graphically illustrate the horror of a first trimester abortion in The Silent Scream did nothing to convince those with hardened hearts that they were wrong. Those with hardened hearts can only rarely be convinced by such evidence barring a miracle of Our Lady’s graces.

Indeed, it was precisely one week after I had debated one of the early leaders of the pro-death movement in the State of New York on March 19, 1985, at Hofstra University that the pro-life group that had organized the debate presented The Silent Scream. A whole variety of pro-aborts attending the presentation and were entirely unmoved, and one of them said “We don’t care” when a thirty year-old pro-life activist and teacher at an independent Catholic high school (Christ the King High School) in Middle Village, Queens, kept asking the question, “Is this human life.” The “we don’t care” answer of thirty-six years, nine mothers ago is precisely the same sentiment as expressed by the heartless, soulless Sonia Sotomayor on December 1, 2021.

Now, I provided the Sonia Sotomayor-Scott Stewart colloquy first before examining what came before it in the Supreme Court of the United States of America’s oral hearings in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization as it demonstrates the impossibility of arguing moral truth with one who believes that contingent beings who did not create themselves and whose bodies are destined one day for the corruption of the grave are the arbiters of morality and truth.

For his part, Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart, whom “conservative” commentators have praised for his opening remarks, his deft handling of adversarial questions and his closing rebuttal to the arguments, such as they were, advanced by the Solicitor General of the United States of America, Elizabeth Prelogar, a former law clerk to the late Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Associate Justice Elena Kagan.

Stewart had to argue against Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. William Casey’s “undue burden” standard and against the “viability” dicta that was created out of whole cloth by Associate Justice Harry Blackmun in Roe v. Wade while fending off questions about reversing a supposed “super precedent” that the Court’s decision in Roe represents to those who have a vested interest in protecting the surgical killing of the innocent preborn up to and including the day of birth, if not thereafter. Mr. Stewart was very well prepared to argue such matters while pointing out that Roe v. Wade was illogical and not grounded in the Constitution and that Planned Parenthood v. Casey was unworkable.

Once again, however, the fact remains that the necessity of having to argue about whether a state law that only partially restricts the surgical slaughter of the innocent preborn at all, no less to discuss “undue burden” and/or “viability” standards, is itself yet another proof of the inability of a written document that makes no reference to any authority other than the words of its own text to serve as any kind of safeguard or bulwark against the triumph of every kind of barbaric debauchery imaginable. To substitute the will of the “people,” expressed through plebiscites or through the actions of their elected representatives, for the law and the will of God is make the will of the adversary a permanent feature of one’s national life and so-called culture.

Having provided a preview of the most egregious line of questioning that took place during oral hearings in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on December 1, 2021, I want to review Scott Stewart’s opening arguments and then the line of questioning that followed thereafter, noting that I will not repeat the Justice Sotomayor’s initial questions for him:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: We will hear argument this morning in Case 19-1392, Dobbs versus Jackson Women's Health Organization. General Stewart.

ORAL ARGUMENT OF SCOTT G. STEWART ON BEHALF OF THE PETITIONERS MR. STEWART:

Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court: Roe versus Wade and Planned Parenthood versus Casey haunt our country. They have no basis in the Constitution. They have no home in our history or traditions. They've damaged the democratic process. They've poisoned the law. They've choked off compromise. For 50 years, they've kept this Court at the center of a political battle that it can never resolve. And 50 years on, they stand alone. Nowhere else does this Court recognize a right to end a human life. Consider this case: The Mississippi law here prohibits abortions after 15 weeks. The law includes robust exceptions for a woman's life and health. It leaves months to obtain an abortion. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Five:

Although Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart, one would have expected more precision in his language when referring to the Supreme Court’s not permitting the ending of human life in any other case. This is not so as the Supreme Court has upheld the death penalty as constitutional even though there was a four year period, 1972-1976, when the Court, in the case of Furman v. Georgia, halted its application on a variety of “equal protection of the law” concerns, which several states answered with new legislation that passed constitutional muster in the case of Gregg v. Georgia, 1976, thus permitting the resumption of its application. Thus, it is inaccurate for Scott Stewart to state the Supreme Court of the United States of America has never permitted of any human life.

What Scott Stewart meant to say is that the Supreme Court of the United States of America had not permitted the ending of any innocent life in any case other than those dealing with the innocent preborn. Even though this is technically true as the Supreme Court has never been asked to decide the constitutionality of the Uniform Determination of Death Act that falsely defined “brain death,” no jurist at any level of government has ever questioned the legitimacy of an act that is based upon a standard that was invented by a committee of “ethicists” at the Harvard Medical College in 1968 to justify in an ex post facto manner the vivisection of Denise Darvall by Dr. Christiaan Barnard in 1967. As readers of this site should know, “brain death” is no kind of death at all. Keep this in mind as the issue “brain death” was mentioned by none other Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her second round of questioning Scott Stewart.

Now, perhaps more substantively and certainly more importantly, Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart’s defense of what he called “robust exceptions for a woman’s life and health” demonstrates yet again that what is considered by most to be “pro-life” legislation is not that at all as there is never any exception to the inviolability of innocent human life.

Scott Stewart is a young man, and thus it is likely that he has no knowledge and hence no understanding of the fact that it is the existence of “exceptions” in most states prior to the 1960s that led advocates of surgical baby-killing such as Bernard Nathanson, Lawrence Lader, and William Baird, among others, to claim that all women should be able to have “access” to “medical care” that was available to the wealthy and the famous who were willing to pay for a doctor to certify they had an “exception” that  justified killing their babies. As I have noted so many times before, do we really expect those who killing innocent human beings in the sanctuaries of their mothers’ wombs to scrupulously observe the limits of “exceptions?” Those who kill with impunity can also lie with impunity. (I will, for the sake of continuity, provide an explanation as to the morally impermissible nature of “exceptions” that I have used previously in numerous articles on this website.)

To boast of “robust exceptions” is to negate any claim of being “pro-life.”

Here is the rest of Mr. Stewart’s opening argument:

Yet, the courts below struck the law down. It didn't matter that the law apply -- that the law applies when an unborn child is undeniably human, when risks to women surge, and when the common abortion procedure is brutal. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Six:

If an unborn child is undeniably human, Mr. Scott, then how is it ever morally permissible to directly kill him in some cases and not others?

Spoiler alert: It isn’t.

Back to Mr. Stewart’s argument:

The lower courts held that because the law prohibits abortions before viability, it is unconstitutional no matter what. Roe and Casey's core holding, according to those courts, is that the people can protect an unborn girl's life when she just barely can survive outside the womb but not any earlier when she needs a little more help. That is the world under Roe and Casey.

That is not the world the Constitution promises. The Constitution places its trust in the people. On hard issue after hard issue, the people make this country work. Abortion is a hard issue. It demands the best from all of us, not a judgment by just a few of us. When an issue affects everyone and when the Constitution does not take sides on it, it belongs to the people.

Roe and Casey have failed, but the people, if given the chance, will succeed. This Court should overrule Roe and Casey and uphold the state's law. I welcome the Court's questions. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Seven:

Mr. Stewart, there is nothing hard about the Fifth Commandment.

There is nothing hard about understanding that the great gift of human procreation is to be used solely by a man and a woman in a sacramentally valid marriage and left open at all times to the fulfillment of its end, a child, who is meant to give the Most Holy Trinity honor and glory in this life as a member of His Catholic Church and to enjoy the Beatific Vision in Heaven.

There is nothing “hard” about this at all.

The anti-Incarnational world given us by the Constitution of the United States of America has given no place to Christ the King nor to His true Church and has become, to quote the words of a well-meaning traditionally minded presbyter from the Midwest, “the devil’s playground.”

As noted above, the “people” have nothing to say about moral truth. The “people” must conform their lives to everything contained within the Sacred Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ revealed exclusively to His Catholic Church, which He founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, and has been entrusted with the mission to infallibly teach and to safeguard until the end of time. Christ the King is Sovereign over men and their nations.

Finally, even if Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey are overturned in six months, the surgical execution of the preborn babies in the State of Mississippi would remain perfectly “legal” prior to the fifteenth week of a child’s development within the sanctuary of his mother’s womb and in the so-called “robust” exceptions that Scott Stewart made such a point of noting were contained in the Mississippi state statute that is being contested in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

Moreover, the surgical killing of the innocent preborn would continue without any limitations in states such as New York and California, and almost every other state would permit some kind of “exceptions.” The overturn of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey would not stop the surgical slaughter of the innocent preborn and it would do nothing to stop the chemical assassination of children by means of contraception, which Mr. Stewart heralded as being more widely available and affordable than when the Casey decision was rendered on June 29, 1992.

It is time at this point to move on to the questioning of Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart by the individual justices, starting with the senior most associate justice, Clarence Thomas:

JUSTICE THOMAS: General Stewart, you focus on the right to abortion, but our jurisprudence seems to -- seem to focus on, in Casey, autonomy; in Roe, privacy. Does it make a difference that we focus on privacy or autonomy or more specifically on abortion?

MR. STEWART: I think whichever one of those you're focusing on, Your Honor, particularly if you're focusing on -- on the right to abortion, each of those starts to become a step removed for what's provided in the Constitution. Yes, the Constitution does provide certain -- protect certain aspects of privacy, of autonomy, and the like, but, as this Court said in Glucksberg, going directly from general concepts of autonomy, of privacy, of bodily integrity, to -- to a right is not how we traditionally, this Court traditionally, does due process analysis. So I think it just confirms, whichever one of those you look at, Your Honor, a right to abortion is -- is not grounded in the text, and it's grounded on abstract concepts that this Court has rejected in -- in other contexts as supplying a substantive right.

JUSTICE THOMAS: You say that this is the only constitutional right that involves the taking of a life. What difference does that make in your analysis?

MR. STEWART: Sure, Your Honor. I -- I -- I think it -- it makes a -- a number of differences. One, I -- I'd mention two in particular. One is it -- it really does mark out the unbelievably profound ramifications of this area, which, in many other areas, assisted suicide, a whole host of important areas that are important to dignity, autonomy, freedom, and important to matters of conscience, it -- it marks it out as one of the unique areas where this Court has taken that important issue to the people, and it's -- it's something that implicates life and it just, I think, marks off, Justice Thomas, how problematic and unusual and how much of a break the Court's abortion jurisprudence is from those other cases. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Eight:

Sophistry, which becomes inevitable when men are incapable of even thinking in terms of the simple truth that there are limits which exist in the nature of things that are not subject to debate and do not depend upon the “people,” whether acting individually or collectively, for their binding force and validity.

Also, it should be pointed out that a preborn baby is his own individual and that his mother has an obligation before God to care for him by cooperating with all the graces He sends her to handle whatever difficulties may be entailed.

Then again, supernatural explanations must give way to sophistry when men’s minds are imprisoned in the framework of the written word that itself is the product of rationalist and deistic thought.

Back to the Justice Thomas-Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart colloquy:

JUSTICE THOMAS: If we don't overrule Casey or Roe, do you have a standard that you propose other than the viability standard?

MR. STEWART: It would be, Your Honor, a clarified version of the undue burden standard. I -- I -- I would -- I would emphasize, I -- I think, as Your Honor is alluding to, that no standard other than the rational basis review that applies to all laws will promote an administrable, workable, practicable, consistent jurisprudence that puts matters back with the people. I think anything heightened here is going to be problematic. But I would say, if the Court were not inclined to -- to overrule Casey, the -- the choice would be undue burden standard, untethered from any bright-line viability rule.

JUSTICE THOMAS: Thank you. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Nine:

Undue burden standard?

As I have written before in this commentary and will write again, the only standard is the Fifth Commandment and that is never debatable by mere creatures, no not even in the august surroundings of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Burden?

As I have written before in this commentary and will write again, it is a mother’s duty before God to love the child begotten as the natural fruit of the gift of marital fecundity.

Oh, no.

Why “oh, no”?

I will tell you why “oh, no?

Oh, now, it’s time to deal with Associate Justice Stephen Breyer’s unique brand of legal sophistry:

JUSTICE BREYER: Well, I'd -- I'd like to go to a different topic, back to Casey.

MR. STEWART: Yes, Your Honor.

JUSTICE BREYER: I assume you've read Casey pretty thoroughly.

MR. STEWART: Yes, Your Honor.

JUSTICE BREYER: And there are two parts. One is they reaffirm Roe. Put that to the side. The second is an opinion for the Court, not for three people but for the Court, and that second part is about what stare decisis principles should be used to overrule a case like Roe.

And they say Roe is special. What's special about it? They say it's rare. They call it a watershed. Why? Because the country is divided? Because feelings run high? And yet the country, for better or for worse, decided to resolve their differences by this Court laying down a constitutional principle, in this case, women's choice. That's what makes it rare.

That's not what I'm asking about. I want your reaction to what they said follows from that. What the Court said follows from that is that it should be more unwilling to overrule a prior case, far more unwilling we should be, whether that case is right or wrong, than the ordinary case.

And why? Well, they have a lot of words there, but I'll give you about 10 or 20. There will be inevitable efforts to overturn it. Of course, there will. Feelings run high. And it is particularly important to show what we do in overturning a case is grounded in principle and not social pressure, not political pressure.

Only "the most convincing justification can show that a later decision overruling," if that's what we did, "was anything but a surrender to political pressures or new members." And that is an unjustified repudiation of principles on which the Court stakes its authority. And then there are two sentences I'd like to read because they say they really mean this, the -- the Court, not just three: To overrule under fire in the absence of the most compelling reason, to reexamine a watershed decision, would subvert the Court's legitimacy beyond any serious question. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Ten:

Here is “compelling” reason, Justice Breyer: You are violating the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment and the Natural Law and, whether or not you realize, you and your other pro-abort jurists on the Court at this time will have to face the Divine Judge Whose Sacred Divinity you do not accept any more than you accept His Law as binding over your sophistic abstractions to protect willful murder:

Those who hold the reins of government should not forget that it is the duty of public authority by appropriate laws and sanctions to defend the lives of the innocent, and this all the more so since those whose lives are endangered and assailed cannot defend themselves. Among whom we must mention in the first place infants hidden in the mother's womb. And if the public magistrates not only do not defend them, but by their laws and ordinances betray them to death at the hands of doctors or of others, let them remember that God is the Judge and Avenger of innocent blood which cried from earth to Heaven. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930.)

This, Justice Breyer, should be your compelling reason.

All right, back to Breyer’s extended soliloquy before poor Scott Stewart had a chance to respond:

JUSTICE BREYER: And the last sentence, after they quote Potter Stewart on the same point, they say overruling unnecessarily and under pressure would lead to condemnation, the Court's loss of confidence in the judiciary, the ability of the Court to exercise the judicial power and to function as the Supreme Court of a nation dedicated to the rule of law.

Now that's the opinion of the Court, all right? And it's about stare decisis and how we approach it, and I hope everybody reads this. It's at 505 U.S. 854 to 869. All right. What do you say to that?

MR. STEWART: Sure, Your -- sure Justice Breyer. I -- I would say a couple things. I would say we have very closely gone through the factors that the Casey court itself went through in stare decisis. More than half of our brief is devoted to stare decisis. We now have 30 years in the wake of Casey to see what Casey has done and what it hasn't done.

JUSTICE BREYER: Well, it's caused some bad things and -- in the eyes of some people and some good things in the eyes of some people.

MR. STEWART: Your Honor –

JUSTICE BREYER: All right. All right. Go ahead.

MR. STEWART: I'm -- I'm sorry, Your Honor. What I'd emphasize, Your Honor, is that to the extent that -- that the -- I would not say it was the people that -- that called this Court to end the controversy. The people -- you know, many, many people vocally really just wanted to have the matter returned to them so that they could decide it -- decide it locally, deal with it the way they thought best and at least have a fighting chance to have their view prevail, which was not given to them under Roe and then, as a result, under Casey.

And -- and I'd also emphasize, Your Honor, that on -- on stare decisis, just as I said, the last 30 years, workability, developments in the law, factual developments that states can't account for. I think the workability, the undue burden standard alone, many problems.

On all the metrics that Casey was describing or the vast bulk of them, Casey fails. And I'd also emphasize this as well, Justice Breyer, that Casey was not -- was -- was not a -- a great example of simply letting precedents stand. It -- it recast Roe's reasoning, it overruled two of the Court's most important abortion decisions. It jettisoned the trimester framework of Roe itself and adopted a new standard unknown to other parts of the law.

Those are not the hallmarks of precedent, and they failed under this Court's stare decisis factors.

JUSTICE BREYER: Okay. Can I take it that your answer is, yes, you accept the way the special rule, the rule for the rare watershed, the stare decisis principles for deciding whether to overturn such a case as Roe, you accept that and you think it's met?

MR. STEWART: I would –

JUSTICE BREYER: Is that right?

MR. STEWART: -- I would say yes in part, Your -- Justice Breyer, and here's what I'd emphasize, is that I -- I do think, particularly when Casey looked outward and looked to what it see -- saw as pressure, there were pressure on all sides. As -- as Your Honor noted, this is a hot, difficult issue for everyone. It's -- that's why it belongs to the people. And I think the conclusion the Court drew from that, that it couldn't provide a -- a good enough example, that it would look on principle, those conclusions were, with respect, Justice Breyer, mistaken, and the -- the last 30 years has -- has not seen any calming of that. It's been very different than some of the others -- the Court's other controversial decisions that -- that have seen – (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Eleven:

By way of summary:

First, stare decisis [let the decision stand] has no standing before the Divine Judge, Christ the King.

Second, the inviolability of innocent human life is not a “difficult” issue.

This is where Associate Just Sonia Sotomayor cuts in for the first time. My comments above will be pasted again here in the event that some readers are only perusing this commentary. (Others can simply skip to the questioning of Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart by Chief Justice John Glover Roberts):

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: General, does -- was -- I know what it said about viability in Roe, but was viability an issue in the case? I know it wasn't briefed or argued.

MR. STEWART: It -- it was -- it was not issue -- an issue certainly the way it is an issue here, Your Honor. I think it was -- to the extent that the Court had to over -- had to reaffirm Roe, the way to read that as something other than dicta would be to under –

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I'm sorry, I don't know whether I said, was it an issue in Roe?

MR. STEWART: Oh, in Roe.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Yeah.

MR. STEWART: I'm sorry, Your Honor. My understanding is no. The law there was -- didn't have a viability tag. That was inserted by –

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: In fact, if I remember correctly, and I -- it's an unfortunate source, but it's there -- in his papers, Justice Blackmun said that the viability line was -- actually was dicta. And, presumably, he had some insight on the question.

MR. STEWART: I -- I think -- and I'd -- I'd add, Your Honor, Justice Blackmun in -- in, I think, as well his papers pointed out the arbitrary nature of it and -- and the line-drawing problems –

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: And then –

MR. STEWART: -- in it too.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: -- and then, in Casey, Casey said that that was the core principle or a central principle in Roe, viability. It said that after tossing out the trimester formula, which many people thought was the core -- core principle. But was viability at issue in Casey?

MR. STEWART: I don't think it was squarely at issue, Your Honor. Again, it's -- it's a little hard not to take the Court at its word when it emphasized that viability -- the -- that viability is -- is the central part of Roe -- Roe's holding and saying that it is reaffirming that, so we kind of take that as it -- as it stands. But the Court has not -- it did not face a law like this certainly, Mr. Chief Justice. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Twelve:

Mind numbing sophistry.

Mind boggling casuistry.

Eye-rolling absurdity.

Headache-inducing tedium.

All the legal wrangling over “viability,” “undue burden” and/or the “trimester approach is very much apart from the simple truth to which I must return repeatedly: A human baby is a unique, unrepeatable creature who has come into existence as the natural consequence of marital fecundity. “Thou shalt not kill” prohibits willful murder.

Speaking of willful murder, it is time to hear again from the heartless, soulless Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: May I finish my inquiry?

MR. STEWART: Of course, Justice Sotomayor.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Virtually every state defines a brain death as death. Yet, the literature is filled with episodes of people who are completely and utterly brain dead responding to stimuli. There's about 40 percent of dead people who, if you touch their feet, the foot will recoil. There are spontaneous acts by dead brain people. So I don't think that a response to -- by a fetus necessarily proves that there's a sensation of pain or that there's consciousness.

So I go back to my question of, what has changed in science to show that the viability line is not a real line, that a fetus cannot survive? And I think that's what both courts below said, that you had no expert say that there is any viability before 23 to 24 weeks. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Thirteen:

Perhaps the best word to describe Sonia Sotomayor is that she is irreligious. However, she is also a scientific and medical illiterate true believer in junk science.

As any reader of this website (I refuse to use the word “blog”) will understand—and as I noted earlier in this analysis, there is no such thing as “brain death” no matter how many states use that standard and no matter how long (thirty-five years) the United States Uniform Determination of Death Act has gone unchallenged in the courts. The very fact that supposedly “brain dead” people respond to stimuli is that they are, quite in fact, alive, and there are numerous cases, many of which have been cited in my articles and several of which are cited in Life, Death, and Truth: Under Attack by Medicine and Law, of supposedly “brain dead” people regaining consciousness and resuming perfectly normal lives. There are also several cases in which people have awakened while on the operating table prior to their vivisection for the profitable bodily organ market.

Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor believes that a preborn baby is as “dead” as a human being who has been declared “brain dead” by medical ghouls,” documenting yet again that there is a repulsively heartless person who simply wants to protect the nonexistent “rights” of married couples, fornicators, adulterers and perverts to misuse the gift God has given to human beings to procreate new lives without regard for the inviolable right of a child to be born and to be brought to the baptismal font for his spiritual regeneration by the infusion of the very inner life of the Most Blessed Trinity into his immortal soul.

Let’s face facts: the whole debate about abortion has always been “different” because it involves the wanton misuse of the generative powers for hedonistic purposes alone that either frustrate the end for which these powers have been given to man or, in the case of an “accident,” to dispose of that which is “unwanted.” The easiest way to this is to deny—or at least to be indifferent about—the humanity of the child just as certainly today’s Aztecs in medical smocks must deny the humanity of the “brain dead” people they need to vivisect in the ghoulish trade of harvesting bodily organs.

With this in mind, it is time to proceed to Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart’s reply to Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s initial question in her second round of questioning:

MR. STEWART: And what I'd say -- say is this, Justice Sotomayor, is that the fundamental problem with viability, it's not really something that rests on -- on science so much. It's that viability is not tethered to anything in the Constitution, in history, or tradition. It's a quintessentially legislative line.

A legislature could think that viability makes sense as -- as a place to draw the line, but it's quite reasonable for a legislature to draw the line elsewhere. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Fourteen:

Viability is a false standard.

Undue burden is a false standard.

The Constitution of the United States of America is a false standard.

Constitutional interpretation without making reference to even so much as the Natural Law is a pointless exercise in sophistry, absurdity and rank intellectual dishonesty.

We return now to the great “scientist,” “bioethicist,” and constitutional “scholar” named Sonia Sotomayor:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Counsel, there's so much that's not in the Constitution, including the fact that we have the last word. Marbury versus Madison. There is not anything in the Constitution that says that the Court, the Supreme Court, is the last word on what the Constitution means. It was totally novel at that time. And yet, what the Court did was reason from the structure of the Constitution that that's what was intended. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Fifteen:

Factually wrong, Sonia Sotomayor.

The case of Marbury v. Madison did not establish the principle that the Supreme Court was the last word on what the Constitution means.

Congress can overturn Supreme Court decisions involving defects in Congressional law to remedy constitutional concerns and, of course, two-thirds of both Houses of Congress, voting individually in their respective chambers, can propose constitutional amendments to be sent to the states for ratification either by three-fourths of the state legislature or three-fourths of specially established state ratifying conventions, whichever shall be specified by Congress.

Marbury v. Madison was not even the first time that the Supreme Court of the United States of America had ever exercised judicial review, which, although explicitly contained in the words of the Constitution itself, was an implied power of the judiciary that Alexander Hamilton had discussed in The Federalist, Number 78. Marbury v. Madison was the first time that the Supreme Court had used judicial review to strike down a provision of Federal law as unconstitutional. The first discussion of the power of judicial review by the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States of America came in the case of Hayburn’s Case, August 11, 1792, but the first actual application of judicial review, which had been explained by Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist, Number 78, to uphold a Congressional enactment occurred in the case of Hylton v. United States, March 8, 1796, as the Supreme Court of the United States of America upheld a Congressional tax on carriages as constitutional. The use of judicial review in the Hylton case was made as a matter course.

Unlike the decisions of the Supreme Court in the case of Marbury v. Madison, Roe v. Wade created “rights” that exist nowhere in the Constitution of the United States of America and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey sought to make sense of Roe’s unconstitutionality by devising a “undue burden” standard to determine how far a crime that cries out to Heaven for vengeance can be taken before state legislatures can intervene.

Herewith, therefore, we return to the histrionic, unhinged ideologue Sonia Sotomayor’s soliloquy to Scott Stewart:

And, here, in Casey and in Roe, the Court said there is inherent in our structure that there are certain personal decisions that belong to individuals and the states can't intrude on them. We've recognized them in terms of the religion parents will teach their children. We've recognized it in -- in their ability to educate at home if they choose. They just have to educate them. We have recognized that sense of privacy in people's choices about whether to use contraception or not. We've recognized it in their right to choose who they're going to marry. I fear none of those things are written in the Constitution. They have all, like Marbury versus Madison, been discerned from the structure of the Constitution. Why do we now say that somehow Roe versus Casey is -- Roe and Casey are so unusual that they must be overturned? (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Sixteen:

Sonia Sotomayor just cannot help herself, can she?

While admitting that parents can homeschool their children, she also added that parents “just have to educate them,” meaning that she does not believe that most homeschooling parents are “educating” their children with anything other than religious biases, which is not the same thing in her warped mind as “education.”

Griswold v. Connecticut, June 7, 1965, Roe v. Wade, January 22, 1973, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, June 29, 1992, and Obergefell v. Hodges, June 26, 2015, have nothing to do with the Constitution of the United States of America. They have everything to do with jurists imposing their own ideology as the “final” say on matters not open to human debate in the first place so as to preclude anyone from daring to challenge their “final” and “settled” decisions even they themselves have dared to defy God by lawing down “laws” in defiance of His.

Return with us now to those thrilling days of last week, the Sotomayor-Stewart colloquy rides again:

MR. STEWART: Well, Your -- Justice Sotomayor, I would -- I would emphasize two things. When you're going beyond the Constitution, this Court has looked closely to –

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: No, what I'm saying is they didn't go beyond the Constitution.

MR. STEWART: Your Honor, they did not deduce those from the structure of the Constitution. They -- they pointed to the Fourteenth Amendment and -- and reasoned that privacy in Roe, autonomy and similar values in Casey led to a right to abortion. That's not how this Court traditionally does things, including in the vast run of cases that Your Honor ran through. The Court looks to history and tradition. And, here, those decisively reject the proposition that states cannot legislate comprehensively on abortion before, after viability, and all throughout. So it's -- it's history and tradition, Your Honor. And I would also add, Your -- Your Honor, that those -- those decisions, a great many of them, draw -- you know, not just draw from text -- text, history, and tradition, but they draw often clear lines, very workable, have not led to the many negative stare decisis factors that we identify here. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Seventeen:

Nations that make no provision for the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by His true Church in all that pertains to the good of souls must wind up arguing about the inarguable and being divided over things that meant to unite men in this life in preparation for the blessedness of life without end in an unending Easter Sunday of glory in Paradise as participants in the victory of Our King, the Paschal Lamb, over the power of sin and eternal death.

The most junior member of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, inserted herself in an attempt to give Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart a chance to pledge his obeisance to Griswold and Obergefell just as the fifth ranking justice, Elena Kagan, was about to begin her own line of questioning:

JUSTICE KAGAN: General –

JUSTICE BARRETT:

General, would -- go ahead. Go ahead.

JUSTICE KAGAN: Go ahead, Justice Barrett.

JUSTICE BARRETT: Would a decision in your favor call any of the questions -- any of the cases, sorry, that Justice Sotomayor is identifying into question?

MR. STEWART: No, Your Honor, I -- I think for a couple reasons. First of all, I think the vast run of those cases, and some mentioned from time to time are Griswold, Lawrence, Obergefell, these are -- these are cases that draw clear rules: you can't ban contraception, you can't ban intimate romantic relationships between consenting adults, can't ban marriage of people of the same sex. Clear rules that have engendered strong reliance interests and that have not produced negative consequences or all the many other negative stare decisis considerations we pointed out, Your Honor.

Also, I -- I'd add none of them involve the purposeful termination of a human life. So those two -- those two features, stare decisis and termination of a human life, Your Honor, puts all of those safely out of reach if the Court overrules here. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Eighteen:

Shame on Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett for accepting the nonexistent legitimacy of cases that has established “rights” in defiance of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law, especially since the Supreme Court’s rationale in support of baby-killing had been established in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, June 7, 1965, that declared a long unused Connecticut statute forbidding the sale of contraceptives to married couples to be unconstitutional.

Just as the widespread acceptance of the contraceptive mentality led to the widespread acceptance of baby-killing-on-demand, so is the case that the Court’s “reasoning” in Griswold led directly to the outcome in Roe. Griswold v. Connecticut, though, was the jurisprudential foundation for them all, however, as the court’s seven justice majority (Chief Justice Earl Warren and Associate Justices William O. Douglas, Tom C. Clark, John Marshall Harlan II, William Brennan—then the court’s lone Catholic justice, Byron White and Arthur Goldberg) “found” a “right to privacy” emanating from alleged “penumbras” in the Fifth, Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America.

Even Associate Justice Hugo Black, the Freemason and former member of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama who became a court liberal on many matters, found that kind of judicial activism too much to stomach, denouncing it very plainly even though he did not like the law, which we know as Catholics is objectively just and good of its nature, in question:

The Court talks about a constitutional 'right of privacy' as though there is some constitutional provision or provisions forbidding any law ever to be passed which might abridge the 'privacy' of individuals. But there is not. There are, of course, guarantees in certain specific constitutional provisions which are designed in part to protect privacy at certain times and places with respect to certain activities. Such, for example, is the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against 'unreasonable searches and seizures.' But I think it belittles that Amendment to talk about it as though it protects nothing but 'privacy.' To treat it that way is to give it a niggardly interpretation, not the kind of liberal reading I think any Bill of Rights provision should be given. The average man would very likely not have his feelings soothed any more by having his property seized openly than by having it seized privately and by stealth. He simply wants his property left alone. And a person can be just as much, if not more, irritated, annoyed and injured by an unceremonious public arrest by a policeman as he is by a seizure in the privacy of his office or home.

One of the most effective ways of diluting or expanding a constitutionally guaranteed right is to substitute for the crucial word or words of a constitutional guarantee another word or words, more or less flexible and more or less restricted in meaning. This fact is well illustrated by the use of the term 'right of privacy' as a comprehensive substitute for the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against 'unreasonable searches and seizures.' 'Privacy' is a broad, abstract and ambiguous concept which can easily be shrunken in meaning but which can also, on the other hand, easily be interpreted as a constitutional ban against many things other than searches and seizures. I have expressed the view many times that First Amendment freedoms, for example, have suffered from a failure of the courts to stick to the simple language of the First Amendment in construing it, instead of invoking multitudes of words substituted for those the Framers used. See, e.g., New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 293, 84 S.Ct. 710, 733, 11 L.Ed.2d 686 (concurring opinion); cases collected in City of El Paso v. Simmons, 379 U.S. 497, 517, n. 1, 85 S.Ct. 577, 588, 13 L.Ed.2d 446 (dissenting opinion); Black, The Bill of Rights, 35 N.Y.U.L.Rev. 865. For these reasons I get nowhere in this case by talk about a constitutional 'right or privacy' as an emanation from one or more constitutional provisions.[1] I like my privacy as well as the next one, but I am nevertheless compelled to admit that government has a right to invade it unless prohibited by some specific constitutional provision. For these reasons I cannot agree with the Court's judgment and the reasons it gives for holding this Connecticut law unconstitutional.. . .

I repeat so as not to be misunderstood that this Court does have power, which it should exercise, to hold laws unconstitutional where they are forbidden by the Federal Constitution. My point is that there is no provision of the Constitution which either expressly or impliedly vests power in this Court to sit as a supervisory agency over acts of duly constituted legislative bodies and set aside their laws because of the Court's belief that the legislative policies adopted are unreasonable, unwise, arbitrary, capricious or irrational. The adoption of such a loose, flexible, uncontrolled standard for holding laws unconstitutional, if ever it is finally achieved, will amount to a great unconstitutional shift of power to the courts which I believe and am constrained to say will be bad for the courts and worse for the country. Subjecting federal and state laws to such an unrestrained and unrestrainable judicial control as to the wisdom of legislative enactments would, I fear, jeopardize the separation of governmental powers that the Framers set up and at the same time threaten to take away much of the power of States to govern themselves which the Constitution plainly intended them to have.[16]

I realize that many good and able men have eloquently spoken and written, sometimes in rhapsodical strains, about the duty of this Court to keep the Constitution in tune with the times. The idea is that the Constitution must be changed from time to time and that this Court is charged with a duty to make those changes. For myself, I must with all deference reject that philosophy. The Constitution makers knew the need for change and provided for it. Amendments suggested by the people's elected representatives can be submitted to the people or their selected agents for ratification. That method of change was good for our Fathers, and being somewhat old fashioned I must add it is good enough for me. And so, I cannot rely on the Due Process Clause or the Ninth Amendment or any mysterious and uncertain natural law concept as a reason for striking down this state law. The Due Process Clause with an 'arbitrary and capricious' or 'shocking to the conscience' formula was liberally used by this Court to strike down economic legislation in the early decades of this century, threatening, many people thought, the tranquility and stability of the Nation. See, e.g., Lochner v. State of New York, 198 U.S. 45, 25 S.Ct. 539, 49 L.Ed. 937. That formula, based on subjective considerations of 'natural justice,' is no less dangerous when used to enforce this Court's views about personal rights than those about economic rights. I had thought that we had laid that formula, as a means for striking down state legislation, to rest once and for all in cases like West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379, 57 S.Ct. 578, 81 L.Ed. 703; Olsen v. State of Nebraska ex rel. Western Reference & Bond Assn., 313 U.S. 236, 61 S.Ct. 862, 85 L.Ed. 1305, and many other opinions.[17] See also Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, 74, 25 S.Ct. 539, 551 (Holmes, J., dissenting). (Associate Justice Hugo Black, Dissenting Opinion, Griswold v. Connecticut, June 7, 1965.)

The late Associate Justice Hugo Lafayette Black, a Freemason and former member of the Ku Klux Klan in his native Alabama, who had was fellow Freemason Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first appointee to the Supreme Court of the United States of America on August 13, 1937, did not like the Connecticut statute under review in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut. Indeed, he defended a fellow Klansman who had murdered Father James Coyle in 1921 when he, Black, a thirty-five year-old attorney in private practice. Nonetheless, though, Black understood the principles of just constitutional interpretation, articulating very clearly what would happen if the Court continued to “invent” “rights” that had no foundation in the Constitution of the United States of America whatsoever.

It impossible to oppose surgical abortion unless one also opposes contraception, which is overthrows the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage and thus makes the conception of a baby to be considered an “accident” if he is not “planned” or “wanted, and it is thus reprehensible that Justice Barrett sought to temporize Justice Sotomayor’s caricature of Scott Stewart’s arguments by giving him a chance to agree that cases providing constitutional cover for contraception and sodomy were established law beyond question, and shame on Scott Stewart for agreeing with her.

Well, we are nearing the end of that part of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization transcript dealing with the questioning of Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart.

Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, the second most senior associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, interjected himself for a second round of questioning:

JUSTICE BREYER: Okay. So we -- I'm sorry to interrupt again, but we really might be making progress. I mean, in the part that -- that I read, you know, of Casey –

MR. STEWART: Yes, Your Honor.

JUSTICE BREYER: -- I think they think go back 150 years, maybe now we can go back 200. You think there have been only two cases which were what they call the watershed and where the special tough overruling rules apply. You want this to be the third, or do you think there were more and, if so, what were they?

MR. STEWART: Well, Your Honor, I -- I -- I think there's quite a bit of difference. I -- I think the question is never is it bad to overrule, period. You know, surely, stare –

JUSTICE BREYER: This is why I'm asking you to think -- think in their terms. There were two they mentioned, you see.

MR. STEWART: But –

JUSTICE BREYER: And they don't want Casey -- they don't want Roe to be the third.

MR. STEWART: And –

JUSTICE BREYER: Now, in your opinion, you just answered Justice Barrett, hey, all these are not rising to that level. Okay.

MR. STEWART: Right, Your Honor.

JUSTICE BREYER: Are there any that do rise to the level in your opinion?

MR. STEWART: I think -- and I -- and I'm not sure that I necessarily agree with the watershed characterization, Your Honor. What I'd say, though, I -- I can't think of another that kind of hits the radar. But -- but I'd emphasize that a problem here is we're -- we're dealing with a right that doesn't have a basis in constitutional text and, again, very much in conflict with those -- with those values, Justice Breyer. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Nineteen:

Once again, stare decisis has no standing in the court of Christ the King when the decisions one believes must stand because they had been decided in the first place are in defiance of the laws of God and thus the temporal good of nations and the eternal good of souls.

Believe it or not, Sonia Sotomayor is back for a third round of questioning:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: I'm not sure how your answer makes any sense. All of those other cases -- Griswold, Lawrence, Obergefell -- they all rely on substantive due process. You're saying there's no substantive due process in the Constitution, so they're just as wrong according to your theory.

MR. STEWART: No, Your Honor, we're quite comfortable with Washington versus Glucksberg and how it analyzes substantive due process and it looks to text, history. It looks to history and tradition to discipline the inquiry to make sure –

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Well, I mean, in Obergefell, there was no history of -- of -- of same-sex marriage.

MR. STEWART: And I think the Court -- the -- the Court pointed out, look, when we -- when we were facing Loving versus Virginia –

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: I -- I'm not trying to argue that we should overturn those cases. I just think you're dissimilating when you say that any ruling here wouldn't have an effect on those. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Twenty:

For once Associate Justice Sotomayor was right when she claimed that Scott Stewart’s arguments trying to separate the Court’s decisions on contraception in Griswold v. Connecticut and on “marriage” between persons of the same gender from the decision in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Scott Stewart was being entirely inconsistent and intellectually dishonest as those cases proceed one from the other.

Alas, a constitutional system based on principles of religious indifferentism make it impossible for men to appeal to Truth Himself as He has revealed Himself to us through His true Church and must wind up yielding to the basest instincts of man’s lower passions as, absent Sanctifying Grace and the sanctifying offices of Holy Mother Church, a mere human document is powerless against the sway of emotion and sentiment.

It gets a little worse as Sonia Sotomayor played the “religious card” in the next part of her questioning of Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart:

MR. STEWART: Respectfully, I -- I -- that's -- that's -- I respectfully –

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Do you think no -- that no state is going to think otherwise, that no people in the population aren't going to challenge those cases in Court?

MR. STEWART: I mean, Your -- Your Honor, we'll always have a diversity of views, but I think -- I think –

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: That's the point.

MR. STEWART: -- I think -- I think that's one –

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: That -- isn't that the -- isn't –

MR. STEWART: -- of the benefits of our society.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: -- isn't that the point?

MR. STEWART: That there's – that there's a diversity of views and people can vigorously debate and make –

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Exactly.

MR. STEWART: -- decisions for themselves?

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: And that's what we're still doing –

MR. STEWART: I think that's a good thing, Your Honor.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: -- and that's what we're doing under undue burden, but we haven't been doing it on the viability line.

MR. STEWART: And -- and neither one has worked well. The viability line discounts and disregards state interests, and the undue burden standard has all -- all of the problems that we've emphasized.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: How is your interest anything but a religious view? The issue of when life begins has been hotly debated by philosophers since the beginning of time. It's still debated in religions. So, when you say this is the only right that takes away from the state the ability to protect a life, that's a religious view, isn't it – (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Twenty-one:

The beginning of human life is a matter of biological science, not a matter of religion.

However, one cannot defend the inviolability of human life without at least making reference to the binding precepts of the Natural Law, which were used to condemn Nazi judges and war criminals at the Nuremburg Trials, but even advertences to the Natural Law must fail without appealing to the Divine Judge Who has been, is now, and will forever be a majority of One. It is, however, impossible to argue with the likes of Sonia Sotomayor on secular terms. One must speak truth and plant the seeds for its reception without fear of the consequences. Period.

Sonia Sotomayor has such hostility for religion—and she has in mind specifically Catholicism, of course, continues in her third colloquy with Scott Stewart:

MR. STEWART: Respectfully –

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: -- because it assumes that a fetus's life at -- when? You're not drawing -- you're -- when do you suggest we begin that life?

MR. STEWART: Your Honor, I -- aside from –

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Putting it aside from religion.

MR. STEWART: I -- I'll -- I'll try to -- I think there might be more than one question. I'll do my very best, Justice Sotomayor. I -- I think this Court in Gonzales pretty clearly recognized that before viability, we are talking with unborn life with a human organism. And I think the philosophical questions Your Honor mentioned, all those reasons, that they're hard, they've been debated, they're -- they're -- they're important, those are all reasons to return this to the people because the people should get to debate these hard issues, and this Court does not in that kind of a circumstance. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Twenty-two:

Once again, these are not “hard” issues.

There is nothing hard, difficult, or opaque about the Fifth Commandment, whose binding precepts must be obeyed, not debated and defied.

Returning now to Sotomayor:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: So when does the life of a woman and putting her at risk enter the calculus? Meaning, right now, forcing women who are poor -- and that's 75 percent of the population and much higher percentage of those women in Mississippi who elect abortions before viability -- they are put at a tremendously greater risk of medical complications and ending their life, 14 times greater to give birth to a child full term, than it is to have an abortion before viability. And now the state is saying to these women, we can choose not only to physically complicate your existence, put you at medical risk, make you poorer by the choice because we believe what? That

MR. STEWART: Sure, Your Honor. I -- I think, to -- to answer, I think, the -- the question I think you -- you led with and -- and then I think expanded on but is still on the same issue is as to when does a woman's interest enter, as far as we're concerned, it's there the entire time. Our point is that all of the interests are there the entire time, and Roe and Casey improperly prevent states from taking account and weighing those interests however they think best. We're not saying – (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Twenty-three:

No mother has any "choice" to be made between her own life and that of her preborn child. Although the improvements in medical technology have made it possible for expectant mothers with serious maladies to be treated in a manner that will permit a baby to be delivered at the point of viability, whereupon more aggressive treatment of a mother's condition can be undertaken, if possible and advised, it is still nevertheless the case that in those rare circumstances, which certainly do occur now and again, where a mother is faced with the possibility of sacrificing her own life so that her preborn baby can be born. A mother formed in the truths of the Catholic Faith knows that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ meant it when He said the following:

[12] This is my commandment, that you love one another, as I have loved you. [13] Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends. (John 15: 12)

A mother who knows the Catholic Faith understands that, as difficult as it can be to those steeped in emotionalism and sentimentality, she can, if she dies in a state of Sanctifying Grace, do more for her child from eternity than she ever could here on the face of this earth. Moreover, those who have died in a state of Sanctifying Grace are more perfectly united to us than they ever were on the face of this earth.

We must think supernaturally at all times. We must think as Catholics at all times no matter the natural pull of human emotions and heartstrings that will certainly affect each of us at various times. We are flesh and blood human beings. We would be heartless creatures if we were not torn in difficult circumstances of facing an earthly separation from our loved ones by means of what is considered to be an "early" death. We must love God's Holy Will first and foremost, praying to His Most Blessed Mother to send us graces to accept His will so that we can obey it as we observe every precept of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.

Naturalists, of course, do not understand this, which is why almost all of those in public life who say that they are "pro-life" support the direct, intentional taking of innocent human lives in their mothers' wombs under any conditions at all. Such people cannot see the contradiction represented by claiming to be "pro-life" while supporting the direct killing of babies in some instances.

God's law is not a matter of feeling, something that Pope Pius XII pointed out in his November 26, 1951, Address to the Association of Large Families. Consider these very telling words from the early part of this address, begging your pardon that they are from a Google translation of the original text, which is in the Italian language:

If there is another danger that threatens the family, not since yesterday, but long ago, which, however, at present, is growing visibly, it can become fatal [to societies], that is, the attack and the disruption of the fruit of conjugal morality.

We have, in recent years, taken every opportunity to expose the one or the other essential point of the moral law, and more recently to indicate it as a whole, not only by refuting the errors that corrupt it, but also showing in a positive sense, the office the importance, the value for the happiness of the spouses, children and all family, for stability and the greater social good from their homes up to the State and the Church itself.

At the heart of this doctrine is that marriage is an institution at the service of life. In close connection with this principle, we, according to the constant teaching of the Church, have illustrated a argument that it is not only one of the essential foundations of conjugal morality, but also of social morality in general: namely, that the direct attack innocent human life, as a means to an end - in this case the order to save another life - is illegal.

Innocent human life, whatever his condition, is always inviolate from the first instance of its existence and it can never be attacked voluntarily. This is a fundamental right of human beings. A fundamental value is the Christian conception of life must be respected as valid for the life still hidden in the womb against direct abortion and against all innocent human life thereafter. There can be no direct murders of a child before, during and after childbirth. As established may be the legal distinction between these different stages of development life born or unborn, according to the moral law, all direct attacks on inviolable human life are serious and illegal.

This principle applies to the child's life, like that of mother's. Never, under any circumstances, has the Church has taught that the life of child must be preferred to that of the mother. It would be wrong to set the issue with this alternative: either the child's life or that of mother. No, nor the mother's life, nor that of her child, can be subjected to an act of direct suppression. For the one side and the other the need can be only one: to make every effort to save the life of both, mother and child (see Pious XI Encycl. Casti Connubii, 31 dec. 1930, Acta Ap. Sedis vol. 22, p.. 562-563).

It is one of the most beautiful and noble aspirations of medicine trying ever new ways to ensure both their lives. What if, despite all the advances of science, still remain, and will remain in the future, a doctor says that the mother is going to die unless here child is killed in violation of God's commandment: Thou shalt not kill!  We must strive until the last moment to help save the child and the mother without attacking either as we bow before the laws of nature and the dispositions of Divine Providence.

But - one may object - the mother's life, especially of a mother of a numerous family, is incomparably greater than a value that of an unborn child. The application of the theory of balance of values to the matter which now occupies us has already found acceptance in legal discussions. The answer to this nagging objection is not difficult. The inviolability of the life of an innocent person does not depend by its greater or lesser value. For over ten years, the Church has formally condemned the killing of the estimated life as "worthless', and who knows the antecedents that provoked such a sad condemnation, those who can ponder the dire consequences that would be reached, if you want to measure the inviolability of innocent life at its value, you must well appreciate the reasons that led to this arrangement.

Besides, who can judge with certainty which of the two lives is actually more valuable? Who knows which path will follow that child and at what heights it can achieve and arrive at during his life? We compare Here are two sizes, one of whom nothing is known. We would like to cite an example in this regard, which may already known to some of you, but that does not lose some of its evocative value.

It dates back to 1905. There lived a young woman of noble family and even more noble senses, but slender and delicate health. As a teenager, she had been sick with a small apical pleurisy, which appeared healed; when, however, after contracting a happy marriage, she felt a new life blossoming within her, she felt ill and soon there was a special physical pain that dismayed that the two skilled health professionals, who watched  her with loving care. That old scar of the pleurisy had been awakened and, in the view of the doctors, there was no time to lose to save this gentle lady from death. The concluded that it was necessary to proceed without delay to an abortion.

Even the groom agreed. The seriousness of the case was very painful. But when the obstetrician attending to the mother announced their resolution to proceed with an abortion, the mother, with firm emphasis, "Thank you for your pitiful tips, but I can not truncate the life of my child! I can not, I can not! I feel already throbbing in my breast, it has the right to live, it comes from God must know God and to love and enjoy it." The husband asked, begged, pleaded, and she remained inflexible, and calmly awaited the event.

The child was born regularly, but immediately after the health of the mother went downhill. The outbreak spread to the lungs and the decay became progressive. Two months later she went to extremes, and she saw her little girl growing very well one who had grown very healthy. The mother looked at her robust baby and saw his sweet smile, and then she quietly died.

Several years later there was in a religious institute a very young sister, totally dedicated to the care and education of children abandoned, and with eyes bent on charges with a tender motherly love. She loved the tiny sick children and as if she had given them life. She was the daughter of the sacrifice, which now with her big heart has spread much love among the children of the destitute. The heroism of the intrepid mother was not in vain! (See Andrea Majocchi. " Between burning scissors," 1940, p.. 21 et seq.). But we ask: Is Perhaps the Christian sense, indeed even purely human, vanished in this point of no longer being able to understand the sublime sacrifice of the mother and the visible action of divine Providence, which made quell'olocausto born such a great result? (Pope Pius XII, Address to Association of Large Families, November 26, 1951; I used Google Translate to translate this address from the Italian as it is found at AAS Documents, p. 855; you will have to scroll down to page 855, which takes some time, to find the address.)

So much for the “life of the mother” exception in pre-Roe statutes, so much for it in Mississippi HB 1510, and so much for Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s tendentious reasoning in her questioning of Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart.

No woman is “poorer” for having given birth to a child.

Indeed, the world has been poorer by the absence of hundreds of millions of children killed by contraceptives and the over one hundred million children who have been killed by surgical means globally in the past fifty years.

Although Associate Justice Elena Kagan tried to pose a question of Scott Stewart immediately after the third round of questions by her colleague Sonia Sotomayor, she was edged out by the Court’s fifth most senior associate justice, Samuel Alito, who, like Justice Barrett previously, wanted to give Mr. Stewart a chance to present evidence of secular philosophers who were opposed to abortion, a question for which Mr. Stewart was inexcusably prepared to answer:

JUSTICE KAGAN: General –

JUSTICE ALITO: General, are there -- are there secular philosophers and bioethicists who take the position that the rights of personhood begin at conception or at some point other than viability?

MR. STEWART: I -- I believe so. I mean, I think there's a wide array, I mean, of -- of -- of people of kind of all different views and -- and of no faith views who -- who would reasonably have that view, Your Honor. It's -- it's -- it's not tied to a religious view and I don't think, were it otherwise, this Court's jurisprudence would -- on this issue would run right into some of its religious exercise jurisprudence. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Twenty-four:

Behold once against the folly of arguing moral truth on secular or naturalistic grounds. It is impossible logically and it is impossible in the America constitutional schema.

Here are the examples that Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart should have given, starting with Hippocrates himself:

I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice.

I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.

The Roman playwright Juvenal, who lived in the early Second Century A.D. and was fierce hater of Christians, had this to say about the crime of the murder of innocent preborn children:

So great is the skill, so powerful the drugs, of the abortionist, paid to murder mankind within the womb. Ancient History Sourcebook: Juvenal: Satire VI 

Even a proto-feminist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who organized the first "women's rights" conference in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, referred to abortion as "disgusting and degrading crime," going on to write:

When you consider that women have been treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit. (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Letter to Julia Ward Howe, October 16, 1873, recorded in Howe's diary at Harvard University Library.)

Yes, it is possible by reason alone to come to recognize that a child, an innocent preborn human being, is the natural fruit of human conjugal relations. It is an accident if one falls down a flight of stairs. It is an accident if the motor vehicle one is driving goes out of control on an icy road. It is not an "accident" if a child is conceived as the result of human conjugal relations. To invade the sanctuary of the womb, therefore, in order to suck out, burn, slice or otherwise destroy a living human being is opposed to the very laws of nature itself. And if the child inside a mother's womb is not alive, why is it necessary to kill it? As to the child's humanity, you see, even secular science has proved that every fertilized embryonic human being has a distinctive DNA of his very own that does not change over the course of his life. All that is added, physically and temporally speaking, is time and nutrition.

As I said to an abortion advocate in a debate at Hofstra University, Hempstead, Long Island, New York, on the Feast of Saint Joseph, March 19, 1985:

"I will quit this debate right now if you can demonstrate to me which one of the cells in your body has a DNA structure different from the moment that you were conceived."

No true, objective biologist can deny the fact that a living, growing human being is created at the moment of fertilization. Ideologues can deny all arguments that can be advanced by means of reason and science, however, which is why arguing against abortion on the grounds of reason alone only takes one so far. Indeed, it is precisely because of naturalism that we have abortion-on-demand and in most other countries in the "developed" world today. Naturalistic arguments are not going to end abortion-on-demand, although the use of scientific facts and basic Natural Law reasoning can be useful as tools to help people to see through some of the illogic of the pro-death arguments. Such arguments are merely "building blocks," if you will, to lead people to accept the simple fact that it is God Himself Who has ordained these immutable facts of nature that do not depend upon human acceptance for their binding force or for their validity.

Well, she waited long enough. Associate Justice Elena Kagan finally got her turn to question Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart and she, while much more respectful than Sonia Sotomayor, expressed her concern about the Supreme Court of the United States of America would listen to the side that yells the loudest, which is not at all what has been happening the past nearly forty-nine years:

JUSTICE KAGAN: General, Justice Breyer started with stare decisis, an important principle in any case, and, here, for the reasons that Casey mentioned, especially so, to prevent people from thinking that this Court is a political institution that will go back and forth depending on what part of the public yells loudest and -- and -- and preventing people from thinking that the Court will go back and forth depending on changes to the Court's membership. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Twenty-five:

As noted earlier in this lengthy analysis, the Supreme Court of the United States of America is a political institution. It always has been, and it will ever be thus. It is a political branch of the government of the United States of America composed of fallible human beings, many of whom have definite ideological predilections that they have sought to superimpose over the framework of the Constitution of the United States of America and who brook no opposition to their judicial tyranny.

Justice Kagan is inventing a straw man by claiming that a reversal of Roe v. Wade would mean the side that yells the longest wins as bread-and-butter issues, sadly, are most important to most voters and it has not been the case as recently as June v. Medical Services that the “pro-life” side, such as it has ever been with the complex set of organizations that are completely opposed to all abortions without exception and others that are content to “live” with some abortions in some cases, have been prevailing in decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Back now to Justice Elena Kagan:

And what strikes me about this case -- and -- and -- and you come here very honestly saying, you know, we want you to discard the entire setup and then, even if you don't do that, we want you to discard the viability line, which you've acknowledged again today Casey says is the -- the heart, the central principle of Roe.

And so usually there has to be a justification, a strong justification in a case like this beyond the fact that you think the case is wrong. And I guess what strikes me when I look at this case is that, you know, not much has changed since Roe and Casey, that people think it's right or wrong based on the things that they have always thought it was right and wrong for. So the -- the -- the -- the -- the rationale behind those cases has something to do with the autonomy and the freedom and the dignity of women to pursue their lives as they wish, to protect their bodily integrity, to make the decisions that are most fundamental to the course of their lives. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Twenty-six:

Human beings have no autonomy to kill other human beings.

A preborn child belongs within his mother’s womb as a result of the free will choice made by his mother to use, whether licitly within the context of a valid marriage, or illicitly, the generative powers, and she has no “choice” thereafter but to surround her child with love and care. A woman debases her dignity when she conducts herself in a sinful manner, and though Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ stands ready to offer His absolution to her through the ministration of a true priest acting in His Person in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance, He has granted no one, man or woman, the authority to dispense with His eternal laws so that they can engage in carnal pleasure sinfully.

All right. I return now to Justice Kagan:

And -- and always, in those cases, there was an understanding that there were important interests on the other side in protecting life or protecting the potential for life, whether people saw it one way or the other way, and that there was a difficult question here and a balance to be made. And, I mean, it strikes me that people -- some people think those decisions made the right balance and some people thought they made the wrong balance, but, in the end, we are in the same exact place as we were then, except that we're not because there's been 50 years of water under the bridge, 50 years of decisions saying that this is part of our law, that this is part of the fabric of women's existence in this country, and that that places us in an entirely different situation than if you had come in 50 years ago and made the same arguments.

So I guess I just wanted to hear you react to that. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Twenty-seven:

Well, I am going to react to this before letting Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart to speak for himself.

The passage of time can never make legitimate that which is illegitimate, and this is precisely the argument that Scott Stewart made before returning to his fatally flawed appeal to “popular sovereignty”:

MR. STEWART: Of course, Justice Kagan. Thank you. I -- I would emphasize a couple things, Your Honor. The fact that so much time has passed, let's say nothing had changed, that's not a point in Roe and Casey's favor. They have no basis in the Constitution. They -- they adopt a right that purposefully leads to the termination of now millions of human lives. The -- if nothing had changed, they'd be just as bad as they were 30 years ago, 50 years ago. And now we just have decades of damage, and we have a situation where nearly 30 years after Casey, the Court unfortunately divides over what Casey, the lead case on -- on -- in the abortion area, even means.

The lower courts are left not knowing what to do, as I think -- and I think kind of a fundamental problem here is, I think, as Justice Gorsuch mentioned, emphasized in his -- his opinion in -- in June Medical, that the problem for lower court judges is the Constitution doesn't give them an answer to this. There's no neutral rule of law, so judges unfortunately have to look within themselves. And that's just never going to solve this issue.

But, if the matter is returned to the people, the people can deal with it, they can work, they can compromise and reach different solutions. But, if we don't do that, we're just going to have all this sort of damage, and at some point, it's appropriate for the Court to say enough, as it has in some of its -- the great overrulings in -- in Brown and in other cases, where it said this is just enough.

Justice Harlan had it right in dissent in Plessy when he recognized that -- that -- that, you know, all are -- all are equal. And, here -- similarly here, the state should be able to recognize, hey, there are real values on both sides here. We -- we -- we think that this one slightly outweighs, we think that this one slightly outweighs, or we think that there's some balance to be drawn here.

But, if the Court doesn't do that, Justice Kagan, it's just going to be continued damage, and the Court will continue to plunge in this political issue.

I apologize, Mr. Chief Justice. I've gone over. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Twenty-eight:

First, there can never be any common ground between right and wrong, good or evil, virtue or vice, Christ or chaos.

Second, the “people” have nothing to “decide” about abortion any more than do their elected representatives or non-elected judges confirmed by them.

Third, the passage of fifty years never makes that which is wrong right, but it is only up to the “people” to obey God and conform human law to His law in all that pertains to the good of souls. In this regard, of course, the failure of the American “bishops” to discipline pro-abortion Catholics in public life has emboldened the forces of darkness and contributed to a general spirit of ignorance about, indifference to or hatred of objective standards of right and wrong beyond which human beings can never legitimately transgress.

It is now time for the Chief Justice, John Glover Roberts, Jr., to question Mississippi Solicitor Scott General, who represented the State of Mississippi in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization at the behest of Mississippi State Attorney General Lynn Fitch.

Roberts was concerned about the shift of Stewart’s focus in the writ of certiorari on “pre-viability” to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in oral argumentation. [A writ of certiorari is a petition made to request the Court to hear a case involving a significant constitutional question, which requires a vote of at least four justices to grant; a writ of appeal is a petition made to ask the Court to hear a case that it is statutorily required to consider before accepting or denying the writ.]

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: No, no, that's all right. I have just a few little -- well, not little, I hope, questions, and the first gets back to the issue of viability. You know, in your petition for cert, your first question and the only one on which we granted review was whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional. And then I think it's fair to say that when you got to the brief on the merits, you kind of shifted gears and talked a lot more about whether or not Roe and Casey should be overruled, and I wanted to give you a chance to explain that.

MR. STEWART: Sure, Your Honor. So a couple points. You know, at the petition stage, we were, of course, identifying -- we identified for the Court three questions. We emphasized, as you do at the cert stage, hey, this is important; only this Court can resolve it. We emphasized, I believe it was five times, that the Court was at the least going need -- going to need to reconsider, revisit, or reevaluate its precedents. And we asked the Court to at least get rid of a viability line or any suggestion of a viability line.

So we added, however -- and we had to take account of the reality that this argument has not fared well in the lower courts. It -- it -- it's lost in every court of appeals. So, you know, we -- we raised the issue in addition, but, once the Court granted only the first question, we presented every argument as we, you know, signaled we -- we would present the -- the -- the full-blown constitutional merits argument with that fundamental question. So I -- I'd emphasize that, Your Honor. It was kind of the shift you go from cert state to merits stage. The Court granted one question. That question fairly includes what is the correct standard.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, it fairly includes the broader arguments you raised. I'm not suggesting that. But, on the other hand, it presumably included the viability question as well, because that's what you talked about in that one sentence.

MR. STEWART: And -- and -- and we -- we've addressed that as well, Your Honor. What I -- what I'd emphasize here is that the merits arguments of, you know, the validity of Roe and Casey as an original matter, is there a viability rule based on the Constitution, those are not that complicated or -- or -- or lengthy. The harder questions are, you know, should the Court overrule and -- and take that momentous step? And that's why we devote a lot of space to that very important issue. We respect stare decisis and have walked through all those points. But, again, focusing on the question presented and arguing -- presenting our best arguments for that, that's -- that's what we've done, Mr. Chief Justice.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: On stare decisis, I think the first issue you look at is whether or not the decision at issue was wrongly decided. I've actually never quite understood how you evaluate that. Is it wrongly decided based on legal principles and doctrine when it was decided or -- or in retrospect? Because Roe -- I mean, there are a lot of cases around the time of Roe, not of that magnitude but the same type of analysis, that -- that went through exactly the sorts of things we today would say were erroneous, but do we look at it from today's -- if we look at it from today's perspective, it's going to be a long list of cases that we're going to say were wrongly decided.

MR. STEWART: Well, I'd say -- I'd say, Mr. Chief Justice, that you -- you look -- you can look both was it wrong at the time, has it been unmasked as wrong by -- by new understandings, new knowledge, any developments. But I -- I don't think -- as I -- I think the colloquy -- my colloquy with Justice Barrett indicated, the Court won't have -- have to be looking at -- at -- at much other -- many other areas because this is an area that has a uniquely problematic set of stare decisis considerations. A lot of other controversial areas or once controversial areas are -- are quite settled clear rules and don't have those considerations against them. So, really, by -- by overruling Roe and Casey, the Court won't have to go down that road, and a lot of those decisions are quite readily groundable in history, tradition, and the Court's traditional factors, Your Honor. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Twenty-nine:

In a nutshell, good readers, Chief Justice John Glover Roberts, Jr., is looking for a “compromise” whereby Mississippi Law HB 5110  can be upheld (he clearly signaled his intent in this regard while questioning the attorney arguing in behalf of Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization, Julie Rikelman; my analysis of her questioning will be in part two of this two-part series) while leaving the decisions in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey intact knowing full well that the effect would be same in that state legislatures desirous of restricting the surgical execution after the fifteenth week of a baby’s development in his mother’s womb without the political storm of a direct overturn that the State of Mississippi is seeking. That is what all the sophistry above was about, noting yet again that almost all the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America involving contraception, abortion, and sodomy have been wrong and have no standing before bar of Justice Himself, Christ the King.

After asking Associate Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Sonia Sotomayor for any additional questions, Roberts turned to Associate Justice Elena Kagan, who knows that some states will rush to limit the surgical killing of preborn children to perhaps six or nine weeks of their development in the sanctuaries of their mothers’ wombs if Mississippi HB 1510 is upheld and Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey are not overturned.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Thank you. Justice Thomas?

JUSTICE THOMAS: No questions.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Justice Breyer?

Justice Alito?

Justice Sotomayor?

Justice Kagan?

JUSTICE KAGAN: General, I -- I just wanted to get your quick sense of how your intermediate positions would work, you know, if basically the viability line was discarded and undue burden became the standard overall, a standard that according to you is an unclear one, what that would leave the Court with going forward.

You know, I'm just sort of thinking about the great variety of different -- of regulations that states could pass, so whether one is 15 weeks and one is 12 weeks and one is 9 weeks or variation across a wide variety of other dimensions. What would that look like coming to the Court? How would we -- how -- how do you think we should -- we would be able to deal with that or -- or how would you counsel us to deal with that if the Court were to go down that road?

MR. STEWART: Well, I think I -- that this is -- not to push back against the end -- and I will -- will answer your question, Justice Kagan, but part of why we've counseled to overrule full scale is that that's the only way to get rid of a number of the problems that I think Your Honor's alluding to.

And that's that when you have the undue burden standard, it's -- it's a very hard standard to apply. It's not objective. The Court looks to the record in each case and what's going on. I mean, the Court in Casey itself said, under this record, this is not an undue burden. You -- you couldn't say necessarily for certain that a certain number of weeks one place would be an undue burden but would be okay another place.

But, again, that is the world we have under Casey. So, if the Court upholds this law under the undue burden standard, it would be carrying forward with those features, which I -- and I hope I've answered your question, but I think that's one of the very strong reasons to just go all the way and overrule Roe and Casey, Your Honor. I -- anyway. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Thirty:

Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart anticipated Justice Kagan’s question by explaining that a clean overturning of both Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey would prevent future challenges to state attempt to limit the surgical execution of babies earlier than fifteen weeks of their prenatal growth.

Once again, though there was nothing about the Fifth Commandment.

It’s on next to a line of questioning by the seventh ranking Associate Justice of the United States of America, Brett Michael Kavanaugh, who clearly wanted Mississippi State Solicitor General to make explicit what had been theretofore implicit in his oral argument and responses to the other justices, namely, to state the Constitution of the United States of America is “neutral” on abortion and that states would still able to permit the surgical slaughter of the innocent preborn even on a completely unrestricted basis if their state legislatures and/or the “people” wanted to do so. In other words, Justice Kavanaugh was leading the witness:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Justice Gorsuch?

Justice Kavanaugh?

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: I want to be clear about what you're arguing and not arguing.

MR. STEWART: Yes, Your Honor.

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: And to be clear, you're not arguing that the Court somehow has the authority to itself prohibit abortion or that this Court has the authority to order the states to prohibit abortion as I understand it, correct?

MR. STEWART: Correct, Your Honor.

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: And as I understand it, you're arguing that the Constitution is silent and, therefore, neutral on the question of abortion? In other words, that the Constitution is neither pro-life nor pro-choice on the question of abortion but leaves the issue for the people of the states or perhaps Congress to resolve in the democratic process? Is that accurate?

MR. STEWART: Right. We're -- we're saying it's left to the people, Your Honor.

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: And so, for the -- if you were to prevail, the states, a majority of states or states still could or -- and presumably would continue to freely allow abortion, many states; some states would be able to do that even if you prevail under your view, is that correct?

MR. STEWART: That's consistent with our view, Your Honor. It's -- it's one that allows all interests to have full voice and -- and many of the abortions we see in certain states that I don't think anybody would think would be moving to change their laws in a more restrictive direction.

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: Thank you.

MR. STEWART: Thank you, Your Honor. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Thirty-one:

First, to reiterate what has been said before, a sound argument can be made on purely constitutional grounds alone that the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment’s due process of law clauses prohibit the direct, intentional taking of any innocent human life.

Second, no one, whether acting individually or collectively with others in the institutions of civil governance, has any authority to do anything about the chemical or surgical killing of the innocent preborn other than to impose just penalties upon those who procure, assist, fund, perform abortions and, yes, upon those mothers who seek them, not that such penalties are matters of legitimate debate and discussion, especially in situations where distraught women have been pressured into killing their babies. Abortion is not a victimless crime, though. The blood of the innocent preborn cry out for justice.

To the final set of questions, which were posed by the most junior member of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Justice Barrett.

JUSTICE BARRETT: General, I have a question that is a little bit of a follow-up to that Justice Breyer was asking you. That's about stare decisis. And I think a lot of the colloquy you've had with all of us has been about the benefits of stare decisis, which I don't think anyone disputes, and, of course, no one can dispute because it's part of our stare decisis doctrine that it's not an inexorable command and that there are some circumstances in which overruling is possible. You know, we have Plessy, Brown. We have Bowers versus Hardwick, to Lawrence.

But, in thinking about stare decisis, which is obviously the core of this case, how should we be thinking about it -- I mean, Justice Breyer pointed out that in Casey and in some respects, well, it was a different conception of stare decisis insofar as it very explicitly took into account public reaction. Is that a factor that you accept, or are you arguing that we should minimize that factor?

And is there a different set of rules -- it is true that Casey identified Brown and West Coast Hotel as watershed decisions. But is there a distinct set of stare decisis considerations applicable to what the Court might decide is a watershed distinction?

MR. STEWART: I don't think there should be a distinct set of -- of -- of considerations there, Your Honor. I think what I -- what I emphasize, and just to make sure, on -- on the kind of legitimacy, the Court looking outward, I -- I think Casey was unusual in that regard. I think it was a mistake. And I think it's something that is kind of in conflict with this Court's structure and approach as an independent branch looking to the Constitution rather than looking without.

And I -- I think that's one reason why traditionally the Court is -- is -- is -- in some of its greatest overrulings, it's -- it's not looking without. It's saying this was wrong. It was wrong the day it was decided. We know it's wrong today. And it's led to all these terrible consequences. We should get -- we should get rid of it.

 I -- so I -- I think that that was an unfortunate break, and I think the Court -- even if the Court were to -- were to still look at legitimacy, though, Justice Barrett, I think the Court could very, very powerfully say, look, our -- our legitimacy really derives from our willingness to stand strong and stand firm in the face of whatever is going on and stand for constitutional principle and follow our traditional stare decisis factors to overrule when it's appropriate.

Thank you, Your Honor.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Thank you, counsel.

MR. STEWART: Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Thirty-two:

Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart gave a very cogent answer to Justice Barrett, who was leading the witness in her own, albeit less obvious, way than had Justice Kavanaugh.

An adherence to constitutional principles, as good as that might be for as far as it goes, which is not very far at all, is useless if men do not adhere first and foremost to the binding law of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.

Then again, a nation without Catholicism is a nation that will always find itself arguable about the inarguable.

I will provide an analysis of the question of the attorney for Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Julie Rikelman, and of the Solicitor General of the United States of America, Elizabeth Prelogar, in the final part of this two-part analysis.

Concluding Remarks

This is no way to establish a just social order, especially when one considers that millions of people alive today blaspheme the Holy Name of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, if not outrightly mock Him, His Most Blessed Mother, and His Holy Catholic Church, she who is our mother (mater) and teacher (magistra).

Impurity, indecency and immodest abound in so-called “modern” “culture.” Sins that once were considered shameful (fornication, adultery) and/or shamefully perverse (sodomy and its related vices) are celebrated widely throughout the nooks and crannies of “popular culture” and have been enshrined in laws and judicial decisions that are considered to be beyond criticism lest one be tarred and feather with the stigma of being “hateful” and “intolerant.” Children are corrupted in their families by television and the obscene language of their parents, and they are further corrupted by the rot of explicit classroom instruction in matters pertaining to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments that are nothing other than vulgar, profanity-laced enticements to sin, yes, even to the point of believing that one can change the gender that God has given him. This is all considered quite “normal” and “natural” when it is abnormal and unnatural, thus undermining the very fabric of social order as countless numbers of souls are deceived into living on the devil’s terms prior to being tortured by him and their demons eternally for having done so.

Innocent human beings are being attacked randomly on the streets of American cities, and many of the perpetrators are allowed to get out on bail immediately thereafter and some do not even get prosecuted by George Soros’s “woke” bought-and-paid for district attorneys in those cities, which are now havens of such lawlessness that I, for one, find it remarkable that even those who know better continue to want to live in such places.

Innocent human beings are being killed by means of “brain death” for the purposes of vital human organ vivisection and transplantation. They are being killed by means of starvation and dehydration, and they are being killed off in hospices under the aegis of “palliative” or “comfort care” by various custom-designed “cocktails” that kill human beings at a rate determined by the “team” of “professionals,” who are well-trained to use all manner of emotional manipulative to convince the unwilling to “let go” and to experience “death with dignity.”

None of this would change if Roe v. Wade were overturned, and physicians will continue to defy the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of Holy Matrimony by prescribing abortifacients that can be filled at CVS or Walgreen’s or Walmart or your neighborhood supermarket’s pharmacy.

While, of course, we do not remain inert in the face of the daily slaughter of the preborn by chemical and surgical means, we can never make compromises with truth of any kind, supernatural or natural. We must state the truth clearly, and then leave it to others to accept or reject it as we pray to Our Lady for their conversion and as we seek, as the consecrated slaves of her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, to do penance for our own many sins of omission and commission that have played their own quite important role in worsening both the state of the world-at-large and the state of the Church Militant here on earth in this time of apostasy and betrayal.

Christ the King alone is Sovereign, and the very law that innocent human life is inviolable is inscribed on the very flesh of our hearts by God, Who has engraved it on the stone tablets that he gave Moses atop Mount Sinai:

And shewing mercy unto thousands to them that love me, and keep my commandments. [7] Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain: for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that shall take the name of the Lord his God in vain. [8] Remember that thou keep holy the sabbath day. [9] Six days shalt thou labour, and shalt do all thy works. [10] But on the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: thou shalt do no work on it, thou nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy beast, nor the stranger that is within thy gates.

[11] For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them, and rested on the seventh day: therefore the Lord blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it. [12] Honour thy father and thy mother, that thou mayest be longlived upon the land which the Lord thy God will give thee. [13] Thou shalt not kill. [14] Thou shalt not commit adultery. [15] Thou shalt not steal.

[16] Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. [17] Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house: neither shalt thou desire his wife, nor his servant, nor his handmaid, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is his. [18] And all the people saw the voices and the flames, and the sound of the trumpet, and the mount smoking: and being terrified and struck with fear, they stood afar off, [19] Saying to Moses: Speak thou to us, and we will hear: let not the Lord speak to us, lest we die. [20] And Moses said to the people: Fear not: for God is come to prove you, and that the dread of him might be in you, and you should not sin. (Exodus 20: 6-20.)

Everything else other than basing human law upon God’s eternal laws is sophistry, and despite all the verbiage about “rationality” and “compelling state interest” in the arguments made by those seeking to find some way only to “restrict,” not eliminate, all surgical killing of babies, to say nothing of ending all chemical assassinations of children, no one is truly rational unless he considers the fact that God’s eternal laws are the only “compelling interest” one needs to consider when assuring the protection of all innocent human life from conception to death.

Fallen men will always sin and they will always make excuses to commit sin and to remain in states of sin.

Granted.

However, we can avoid sin by cooperating with the graces that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has won for us by shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday and that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces.

It is one thing to sin and to be sorry and then to seek out the mercy of the Divine Redeemer in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance. It is quite another to persist in sin, no less perverse sins against nature, unrepentantly and to expect others to reaffirm him in those sins, whether explicitly by words of approval or implicitly by silence, which betokens consent. Catholics must judge the states of their own souls every night in their Examen of Conscience, and they have a duty to help others to recognize the serious states of sin into which they have plunged themselves, praying beforehand to God the Holy Ghost to fill them with wisdom and prudence so as to provide a warning in such a way that could plant a seed to get an unrepentant sinner to a true priest in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance.

Although the hour is very late, so late in fact that we may never live to see the restoration of all things in Christ the King during our lifetimes, we must continue, despite our own sins and failings, to plant the seeds for the conversion of men and their nations to Him and his true Catholic Church, which is not and can never be the heresy riddled conciliar sect that is replete with a so-called “pope” and “bishops” who celebrate the sins du jour with as much ready abandon as do the lords of the world and those who itching ears they always stand so ready to tickle.

We must take heed as we consider that, although He takes His time, God is just. Indeed, the seers of apparitions, on which, much like Our Lady’s apparitions in Garabandal, Spain, in 1961, Holy Mother Church has not ruled, in Heede, Germany, between 1937 during the height of Adolph Hitler’s so-called “Third Reich” were warned by Our Lady and then her Divine Son about the chastisements that human beings deserved for their wretched sins.

This what Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ told the seers at Heede in 1945 after His Most Blessed Mother had appeared to them between 1937 and 1940:

“Men have note listened to My Most Holy Blessed Mother when she appeared to them at Fatima, to exhort everyone to penitence. Now I, Myself, am coming in this last hour to warn and admonish mankind! The times are very serious! Men should at last do penance for their sins, turn away from their sins and pray, pray much in order the wrath of God may be mitigated. Particularly the Holy Rosary should be prayed very often. The Rosary is very powerful with God. Worldly pleasures and amusements should be restricted.

Men do not listen to My voice. They harden their hearts; they resist My grace. They do not wish to have anything to do with My Mercy, My Love, My merits. Mankind is worse than before the deluge. Mankind is suffocating in sin. Hatred and greed rule their hearts. This the work of the devil. They live in great darkness. All this is the work of satan. The world sleeps in a dense darkness…. This generation deserves to be annihilated but I desire to show Myself as Merciful.

Through the wounds that bled, Mercy will again gain victory over justice. My faithful souls should not be so asleep now like the disciples on Mount Olivet. They should pray without ceasing and gain all they can for themselves and for others.

Tremendous things are in preparation; it will be terrible as never before since the foundation of the world. All those who in these grave times have suffered so much, are martyrs and form the seed for the renovation of the Church. There were privileged to participate in My captivity, in My scourging, in My crown of thorns, and My Way of the Cross.

The Blessed Virgin Mary and the choirs of angels will active during these events. Hell believe that it is sure of the harvest, but I will snatch it away from them. I will come with My peace. Many curse me now, but these sufferings will come over mankind that they may be saved through it … Many expiate all they can for those who curse me Me now …

With a few faithful I will build up my Kingdom. As a flash of lightning this Kingdom will come … much faster than mankind will realize. I will give them a special light. For some this light will be a blessing; for others darkness. The light will come like the Star that showed the way to the wise men. Mankind will experience My love an My power … My beloved, the hour comes closer. Pray without ceasing. (cf. Queen of the Universe, Heede, Germany, 1937-1945.)

Lest the skeptic doubt whether it is worthwhile to reflect on the apparitions of Our Lady and her Divine Son at Heede, Germany, it is good to consider what has been written in their defense:

It has been falsely reported that the Vatican rejected or even condemned the apparitions of Heede. While there has been no formal judgment issued about the apparitions or message, the Bishop of Osnabrück received a favorable report from two priests he sent to investigate. It was only after wonderful cures occurred that the parish priests and other clergy supported the seers (forbidding a public dance announced for October 21, 1945, in response to their warnings). A new parish priest, appointed by the Bishop at the time the apparitions commenced, declared that there are “undeniable proofs of the seriousness and authenticity of these manifestations.” Pilgrimages and devotions in honor of Our Lady of Heede have always been freely permitted. The history of the apparitions and messages has appeared in numerous publications bearing the Imprimatur of various bishops. Great caution is required on the part of the faithful, however, because of the flood of allegations of apparitions and supernatural messages plaguing the world these days. These phony apparitions almost always contradict the true Catholic Faith in some way. But in the apparitions and messages of Heede we find nothing contrary to the Faith; indeed, their similarity to the approved apparitions of Fatima, Lourdes and La Salette give good. (See Our Lady of Heede.)

I think that the content of the message that the seers at Heede received from Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is quite valid, and it is even more relevant to our times today that they were given between 1937 and 1945, especially since Our Lord Himself warned a seer, Greta Ganseforth, about a dance that was to take place at school in Heede:

There was an occasion when a school dance was being prepared which apparently was going to exceed Catholic norms for modesty and decency. At the request of Jesus, Greta sought to have the dance cancelled or at least modified so that it would not be a dangerous occasion of sin for the youth. Greta even appealed to the parents of the students to not go against the warning from Jesus, who stated:

“If they proceed with that dance, all involved will have to answer to Me at their Judgment.” (cf. Queen of the Universe, Heede, Germany, 1937-1945.)

“Rock for Life,” anyone?

I do not think so, and the danced schedule to take place in Heede, Germany, in 1945 was about eight years or so before the appearance of the diabolical disturbance of the soul called “rock and roll” and its various mutations, each of which come straight from hell.

The narrative proceeds:

The dance for October 21, 1945, was cancelled. Along with this event and a number of other miraculous healings, other priests and clergymen finally believed. (cf. Queen of the Universe, Heede, Germany, 1937-1945.)

It had been three years previously that Bishop Hermann Wilhelm Berning, the Prefect of Schleswig -Holstein, “made the following remarks” during a sermon delivered on July 23, 1942:

“From Heede came a rich blessing. I could see that Marian devotion dramatically increased—that sacramental life, in particular, has flourished dramatically in this parish.” (cf. Queen of the Universe, Heede, Germany, 1937-1945.)

I believe that the warning of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ should sober us up from believing that there is anything short of Catholicism that can retard the evils of these days, evils that are caused what are in the objective order of things the Actual Sins of Men, leaving subjective culpability for them to God, Who alone judges individual souls, in world that has been deprived of the true teaching offices of Holy Mother Church and is devoid of the superabundance of Actual Graces caused by the spiritual barrenness of the conciliar sect’s abominable liturgical rites.

Indeed, most Catholics have never even heard of, no less read, this beautiful and moving summary of Catholic truth found in Pope Leo XIII's Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900, that has been oft-quoted on this site:

We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime.  (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.)

Having made war against the Social Reign of Christ King by its embrace of "religious liberty" and "healthy secularity--and blasphemed Him by means of the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo worship service, the counterfeit church of conciliarism has actually fed into the social evils it seeks to oppose as it robs Catholics yet attached to its structures of the means by which they can see the world clearly through the eyes of the true Faith and thus come to a recognition that we must be uncompromisingly Catholic in thought, word and speech at a times and in all circumstances without any exception whatsoever. The conciliarists have robbed Catholics of the ability to look that the following statement of Pope Saint Pius X and to recognize the truth contained therein:

By separating fraternity from Christian charity thus understood, Democracy, far from being a progress, would mean a disastrous step backwards for civilization. If, as We desire with all Our heart, the highest possible peak of well being for society and its members is to be attained through fraternity or, as it is also called, universal solidarity, all minds must be united in the knowledge of Truth, all wills united in morality, and all hearts in the love of God and His Son Jesus Christ. But this union is attainable only by Catholic charity, and that is why Catholic charity alone can lead the people in the march of progress towards the ideal civilization.. . .

Here we have, founded by Catholics, an inter-denominational association that is to work for the reform of civilization, an undertaking which is above all religious in character; for there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

It is essential that Catholics come to recognize that the remote cause of all problems, whether personal or social, is Original Sin and that the proximate cause for our social problems today is Modernity's warfare against the Incarnation and thus against the Social Reign of Christ the King, a warfare that has been aided and abetted by conciliarism's warfare against the necessity of restoring Christendom as the foundation, although never an absolute guarantor, of course, of personal and social order.

Each family should, however, find some time today to pray an extra set of mysteries of the Rosary if possible to pray in reparation for abortion, both chemical and surgical, and for the conversion of those of who have had, performed, participated in or been supportive of abortion in any way, shape or form, remembering also to pray for the day that the United States of America will become the Catholic States of America. God will never "bless" a land that is responsible for the shedding of so much innocent blood under cover of law, a land that has spread, in the name of "civil and religious liberty," mind you, Protestant "churches" and Masonic "lodges" in formerly Catholic countries, taking many souls out of the true Church in the process, a country that has spread fashions and "entertainment" fare that have been responsible for the poisoning of so many souls

While it is important to continue to be a peaceful, prayerful presence in front of the abortuaries as we pray our Rosaries alongside our fellow traditional Catholics (we cannot participate in Catholic "ecumenical" events where the false "luminous mysteries" are prayed) and to do the work of sidewalk counseling for those who are so called, it is necessary first and foremost to build up the Kingship of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in our own souls, seeking to making reparation for our own many sins, especially those, if any, against the virtues of Chastity and Modesty, as the precondition for helping to plant a few seeds for the restoration for His Social Reign over us and our nations.

In addition to our daily Rosaries and the acts of reparation we make to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, who better to turn do in our efforts to restore the Faith in this time of barbarism in the world and apostasy and betrayal on the part of the Modernists than to our beloved Saint Joseph, the Patron of the Universal Church and the Protector of the Faithful:

O Blessed Saint Joseph, tenderhearted father, faithful guardian of Jesus, chaste spouse of the Mother of God, we pray and beseech thee to offer to God the Father, His divine Son, bathed in blood on the cross for sinners, and through the thrice-holy Name of Jesus, obtain for us from the eternal Father the favor we implore (mention your petitions):

Appease the Divine anger so justly inflamed by our crimes, beg of Jesus mercy for thy children. Amid the splendors of eternity, forget not the sorrows of those who suffer, those who pray, those who weep; stay the Almighty arm which smites us, that by thy prayers and those of thy most holy Spouse, the Heart of Jesus may be moved to pity and to pardon. Amen.

No, Christ the King must reign in our minds, not naturalism of the "left" or naturalism of the "right" or the naturalism of "populism," whether inchoate or fully developed. The "people" are not sovereign. Christ the King is sovereign. Everything else is a lie and an illusion

The Rome of the pagan emperors was not converted at the ballot box. It was converted by the missionary activity of the Apostles and those who followed them, over thirteen millions of whom shed their blood in defense of the Holy Faith.

 Why do we think the conversion of the modern civil state will take any less than that? Why do we think that we are exempt from suffering for the Faith?

Why do we even think that we deserve some respite from the inexorable growth of the size and power of the modern civil state that is has arisen in the wake of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King?

This is why we must fulfill that part of Our Lady's Fatima Message that we are able to fulfill, praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit to make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world, being willing to suffer gladly anything and everything that we are asked to suffer for the restoration of the Church Militant on earth and for the restoration of Christendom in the world. Our Lady wants to protect us in the folds of her mantle in these troubling times.

Will we let her?

Will we run to her as we renew daily our total consecration to her Divine Son through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart?

The following words of Pope Leo XIII, contained in Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890, should give us cause before we continue to rush into the insanity of listening the naturalist babblers babble on and on about "issues" that they do not understand clearly or fully because they believe in one naturalist falsehood after another:

Nor can such misgivings be removed by any mere human effort, especially as a vast number of men, having rejected the Christian faith, are on that account justly incurring the penalty of their pride, since blinded by their passions they search in vain for truth, laying hold on the false for the true, and thinking themselves wise when they call "evil good, and good evil," and "put darkness in the place of light, and light in the place of darkness." It is therefore necessary that God come to the rescue, and that, mindful of His mercy, He turn an eye of compassion on human society. (Pope Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890.)

What can be a better description of the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic constitutional regime in the United States of America?

May the Rosaries we pray this day help to make reparation for the crimes of the baby-killers as well as for those of whose continue to kill the life of the soul and thus made more possible the daily war against all innocent human life, whether in the womb by means of chemical and surgical baby-killing or by the killing off of anyone after birth under the aegis of "brain death" or in the name of "compassion" by means of "palliative care." 

We can plant the seeds for the conversion of men and their nations to the true Faith, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.

We had better take heed of the warnings issued in Heede, Germany, and to be ever read to see beyond the headlines and thus to at everything through the supernatural eyes of the Holy Faith.

PART TWO

All right, now that you have read, digested and fully understood part-one of this commentary, it is time for review the questioning of Julie Rikelman, the attorney representing Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and Elizabeth Prelogar, the Solicitor General of the United States of America, by the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Thomas E. Dobbs, Mississippi State Health Officer, et al. v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, et al. on December 1, 2021.

Readers will clearly see that, as mentioned in part one of this two-part series, that Chief Justice Glover Roberts, Jr., believes that the statute being reviewed by the Court, Mississippi HB 1510, which limits the surgical execution of babies after their fifteenth week of development in the sanctuaries of their mothers’ wombs except for what Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart boasted of as “robust exceptions” for the “health” and the life of the mother should be upheld.

However, before providing of analysis of the Roberts-Rikelman colloquy, which came after Associate Justice Clarence Thomas’s questioning, it is necessary to review and to demolish the opening statement of attorney Julie Rikelman. who  is the senior director of the so-called “Center for Reproduction Rights:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Ms. Rikelman.

ORAL ARGUMENT OF JULIE RIKELMAN ON BEHALF OF THE RESPONDENTS

MS. RIKELMAN: Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court: Mississippi's ban on abortion two months before viability is flatly unconstitutional under decades of precedent. Mississippi asks the Court to dismantle this precedent and allow states to force women to remain pregnant and give birth against their will. The Court should refuse to do so for at least three reasons.

Interjection Number One:

A preborn child is not a disease.

Women who do not want to bear a child should not engage in that which leads to his conception.

Everyone has an obligation to practice the virtue of chastity according to their state in life, and those who fall into a sin of impurity have the obligation before God to accept the consequences of their actions and to welcome the new life whom He desires to be brought to the Baptismal font to have his immortal soul regenerated in the life-giving waters of Sanctifying Grace.

To kill a baby in order to continue living sinfully and/or to cater to one’s own career ambitions is barbaric egoism that makes every human life, preborn and born, subject to the arbitrary whims of those who have no more respect for life after birth than they did before birth. Those who do not see the Divine impress in an innocent preborn baby will never see it in the souls of anyone else, including themselves.

Back to the Miss Rikelman’s opening statement:

First, stare decisis presents an especially high bar here. In Casey, this Court carefully examined and rejected every possible reason for overruling Roe, holding that a woman's right to end a pregnancy before viability was a rule of law and a component of liberty it could not renounce. The question then is not whether Roe should be overturned but whether Casey was egregiously wrong to adhere to Roe's central holding.

Interjection Number Two:

Once again, that which is decided erroneously has no standing in the court of the Divine Judge, Christ the King, not that this matters at all to Julie Rikelman, who is such a believer in unrestricted baby-killing that she believes that the decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania, et al. v. William Casey, et al, June 27, 1992, was wrong to mentioned “viability” and not “liberty” as the central holding of the seven justice majority (Chief Justice Warren Earl Burger and Associate Justices, Harry Blackman, William Douglas, William Brennan, Potter Stewart, and Lewis Powell) in the case of Roe v. Wade, January 22, 1973.

Obviously, no one is morally free to do that which is proscribed by the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.

To call the mind the words of our first pope, Saint Peter:

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, to refrain yourselves from carnal desires which war against the soul, [12] Having your conversation good among the Gentiles: that whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may, by the good works, which they shall behold in you, glorify God in the day of visitation. [13] Be ye subject therefore to every human creature for God's sake: whether it be to the king as excelling; [14] Or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of the good: [15] For so is the will of God, that by doing well you may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men:

[16] As free, and not as making liberty a cloak for malice, but as the servants of God. [17] Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king. [18] Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward. [19] For this is thankworthy, if for conscience towards God, a man endure sorrows, suffering wrongfully. [20] For what glory is it, if committing sin, and being buffeted for it, you endure? But if doing well you suffer patiently; this is thankworthy before God.

[21] For unto this are you called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving you an example that you should follow his steps. [22] Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth. [23] Who, when he was reviled, did not revile: when he suffered, he threatened not: but delivered himself to him that judged him unjustly. [24] Who his own self bore our sins in his body upon the tree: that we, being dead to sins, should live to justice: by whose stripes you were healed. [25] For you were as sheep going astray; but you are now converted to the shepherd and bishop of your souls. (1 Peter 2: 11-25.)

The issues of contraception and abortion involve wanton carnal pleasure, which is taken so much for granted as a human “right” that most parents today have no problem at all with their children dressing indecently, speaking and behaving immodestly or engaging in sins of impurity, whether natural or unnatural or both.  

Returning to Miss Rikelman’s opening statement:

Second, Casey and Roe were correct. For a state to take control of a woman's body and demand that she go through pregnancy and childbirth with all the physical risks and life-altering consequences that brings is a fundamental deprivation of her liberty. Preserving a woman's right to make this decision until viability preserve -- protects her liberty while logically balancing the other interests at stake.

Interjection Number Three:

Physical risks?

Life-altering consequences?

Deprivation of liberty?

Miss Rikelman, whose arguments prevailed in the case of June Medical Services v. Russo, June 29, 1992, would have us believe that pregnancy is a “medical condition” and not the natural consequence of the generative powers between a man and a woman. She would also have us believe that children are an “inconvenience” who “alter” the lives of women, who must thus be deprived of their precious licentiousness, which she claims is liberty, to live as they want without caring for the fruit of their own wombs.

This reminds me of that debate I had at Hofstra University, Hempstead, Long Island, New York, on March 19, 1985, the Feast of Saint Joseph, with a pro-abortion activist who was lamenting what would happen to the life of a sixteen-year-old girl who was “forced” to care for a baby she did not “want,” to which I replied as follows: “Perhaps this young girl would learn to care for the first time in her life to care for someone other than herself.”

Here is the conclusion of Miss Rikelman’s arguments before the Supreme Court of the United States of America on December 1, 2021:

Third, eliminating or reducing the right to abortion will propel women backwards. Two generations have now relied on this right, and one out of every four women makes the decision to end a pregnancy.

Mississippi's ban would particularly hurt women with a major health or life change during the course of a pregnancy, poor women, who are twice as likely to be delayed in accessing care, and young people or those in contraception, who take longer to recognize a pregnancy. To avoid profound damage to women's liberty, equality, and the rule of law, the Court should affirm.

Interjection Number Four:

Whether or not she realizes it, Miss Julie Rikelman is a true ideological child of the French and Bolshevik revolutions and a true descendant of the anti-child agenda of the late Margaret Sanger.

Miss Rikelman believes that teenagers should fornicate with abandon. She believes in contraception and it is clear that she believes that it childbearing and child-rearing lessen the “power” of women to shape their own lives and the life of the world around them.

Alas, anyone who believes that childbearing and child-rearing represent a “backward” step for women is to be pitied as the most “empowered” women in the world are mothers who deny themselves to love, to care for and to educate their children to know, love, and serve the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Blessed Trinity, as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His Catholic Church, she who is the spotless, immaculate mystical bride of her Divine Founder, Invisible Head and Mystical Bridegroom, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

A mother is the most powerful person on the face of this earth as she can, when cooperating with the graces that Our Lady Our Blessed Mother and hence the model of all mothers, form the souls of her children to be saints. Her loving sacrifices (daily work attending to the house, loss of sleep during an infant’s first years and whenever her children are sick, the use of her great talents for the formation of souls rather than for her own material enrichment and worldly esteem, the patience they must exercise with the strong-willed and the efforts they must expend with those are indolent by nature, the time she spends in prayer by herself and with her husband and children) are always seen by Our Lord, Who will reward them abundantly in this life and upon her death.

As a naturalist, Julie Rikelman has no concept of this whatsoever. She thinks of women’s carnal pleasure divorced and disserved from children, making her one of the poorest people spiritually on the face of this earth.

Finally, although the point has been made so many times before on this website, the evil of contraception has given rise to an epidemic of divorce, the abandonment of families by husbands and/or wives, the feminization of poverty, latch-key children, the placement of children in daycare from their tenderest years and then their being dumped in pre-school or after-school programs until one or both of their parents have “time” to pick them up, generations of maladjusted narcissists who have never known true parental love, and an epic rise in violence caused by fatherless families and children who have never been taught to love God and to see in themselves and others His Divine impress.

Although the editors who wrote the editorial that was published ninety years ago did not see the world clearly through the eyes of the true Faith, they did, at least, see the consequences that would result from the widespread use of contraception:

The Federal Council of Churches in America some time ago appointed a committee on “marriage and the home,” which has now submitted a report favoring a “careful and restrained” use of contraceptive devices to regulate the size of families. The committee seems to have a serious struggle with itself in adhering to Christian doctrine while at the same time indulging in amateurish excursions in the field of economics, legislation, medicine, and sociology. The resulting report is a mixture of religious obscurantism and modernistic materialism which departs from the ancient standards of religion and yet fails to blaze a path toward something better.

The mischief that would result from an an attempt to place the stamp of church approval upon any scheme for “regulating the size of families” is evidently quite beyond the comprehension of this pseudo-scientific committee. It is impossible to reconcile the doctrine of the divine institution of marriage with any modernistic plan for the mechanical regulation of human birth. The church must either reject the plain teachings of the Bible or reject schemes for the “scientific” production of human souls. Carried to its logical conclusion, the committee’s report if carried into effect would lead to the death-knell of marriage as a holy institution, by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be “careful and restrained” is preposterous. If the churches are to become organizations for political and ‘scientific’ propaganda they should be honest and reject the Bible, scoff at Christ as an obsolete and unscientific teacher, and strike out boldly as champions of politics and science as substitutes for the old-time religion. (“Forgetting Religion,” Editorial, The Washington Post, March 22, 1933.)

What the authors of this otherwise very prescient editorial did not realize is that utilitarianism must prevail when men and their nations do not recognize that the only true standard of human liberty is the Cross of the Divine Redeemer as It must be held high by His Holy Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order. Men and their nations who “free” themselves from the means of their true liberty must perforce become slaves to their own passions, including their carnal lusts, and thus to the devil himself. Some “freedom.”

It is time now to turn our attention to colloquy between the Supreme Court’s senior most Associate Justice, Clarence Thomas, and attorney Julie Rikelman:

JUSTICE THOMAS: Counsel, I just have one question. I assume you -- from your brief, you're relying on an autonomy theory?

MS. RIKELMAN: Both bodily integrity and the ability to make decisions related to family, marriage, and childbearing, Your Honor.

JUSTICE THOMAS: Shortly, some years after we decided Casey, we had a case out of South Carolina, I believe, and it involved a woman who had been convicted of criminal child neglect because she ingested cocaine during pregnancy, and her case was post-viability, so it doesn't fit in the facts of this case. If she had ingested cocaine pre-viability and had the same negative consequences to her child, do you think the state had an interest in enforcing that law against her?

MS. RIKELMAN: The state may have, Your Honor. The state can certainly regulate to serve its interests in fetal life and in women's health. Those particular laws tend to undermine both of those interests because they deter women from seeking prenatal care, which is counterproductive to both their health.

JUSTICE THOMAS: But pre-viability as well as post-viability?

MS. RIKELMAN: No, Your Honor. The -- the Court has been clear that after viability states can prohibit abortion, except to save a woman's life.

JUSTICE THOMAS: No, I mean the -- in my example of criminal child neglect. I understand you -- your argument is about abortion. I am trying to look at the issue of bodily autonomy and whether or not she has a right also to bodily autonomy in the case of ingesting an illegal substance and causing harm to a pre-viability fetus.

MS. RIKELMAN: Your Honor, of course, those issues aren't posed in this case, and, again, I would say that the states can certainly regulate throughout pregnancy, both before and after viability, to preserve fetal life and to preserve the woman's health. The Court has said, however, there is -- there are other constitutional issues at stake, for instance, in the Ferguson case, that states still can't violate women's Fourth Amendment rights. But, again, that's not what this case is about.

This case is about a ban on abortion that the state concedes is weeks before viability, and the Court has been clear for 50 years that the one thing that states cannot do is to take the decision completely away from the woman until viability, that, until that point, it is her decision to make given the unique physical demands of pregnancy and the, life-altering consequences of pregnancy and having a child.

JUSTICE THOMAS: Thank you.

Interjection Number Five:

Associate Justice Clarence Thomas is on record stating that Roe v. Wade should be reversed, and he was trying to point out Miss Rikelman’s logical inconsistency in making a claim about “autonomy” about the supposedly “life-altering consequences of pregnancy and having a child” and the state’s interest in protecting a preborn baby from his mother’s use of substances that can harm him. Child abuse is child abuse, and the surgical execution of a preborn baby is the most horrific form of child abuse imaginable.

No mother has “autonomy” over her preborn baby. She has the duty before God to provide him the love and care that is his due as a fellow child of God entitled to the protection of his life, not its destruction.

A preborn baby is not the “possession” of his mother. He is his own human being.

Julie Rikelman does not care about this. Associate Justice Clarence Thomas does.

Oh, by the way, we are talking about human beings, not impersonal fetuses.

Chief Justice John Glover Roberts, who had waited until several other justices had questioned Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart to do so himself, was the second justice to question the Center for “Reproductive Rights’” Julie Rikelman, and he wanted to do know why the United States of America is one of only three countries that permit the surgical execution of children after fifteen weeks:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: You -- the point you made about the impact on -- on women and their place in society, those -- those words are certainly made in Roe as well. What we have before us, though, is a 15-week standard. Are -- are you suggesting that the difference between 15 weeks and viability are going to have the same sort of impacts as you were talking about -- or as we were talking about in Roe?

MS. RIKELMAN: Yes, Your Honor, I believe they would because people who need abortion after 15 weeks are often in the most challenging circumstances. As I mentioned, they're people who have made -- perhaps had a major health or life change, a family illness, a job loss, a separation, young people or people who are on contraception or pregnant for the first time and who are delayed in recognizing the signs of pregnancy, or poor women, who often have much more trouble navigating access to care, and if they're denied the ability to make this decision because there's a ban after 15 weeks, they will suffer all of the consequences that the Court has talked about in the past. And, in fact, the data has been very clear over the last 50 years that abortion has been critical to women's equal participation in society. It's been critical to their health, to their lives, their ability to pursue –

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I'm sorry, what -- what kind of data is that?

MS. RIKELMAN: I would refer the Court to the brief of the economists in this case, Your Honor, and it compiles data showing studies based actually on causal inference, showing that it's the legalization of abortion and not other changes that have had these benefits for women in society, and, again, those benefits are clear for education, for the ability to pursue a profession, for the ability to have –

Interjection Number Six:

One of the courses that I had to take while pursuing my doctorate in political science was a methodology course taught by Dr. Leigh Stelzer, who, though trained in methodology and statistics, knew the limits of statistical measures. This is why he assigned a small book entitled How to Lie With Statistics which was written by Darrell Huff. Statistics and data prove nothing as they can be manipulated with aplomb. The edition of the book we used in the Spring 1974 Semester at the then named State University of New York at Albany had a chapter entitled, “If you can’t prove what you would with your statistics, prove something else.”

Ultimately, however, all the statistical measures in the world are very much beside the constitutional issues under examination in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health and they are entirely irrelevant to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law, precepts with which Miss Rikelman should familiarize herself. The true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Blessed Trinity, has not given man the generative powers to be abused with ready abandon and thus create a world of luxury and career ambition built on the blood of the innocent preborn.

Miss Rikelman refused to present her data, which is, of course, completely irrelevant.

However, I can provide her with the stark facts of the number of babies killed worldwide since 1980. See the World Abortion Clock.

It is time to return to the Chief Justice-Julie Rikelman colloquy:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, putting that data aside, if you think that the issue is one of choice, that women should have a choice to terminate their pregnancy, that supposes that there is a point at which they've had the fair choice, opportunity to choice, and why would 15 weeks be an inappropriate line?

Because viability, it seems to me, doesn't have anything to do with choice. But, if it really is an issue about choice, why is 15 weeks not enough time?

MS. RIKELMAN: For -- for a few reasons, Your Honor. First, the state has conceded that some women will not be able to obtain an abortion before 15 weeks and this law will bar them from doing so. And a reasonable possibility standard would be completely unworkable for the courts. It would be both less principled and less workable than viability, and some of the reasons for that are, without viability, there will be no stopping point. States will rush to ban abortion at virtually any point in pregnancy. Mississippi itself has a six-week ban that it's defending with very similar arguments as it's using to defend the 15-week ban. And there are states that have bans –

Interjection Number Seven:

No one has the moral right to choose to kill an innocent human being. One may have the physical ability to kill an innocent human being. One may even have a “legal” ability to kill an innocent human being. One has no authority from God to do so, and the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment have been inscribed onto the very flesh of our hearts.

Remember, abortion-on-demand without exceptions began with the regime of Vladimir I. Lenin in 1918. He believed that he was “liberating” women from childbirth so that they could take part in the revolutionary activity of building the “new socialist man,” the “worker’s paradise.” He moved on quickly from there to kill off anyone who was opposed to his revolutionary plans after first imprisoning in the world’s first concentration camps. Lenin was followed, albeit a few dead bodies later, by Joseph Stalin, who killed tens of millions more all under cover of the civil law. Everything was perfectly “legal.”

One of the things that most secularists refuse to admit is that the mass murderer and occultist named Adolph Hitler modeled his schemes of mass murder after those of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. Nothing the National Socialist monsters did was “illegal.” However, like their Soviet contemporaries, what they did was in full violation of the Natural Law, which is knowable, albeit imperfectly, by reason alone.

The late Morris Abram, who was an aide to Supreme Court of the United States Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson, documented the use of the Naural Law in those trials:

In my opinion, there was preexisting applicable law for most of the acts declared criminal at Nuremberg. The law consisted of treaties against aggressive war, war crimes as defined in the Hague Conventions and the general principles of law recognized by all nations based in part on the natural law, for it is inconceivable that Hitler, Himler, Eichmann, or any subaltern did not know that it was an offense against civilization that children and other noncombatants be tortured and exterminated on ethnic grounds." (Morris Abram, Hearing before the Commission on Cooperation and Security in Europe, April 21, 1993.)

Although the hypocrisy of the Nuremberg Trials has been noted in the past, suffice it to say for the moment that the Allies themselves were guilty of crimes against humanity in the deliberate targeting of civilian population centers and the mass incineration of human beings at various points during World War II, including firebombing of Dresden, Germany, on February 11-12, 1945, and the dropping of atomic bombs on the cities of Hirsohima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. Ah, no one judges the “victors,” do they? No one? Well, God does, and has done so.

Stipulating the hypocrisy, therefore, the point of citing the Nuremberg Trials is to illustrate that Natural Law jurisprudence is part of the fabric of Western civilization, and it is the specific rejection of this jurisprudence, albeit the inevitable result of Modernity itself, that has led to triumph of the false belief that civil law is above all other law. It is not.

Even the late plagiarist and serial adulterer named Martin Luther King, Jr., cited none other than Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Natural Law as justification for his acts of civil disobedience to protest the invidious de jure segregation of human beings on the basis of their skin color existed under the cover of the civil law in the former states of the Confederate States of America following the end of the vindictive policies of the “Union” victors that had been imposed between the end of the War between the States and the end of the so-called “Reconstruction” in 1877: 

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all." Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. (Letter from Birmingham Jail, by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)

Mind you, this is not to endorse Martin Luther King, Jr., or the Federal holiday named after him, only to point out that he cited the Natural Law to oppose de jure racial segregation, which was unjust. That is all. King supported the diabolical work of Margaret Sanger, and he came under the influenced of and was used by a number of Communists during the last years of his life prior to his murder on April 4, 1968.

No one, including judges and lawyers, is above the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law, not even Julie Rikelman, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, or Elena Kagan.

Thou shalt not kill means Thou shalt not kill.

Finally in this regard, Julie Rikelman did herself no good in her reply to Chief Justice Roberts, who seems very poised to accept Mississippi HB 1510, whose vote and influence with at least one other “conservative” justice she needs to strike down the State of Mississippi’s conditional ban on the killing of preborn children after their fifteenth week of development in their mothers’ wombs.

Back to the Roberts-Rikelman colloquy:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, I know, but I'd like to focus on the 15-week ban because that's not a dramatic departure from viability. It is the standard that the vast majority of other countries have.

When you get to the viability standard, we share that standard with the People's Republic of China and North Korea. And I don't think you have to be in favor of looking to international law to set our constitutional standards to be concerned if those are your -- share that particular time period.

Interjection Number Seven:

Longtime readers of this website know that I have been a very consistent critic of Chief Justice John Glover Roberts, Jr., especially for his decision in the combined cases of National Federation of Independent Business, et al. v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. and Department of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Florida, et al., June 28, 2012, and King v. Burwell, June 25, 2015, and, among many other reasons, for refusing to read United States Seantor Rand Paul’s question naming Eric Ciaramella (aka “The Whistleblower”) during the first Senate impeachment trial of President Donald John Trump on Thursday, January 29, 2020, he is to be given credit for having noted that the United States of America stands with two communist countries, North Korea and Red China, in permitting the killing of babies after fifteen weeks.

This having been noted, Julie Rikelman pointed out that some European countries, especially the United Kingdom, have wide range of legal “options” that make the surgical killing of babies available until “viability” and even thereafter:

MS. RIKELMAN: I think there's two questions there, Your Honor, if I may. First, that is not correct about international law. In fact, the majority of countries that permit legal access to abortion allow access right up until viability, even if they have nominal lines earlier. So, for example, Canada, Great Britain and most of Europe allows access to abortion right up until viability, and it also doesn't have the same barriers in place.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: What do you mean, even if they have nominal lines earlier?

MS. RIKELMAN: Some countries, Your Honor, have a nominal line of 12 weeks or 18 weeks, but they permit legal access to abortion after that point for broad social reasons, health reasons, socioeconomic reasons, so their regimes really aren't comparable, and they also don't have the same type -- types of barriers that we have here. So, if the Court were to move the line substantial -- substantially backwards -- and 15 weeks is 9 weeks before viability, Your Honor, it's quite a bit backwards -- it may need to reconsider the rules around regulations because, if it's cutting the time period to obtain an abortion roughly in half, then those barriers are going to be much fact, the majority of countries that permit legal access to abortion allow access right up until viability, even if they have nominal lines earlier. So, for example, Canada, Great Britain and most of Europe allows access to abortion right up until viability, and it also doesn't have the same barriers in place.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Thank you.

Interjection Number Eight:

Barriers.

Health reasons.

Socioeconomic reasons.

Viability.

My word, arguing about “viability” is such an exercise in sophistry that it is hard to realize that anyone but a committed pro-death ideologue or one blinded by a commitment to legal wrangling that has nothing to do with the Constitution of the United States of America nor, much more importantly, the absolute inviolability of all innocent human life can take any of this seriously.

The degeneracy of the American founding’s flawed premises has reached such a state of perfection that men and women who are considered to be “sane” and “rational” are discussing up to what age a preborn child can be vacuumed apart, surgically sliced and diced, burned or have his life ended by either twisting his neck in a hysterotomy or piercing his skull in a crushed skull abortion (dilation and extraction, “partial-birth” abortion). Each of these gruesome methods would remain perfectly “legal” in Mississippi in the “robust exceptions” mentioned by Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart if HB 1510 is upheld as constitutional, which appears very likely.

No Catholicism?

Barbarism must result.

Well, it is time now to turn our attention to a colloquy between Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Julie Rikelman that centered on “safe haven” laws, although I think that Justice Barrett misspoke when she referred to “relinquishing a child after abortion” as there is no child to adopt after he has been killed. I think Justice Barrett meant to say either “after birth” or “instead of abortion.” Anyhow, here is the first part of the Barrett-Rikelman colloquy:

JUSTICE BARRETT: Ms. Rikelman, I have a question about the safe haven laws. So Petitioner points out that in all 50 states, you can terminate parental rights by relinquishing a child after abortion, and I think the shortest period might have been 48 hours if I'm remembering the data correctly.

So it seems to me, seen in that light, both Roe and Casey emphasize the burdens of parenting, and insofar as you and many of your amici focus on the ways in which forced parenting, forced motherhood, would hinder women's access to the workplace and to equal opportunities, it's also focused on the consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy.

Why don't the safe haven laws take care of that problem? It seems to me that it focuses the burden much more narrowly. There is, without question, an infringement on bodily autonomy, you know, which we have in other contexts, like vaccines. However, it doesn't seem to me to follow that pregnancy and then parenthood are all part of the same burden.

And so it seems to me that the choice more focused would be between, say, the ability to get an abortion at 23 weeks or the state requiring the woman to go 15, 16 weeks more and then terminate parental rights at the conclusion. Why -- why didn't you address the safe haven laws and why don't they matter?

MS. RIKELMAN: I think they don't matter for a couple of reasons, Your Honor. First, even if some of those laws are new since Casey, the idea that a woman could place a child up for adoption has, of course, been true since Roe, so it's a consideration that the Court already had before it when it decided those cases and adhered to the viability line. But, in addition, we don't just focus on the burdens of parenting, and neither did Roe and Casey. Instead, pregnancy itself is unique. It imposes unique physical demands and risks on women and, in fact, has impact on all of their lives, on their ability to care for other children, other family members, on their ability to work. And, in particular, in Mississippi, those risks are alarmingly high. It's 75 times more dangerous to give birth in Mississippi than it -- than it is to have a pre-viability abortion, and those risks are disproportionately threatening the lives of women of color.

Interjection Number Nine:

First, Miss Rikelman’s advertence to scare tactics about the “dangers” of giving birth in the State of Mississippi and her to portray herself as an advocate of the “lives of women of color” is reprehensible. Even a lot of black Protestant “ministers” speak of the genocide of black babies that has resulted from Roe v. Wade, and there was a certain thirty-eight-year black Protestant “minister,” a man who himself had been born out of wedlock, who wrote the following in the year 1977:

The question of "life" is The Question of the 20th century. Race and poverty are dimensions of the life question, but discussions about abortion have brought the issue into focus in a much sharper way. How we will respect and understand the nature of life itself is the over-riding moral issue, not of the Black race, but of the human race.

The question of abortion confronts me in several different ways. First, although I do not profess to be a biologist, I have studied biology and know something about life from the point of view of the natural sciences. Second, I am a minister of the Gospel and therefore, feel that abortion has a religious and moral dimension that I must consider.

Third, I was born out of wedlock (and against the advice that my mother received from her doctor) and therefore abortion is a personal issue for me. From my perspective, human life is the highest good, the summum bonum . Human life itself is the highest human good and God is the supreme good because He is the giver of life. That is my philosophy. Everything I do proceeds from that religious and philosophical premise.

Life is the highest good and therefore you fight for life, using means consistent with that end. Ufe is the highest human good not on its own naturalistic merits, but because life is supernatural, a gift from God. Therefore, life is the highest human good because life is sacred. Biologically speaking, thousands of male sperms are ejaculated into the female reproductive tract during sexual intercourse, but only once in a while do the egg and sperm bring about fertilization. Some call that connection accidental, but I choose to call it providential. It takes three to make a baby: a man, a woman and the Holy Spirit.

I believe in family planning. I do not believe that families ought to have children, as some people did where I was growing up, by the dozens. I believe in methods of contraception -- prophylactics, pills, rhythm, etc. I believe in sex education. We ought to teach' it in the home, the school, the church, and on the television. I think that if people are properly educated sexually they will appreciate the act and know its ultimate function, purpose and significance.

Only the name has changed

In the abortion debate one of the crucial questions is when does life begin. Anything growing is living. Therefore human life begins when the sperm and egg join and drop into the fallopian tube and the pulsation of life take place. From that point, life may be described differently (as an egg, embryo, fetus, baby, child, teenager, adult), but the essence is the same. The name has changed but the game remains the same.

Human beings cannot give or create life by themselves, it is really a gift from God. Therefore, one does not have the right to take away (through abortion) that which he does not have the ability to give.

Some argue, suppose the woman does not. want to have the baby. They say the very fact that she does not want the baby means that the psychological damage to the child is reason enough to abort the baby'. I disagree. The solution to that problem is not to kill the innocent baby, but to deal with her values and her attitude toward life \emdash that which has allowed her not to want the baby. Deal with the attitude that would allow her to take away that which she cannot give.

Some women argue that the man does not have the baby and will not be responsible for the baby after it is born, therefore it is all right to kill the baby. Again the logic is off. The premise is that the man is irresponsible.

If that is the problem, then deal with making him responsible. Deal with what you are dealing with, not with the weak, innocent and unprotected baby. The essence of Jesus' message dealt with this very problem -- the problem of the inner attitude and motivation of a person. "If in your heart . . ." was his central message. The actual abortion (effect) is merely the logical conclusion of a prior attitude (cause) that one has toward life itself. Deal with the cause not merely the effect when abortion is the issue.

Pleasure, pain and suffering

Some of the most dangerous arguments for abortion stem from popular judgments about life's ultimate meaning, but the logical conclusion of their position is never pursued. Some people may, unconsciously, operate their lives as if pleasure is life's highest good, and pain and suffering man's greatest enemy. That position, if followed to its logical conclusion, means that that which prohibits pleasure should be done away with by whatever means are necessary. By the same rationale, whatever means are necessary should be used to prevent suffering and pain. My position is not to negate pleasure nor elevate suffering, but merely to argue against their being elevated to an ultimate end of life. Because if they are so elevated, anything, including murder and genocide, canbe carried out in their name,

Often people who analyze and operate In the public sphere (some sociologists, doctors, politicians, etc.) are especially prone to argue in these ways. Sociologists argue for - population control on the basis of a shortage of housing, food, space, etc. I raise two issues at this point: (1) It is strange that they choose to start talking about population control at the same time that Black people in America and people of color around the world are demanding their rightful place as human citizens and their rightful share of the material wealth in the world. (2) People of color are for the most part powerless with regard to decisions made about population control. Given the history of people of color in the modern world we have no reason to assume that whites are going to look out for our best interests.

Politicians argue for abortion largely because they do not want to spend the necessary money to feed, clothe and educate more people. Here arguments for in-convenience and economic savings take precedence over arguments for human value and human life. I read recently where a politician from New York was justifying abortion because they had prevented 10,000 welfare babies from being born and saved the state $15 million. In my mind serious moral questions arise when politicians are willing to pay welfare mothers between $300 to $1000 to have an abortion, but will not pay $30 for a hot school lunch program to the already born children of these same mothers.

I think the economic objections are not valid today because we are confronted with a whole new economic problem. The basic and historic economic problem has been the inability to feed everyone in the world even If the will were there to do so. They could not produce enough to do the job even if they wanted to. An agrarian and disconnected world did not possess the ability to solve the basic economic problem. That was tragic, but hardly morally reprehensible. Today. however, we do not have the same economic problem. Our world is basically urban, industrial, interconnected, and technological so that we now, generally speaking, have the ability to feed the peoples of the world but lack the political and economic will to do so. That would require basic shifts of economic and political power in the world and. we are not willing to pay that price -- the price of justice. The problem now is not the ability to produce but the ability to distribute justly.

Psychiatrists, social workers and doctors often argue for abortion on the basis that the child will grow up mentally and emotionally scared. But who of us is complete? If incompleteness were the criteria for taking life we would all be dead. If you can justify abortion on the basis of emotional incompleteness then your logic could also lead you to killing for other forms of incompleteness -- blindness, crippleness, old age.

Life is public and universal

There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of higher order than the right to life. I do not share that view. I believe that life is not private, but rather it is public and universal. If one accepts the position that life is private, and therefore you have the right to do with it as you please, one must also accept the conclusion of that logic. That was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore outside of your right to concerned.

Another area that concerns me greatly, namely because I know how it has been used with regard to race, is the psycholinguistics involved in this whole issue of abortion. If something can be dehumanized through the rhetoric used to describe it, then the major battle has been won. So when American soldiers can drop bombs on Vietnam and melt the faces and hands of children into a hunk of rolling protoplasm and in their minds say they have not maimed or killed a fellow human being something terribly wrong and sick has gone on in that mind. That is why the Constitution called us three-fifths human and then whites further dehumanized us by calling us "niggers." It was part of the dehumanizing process. The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in. order to justify that which they wanted to do and not even feel like they had done anything wrong. Those advocates of taking. life prior to birth do not call it killing or murder; they call it abortion. They further never talk about aborting a baby because that would imply something human. Rather they talk about aborting the fetus. Fetus sounds less than human and therefore can be justified.

In conclusion, even if one does take life by aborting the baby, as a minister of Jesus Christ I must also inform and-or remind you that there is a doctrine of forgiveness. The God I serve is a forgiving God. The men who killed President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. can be forgiven. Everyone can come to the mercy seat and find forgiveness and acceptance. But, and this may be the essence of my argument, suppose one is so hard-hearted and so in-different to life until he assumes that there is nothing for which to be forgiven. What happens to the mind of a person, and the moral fabric of a nation, that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience? What kind of a person, and what kind of a society will we have 20 years hence if life can be taken so casually?

It is that question, the question of our attitude, our value system, and our mind-set with regard to the nature and worth of life itself that is the central question confronting mankind. Failure to answer that question affirmatively may leave us with a hell right here on earth. (How We Respect Life is the Overriding Moral Issue.)

Leaving aside the fact that the author of the article above is not a “minister of the Gospel,” his words are a direct rebuke of everything that Jill Rikelman said at the Supreme Court of the United States of America on Wednesday, December 1, 2021.

Who wrote the article?

Well, a man who later got the “presidential bug” and learned how to incant pro-death cliches: Jesse Louis Jackson.

So much for Jill Rikelman’s presenting herself as a defender of “women of color,”

Second, Jill Rikelman is such a feminist ideologue that she is unaware that her discussion of pregnancy as a burden that “interferes” with a woman’s “liberty” and “autonomy” makes her a utilitarian who believes that babies are “burdens” to be discarded and not gifts to be loved selflessly and unconditionally. Selflessness is foreign to the mind of utilitarian hedonists.

Third, weak human nature is what it is. Although, quite unlike what Jorge Mario Bergoglio said recently, sins of the flesh are gravely evil in the objective order of things, it used to be the case those who fell from grace in this regard, went to Confession, and then made arrangements with the parish priest for a simple nuptial ceremony in private without public fanfare. Others, perhaps in cases of adultery or in the cases of teenaged mothers, put up their children for adoption. My own mother was born out of wedlock to a women named Ruth Coomer in Kansas City, Missouri, on March 6, 1921, and I dare say that her chances of making out of the womb alive a century later would be minimal, to say the least.

Fourth, it must be remembered that there were not over three to four million babies being killed in abortuaries around the United States of America. Laws decriminalizing surgical baby-killing between 1967 and 1973 before Roe v. Wade produced the demand for surgical abortion (with the path having been paved for surgical abortions by the acceptance of contraception and the Supreme Court of the United States of America's decisions in Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965). Roe v. Wade created a demanded and thus fed into the sickness that pregnancy is a “burden” that a women can dispose of with complete impunity.

It makes no difference that women might still seek to kill their babies if civil law restored to them the full legal protection that is their absolute due without any exception?

We don't wait to enact legislation against bank robbery until all people stop robbing banks, do we? Sure, bank robberies will always take place. Desperate people will always do desperate things to "solve" their problems.

However, the civil law serves an educative function and a punitive function for those who have no regard for the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. God does not wait for everyone to “agree” with His laws before He expects His rational creatures to comply with them. Those who make civil law, whose authority in this instance of the inviolability of innocent human life extends only to the realm of imposing particular penalties upon those involved in abortion and does not extend to any authority to "permit" direct, intentional baby killing, do not wait for everyone to be "good" in order to pass legislation to enforce the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.

Illicit law miseducates the public into thinking that that which is by natural immoral is a “right” of theirs to do as they please. There would be no Jill Rikelmans if the world was conformed to right principles in light of First and Last Things.

We return now to the next part of the Barrett-Rikelman colloquy:

JUSTICE BARRETT: So are you saying -- I mean, actually, as I read Roe and Casey, they don't talk very much about adoption. It's a passing reference that that means out of the obligations of parenthood. But, as I hear this answer then, are you saying that the right as you conceive of it is grounded primarily in the bearing of the child, in the carrying of a pregnancy, and not so much looking forward into the consequences on professional opportunities and work life and economic burdens?

MS. RIKELMAN: No, Your Honor, I believe it's both, and -- and that is exactly how Casey talked about it. It talked about the two strands of cases that supported the right. One was the strand of cases supporting bodily integrity, and it cited to cases like Curzan and Riggins versus Nevada. And the second was the strand of cases supporting decisional autonomy and specifically decisions related to childbearing, marriage, and procreation, decisions like Griswold, Loving. And so it's really both strands that we're relying on here.

Interjection Number Ten:

Strands of sophistry, Miss Rikelman. Strands of sophistry.

Sophists believe that there is no objective morality, and they believe it absolutely, making absolutists even though they do not understand it.

Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch was next up to question Jill Rikelman:

JUSTICE GORSUCH: May I ask you a question about stare decisis, counsel? Your -- your colleagues on the other side have emphasized that Casey rejected Roe's trimester framework and replaced it with an undue burden standard. They argue that the undue burden standard was not well known to the law before that, and then they argue that the undue burden standard has evolved over time too in ways the Court has found difficult to agree upon. In Hellerstedt, for example, they -- they point out in their briefs that the Court seemed to suggest that a court should consider both the benefits and the burdens associated with the proposed restriction. In June Medical more recently, the Court splintered on -- on -- on that same question, whether benefits could be considered or only burdens.

And so the argument goes that this has proved to be, putting aside all the other obviously difficult questions in the case, that -- that the standard itself has proved difficult to administer and that that is relevant to the stare decisis analysis, and I just wanted to give you an opportunity to respond.

MS. RIKELMAN: Yes, Your Honor. The first point I'd like to make is the undue burden test is not at issue in this case. That is the test that applies to regulations, not prohibitions.

And the state has conceded that this is a prohibition. In fact, that's the title of this law, is an Act to prohibit abortion after 15 weeks.

And the only thing that's at issue in this case is the viability line, and the viability line has been enduringly workable. The lower federal courts have applied it consistently and uniformly for 50 years. And the Fifth Circuit here below had no difficulty striking down this law unanimously, 3-0. So it's been an exceedingly workable standard. And if I may return to your question, Mr. Chief Justice, a reasonable possibility standard would not be workable. It would ultimately boil down to an argument that states can prohibit a category of women from exercising a constitutional right merely because of the number of people in the category. And that's just not how constitutional rights work. A state would never say that it could ban religious services on a Wednesday evening, for example, simply because most people could attend religious services on another night of the week.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: So -- so I actually just wanted to -- that's helpful, I think. I just want to make sure I understand what you're telling me, counsel, that -- that if the Court were to, in this case, step past viability and apply undue burden, the undue burden test, to regulations prior to viability, you would agree with the other side, I think, that that's not a workable standard. Is -- is that -- is that a fair understanding of what you're -- you're telling the Court?

MS. RIKELMAN: No, Your Honor. I -- I believe –

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Do you think that would be workable?

MS. RIKELMAN: -- I believe -- if I may clarify, I believe the undue burden test has been workable for regulations that it is –

JUSTICE GORSUCH: I -- I – I understand that. I'm -- if it were to apply -- if the Court were to -- and I thought this was what you were saying in response to the Chief Justice, but maybe I'm mistaken, and please correct me if I am -- but what -- what is your argument against applying the undue burden standard prior to viability?

MS. RIKELMAN: If the undue burden standard, as this Court laid out in Casey, which includes the viability line, is applied –

JUSTICE GORSUCH: No, no, I'm asking -- I know -- we're fighting the hypothetical here, counsel, all right? Accept the hypothetical. If, hypothetically, the Court were to extend the undue burden standard to regulations prior to viability, would that be workable or would that not be workable in your view?

MS. RIKELMAN: Without viability, it would not be workable, Your Honor, because it would ultimately, again, always come down to a claim that states can bar a certain category of people from exercising this right simply because of the number of people in the category, and that's not a workable standard and it's not a constitutional standard.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: I appreciate that clarification. Thank you.

Interjection Number Eleven:

Eyeball-rolling sophistry.

Once again, the extended discussion about “undue burden” and “viability” standards concerning when the civil law can restrict the surgical execution of the innocent preborn is a testament to the levels of absolute absurdity into which men must fall when they are unable, unwilling or even ignorant of the binding laws of God that the late Bishop Clemens von Galen, the heroic Bishop of Munster, Germany, invoked the Fifth Commandment openly as the monsters of Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich were enforcing the “Nuremburg Laws” under which the feeble-minded, the elderly, the feeble-bodied, and those deemed “impure” racially were sentenced to death in a manner that is being mirrored at this time in so-called healthcare system on a global basis:

“Thou shalt not kill!” God wrote this commandment in the conscience of man long before any penal code laid down the penalty for murder, long before there was any prosecutor or any court to investigate and avenge a murder. Cain, who killed his brother Abel, was a murderer long before there were any states or any courts of law. And he confessed his deed, driven by his accusing conscience: “My punishment is greater than I can bear . . . and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me the murderer shall slay me” (Genesis 4,13-14).

“Thou shalt not kill!” This commandment from God, who alone has power to decide on life or death, was written in the hearts of men from the beginning, long before God gave the children of Israel on Mount Sinai his moral code in those lapidary sentences inscribed on stone which are recorded for us in Holy Scripture and which as children we learned by heart in the catechism. (Three Sermons of Bishop Clemens von Galen.)                 

“Thou shalt not kill!” is the only standard to guide civil law concerning the inviolability of human life, whether before or after birth, not “undue burden,” not “viability,” and not “quality of life.”

Be patient.

Be very patient.

Justice Samuel Alito was trying to follow up with Miss Rikelman about “viability” and “undue burden” in his own line of questions:

JUSTICE ALITO: Just to follow up on that, I read your briefs -- your brief to say that the only real options we have are to reaffirm Roe and Casey as they stand or to overrule them in their entirety. You say that "there are no half-measures here." Is that a correct understanding of your brief?

MS. RIKELMAN: Your Honor, it -- certainly, the arguments that the state has presented is what we're responding to there, which is that all of the state's arguments, including their alternatives, which are undue burden without viability, would be the equivalent of overruling Casey and Roe because the viability line is the central holding of those cases. Casey mentioned it no fewer than 19 times. And the Court in June Medical just a year ago affirmed that the viability line is the central holding of both Casey and Roe.

Interjection Number Twelve:

Miss Rikelman, it does not matter to the true God of Divine Revelation in Whom you do not believe what was decided in June Medical Services v. Russo nor what was decided in Roe v. Wade nor Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. The chemical and surgical execution of children is illicit, which is why it must be stopped without exceptions today, not tomorrow, lest the wrath of God continue to fall down the United States of America and other nations around the world defy His laws with contemptuous arrogance.

Back to the Alito-Rikelman colloquy:

JUSTICE ALITO: Well, you -- you do emphasize that the Court drew the line at viability in Roe and reaffirmed that in Casey, and that is certainly something that we have to take very seriously into consideration.

But suppose we were considering that question now for the first time. I'm sure you know the arguments about the viability line as well as I do, probably better than I do. What would you say in defense of that line? What would you say to the argument that has been made many times by people who are pro-choice and pro-life that the line really doesn't make any sense, that it is, as Justice Blackmun himself described it, arbitrary?

The -- the woman's -- if a woman wants to be free of the burdens of pregnancy, that interest does not disappear the moment the viability line is crossed. Isn't that right?

MS. RIKELMAN: No, Your Honor, and if I may make a few points to answer your question. First, I think the state views viability as arbitrary because it completely discounts the woman's interests. But viability –

JUSTICE ALITO: No, no. But does a woman have -- does -- upon reaching the point of viability, does not the woman have the same interests that she had before viability in being free of this pregnancy that she no longer wants to continue?

MS. RIKELMAN: Viability is a principled line, Your Honor, because, in ordering the interests –

JUSTICE ALITO: Well, I'm trying to see whether it is a principled line.

MS. RIKELMAN: Yeah. The –

JUSTICE ALITO: Will you agree with me at least on that point, that a woman still has the same interest in terminating her pregnancy after the viability line has been crossed?

MS. RIKELMAN: Yes, Your Honor, but the Court balanced the interests –

JUSTICE ALITO: Okay. And then –

MS. RIKELMAN: -- and in ordering the interests at stake –

JUSTICE ALITO: -- look at the interests on -- on the other side. The -- the fetus has an interest in having a life, and that doesn't change, does it, from the point before viability to the point after said is that those philosophical differences couldn't be resolved –

JUSTICE ALITO: Well, what is the –

MS. RIKELMAN: -- in the way –

JUSTICE ALITO: That -- that's what I'm getting at. What is the philosophical argument, the secular philosophical argument for saying this is the appropriate line? There are those who say that the rights of personhood should be considered to have taken hold at a point when the fetus acquires certain independent characteristics. But viability is dependent on medical technology and medical practice. It has changed. It may continue to change.

MS. RIKELMAN: No, Your Honor, it is principled because, in ordering the interests at stake, the Court had to set a line between conception and birth, and it logically looked at the fetus's ability to survive separately as a legal line because it's objectively verifiable and doesn't require the Court to resolve the philosophical issues at stake.

Interjection Number Thirteen:

Arguing on the devil’s terms of secular philosophy following the Incarnation, Nativity and Redemptive Act of Our Blessed Lord of Saviour Jesus Christ is akin to trying the invoke the “authority” of Zeus or Apollo on matters of religious belief.

Secularism had gotten us to where we are today, and where are today is a state of open rebellion against everything contained within the Sacred Deposit of Faith and even a refusal to admit that the Natural Law can be used in jurisprudential decision-making.

To quote one Jed Clampett: “Pity-full. Pity-full.”

It impossible to draw lines between right and wrong on secular terms in a pluralist regime and it is offensive to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to pretend that He does not exist and that His laws do not bind all men in all circumstances and at all times.

Chief Justice John Glover Roberts, who focused yet again on stare decisis and whether Supreme Court decisions about the direct, intentionally killing of preborn children should take into consideration the public’s support:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I just want to focus on stare decisis for a little bit. found my colleague, Justice Breyer's, comments quite compelling. I'm not quite sure how they're -- they play out in -- in Casey.

It is certainly true that we cannot base our decisions on whether they're popular or not with the people. Casey seemed to say we shouldn't base our decisions not only on that but whether they're going to -- whether they're going to seem popular, and it seemed to me to have a paradoxical conclusion that the more unpopular the decisions are, the firmer the Court should be in not departing from prior precedent, sort of a super stare decisis, but it's super stare decisis for what are regarded as -- by many, as the most erroneous decisions.

Do you think there is that category? Is there -- or is it just normal stare decisis?

MS. RIKELMAN: I think it is precedent on precedent, Your Honor, because Casey did the stare decisis analysis for Roe, so the question before this Court is whether that stare decisis analysis was egregiously wrong.

And if I may answer your earlier question about whether viability was squarely at issue in Casey, it clearly was, Your Honor. In -- in some people's view, it doesn't, Your Honor,  but what the Court pages 869 to 871, the Court squarely discussed viability because the government had made the argument that viability was arbitrary –

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, no, I appreciate that Casey addressed it, but that's different than saying it was at issue. It said it was the central principle of Roe because it was pretty much all that was left after they were done dealing with the rest of it.

And the regulations in Casey had -- had no applicability or not depending upon where viability was. They applied throughout the whole range, period. So, if they didn't say anything about viability, it's like what Justice Blackmun said in -- when discussing among his colleagues, which is a good reason not to have papers out that -- that early, is that they don't have to address the line-drawing at all in Roe, and they didn't have to address the line-drawing at all in Casey.

 MS. RIKELMAN: I disagree with that, Your Honor, because the undue burden test incorporates the viability line. That was what the Court was assessing the regulations against, whether they imposed a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman before Your Honor, because Casey did the stare decisis analysis for Roe, so the question before this Court is whether that stare decisis analysis was egregiously wrong. And if I may answer your earlier question about whether viability was squarely at issue in Casey, it clearly was, Your Honor. At viability. And if a prohibition like this law isn't a substantial obstacle, then nothing would be, so the issue was squarely before the Court, and, in fact, the Court said at page 879 that in adopting the undue burden test, it was not disturbing the viability line.

Interjection Number Fifteen:

I am going to let Pope Pius IX speak for me about the needless mind-numbing exchange between the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America and Miss Julie Rikelman that applies to the entirety of the Court’s case history concerning contraception, abortion, and “marriage rights” for people of the same gender:

But, although we have not omitted often to proscribe and reprobate the chief errors of this kind, yet the cause of the Catholic Church, and the salvation of souls entrusted to us by God, and the welfare of human society itself, altogether demand that we again stir up your pastoral solicitude to exterminate other evil opinions, which spring forth from the said errors as from a fountain. Which false and perverse opinions are on that ground the more to be detested, because they chiefly tend to this, that that salutary influence be impeded and (even) removed, which the Catholic Church, according to the institution and command of her Divine Author, should freely exercise even to the end of the world -- not only over private individuals, but over nations, peoples, and their sovereign princes; and (tend also) to take away that mutual fellowship and concord of counsels between Church and State which has ever proved itself propitious and salutary, both for religious and civil interests.

For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of "naturalism," as they call it, dare to teach that "the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones." And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that "that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require." From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an "insanity," viz., that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way." But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching "liberty of perdition;" and that "if human arguments are always allowed free room for discussion, there will never be wanting men who will dare to resist truth, and to trust in the flowing speech of human wisdom; whereas we know, from the very teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, how carefully Christian faith and wisdom should avoid this most injurious babbling."

And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that "the people's will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right." But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests? (Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864.)

That about sums up the matter.

Correction: That does sum up the matter.

Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, who evidently believes himself to be a Diogenes in a quest not for truth but what he thinks is jurisprudential “clarity” to “get somewhere,” was next up to pose questions of Julie Rikelman, the legal counsel for Jackson Women’s Health Organization:

JUSTICE BREYER: It's a very interesting question that I think Justice Barrett raised too. It's usually just philosophical, but I think it has bite here.

When I read Casey, it's not just one on one, you know, two is greater than one. Casey plus Roe is greater than -- it -- it's -- they're making a point that -- that -- that we're an institution, perhaps more, than a court of appeals or a district court. It's Hamilton's point, no purse, no sword, and yet we have to have public support, and that comes primarily, says Casey -- I wonder if it was O'Connor who wrote that? I don't know.

But it comes primarily from people believing that we do our job. We use reason. We don't look to just what's popular. And that's where you're seeing the paradox. But the problem with the super case of which we've heard three mentioned, the problem with a super case like this, the rare case, the watershed case, where people are really opposed on both sides and they really fight each other, is they're going to be ready to say, no, you're just political, you're just politicians.

And that's what kills us as an American institution. That's what they're saying. So we're looking at it for that. But we are looking to, and that they say is a reason why -- a reason why, when you get a case like that, you better be damn sure that the normal stare considerations, stare decisis overrulings are really there in spades, double, triple, quadruple, and then they go through and show they're not. Okay?

What's the paradox? Now maybe you think I've just made an argument that there isn't one, but, really, in my head, I'm thinking I'm not sure. There may be one. And I don't know if you've ever thought about this. I don't know if you've ever -- if -- when -- when -- when that occurred to you, I don't want to overrule the stare -- I wouldn't want the Court to overrule the stare decisis section of Casey, you see. And that -- that's -- that's what I think is being brought up, and maybe I haven't made it clearer, but I've tried to.

MS. RIKELMAN: Yes, Your Honor. I think the point that the Court was making was that the fact that some states may continue to enact laws in the teeth of the Court's precedent has never been enough of a reason to overrule. And that's true for a number of decisions that the Court has issued. The fact that some people continue to disagree with them is not a basis to discard that precedent.

Interjection Number Sixteen:

In other words, Justice Stephen Breyer was pleading with Julie Rikelman to confirm his belief that Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey do not lose their “special” stare decisis “protection” because some state legislatures are pushing the limits of the Casey decision or, worse yet from his warped perspective, even ignoring those limits in an open effort to reverse both those cases, which is precisely what the State of Mississippi is asking the Court to do in the case of Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the State of Mississippi, et al. v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, et al. Obviously, Julie Rikelman agreed.

What a surprise.

Justice Clarence Thomas had an additional question for Julie Rikelman:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Justice Thomas, anything further?

JUSTICE THOMAS: Back to my original question. If I were -- I know your interest here is in abortion, I understand that, but, if I were to ask you what constitutional right protects the right to abortion, is it privacy? Is it autonomy? What would it be?

MS. RIKELMAN: It's liberty, Your Honor. It's the textual protection in the Fourteenth Amendment that a state can't deprive a person of liberty without due process of law, and the Court has interpreted liberty to include the right to make family decisions and the right to physical autonomy, including the right to end a pre-viability pregnancy.

JUSTICE THOMAS: So it's all of the above?

MS. RIKELMAN: Well, the Court -- that's how the Court has interpreted the liberty clause for over a hundred years in cases going back to Meyer, Griswold, Carey, Loving, Lawrence.

 JUSTICE THOMAS: Yeah, but I -- I mean, all of those sort of just come out of Lochner, the -- so it's that we've -- we've dropped part of it. So I understand what you're saying, but what I'm trying to focus on is, if we -- is to lower the level of generality or at least be a little bit more specific.

In the old days, we used to say it was a right to privacy that the Court found in the due process, substantive due process clause, okay? So -- or in substantive due process, and I'm trying to get you to tell me, what are we relying on now? Is it privacy? Is it autonomy? What is it?

MS. RIKELMAN: I think it continues to be liberty, and the right exists whatever level of generality the Court applies. There was a tradition under the common law for centuries of women being able to end their pregnancies. But, in addition, when it comes to decisions related to family, marriage, and childbearing, the Court has done the analysis at a higher level of generality, and that makes sense because, otherwise, the Constitution would reinforce the historical discrimination against women.

JUSTICE THOMAS: Thank you.

Interjection Number Seventeen:

No one has a right to kill a baby.

No one has the right to “choose” to kill a baby.

There is no right to “privacy” to prevent the conception of a baby or to kill him if he manages to be conceived despite the use of that which frustrates the end for which God Himself has ordained the marital union between one man and one woman.

Julie Rikelman just wants abortion, and she will use anything at all to justify her position on behalf of the slaughter of the innocent. In this, of course, she is an exemplar of the feminist revolution that is, of course, a revolution against the Order of Creation (Nature) and the Order of Redemption (Grace).

Justice Samuel Alito came to bat for a second set of questions of Julie Rikelman:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Justice Breyer? Justice Alito?

JUSTICE ALITO: Well, you just mentioned the common law, so let me ask you a couple questions about history.

Did any state constitutional provision recognize that abortion was a right, liberty, or immunity in 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted?

MS. RIKELMAN: No, Your Honor, but it had been allowed under the common law for many years.

JUSTICE ALITO: Does any judicial decision at that time or shortly or immediately after 1868 recognize that abortion was a right, liberty, or immunity?

MS. RIKELMAN: There were state high court decisions shortly before then, Your Honor, talking about the ability of women to end a pregnancy before quickening.

JUSTICE ALITO: What's your best case?

MS. RIKELMAN: For the right to end a pregnancy, Your Honor?

JUSTICE ALITO: Uh-huh.

MS. RIKELMAN: Allowing a state to take control of a woman's body and force her to undergo the physical demands, risks, and life-altering consequences of pregnancy is a fundamental deprivation of her liberty. And, once the Court recognizes that that liberty interest deserves heightened protection, it does need to draw a workable line, and viability is a line that logically balances the interests at stake.

Interjection Number Eighteen:

Julie Rikelman could not provide a single case to back up her contention, not that it would have mattered because no human institution of civil governance has any authority to dispense with innocent human life at any time, whether before or after birth, and it does not matter that there might have been state judicial decisions justifying the killing of babies as decisions contrary to the objective truth have no binding force whatsoever and only establish precedents for the ruin of men and their nations.

I return you now to the colloquy between Associate Justice Samuel Alito and the Center for [Non] Reproduction’s director, Julie Rikelman that concentrated a history lesson given by Justice Alito that is, as I will explain shortly, very misleading:

JUSTICE ALITO: The brief for the American Historical Association says that abortion was not legal before quickening in 26 out of 37 states at the time when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted. Is that correct?

MS. RIKELMAN: That is correct because some of the states had started to discard the common law at that point because of a discriminatory view that a woman's proper role was as a wife and mother, a view that the Constitution now rejects, and that's why it's appropriate to do the historical analysis at a higher level of generality.

Interjection Number Nineteen:

This is all entirely misleading as the “common law” on abortion to which Miss Rikelman referred was developed in England during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries as both Lockean liberalism and, in its wretched wake, utilitarianism began to erode the vestigial remnants of the true English common as it emerged when England was a bulwark of Catholicism as judges sat beneath crucifixes in their courtrooms and pursued justice with the knowledge that all their judgments would be judged by the Divine Judge Himself, Christ the King, at the moment of their Particular Judgment.

The direct, intentional killing of an innocent human being was always abhorrent during Christendom and the fact that true English common law was corrupted in Protestant England, which has now become, for all intents and purposes, a land of abject paganism, does nothing to lend any kind of credibility to Miss Rikelman’s argument. Indeed, this fact is quite damning to it.

We return now to the colloquy:

JUSTICE ALITO: In the face of that, can it said that the right to -- to abortion is deeply rooted in the history and traditions of the American people?

MS. RIKELMAN: Yes, it can, Your Honor. Again, at the founding, women were able to end their pregnancy under the common law. And, in fact, this Court in Glucksberg specifically decided -- discussed Casey as a decision based on history and tradition and, at Note 19, specifically called out and relied on Roe's conclusion that at the time of the founding and well into the 1800s, women had the ability to end a pregnancy.

JUSTICE ALITO: What was the -- the principal source that the Court relied on in Roe for its historical analysis? Who was the author of that -- of that article?

MS. RIKELMAN: I apologize, Your Honor, I don't remember the author. I know that the Court spent many pages of the opinion doing a historical analysis. There's also a brief on behalf of several key American historian associations that go through that history in detail because there's even more information now that supports Roe's legal conclusions.

JUSTICE ALITO: All right. Thank you.

Interjection Number Twenty:

Facts are troublesome things, Miss Rikelman. One had better marshal his facts if one is going to make gratuitous claims about abortion being well-grounded in a nation’s history when it was as late as the 1960s that baby-killers in many cities were rounded up by the police and sent to jail. Within twenty years, thereafter, many police officers in the same cities were manhandling—to the point of brutalizing—elderly women and priests during Operation Rescue. Law not rooted into the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law must wind up being used as a weapon against the innocent and in favor all that is wrong and thus injurious to the salvation of men and the right ordering of their nations.

Once again, however, no amount of historical “proof” that the killing of an innocent child was not prosecuted in some jurisdictions in the 1800s does lend any kind of credibility to the practice as there was once a time when chattel slavery and the invidious practice of enforced racial segregation was widespread and protected by law. One’s nation can have bad traditions that are unworthy of man’s calling as a redeemed creature and offensive to God, Who will not fail to avenge the blood of the innocent. God takes His time, but He is just.er

Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh jumped at a second round of questioning after Associate Justices Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch passed when their names were called by Chief Justice John Glover Roberts, Jr.:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Justice Sotomayor?

Justice Kagan?

Justice Gorsuch?

Justice Kavanaugh?

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: I think the other side would say that the core problem here is that the Court has been forced by the position you're taking and by the -- the cases to pick sides on the most contentious social debate in American life and to do so in a situation where they say that the Constitution is neutral on the question of abortion, the text and history, that the Constitution's neither pro-life nor pro-choice on the question of abortion, and they would say, therefore, it should be left to the people, to the states, or to Congress.

And I think they also then continue, because the Constitution is neutral, that this Court should be scrupulously neutral on the question of abortion, neither pro-choice nor pro-life, but, because, they say, the Constitution doesn't give us the authority, we should leave it to the states and we should be scrupulously neutral on the question and that they are saying here, I think, that we should return to a position of neutrality on that contentious social issue rather than continuing to pick sides on that issue. So I think that's, at a big-picture level, their argument. I want to give you a chance to respond to that.

Interjection Number Twenty-one:

I interject at this point prior to Miss Rikelman’s reply to point out that Associate Justice Brett Michael Kavanaugh, a Catholic who has known nothing other than conciliarism throughout his entire life, has a penchant for using language that assuages those committed to false positions, in this instance using the phrase “pro-choice” rather than “pro-abortion.” No one has a moral right to kill a baby. As the slogan on the Covenant trucking company trailers goes, “It’s a child, not a choice.” Pro-aborts know that in a war, words are weapons, and their insistence on using the phrase “pro-choice” is based on a desire to anesthetize the reality of what abortion does: brutally slaughter a baby who has committed no crime.

Also, as noted in part one of this commentary, it is not necessarily true that the Constitution is “neutral” on abortion, but it is neutral on the Social Kingship of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, which is precisely why the Constitution of the United States of America is defenselss against those who consider it an empty vessel into which to pour their own ideological presuppositions and policy preferences.

All right, I will Miss Rikelman reply to Associate Justice Brett Michael Kavanaugh:

MS. RIKELMAN: Yes. A few points if I may, Your Honor.

First, of course, those very same arguments were made in Casey, and the Court rejected them, saying that this philosophical disagreement can't be resolved in a way that a woman has no choice in the matter.

And, second, I don't think it would be a neutral position. The Constitution provides a guarantee of liberty. The Court has interpreted that liberty to include the ability to make decisions related to child -- childbearing, marriage, and family. Women have an equal right to liberty under the Constitution, Your Honor, and if they're not able to make this decision, if states can take control of women's bodies and force them to endure months of pregnancy and childbirth, then they will never have equal status under the Constitution.

Interjection Number Twenty-three:

Miss Rikelman, no mere creature has any “choice” in the matter of childbearing. Human beings obey God and His Commandments.

Julie Rikelman, of course, is a pro-death ideologue and only knows how to incant slogans while using words such as “force” that connote “violence” even though it is the duty of a women who has conceived a child to bear him until birth and, in the cases of single mothers, to put the child up for adoption if she does not want to care for him. However, a mother still has the obligation to pray for her child even after she places him up for adoption.

People such as Julie Rikelman believe that emotionalism and sloganeering can win the day, which is precisely what the Sophism of Greek antiquity was all about:

"It is as though we had returned to the age of Protagoras and the Sophists, the age when the art of persuasion--whose modern equivalent is advertising slogans, publicity, propaganda meetings, the press, the cinema, and radio--took the place of thought and controlled the fate of cities and accomplished coups d'etat. So the ninth book of Plato's Republic looks like a description of contemporary events." (Simone Weil, quoted in Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order.)

This even truer today than it was eighty years ago.

Justice Kavanaugh returned to the issue of stare decisis once again as he continued his questioning of Julie Rikelman as he cited a number of cases that have been overturned by the Supreme Court of the United States of America:

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: And I want to ask a question about stare decisis and to think about how to approach that here because there have been lots of questions picking up on Justice Barrett's questions and others. And history helps think about stare decisis, as I've looked at it, and the history of how the Court's applied stare decisis, and when you really dig into it, the history tells a somewhat different story, I think, than is sometimes assumed.

If you think about some of the most important cases, the most consequential cases in this Court's history, there's a string of them where the cases overruled precedent. Brown v. Board outlawed separate but equal. Baker versus Carr, which set the stage for one person/one vote. West Coast Hotel, which recognized the states' authority to regulate business. Miranda versus Arizona, which required police to give warnings when the right to -- about the right to remain silent and to have an attorney present to suspects in criminal custody. Lawrence v. Texas, which said that the state may not prohibit same-sex conduct. Mapp versus Ohio, which held that the exclusionary rule applies to state criminal prosecutions to exclude evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Giddeon versus Wainwright, which guaranteed the right to counsel in criminal cases. Obergefell, which recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

In each of those cases -- and that's a list, and I could go on, and those are some of the most consequential and important in the Court's history -- the Court overruled precedent. And it turns out, if the Court in those cases had -- had listened, and they were presented in -- with arguments in those cases, adhere to precedent in Brown v. Board, adhere to Plessy, on West Coast Hotel, adhere to Atkins and adhere to Lochner, and if the court had done that in those cases, you know, this -- the country would be a much different place.

So I assume you agree with most, if not all, the cases I listed there, where the Court overruled the precedent. So the question on stare decisis is why, if -- and I know you disagree with what about I'm about to say in the "if" -- if we think that the prior precedents are seriously wrong, if that, why then doesn't the history of this Court's practice with respect to those cases tell us that the right answer is actually a return to the position of neutrality and -- and not stick with those precedents in the same way that all those other cases didn't?

MS. RIKELMAN: Because the view that a previous precedent is wrong, Your Honor, has never been enough for this Court to overrule, and it certainly shouldn't be enough here when there's 50 years of precedent. Instead, the Court has required something else, a special justification. And the state doesn't come forward with any special justification. It makes the same exact arguments the Court already considered and rejected in its stare decisis analysis in Casey. And, in fact, there is nothing different. There is no less need today than 30 years ago or 50 years ago for women to be able to make this fundamental decision for themselves about their bodies, lives, and health.

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: Thank you.

Interjection Number Twenty-four:

Justice Kavanaugh was very correct to bring up the cases he mentioned, although I would argue that many of the cases he cited that overturned existing case law were decided wrongly. In particular, the case of Baker v. Carr, which got the Federal court system into business of legislative districting, was a dramatic departure from the wisdom of Colegrove v. Green in which the Court declared that legislative districting was a non-justiciable question because it would involve the courts in the “political thicket.” Under the Court of Chief Justice Earl Warren (1953-1969), sound precedents were overturned regularly while its justices busied themselves with establishing novel “precedents” such as the one in Griswold v. Connecticut, June 7, 1965, that led directly to Roe v. Wade.

Miss Rikelman’s answer can be summarized as follows: abortion is “special”, and no one has any “right” to “interfere” with Roe v. Wade.

Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett posed several more questions of Julie Rikelman to finish the Court’s questioning of her prior to the presentation of United States Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and the questioning of her by the justices:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Justice Barrett?

JUSTICE BARRETT: I want to ask you a follow-up question. You know, the Chief was asking you about the viability line and if that was the right place, if that's the right line to draw. So let's take it out of the question of stare decisis and imagine that there is a state constitution that's identical to the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause, and a state supreme court has to decide as a matter of state constitutional law what the scope of an abortion right is. And the second trimester ends at 27 weeks. And so that state supreme court says, we think that the right exists, you know, in a -- in a -- in an absolute sense, that the state cannot take away the right up to 27 weeks and then after that adopts an undue burden standard. As a matter of first principles, is that line acceptable as a matter of constitutional law?

MS. RIKELMAN: Your Honor, it may be, but I think that the question in this case is whether a line is obviously more principled or obviously more workable than viability because of the stare decisis context.

JUSTICE BARRETT: Why -- I mean, that's the Roe framework basically, the trimester. Why wouldn't that be workable if you pick a line and say the end of the second trimester, 27 weeks; the third trimester, state's interests increase? I don't understand why 27 weeks is less workable than 24.

MS. RIKELMAN: I'm not trying to suggest it is, Your Honor. What I was trying to suggest is that the viability line is a principled and workable line, so to change it, there would have to be a new line that's obviously more principled and more workable.

And -- and the line that the Court has drawn actually –

JUSTICE BARRETT: But that's stare decisis. I'm asking as a matter of first principles.

MS. RIKELMAN: As a matter of first principle, the viability line makes sense because if the -- the state constitution was the same –

JUSTICE BARRETT: As a matter of prudential judgment. It's not constitutionally required as a matter of first principles because, in fact, we could decide to be more protective and say 27 weeks, end of the second trimester.

MS. RIKELMAN: You could, Your Honor, but the -- the viability line makes sense given the protection for liberty because it comes from the woman's liberty interests in resisting state control of her body. And, once the Court recognizes that interest, it does need to draw a line, as it does in many other constitutional contexts, like the Fourth and Fifth Amendment. And the viability line, as I mentioned, makes sense because it focuses on the fetus's ability to survive separately, which is an appropriate legal line because it's objectively verifiable and doesn't delve into philosophical questions about when life begins.

Interjection Number Twenty-five:

Here’s a first principle for you both, Justice Barrett and Miss Rikelman: “Thou shalt not kill.”

Such is the state of absurdity to which a written document must lead when the text of its words do not mean of any higher authority, thus opening itself up to deliberate misinterpretations to justify whatever mother lode of ideology passes for “jurisprudence” for men who have untethered themselves from the one and only true standard of human liberty, the Holy Cross.

Thankfully, mercifully, we move on from Julie Rikelman. However, the next person to speak before the Court was United States Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who made Julie Rikelman seem like a constitutional “originalist” as Mrs. Prelogar essentially argued that the surgical execution of innocent preborn babies should continue because, well, women have gotten used to killing their babies:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Thank you, counsel.

General Prelogar?

ORAL ARGUMENT OF GENERAL ELIZABETH B. PRELOGAR FOR THE UNITED STATES, AS AMICUS CURIAE, SUPPORTING THE RESPONDENTS GENERAL PRELOGAR: Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court: For a half century, this Court has correctly recognized that the Constitution protects a woman's fundamental right to decide whether to end a pregnancy before viability. That guarantee that the state cannot force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term and give birth has engendered substantial individual and societal reliance.

The real-world effects of overruling Roe and Casey would be severe and swift. Nearly half of the states already have or are expected to enact bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy, many without exceptions for rape or incest.

Women who are unable to travel hundreds of miles to gain access to legal abortion will be required to continue with their pregnancies and give birth, with profound effects on their bodies, their health, and the course of their lives. If this Court renounces the liberty interests recognized in Roe and reaffirmed in Casey, it would be an unprecedented contraction of individual rights and a stark departure from principles of stare decisis.

The Court has never revoked a right that is so fundamental to so many Americans and so central to their ability to participate fully and equally in society. The Court should not overrule this central component of women's liberty.

Interjection Number Twenty-six:

First, the execution of the innocent preborn is a “fundamental right” only for the devil to perpetuate a cycle of sin and violence that has reduced human beings to mere objects whose humanity can be denied or denigrated for a variety of utilitarian reasons. The rise of random attacks upon bystanders in the major cities of the United States of America, which have included slashings, stabbings, the shoving of people onto subway tracks in front of moving trains, and kinds of beatings in broad daylight in major business centers is the dire result of denying the humanity of the innocent preborn child, which itself is the consequence of denying the relevance, if not the very fact of, the Incarnation, Nativity, and Redemptive Act of Christ the King to the right ordering of men and their nations.

Second, the mere fact that a decision has been rendered by mere mortals wearing black gowns and who bear the title of justices or justices does not make it right. The mere weight of numbers can never make legitimate that which is illegitimate in the objective order of things.

Third, Solicitor General Prelogar’s argument has been made before, perhaps nowhere more notoriously than by Associate Justice Anthony McLeod Kennedy in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania, et al. v. William Casey, et al., June 29, 1992:

Although Roe has engendered opposition, it has in no sense proven unworkable, representing as it does a simple limitation beyond which a state law is unenforceable.  

(e) The Roe rule's limitation on state power could not be repudiated without serious inequity to people who, for two decades of economic and social developments, have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives. The Constitution serves human values, and while the effect of reliance on Roe cannot be exactly measured, neither can the certain costs of overruling Roe for people who have ordered their thinking and living around that case be dismissed. Pp. 855-856. (Text of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey.)

The fact that something has become a commonly accepted practice does not make it morally right, although we know that this is what Jorge Mario Bergoglio really believes about false religions and about those who live in sin.

United States Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar’s appeal to the “legalization” of the willful murder of innocent babies has no merit constitutionally and it is damnable before the true God of Divine Revelation.

All right, let the questioning begin, starting with Associate Justice Clarence Thomas:

JUSTICE THOMAS: General, would you specifically tell me -- specifically state what the right is? Is it specifically abortion? Is it liberty? Is it autonomy? Is it privacy?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: The right is grounded in the liberty component of the Fourteenth Amendment, Justice Thomas, but I think that it promotes interest in autonomy, bodily integrity, liberty, and equality. And I do think that it is specifically the right to abortion here, the right of a woman to be able to control, without the state forcing her to continue a pregnancy, whether to carry that baby to term.

JUSTICE THOMAS: I understand we're talking about abortion here, but what is confusing is that we -- if we were talking about the Second Amendment, I know exactly what we're talking about. If we're talking about the Fourth Amendment, I know what we're talking about because it's written. It's there.

What specifically is the right here that we're talking about?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: Well, Justice Thomas, I think that the Court in those other contexts with respect to those other amendments has had to articulate what the text means in the bounds of the constitutional guarantees, and it's done so through a variety of different tests that implement First Amendment rights, Second Amendment rights, Fourth Amendment rights. So I don't think that there is anything unprecedented or anomalous about the right that the Court articulated in Roe and Casey and the way that it implemented that right by defining the scope of the liberty interest by reference to viability and providing that that is the moment when the balance of interests tips and when the state can act to prohibit a woman from -- from getting an abortion based on its interests in protecting the fetal life at that point.

JUSTICE THOMAS: So the right specifically is abortion?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: It's the right of a woman prior to viability to control whether to continue with the pregnancy, yes.

JUSTICE THOMAS: Thank you.

Interjection Number Twenty-seven:

Mindful of the fact that just today, Friday, December 10, 2021, within the Octave of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Commemorations of Pope Saint Melchidades, the Second Sunday of Advent and the Translation of the House of Loreto, the Supreme Court of the United States of America has issued a ruling on the case of Whole Women’s Health of Texas, et al. v. Austin Reeves Jackson, et al., concerning the procedure to be followed for filing suit against Texas S.B. 8 that was the subject of Beyond the Headlines: Making Catholic Sense of New Efforts to End Surgical Baby-Killing in which Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who dissented in part from today’s decision and concurred in part, made what Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch said in his opinion for the Court were “novel arguments” in contradiction of established procedures, we turn now to Sotomayor’s friendly questioning of Elizabeth Prelogar:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: General, I am interested in Justice Kavanaugh's long litany of cases in which we've overruled precedent, and we have. Yet, you did call this unprecedented. As I see the structure of the Constitution, the body of it is the relationship of the three branches of government, and then there is the relationship of the federal government to the state, and, through our incorporation of the Fourteenth Amendment, of the state vis-α-vis the individual, it's the federal government and the states' relationship to individuals.

And I see the Bill of Rights, including the Fourteenth Amendment, as basically setting the limits, giving individual freedom to do certain things and stopping the government from intruding in those liberties, in those Bill of Rights, correct?

Of all of the decisions that Justice Kavanaugh listed, all of them invite -- virtually, except for maybe one, involved us recognizing and overturning state control over issues that we said belong to individuals, the right in Miranda to be warned was an individual right, correct?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: That's right, Justice Sotomayor, and I think that that is a key distinction with the list of precedents that Justice Kavanaugh was relying on. I think that there are really two key distinctions, and the first is that in the vast majority of those cases, the Court was actually taking the issue away from the people and saying that it had been wrong before not to recognize a right. And I think that matters because it goes straight to reliance interests.

Here, the Court would be doing the opposite. It would be telling the women of America that it was wrong, that, actually, the ability to control their bodies and perhaps the most important decision they can make about whether to bring a child into this world is not part of their protected liberty, and I think that that would come at tremendous cost to the reliance that women have placed on this right and on societal reliance and what this right has meant for further ensuring equality.

Interjection Number Twenty-eight:

Yes, ladies, the Supreme Court of the United States of America was wrong in the cases of Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and June Medical Services v. Russo.

Associate Justice Stephen Breyer proceeded to question Mrs. Prelogar as follows:

JUSTICE BREYER: The reliance point is a -- is a good point, and this may be my fault. I'm talking about pages 854 to 863 in the Casey case. And I've already used up too much time. I can't read those pages out loud. But they do not include the list that Justice Kavanaugh had. They do include two. One is Brown, and the second one is West Coast Hotel versus Parrish. And you could add the gay rights cases as a third which would fit the criteria. But there are complex criteria that she's talking about that link to the position in the rule of law of this Court, so all I would say is you have to read them before beginning to say whether they are overruling or not overruling in the sense meant there calling for special concern. Now they say in those, maybe I'd mention two, wait a minute, of course, Plessy was wrong when decided, but, just a minute, also remember Plessy said that separate but equal was a badge of inferiority. No, they said, it isn't. Well, all you have to do is open your eyes and look at the south, my friend, and you will see whether it was or it wasn't in 1954. And they made a similar point. They said, are you going to sit here in the middle of the Depression and tell me that -- that Lochner, with its other cases, and pure, just about pure laissez faire, we can run the country that way. I mention that because I want people to read those 15 pages with care, and that's why I said that. If you have anything to add to my plea to read it, please do.

GENERAL PRELOGAR: Well, Justice Breyer, I agree completely. I have read those pages and re-read them many times, and I think that this is actually another key distinction from the cases that Justice Kavanaugh was referring to, and that is, as I understand those passages in Casey, the Court carefully walked through each and every stare decisis factor that this court focuses on. It looked at workability of the viability rule, doctrinal underpinnings, legal and factual developments, and critically reliance interests. And down the line, it found that the case for reaffirming Roe was overwhelming. And in that situation, when every factor that the Court consults to determine whether to retain precedent counsels in favor of retaining it, I think Casey properly perceived that a decision to overrule nevertheless, perhaps based on a conclusion that the justices thought the case was wrongly decided in the first instance, would run counter to the ability of stare decisis to function as a cornerstone of the rule of law in this context.

Interjection Number Twenty-nine:

What Justice Breyer does not understand is that an unwillingness to overturn a court decision that had been decided wrongly means that the Nuremburg Trials had no authority to judge the judges who enforce the eugenics laws of the Nazi Third Reich. Error can never be the foundation of a just social order, those who believe that we must tolerate grievous error that deprives human beings of their fundamental right, the right to life, will find out sooner or later that they will be deprived of eternal life if they persist in their unbelief and the errors born from it.

Associate Justice Samuel Alito was the next to question United States Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar:

JUSTICE ALITO: Is it your argument that a case can never be overruled simply because it was egregiously wrong?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: I think that at the very least, the state would have to come forward with some kind of materially changed circumstance or some kind of materially new argument, and Mississippi hasn't done so in this case. It is –

 JUSTICE ALITO: Really? So suppose Plessy versus Ferguson was re-argued in 1897, so nothing had changed. Would it not be sufficient to say that was an egregiously wrong decision on the day it was handed down and now it should be overruled?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: It certainly was egregiously wrong on the day that it was handed down, Plessy, but what the Court said in analyzing Plessy to Brown and Casey was that what had become clear is that the factual premise that underlay the decision, this idea that segregation didn't create a badge of inferiority, had been entirely mistaken.

JUSTICE ALITO: So is your -- is it really –

 GENERAL PRELOGAR: And, here, the state is not –

JUSTICE ALITO: -- is it your answer that we needed all the experience from 1896 to 1954 to realize that Plessy was -- was wrongly decided? Would you answer my question? Had it come before the Court in 1897, should it have been overruled or not?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: I think it should have been overruled, but I think that the factual premise was wrong in the moment it was decided, and the Court realized that and clarified that when it overruled in Brown.

JUSTICE ALITO: So there are –

GENERAL PRELOGAR: And, here –

JUSTICE ALITO: -- circumstances in which a decision may be overruled, properly overruled, when it must be overruled simply because it was egregiously wrong at the moment it was decided?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: Well, I think –

JUSTICE ALITO: Correct?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: -- every other –

JUSTICE ALITO: Is that correct?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: -- stare decisis factor likewise would have justified overruling in that interest, that actually it would run counter to any notion of reasonable reliance, that it was not a workable rule, that it had become an outlier in our understanding of fundamental freedoms.

JUSTICE ALITO: Well, there was a lot of reliance on –

GENERAL PRELOGAR: And so I think, looking at all of the facts –

JUSTICE ALITO: -- there was a lot of reliance on Plessy. The -- the south built up a whole society based on the idea of white supremacy. So there was a lot of reliance. It was -- it was improper reliance. It was reliance on an egregiously wrong understanding of what equal protection means. But your answer is -- I don't -- I still don't understand -- I still don't have your answer clearly. Can a decision be overruled simply because it was erroneously wrong, even if nothing has changed between the time of that decision and the time when the Court is called upon to consider whether it should be overruled? Yes or no? Can you give me a yes or no answer on that?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: This Court, no, has never overruled in that situation just based on a conclusion that the decision was wrong. It has always applied the stare decisis factors and likewise found that they warrant overruling in that instance. And -- and Casey did that. It applied the stare decisis factors. If stare decisis is to mean anything, it has to mean that that kind of extensive consideration of all of the same arguments for whether to retain or discard a precedent itself is an additional layer of precedent that needs to be relied on and can form a stable foundation of the rule of law.

Interjection Number Thirty:

“Whether to retain or discard a precedent itself is an additional layer of precedent that needs to be relied on and can form a stable foundation of the rule of law”?

Au contraire, Mrs. Prelogar. Au contraire:

The more closely the temporal power of a nation aligns itself with the spiritual, and the more it fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to the conservation of the commonwealth. For it is the aim of the ecclesiastical authority by the use of spiritual means, to form good Christians in accordance with its own particular end and object; and in doing this it helps at the same time to form good citizens, and prepares them to meet their obligations as members of a civil society. This follows of necessity because in the City of God, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a good citizen and an upright man are absolutely one and the same thing. How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity. (Silvio Cardinal Antoniano, quoted by Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

Painful as it is, I must turn now to the questioning of Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar by Associate Justice Elena Kagan, who had been Solicitor General of the United States of America from March 19, 2009, to May 17, 2010, before her nomination by President Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro to succeed the only justice who had been appointed by President Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr./Leslie Lynch King, Jr., the pro-abortion John Paul Stevens:

JUSTICE KAGAN: General, you've talked a number of times about the reliance interests here, and I think I'd like you to say a little bit more about that because, you know, sometimes, when we talk about reliance interests, it's like there's a rule of law and you look at it and you say, oh, somebody will enforce my contract because of this rule, and it has a very kind of grounded quality to it. And, as Casey talked about the reliance interests here, they're a little bit more airy. And I just wanted to get your sense of what are the reliance interests here and how does -- how do they cash out on the ground?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: Well, there are multiple reliance interests here, as I think Casey correctly recognized. Casey pointed to the individual reliance of women and their partners who had been able to organize their lives and make important life decisions against the backdrop of having control over this incredibly consequential decision whether to have a child. And people make decisions in reliance on having that kind of reproductive control, decisions about where to live, what relationships to enter into, what investments to make in their jobs and careers. And so I think, on a very individual level, there has been profound reliance. And it's certainly the case that not every woman in America has needed to exercise this right or has wanted to, but one in four American women have had an abortion, and for those women, the right secured by Roe and Casey has been critical in ensuring that they can control their bodies and control their lives. And then I think there's a second dimension to it that Casey also properly recognized, and that's the societal dimension. That's the -- the understanding of our society, even though this has been a controversial decision, that this is a liberty interest of women. It's the case that not everyone agrees with Roe versus Wade, but just about every person in America knows what this Court held, they know how the Court has defined this concept of liberty for women and what control they will have in the situation of an unplanned pregnancy. And for the Court to reverse course now, I think, would run counter to that societal reliance and the very concept we have of what equality is guaranteed to women in this country.

Interjection Number Thirty-one:

Pure utilitarianism.

Children are gifts to be welcomed with loving, open hearts, not objects to be “planned.”

Women of childbearing years who want to work to “fulfill” themselves rather than being forced into the workplace to help support their families because of abandonment by their spouses or the inability of their husbands to find work because of preference giving to women in the hiring process today (or because of the confiscatory taxes imposed to support Federal and state bureaucracies that exist to mishandle taxpayer dollars on wasteful, duplicative and, in all too many instances, unconstitutional statist programs) should not be married.

Married or not, however, no one, whether man or woman, has any “right” to use generative powers God has given to man outside the context of a valid marriage. Holy Writ speaks very plainly about what will happen who misuse the generative powers for their own illicit pleasures rather than according to God’s commands and in accordance with His laws:

[1] Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James: to them that are beloved in God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ, and called. [2] Mercy unto you, and peace, and charity be fulfilled. [3] Dearly beloved, taking all care to write unto you concerning your common salvation, I was under a necessity to write unto you: to beseech you to contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints. [4] For certain men are secretly entered in, (who were written of long ago unto this judgment,) ungodly men, turning the grace of our Lord God into riotousness, and denying the only sovereign Ruler, and our Lord Jesus Christ. [5] I will therefore admonish you, though ye once knew all things, that Jesus, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, did afterwards destroy them that believed not:

[6] And the angels who kept not their principality, but forsook their own habitation, he hath reserved under darkness in everlasting chains, unto the judgment of the great day. [7] As Sodom and Gomorrha, and the neighbouring cities, in like manner, having given themselves to fornication, and going after other flesh, were made an example, suffering the punishment of eternal fire. [8] In like manner these men also defile the flesh, and despise dominion, and blaspheme majesty. [9] When Michael the archangel, disputing with the devil, contended about the body of Moses, he durst not bring against him the judgment of railing speech, but said: The Lord command thee. [10] But these men blaspheme whatever things they know not: and what things soever they naturally know, like dumb beasts, in these they are corrupted.

[11] Woe unto them, for they have gone in the way of Cain: and after the error of Balaam they have for reward poured out themselves, and have perished in the contradiction of Core. [12] These are spots in their banquets, feasting together without fear, feeding themselves, clouds without water, which are carried about by winds, trees of the autumn, unfruitful, twice dead, plucked up by the roots, [13] Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own confusion; wandering stars, to whom the storm of darkness is reserved for ever. [14] Now of these Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying: Behold, the Lord cometh with thousands of his saints, [15] To execute judgment upon all, and to reprove all the ungodly for all the works of their ungodliness, whereby they have done ungodly, and of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against God. 

[16] These are murmurers, full of complaints, walking according to their own desires, and their mouth speaketh proud things, admiring persons for gain' s sake. [17] But you, my dearly beloved, be mindful of the words which have been spoken before by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ, [18] Who told you, that in the last time there should come mockers, walking according to their own desires in ungodlinesses. [19] These are they, who separate themselves, sensual men, having not the Spirit. [20] But you, my beloved, building yourselves upon your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost, 

[21] Keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, unto life everlasting. [22] And some indeed reprove, being judged:[23] But others save, pulling them out of the fire. And on others have mercy, in fear, hating also the spotted garment which is carnal. [24] Now to him who is able to preserve you without sin, and to present you spotless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, in the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,[25] To the only God our Saviour through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory and magnificence, empire and power, before all ages, and now, and for all ages of ages. Amen. (Jude 1-25.)

Every single justice serving on the Supreme Court of the United States of America accepts fornication as an irreversible fact of life today. Although, once again, it is one thing to be fall into sin and to be sorry. It is quite another to persist in sin unrepentantly and to plan to put oneself into the near occasions of sin and/or to base one’s entire life upon living in its throes. Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ stands ready to forgive the fallen who repent, but He will be unstinting in His wrath against those who persist in their sins arrogantly and without a trace of repentance.

Sin is the most deadly force on earth, yet it is that grown human beings have been emboldened to argue on its behalf before the highest court in the United States of America.

Oh no.

It’s back to Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor again:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: It is certainly true that there can be some planning by some people about pregnancy. People who are raped don't have a choice, whether it's by an outsider or their own husband. And not everybody can afford contraceptives, contrary to the -- the -- your adversary's brief. In fact, 19 percent of the women in Mississippi are uninsured, so they don't have money to pay for contraceptives. So -- but why -- their point in their brief was, you know, contraceptives, if you use them, the failure rate is very small, et cetera, et cetera, how can there be real reliance. So could you address that issue?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: Of course. So, first, this is not a new circumstance since Roe and Casey. Contraceptives existed in 1973 and in 1992, and still the Court recognized that unplanned pregnancies would persist and deeply implicate the liberty interests of women. But I think even on the facts, the state is mistaken here. Contraceptive failure rate in this country is at about 10 percent, using the most common methods. That means that women using contraceptives, approximately one in 10 will experience an unplanned pregnancy in the first year of use alone. About half the women who have unplanned pregnancies were on contraceptives in the month that that occurred. And so I think the idea that contraceptives could make the need for abortion dissipate is just contrary to the factual reality.

Interjection Number Thirty-two:

Please note that none of this has any relation to constitutional law. It has everything to do with unrestrained carnal lust, and it is all based upon the belief that contraception is a human “right.
Contraception is a denial of the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage.

Returning you now to the incredible spectacle of the Sotomayor-Prelogar colloquy:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: You also mentioned, or maybe it was your co-counsel, that life changes for women after 15 weeks.

GENERAL PRELOGAR: That's exactly right, Justice Sotomayor, and I think that this is responsive as well to the questions that the Chief Justice was asking about, in particular, the impact of enforcing a 15-week bar in this case. The Court has always looked at that issue by looking at the people for whom the law is a restriction, not those for whom it's irrelevant.

So the question is, why would women need access to abortion after 15 weeks, and what is the effect on them? And there are any number of women who cannot get an abortion earlier. They don't realize that they're pregnant. That's especially true of women who are young or don't have -- haven't experienced a pregnancy before, or their life circumstances change, as you referred to, Justice Sotomayor. They lose their job or their relationship breaks apart or they have medical complications. Or, for many women, they don't have the resources to pay for it earlier. It takes time for them to raise the money or make the appropriate logistical arrangements to be able to take time off work and travel and have childcare. And for all those women in this category who need access to abortion after 15 weeks, the fact that other women were able to exercise their constitutional rights does nothing to diminish the impact on their liberty interests in forcing them to continue with that pregnancy.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Thank you.

Interjection Number Thirty-three:

This is outcome-based jurisprudence having nothing to do with the rule of reasoned law even on the natural law.

Neither abortion nor contraception are protected by the Constitution of the United States of America, and both are proscribed by the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.

Any questions?

Good.

Chief Justice John Glover Roberts, Jr., who, as we will see shortly, is a sure vote to retain Roe v. Wade in this case, had his own questions for Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: General, following up on that, would that argument be true in terms of viability as well? In other words, what -- your discussion of the reliance interests and the ability of women and men to control their lives in reliance on the right to -- to an abortion, the argument would not be as strong, I think you'll have to concede, given what we're talking about, which is not a prohibition; it's a 15-week line. Is that right?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: Yes. So this –

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: There -- you have to hypothesize people who have planned their lives according to a 24 or whatever week limit it is but not a 15-week limit on abortion, right?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: Well, I don't think the Court has ever analyzed reliance with that kind of parsing. I think, here, the -- I – the -- the force of the viability line is that it's clearly demarcated to the scope of a woman's protected liberty interests in this context. And the state is not actually asking this Court to replace it with a clear 15-week line that would provide some measure of continued protection for this right. They're asking the Court to reverse the liberty interest altogether or leave it up in the air.

And if that were to happen, then immediately states with six-week bans, eight-week bans, ten-week bans, and so on, would seek to enforce those with no continued guidance of what the scope of the liberty interest is going forward.

Interjection Number Thirty-four:

There is no moral liberty to do that which is wrong.

Civil law must be conformed to the Divine and Natural Laws.

Contrary to what naturalists who label themselves as "liberals" or "libertarians" or even many "conservatives" contend, such things as baby-killing, whether chemical or surgical or both, or perverse sins against nature cannot be made "legal" by a decision or a court or by a legislative enactment or executive order or by a plebiscite to reflect "the will of the people," which is considered by many naturalists, especially the libertarians, as the "will of God" that must govern legislative enactments. In other words, human beings are demigods who are "free" to act as they desire, with a few exceptions here and there, of course, as long as the "will of the people" is observed. Naturalists of the liberal bent believe that judges and other potentates can do what they want no matter what the "people" may desire.

This is all erroneous as contingent beings who did not create themselves and whose bodies are destined one day for the corruption of the grave until the General Resurrection of the Dead on the Last Day do not "determine" moral truth any more than they determine the physical laws of nature.

The law of gravity cannot be "repealed" by a decision of a judge or of a president or of a government or a mayor.

The law of gravity cannot be "repealed" by a majority vote of a human legislature or the majority vote of the "people" in a plebiscite (a referendum on a particular issue that is put to the voters at a general or a special election for their approval or rejection, sometimes originating as a result of legislative initiative or state constructional mandate and sometimes originating as a result of a grass roots petition drive to place a particular question on the ballot, which is called an "initial." one of the "good government" reforms of the Progressive Era). It is also true that the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law cannot be repealed by the pronouncement of any judge or executive or legislative or popular enactments.

It is that simple.

Back to the Roberts-Prelogar colloquy:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, that may be what they're asking for, but the thing that is at issue before us today is 15 weeks. And I just wonder what the strength of your reliance arguments, which sounded to me like being based on a total prohibition, would be if there isn't a total prohibition, and as far as viability goes, I don't see what that has to do with the question of choice at all.

GENERAL PRELOGAR: Well, I think, as Casey emphasized in reaffirming the viability line, the Court justified that as having both a logical and a biological justification that it marks the point in pregnancy when the fetus is capable of meaningful life –

Interjection Number Thirty-five:

Meaningful life?

Every life is meaningful as it has been redeemed by the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity made Man in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother. Even human beings who might be dependent upon others for care throughout their entire lives are serving as instruments of grace for those who care for them so that they can rise above themselves and to serve others as they would serve Our Lord in the very Flesh.

This whole colloquy is ridiculously absurd, but part of the work that is required in these remarkable times is to deal with absurdity:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: No, that's what John Hart Ely explained was a complete syllogism. That's the definition of viability. It's not a reason that viability is a good line.

GENERAL PRELOGAR: Well, it's focused on the idea of fetal separateness, and I think that that is a line that also accords with the history and tradition in this country of abortion regulation. Contrary to the state's arguments here, at the time of the founding and for most of early American history, women had an -- an ability to access abortion in the early stages of pregnancy, and it was only when the fetus was deemed sufficiently separate that states could act to bar that. So I think that the viability line also aligns with history and tradition in that respect.

Interjection Number Thirty-six:

John Hart Ely was a constitutional theorist who, though personally supportive of child-killing in the womb, believed that the text of the Constitution did not support the Court’s decision in the case of Roe v. Wade, January 22, 1973. However, he did believe that the Constitution had to be interpreted “broadly” to support the “democratic processes” (whatever they are, not that I have seen any of those lately nor would recognize what they are). In other words, despite the respect he commands among legal scholars, including “conservatives,” he was just another legal positivist who did not believe in an eternal law above man that was recognized even by the Roman orator Cicero as follows:

True law is right reason conformable to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil. Whether it enjoins or forbids, the good respect its injunctions, and the wicked treat them with indifference. This law cannot be contradicted by any other law, and is not liable either to derogation or abrogation. Neither the senate nor the people can give us any dispensation for not obeying this universal law of justice. It needs no other expositor and interpreter than our own conscience. It is not one thing at Rome, and another at Athens; one thing to-day, and another to-morrow; but in all times and nations this universal law must forever reign, eternal and imperishable. It is the sovereign master and emperor of all beings. God himself is its author, its promulgator, its enforcer. And he who does not obey it flies from himself, and does violence to the very nature of man. And by so doing he will endure the severest penalties even if he avoid the other evils which are usually accounted punishments. (Cicero, The Republic.)

Cicero had it almost entirely correct. Almost. He was wrong in asserting that the natural law does not need any "other expositor and interpreter than our own conscience." He lived before the Incarnation and before the founding of the true Church upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. Cicero thus did not know that man does need an interpreter and expositor of the natural law, namely, the Catholic Church. Apart from this, however, Cicero understood that God's law does not admit of abrogations by a vote of the people or of a "representative" body, such as the Roman Senate in his day or the United States Congress or state legislatures, et al. in our own day.

Pope Pius XI explained in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929, the Natural Law is authoritatively explicated by Holy Mother Church even though it can be known by human reason and is thus not, unlike the Divine Positive Law, her exclusive possession:

The Church does not say that morality belongs purely, in the sense of exclusively, to her; but that it belongs wholly to her. She has never maintained that outside her fold and apart from her teaching, man cannot arrive at any moral truth; she has on the contrary more than once condemned this opinion because it has appeared under more forms than one. She does however say, has said, and will ever say, that because of her institution by Jesus Christ, because of the Holy Ghost sent her in His name by the Father, she alone possesses what she has had immediately from God and can never lose, the whole of moral truth, omnem veritatem, in which all individual moral truths are included, as well those which man may learn by the help of reason, as those which form part of revelation or which may be deduced from it  (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

To the point of Elizabeth Prelogar’s answer to Chief Justice John Glover Roberts, Jr., suffice it to say that a mother can never dispose of the fruit of her womb as she desires. She has an obligation before God to provide the love that is the child’s due. True justice is, after all, giving to each that which his is due:

Associate Justice Clarence Thomas posed another question for United States Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Justice Thomas?

JUSTICE THOMAS: You heard my question to counsel earlier about the woman who was convicted of criminal child neglect. What would be your reaction to that as far as her liberty and whether or not the liberty interest that we're talking about extends to her?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: Well, Justice Thomas, I have to confess that I haven't read the specific case you're referring to, but, if I understand the question you were posing, it sounds as though the state is seeking to regulate for a child that's been born that was injured while it was inside the womb.

And I think that we are not denying that a state has an interest there. We're not denying that a state has an interest here either. Roe recognized that states have interests that exist from the outset of pregnancy.

But, with respect to this specific right to abortion, there are also profound liberty interests of the woman on the other side of the scale in not being forced to continue with a pregnancy, not being forced to endure childbirth and to have a child out in the world.

And the state's arguments here seem to ask this Court to look only at its interests is Court to look only at its interests and to ignore entirely those incredibly weighty interests of the women on the other side.

JUSTICE THOMAS: Thank you.

Interjection Number Thirty-seven:

And around and around they go with “profound liberty interests” and “being forced to continue with a pregnancy” and to “endure childbirth.” This is all foreign to the mind of Christ the King, but it is very much part of the anti-Incarnational world of Modernity to which the Modernists within the counterfeit church of conciliarism have made their “official reconciliation.”

Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch then asked a question of Elizabeth Prelogar as her series of colloquies with the justices neared its conclusion:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS:

Justice Breyer?

Justice Alito? No?

Justice Gorsuch, anything further?

JUSTICE GORSUCH: I just want to make sure I understand your response to the Chief Justice. If this Court will reject the viability line, do you see any other intelligible principle that the Court could choose?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: Well, I think that it would be critically important, even if this Court were to reject the viability line, to reinforce and reaffirm the fundamental and profound liberty interests –

JUSTICE GORSUCH: That -- that –

GENERAL PRELOGAR: -- at stake here, and I –

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Counsel, I'm sorry for interrupting, but that wasn't my question. I understand -- I understand you -- I understand that point fully by the end of this argument. That is deeply clear to me. I understand your position.

I -- I'm just asking a question about whether you think there would be another alternative line that the government would propose or not. You emphasized that if -- if 15 weeks were approved, then we'd have cases about 12 and 10 and 8 and 6, and so my question is, is there a line in there that the government believes would be principled or not.

GENERAL PRELOGAR: I don't think there's any line that could be more principled than viability. You know, I think the factors the Court would have to think about are what is most consistent with precedent, what would be clear and workable and what would preserve the -- the essential components of the liberty interests, and viability checks all of those boxes and has the advantage as well as being a rule of law for 50 years.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Thank you. That's helpful, counsel. Appreciate it.

Interjection Number Thirty-eight:

Helpful?

To whom?

For what?

This is all madness, and it is frightening to behold otherwise rational human beings arguing about “viability,” “precedent” and the “essential components of liberty interests” that have standing before the bar of Divine Justice.

Associate Justice Brett Michael Kavanaugh posed his own line of questions before the colloquies between the justices and Elizabeth Prelogar ended with a series of questions asked by Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Justice Kavanaugh?

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: You -- you make a very forceful argument and identify critically important interests that are at stake in this issue, no doubt about that.

The other side says, though, that there are two interests at stake, that there's also the interest in -- in fetal life at stake as well.

And in your brief, you say that the existing framework accommodates -- that's your word -- both the interests of the pregnant woman and the interests of the fetus. And the -- and the problem, I think the other side would say and the reason this issue is hard, is that you can't accommodate both interests. You have to pick. That's the fundamental problem.

 And one interest has to prevail over the other at any given point in time, and that's why this is so challenging, I think. And the question then becomes, what does the Constitution say about that? And I just want to get your reaction to what the other side's theme is, and I've mentioned it in my prior questions.

When you have those two interests at stake and both are important, as you acknowledge, why not -- why should this Court be the arbiter rather than Congress, the state legislatures, state supreme courts, the people being able to resolve this? And there will be different answers in Mississippi and New York, different answers in Alabama than California because they're two different interests at stake and the people in those states might value those interests somewhat differently. Why is that not the right answer?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: Justice Kavanaugh, it's not the right answer because the Court correctly recognized that this is a fundamental right of women, and the nature of fundamental rights is that it's not left up to state legislatures to decide whether to honor them or not.

And it's true, different rules would prevail throughout the country if this Court were to overrule Roe and Wade -- Roe and Casey, but what that would mean is that women in those states who are refusing to honor their rights and who are forcing them to continue to use their bodies to sustain a pregnancy and then to bring a child into the world will have no recourse other than to travel if they're able to afford it or to attempt abortion outside the confines of the medical system or to have a child even though that was not the best choice for them and their family.

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: Thank you.

Interjection Number Thirty-nine:

Notice how United States Justice Elizabeth Prelogar inverts reality.

Mrs. Prelogar believes that the chemical and surgical execution of innocent babies in their mothers’ wombs is a “fundamental right” that cannot be subjected to a vote of the people” when the truth of the matter is that a baby’s right to life is his fundamental right that cannot be subjected to a vote of the “people,” their elected legislative representatives or to the decisions offered by magistrates in black judicial gowns.

Wrapping up the colloquies with the questions asked by Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Justice Barrett.

JUSTICE BARRETT: I have a follow-up to Justice Kagan's question about reliance. I'm just trying to nail down, and I -- and I asked Ms. Rikelman this question too, but I'm not sure that I fully understand the government's position or Ms. Rikelman's position.

So, on pages 18 and 19 of your brief, you talk about reliance interests and you quote some of the language from Casey about a woman's ability to participate in the social and economic life of the nation.

And I mentioned the safe haven laws to Ms. Rikelman, and it -- it seems to me I fully understand the reliance interests. There are the airy ones Justice Kagan was referring to and then there are the more specific ones about a woman's access to abortion as a backup form of birth control in the event that contraception fails so that she need not bear the burdens of pregnancy.

But what do you have to say to Petitioners' argument that those reliance interests do not include the reliance interests of parenting and bringing a child into the world when maybe that's not the best thing for her family or her career?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: I think the state is wrong about that. And I -- I think where the analysis goes wrong in reliance on those safe haven laws is overlooking the consequences of forcing a woman upon her the choice of having to decide whether to give a child up for adoption. That itself is its own monumental decision for her.

And so I think that there's nothing new about the safe haven laws, the -- or -- or at least nothing new about the availability of adoption as an alternative. Roe and Casey already took account of that fact. And I think that there are certainly, of course, all of the -- the bodily integrity interests that we've referred to, but, also, the autonomy interests retain in force as well.

JUSTICE BARRETT: Okay. So it's the -- the reliance interests and the right to be able to choose to terminate the pregnancy rather than having to terminate the parental rights?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: I think that that is part of it, yes. And I think, for many women, that is an incredibly difficult choice, but it's one that this Court for 50 years has recognized must be left up to them based on their beliefs and their conscience and their determination about what is best for the course of their lives.

JUSTICE BARRETT: Thank you, General.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Thank you, General.

Interjection Number Forty:

There are no “decisions” to be made about a child, only selfless, unconditional love to be offered.

There are no “difficult choices” to be made, only a firm reliance upon Our Lady’s graces to provide all the supernatural and natural helps necessary to fulfill one’s maternal duties with the distinction of a saint and imitation of the Queen of All Saints, Our Lady herself.

Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart was given an opportunity to present a rebuttal on behalf of the petitioners, the State of Mississippi:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Rebuttal, General Stewart.

REBUTTAL ARGUMENT OF SCOTT G. STEWART. ON BEHALF OF THE PETITIONERS MR. STEWART: Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice. I'd like to do my best to make three points.

First, picking up where -- where you just left off, Justice Barrett, on safe haven laws, the Respondents in this case, I -- I believe, as Your Honor pointed out, have emphasized parenting burdens being a lead or the lead reason that women seek abortions.

I would emphasize safe haven laws, as best I've been able to find, first came into existence in 1999 in Texas. They're now ubiquitous, and you're correct, Justice Barrett, that they relieve that huge burden.

I would also add that as to -- as to burdens during pregnancy, I would emphasize that contraception is more accessible and affordable and available than it was at the time of Roe or Casey. It serves the same goal of allowing women to decide if, when, and how many children to have. And I would also note, just frankly, the lowest cost abortion at Jackson Women's Health is $600 for the abortion, additional costs and further fees. According to -- to my friends, the Respondents, and their amici, there are also additional costs related to travel, taking off time -- time off of work, accommodations, all of those sorts of things. Whether somebody is uninsured or not, the costs of contraception are consistently significantly less than those.

Interjection Number Forty-one:

Trying to defend a highly conditioned ban on the surgical execution of the innocent preborn by noting that the chemical means to kill babies, contraceptive pills and devices, are more “accessible and affordable” now is to concede the point made by pro-aborts: that married couples together or women individually have a right to misbehave as they desire and to put career or interests ahead of welcoming children with love, thereby impoverishing families and nations as well as accustoming men to believe that it is their right to avoid the conception of children. The contraceptive mentality is what led to the widespread acceptance of surgical baby-killing after the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Dole v. Bolton. It is reprehensive to compare the costs associated with killing a baby at Jackson Women’s Health Organization in Jackson, Mississippi, with the costs of contraception.

Contraception is evil, and one cannot prevent other evils, such as surgical abortion, by boasting of the availability of another evil, contraception, which leads inevitably to the killing of babies. Contraception and abortion are inexorably, and to separate one from the other is an exercise in sophistic illogic.

Pope Pius XII explained the nature of the marital union in his Address to Italian Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession, October 29, 1951:

The reason is that marriage obliges the partners to a state of life, which even as it confers certain rights so it also imposes the accomplishment of a positive work concerning the state itself. In such a case, the general principle may be applied that a positive action may be omitted if grave motives, independent of the good will of those who are obliged to perform it, show that its performance is inopportune, or prove that it may not be claimed with equal right by the petitioner—in this case, mankind.

The matrimonial contract, which confers on the married couple the right to satisfy the inclination of nature, constitutes them in a state of life, namely, the matrimonial state. Now, on married couples, who make use of the specific act of their state, nature and the Creator impose the function of providing for the preservation of mankind. This is the characteristic service which gives rise to the peculiar value of their state, the bonum prolis. The individual and society, the people and the State, the Church itself, depend for their existence, in the order established by God, on fruitful marriages. Therefore, to embrace the matrimonial state, to use continually the faculty proper to such a state and lawful only therein, and, at the same time, to avoid its primary duty without a grave reason, would be a sin against the very nature of married life.

Serious motives, such as those which not rarely arise from medical, eugenic, economic and social so-called "indications," may exempt husband and wife from the obligatory, positive debt for a long period or even for the entire period of matrimonial life. From this it follows that the observance of the natural sterile periods may be lawful, from the moral viewpoint: and it is lawful in the conditions mentioned. If, however, according to a reasonable and equitable judgment, there are no such grave reasons either personal or deriving from exterior circumstances, the will to avoid the fecundity of their union, while continuing to satisfy to the full their sensuality, can only be the result of a false appreciation of life and of motives foreign to sound ethical principles. (Pope Pius XII, Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession, October 29, 1951.)

We are eyewitnesses to the carnage produced by the “will to avoid the fecundity of their union, while continuing to satisfy to the full their sensuality, can only be the result of a false appreciation of life and of motives foreign to sound ethical principles. It is impossible to oppose abortion by supporting contraception.

We return now to Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart’s rebuttal argument:

Number two, I -- I think you -- Justice Kavanaugh, you had it exactly right when you -- when you used the term scrupulously neutral. I think that's a very good description of what we're asking for here. I think it's the problem and the value that has evaded the Court and will continue to evade this Court under Roe and Casey, but that is exact -- exactly right.

Interjection Number Forty-one:

As noted in part one of this series, constitutional scholars have long argued that the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America. This poor excuse of a scholar wrote an unpublished monograph in early-1982 against the Nelson-Helms Amendment because it sought to enshrine the surgical execution of children as an issue to “decided” by the states. Abortion is not a matter of states’ rights. It is a matter of God’s law, against which no one is free morally to rebel or deny its relevance to civil law and popular culture.

Returning now to Scott Stewart’s rebuttal argument:

This is a hard issue. It involves -- and -- and I would emphasize, Your Honor, that, as you said, there are interests here on -- on both sides. There are interests for everyone involved. This is unique for the woman. It's unique for the unborn child too whose life is at stake in all of these decisions. It's unique for us as a society in how we decide if the states get to -- get -- get to legislate on this issue, how to decide and how to weigh these tremendously momentous issues.

Interjection Number Forty-three:

Pardon me while I gnash my teeth and rend my garments.

There is nothing “hard” about “Thou shalt not kill.”

The acceptance and widespread use of contraception made possible the revolution of lust that was unleashed sixty years ago and has been institutionalized even in pre-school programs and throughout what passes for “popular culture” has made the issue of abortion seem to be hard simply because people do not want to give up their lives of sin.

I turn now to the final part of Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart’s rebuttal argument of December 1, 2021, in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization:

In closing, I would say that in its dissent in Plessy versus Ferguson, Justice Harlan emphasized that there is no caste system here. The humblest in our country is the pure, the most powerful. Our Constitution neither knows nor tolerates distinctions on the basis of race.

It took 58 years for this Court to recognize the truth of those realities in a decision, and that was the greatest decision that this Court ever reached. We're -- we're running on 50 years of Roe. It is an egregiously wrong decision that has inflicted tremendous damage on our country and will continue to do so and take enumerable human lives unless and until this Court overrules it.

We ask the Court to do so in this case and uphold the state's law. Thank you, Your Honor.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Thank you, General, counsel. The case is submitted. (Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et Al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Et. Al.)

Interjection Number Forty-four:

This is a very strong closing statement about the innumerable human lives that have been killed by surgical means in the past fifty-four years since the State of California began to “liberalize” its laws concerning surgical abortions except, of course, Mississippi HB 1510 permits the direct, intentional killing of the innocent preborn after their fifteenth week of development in their mothers’ wombs with provisions for “robust exceptions,” making the law meaningless in the long run.

However, as noted just above, to contend that the “people” can decide anything about abortion is grievously wrong and will solve nothing either now or in the future as efforts would be made by pro-death advocates on a constant basis to challenge state laws that sought to restrict or to prohibit the surgical execution of children. There will be constantly wrangling over the issue in each election and in every legislature session.

Remember this and remember it well: adherents of the false opposite of the naturalist “left” never believe that anything is “settled” unless is on their terms and anyone who attempts to unsettle what they believe is “settled” must be branded with a variety of epithets designed to intimidate them into a docile submission to what is considered to the “rule of law.”

As the title of this two-part series notes, it is a very telling commentary that not one of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States of America mentioned the following four words: “Thou shalt not kill.” Such words are forbidden in a secular forum, which is sophistry and absurdity must reign supreme.

Predictions?

Predicting the outcome of cases once they have been argued before the Supreme Court of the United States of America is not an easy task, and I would normally not venture to make any prediction except that I think the outline of the outcome in Thomas E. Dobbs, Mississippi State Health Officer, et al. v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is somewhat clear.

To wit, I think that, given the questioning, Mississippi HB 1510 will be upheld as constitutional by a vote of 6-3 (Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Michael Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett in favor; Associate Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan in dissent), although, much like the case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. William Casey, there will be a number of “concurring in part and dissenting part” opinions within the six person majority depending upon the specific sophistic grounds used in the principal opinion of the Court.

As to the fate of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, I believe that Chief Justice John Glover Roberts will do everything imaginable to convince either Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch and/or Associate Justice Brett Michael Kavanaugh to join him in preventing the “precedent” established in Roe v. Wade from being overturned. If Roberts is unsuccessful, however, Roe and Casey could go by a vote of five to four (Associate Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Michael Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett in favor; Chief Justice John Glover Roberts, Jr., and Associate Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan in dissent.)

I have long contended that John Glover Roberts, Jr., would never vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, and I based that contention originally on what he said during his Senate confirmation hearings to succeed the late Chief Justice William Hobbs Rehnquist in 2005:

Chairman SPECTER. When you and I met on our first so-called courtesy call, I discussed with you the concept of a super-stare decisis. And this was a phrase used by Circuit Judge Luttig in Richmond Medical Center v. Governor Gilmore in the year 2000, when he refers to Casey being a super-stare decisis decision with respect to the fundamental right to choose, and a number of the academics—Professor Farber has talked about super-stare decisis, and Professor Estrich has, as it applies to statutory lines. Do you think that the cases which have followed Roe fall into the category of a super-stare decisis designation?

Judge ROBERTS. Well, it’s a term that hasn’t found its way into the Supreme Court opinions yet. I think—

Chairman SPECTER. Well, there is an opportunity for that. [Laughter.]

Judge ROBERTS. I think one way to look at it is that the Casey decision itself, which applied the principles of stare decisis to Roe v. Wade, is itself a precedent of the Court, entitled to respect under principles of stare decisis. And that would be the body of law that any judge confronting an issue in his care would begin with, not simply the decision in Roe v. Wade but its reaffirmation in the Casey decision. That is itself a precedent. It’s a precedent on whether or not to revisit the Roe v. Wade precedent. And under principles of stare decisis, that would be where any judge considering the issue in this area would begin.

Chairman SPECTER. When you and I talked informally, I asked you if you had any thought as to how many opportunities there were in the intervening 32 years for Roe to be overruled, and you said you did not really know, and you cited a number. And I said, ‘‘Would it surprise you to know that there have been 38 occasions where Roe has been taken up, not with a specific issue raised but all with an opportunity for Roe to be overruled?’’ One of them was Rust v. Sullivan, where you participated in the writing of the brief, and although the case did not squarely raise the overruling of Roe, it involved the issue of whether Planned Parenthood units funded with Federal money could counsel on abortion. And in that brief, you again raised the question about Roe being wrongly decided, and then I pointed out to you that there had been some 38 cases where the Court had taken up Roe. I am very seldom a user of charts, but on this one I prepared a chart because it speaks—a little too heavy to lift, but it speaks louder than just—thank you, Senator Grassley. Thirty-eight cases where Roe has been taken up, and I don’t want to coin any phrases on super precedents. We will leave that to the Supreme Court. But would you think that Roe might be a super-duper precedent in light— [Laughter.]

Chairman SPECTER.—of 38 occasions to overrule it?

Judge ROBERTS. The interesting thing, of course, is not simply the opportunity to address it, but when the Court actually considers the question. And that, of course, is in the Casey decision where it did apply the principles of stare decisis and specifically addressed it. And that I think is the decision that any judge in this area would begin with.

Chairman SPECTER. Judge Roberts, in your confirmation hearing for circuit court, your testimony read to this effect, and it has been widely quoted: ‘‘Roe is the settled law of the land.’’ Do you mean settled for you, settled only for your capacity as a circuit judge, or settled beyond that?

Judge ROBERTS. Well, beyond that, it’s settled as a precedent of the Court, entitled to respect under principles of stare decisis. And those principles, applied in the Casey case, explain when cases should be revisited and when they should not. And it is settled as a precedent of the Court, yes.

Chairman SPECTER. You went on then to say, ‘‘It’s a little more than settled. It was reaffirmed in the face of a challenge that it should be overruled in the Casey decision.’’ So it has that added precedential value.

Judge ROBERTS. I think the initial question the judge confronting an issue in this area, you don’t go straight to the Roe decision; you begin with Casey, which modified the Roe framework and reaffirmed its central holding.

Chairman SPECTER. And you went on to say, ‘‘Accordingly, it is the settled law of the land,’’ using the term ‘‘settled’’ again. Then your final statement as to this quotation, ‘‘There is nothing in my personal views that would prevent me from fully and faithfully applying the precedent as well as Casey.’’ There had been a question raised about your personal views, and let me digress from Roe for just a moment because I think this touches on an issue which ought to be settled. When you talk about your personal views, and as they may relate to your own faith, would you say that your views are the same as those expressed by John Kennedy when he was a candidate and he spoke to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September of 1960, ‘‘I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me’’?

Judge ROBERTS. I agree with that, Senator, yes.

Chairman SPECTER. And did you have that in mind when you said, ‘‘There is nothing in my personal views that would prevent me from fully and faithfully applying the precedent as well as Casey’’?

Judge ROBERTS. Well, I think people’s personal views on this issue derive from a number of sources, and there’s nothing in my personal views based on faith or other sources that would prevent me from applying the precedents of the Court faithfully under principles of stare decisis. (Roberts Confirmation Hearing.)

John Glover Roberts, Jr., meant what he said sixteen years ago as this is what he said just today, Friday, December 10, 2021, in a dissenting opinion in the case of Whole Women’s Health, et al. v. Austin Reeves Jackson, Judge, et al. as the Court, by a 5-4 margin, let Texas SB 8 continue to stand while, at the same time, permitting lawsuits to be filed in Federal and Texas State courts to challenge its constitutionality:

Texas has passed a law banning abortions after roughly six weeks of pregnancy. See S. B. 8, 87th Leg., Reg. Sess. (2021). That law is contrary to this Court’s decisions in Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833 (1992). It has had the effect of denying the exercise of what we have held is a right protected under the Federal Constitution.1

Texas has employed an array of stratagems designed to shield its unconstitutional law from judicial review. To cite just a few, the law authorizes “[a]ny person,” other than a government official, to bring a lawsuit against anyone who “aids or abets,” or intends to aid or abet, an abortion performed after roughly six weeks; has special preclusion rules that allow multiple lawsuits concerning a single abortion; and contains broad venue provisions that allow lawsuits to be brought in any of Texas’s 254 far flung counties, no matter where the abortion took place. See Tex. Health & Safety Code Ann. §§171.208(a), (e)(5), 171.210 (West Cum. Supp. 2021). The law then provides for minimum liability of $10,000 plus costs and fees, while barring defendants from recovering their own costs and fees if they prevail. §§171.208(b), (i). It also purports to impose backward-looking liability should this Court’s precedents or an injunction preventing enforcement of the law be overturned. §§171.208(e)(2), (3). And it forbids many state officers from directly enforcing it. §171.207.

These provisions, among others, effectively chill the provision of abortions in Texas. Texas says that the law also blocks any pre-enforcement judicial review in federal court. On that latter contention, Texas is wrong. As eight Members of the Court agree, see ante, at 11, petitioners may bring a pre-enforcement suit challenging the Texas law in federal court under Ex parte Young, 209 U. S. 123 (1908), because there exist state executive officials who retain authority to enforce it. See, e.g., Tex. Occ. Code Ann. §164.055(a) (West 2021). Given the ongoing chilling effect of the state law, the District Court should resolve this litigation and enter appropriate relief without delay. . . .

The clear purpose and actual effect of S. B. 8 has been to nullify this Court’s rulings. It is, however, a basic principle that the Constitution is the “fundamental and paramount law of the nation,” and “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803). Indeed, “[i]f the legislatures of the several states may, at will, annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgments, the constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery.” United States v. Peters, 5 Cranch 115, 136 (1809). The nature of the federal right infringed does not matter; it is the role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system that is at stake. (21-463 Whole Woman's Health v. Jackson (12/10/2021).)

What a shame.

Texas SB 8 might “chill” the execution of innocent babies here in Texas. John Glover Roberts, Jr., will never vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, not, as noted just above, its overturning will “settle” anything, of course, as babies will still continue to be killed surgically in every state, either because of state “trigger” laws permitting baby-killing upon demand without restrictions or the sort of “robust exceptions of which Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart boasted on December 1, 2021. Moreover, innocent babies will still be killed chemically not only so-called “abortion pills” (human pesticides) but also by contraceptive pills and devices.

Insofar as the “paramount law” of the United States of America is concerned, a civil constitution that takes no account of Christ the King and His true Church becomes an instrument to enshrine evil as it is has been the longstanding goal of the adversary to dethrone Christ the King and to enshrine himself as the leader of men and nations, and he does not care whether he gets any kind of “credit” from men as the only thing he wants is pull their souls and bodies down into hell with him to be tortured for all eternity.

Concluding Remarks

Dom Prosper Gueranger. O.S.B.’s reflection on the Friday in the week of the Second Sunday of Advent centers on a reading from the Prophet Isaias found in Matins for the day’s Divine Office. by the Abbot of Solesmes’ reflection upon its description of the end of the world:

Behold the Lord shall lay waste the earth, and shall strip it, and shall afflict the face thereof, and scatter abroad the inhabitants thereof. And it shall be as with the people, so with the priest: and as with the servant, so with his master: as with the handmaid, so with her mistress: as with the buyer, so with the seller: as with the lender, so with the borrower: as with him that calleth for his money, so with him that oweth. With desolation shall the earth be laid waste, and it shall be utterly spoiled: for the Lord hath spoken this word. The earth mourned, and faded away, and is weakened: the world faded away, the height of the people of the earth is weakened. And the earth is infected by the inhabitants thereof: because they have transgressed the laws, they have changed the ordinance, they have broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore shall a curse devour the earth, and the inhabitants thereof shall sin: and therefore they that dwell therein shall be mad, and few men shall be left. The vintage hath mourned, the vine hath languished away, all the merryhearted have sighed. The mirth of timbrels hath ceased, the noise of them that rejoice is ended, the melody of the harp is silent. They shall not drink wine with a song: the drink shall be bitter to them that drink it. The city of vanity is broken down, every house is shut up, no man cometh in. There shall be a crying for wine in the streets: all mirth is forsaken: the joy of the earth is gone away. Desolation is left in the city, and calamity shall oppress the gates. For it shall be thus in the midst of the earth, in the midst of the people, as if a few olives, that remain, should be shaken out of the olive tree: or grapes, when the vintage is ended. These shall lift up their voice, and shall give praise: when the Lord shall be glorified, they shall make a joyful noise from the sea. Therefore glorify ye the Lord in instruction: the name of the Lord God of Israel in the islands of the sea. From the ends of the earth we have heard praises, the glory of the just one. (Isaias, Chapter XIX.)

This passage from the Book of the Prophet Isaias describes perfectly the mad, mad, mad, mad nature of the arguments that passed for sober jurisprudential argumentation in the case of Thomas E. Dobbs, Mississippi State Health Officer, et al. v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, et al.

The Abbot of the Benedict Abbey of Solesmes, France, from 1837 to 1875, Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B. provided a reflection upon the passage from the Book of the Prophet Isaias quoted just above, noting that the world was in a mess when Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus  Christ was born in humility and anonymity in Bethlehem as most of the Jews, who had become practical pagans for all intents and purposes, looked for a political Messias who would deliver them from the bondage of Roman captivity and restore Israel to its “rightful” place politically and territorially:

Thus was the earth in desolation when the Messias came to deliver and save it. So diminished, so  decayed, were truths among the children of menthat the human race was bordering on its ruin. The knowledge of the true God was becoming rarer as the world got older; idolatry had made everything in creation an object of its adulterous worship; the practical result of a religion which was but gross materialism, was frightful immorality; man was forever at war with man; and the only safeguards of what social order still existed in the world were the execrable laws of slavery and extermination. Among the countless inhabitants of the glove, a mere handful could be found who were seeking God; they were as rare as the olives that remain on the tree after a careful plucking, or as grape bunches after the vintage is ended. Of this happy few were, among the Jewish people, those true Israelites whom our Savior chose for his disciples; and, among the Gentiles, the Magi that came from the East, asking for the newborn King; and later on, Cornelius the Centurion, whom the Angel of the Lord directed to St. Peter. But with what faith and joy did they not acknowledge the Incarnate God! and what their hymns of glad gratitude, when they found that they had been privileged, above others, to see, with their own eyes, the promised Savior!

Now, all this will again happen when the time draws near of the second Coming of the Messias. The earth will once more be filled with desolation, and mankind will be again a slave of its self-degradation. The ways of men will again grow corrupt; and this time the malice of their evil will be the greater, because they will have received Him who is the Light of the world, the Word of Life. A profound sadness will sit heavy on all nations, and every effort for their well being will seem paralyzed; they, and the earth they live on, will be conscious of decrepitude; and yet it will never once strike them that the world is drawing to an end. There will be great scandals; there shall fall stars from heaven, that is, many of those who had been masters in Israel shall apostatize, and their light shall be changed into darkness. There shall be days of temptation, and faith shall grow slack; so that when the Son of Man shall appear, faith shall scarce be found on the earth. Let it not be, O Lord, that we live to see those days of temptation; or, if it be thy will that they overtake us, make our hearts firm in their allegiance to thy holy Church, which will be the only beacon left to thy faithful children in that fierce storm. Grant, O Lord, that we may be of the number of those chosen olives, of those elect bunches of grapes, wherewith thou wilt complete the rich harvest which thou wilt garner forever into thy house. Preserve intact within us the deposit of faith which thou hast entrusted to us; let our eye be fixed on that Orient of which the Church speaks to us, and where thou art suddenly to appear in thy majesty. When that day of thine comes, and we behold thy triumph, we will shout our glad delights, and then, like eagles which cluster round the body, “we shall be taken up to meet thee in the air, as thy Apostle speaks, and thus shall we forever be with thee.” Then we shall hear the praises and glory of the Just One, from the ends of this earth, which it is thy good will to preserve until the decrees of thy mercy and justice shall have been fully executed. O Jesus! we are the work of thy hands; save us, and be merciful to us on that great day. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Friday of the Second Week of Advent.)

Yes, true Faith is in very scarce supply today.

Men have returned to a state of depravity worse than that which existed at the time of Noah and the Great Flood because, as Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., the Word has become Flesh and dwelt amongst us and suffered and died on the wood of the Holy Cross to redeem us and the Gospel has been preached throughout the whole world. Yet it is that most Catholics place their trust in princes, in the children of men in whom is not be found salvation, whether those “princes” to one or the other of two major organized crime families of naturalism.

The Incarnation of Our Lord at the Annunciation matters, and it was to defend this fundamental doctrine of Catholic life that Pope Saint Damasus I, a son of Spain, whose feast we celebrate today, Saturday, December 11, 2021, devoted his life’s work:

This great Pontiff comes before us in the Liturgical Year not to bring us tidings of Peace, as St. Melchiades did, but as one of the most illustrious defenders of the great Mystery of the Incarnation. He defends the faith of the Universal Church in the divinity of the Word, by condemning, as his predecessor Liberius had done, the acts and the authors of the celebrated Council of Rimini. With his sovereign authority, he bears witness to the teaching of the Church regarding the Humanity of Jesus Christ, and condemned the heretic Apollinaris, who taught that Jesus Christ had only assumed the flesh and not the soul of man. He commissioned St. Jerome to make a new translation of the New Testament from the Greek, for the use of the Church of Rome; here, again, giving a further proof of the faith and love which he bore to the Incarnate Word. Let us honor this great Pontiff, whom the Council of Chalcedon calls the ornament and support of Rome by his piety. St. Jerome, too, who looked upon St. Damasus as his friend and patron, calls him a man of the greatest worth; a man whose equal could not be found, well versed in the holy Scriptures, and a virgin Doctor of the virgin Church. The Legend of the Breviary gives us a brief account of his life. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Feast of Pope Saint Damasus I.)

Damasus was a Spaniard, a man of eminence and of great learning in the Scriptures, (and was elected to the Chair of Peter in the year of our Lord 381) he convoked the First Council of Constantinople, wherein he crushed the wicked heresy of Eunomius and Macedonius. He confirmed the condemnation of the Assembly, at Rimini, which condemnation had already been pronounced by Liberius. This Assembly of Rimini was that in which, to use the language of St. Jerome, Valens and Ursacius brought it about through trickery that the Faith of Nice was abrogated by mob law, and the world afterwards groaned in amazement to find itself Arian.

This Pope built two Basilicas, first, St. Lawrence's, near Pompey's Theatre, which he magnificently enriched, and endowed with houses and farms; and, secondly, another, over the Catacombs on the Road to Ardea. He also consecrated the Platonia, where the bodies of St. Peter and St. Paul lay for some time, and decorated it with elegant inscriptions in poetry composed by himself. He wrote on the subject of virginity both in prose and verse, and likewise many other poems on various subjects.

He ordained that false accusers should be punished for the offences which they had falsely laid to the charge of their neighbours. He established the usage, which already prevailed in many churches, of singing the Psalms, both by day and by night, by alternate choirs, and of adding at the end of each Psalm the words, Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. It was at his command that St. Jerome revised the translation of the New Testament to accord with the Greek text. He ruled the Church for seventeen years, two months, and twenty-six days. He held five Advent ordinations, wherein he ordained thirty-one Priests, eleven Deacons, and sixty-two Bishops for diverse Sees. At length he fell asleep in the Lord, in the reign of Theodosius the Elder, (upon the 10th day of December, in the year 384, being) aged nearly eighty years, and full of righteousness, truth, and judgment. He was buried beside his mother and sister in the Church which he had himself founded on the Road to Ardea. His reliques were afterwards taken to the Basilica of St. Lawrence, which is thence sometimes called San Lorenzo in Damaso. (Matins, The Divine Office, Feast of Pope Saint Damasus I.)

Dom Prosper Gueranger composed a prayer in honor of Pope Saint Damasus that contains but a summary of the spirit that should move each of us to defend Catholicism as the one and only means of human salvation and hence of a just social order:

Holy Pontiff Damasus! during thy life on earth, thou wast the Light, which guided the children of the Church; for thou didst teach them the mystery of the Incarnation, and didst guard them against those perfidious doctrines, wherewith hell ever strives to corrupt that glorious Symbol of our faith, which tells us of God’s infinite mercy towards us, and of the sublime dignity of man thus mercifully redeemed. Seated on the Chair of Peter, thou didst confirm thy brethren, and thy faith failed not; for Jesus had prayed to his Father for thee. We rejoice at the infinite recompense with which this divine Prince of Pastors has rewarded the unsullied purity of thy faith, O thou virgin Doctor of the virgin Church! O that we could have a ray of that light which now enables thee to see Jesus in his glory! Pray for us, that we may have light to see him, and know him, and love him under the humble guise in which he is so soon to appear to us. Obtain for us the science of the sacred Scriptures, in which thou wast so great a Master; and docility to the teachings of the Bishop of Rome, to who, in the person of St. Peter, Christ has said: Launch out into the deep!

Obtain also for all Christians, O thou the successor of this Prince of the Apostles, that they be animated with those sentiments, which St. Jerome thus describes in one of his letters addressed to thee: “It is the Chair of Peter that I will consult, for from it do I derive that faith, which is the food for my soul. I will search for this precious pearl, heeding not the vast expanse of sea and land which I must pass over. Where the body is, there shall the eagles be gathered together. It is now in the West that the Sun of justice rises. I ask the Victim of salvation from the Priest, and from the Shepherd the protection of the sheep. On that rock I know the Church is built. He that eats the Lamb in any house but this, is profane. He that is not in Noah’s Ark, shall perish in the waters of the deluge. I know not Vitalis, I reject Meletius, I pass by Paulinus. He that gathers not with thee, Damasus, scatters; for he that is not of Christ, is of Antichrist.”

Let us contemplate our divine Savior in the womb of his most holy Mother Mary. Let us, together with the holy Angels, adore him in this state of profound humiliation, to which his love for us has brought him. See him there offering himself to his Father for the redemption of mankind, and commencing at once to fulfill the office of our Mediator, which he has taken upon himself. What an excess of love is this of our Jesus, that he is not satisfied with having humbled himself in assuming our nature, and which alone would have sufficed to redeem a million worlds! The eternal Son of God wills to remain, as other children, nine months in his Mother’s womb: after that, to be born in poverty, to live a life of labor and suffering, and to be obedient to death even to the death of the Cross. O Jesus! mayest thou be praised and loved by all creatures for this thy immense love of us! Thou hast come down from heaven the Victim that art to take the place of all those which were hitherto offered, but which could not efface man’s sin. At length, the earth possesses its Savior, though as yet unseen. No, God will not curse the earth, which, though covered with crime, is rich in such a treasure as this. Still repose, O Jesus, in the chaste womb of Mary, that living Ark which contains the true Manna sent for the food of man. But the time is approaching for thee to leave this loved sanctuary. The tender love which thou hast received from Mary must be changed for the malice wherewith men will treat thee; yet it must needs be that thou be born on the day which thou thyself hast decreed: it is the will of thy eternal Father, it is the expectation of the world, it is the salvation of all who shall love thee. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Feast of Pope Saint Damasus I.)

We know that the final triumph over the forces of darkness that envelop us now belongs to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Our Lady’s triumph, of course, will be usher in her reign—the Reign of Mary—and with it there will be, at least for a time, the renewed Social Reign of her Divine Son, Christ the King.

All we must do at this time is to suffer the lot that our sins have helped to make for us and for the whole world, which means that we should and must consider it a joy—neigh well, a veritable privilege—to be alive at this time so that we, despite our own unworthiness, can plant a few seeds for the conversion of men to the true Faith so that they will, animated by a deep love of the Mother of God and a tender, filial devotion to her Most Holy Rosary, join us in making reparation for our sins by offering up the tribulations of this moment as the consecrated slaves of her Divine Son through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

Let us continue to pray for the day when all men will exclaim:

Viva Cristo Rey!

Viva La Virgen de Guadalupe!

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

 

Pope Saint Damasus I, pray for us.