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