Before we point out some caveats – and there are always caveats –I’d like to make clear I think it overall, in the balance, a good thing indeed that Amy Coney Barrett is Trump’s appointee to the Supreme Court. But we should curb, moderate or at least modify our enthusiasm. Our salvation – and even the turning around of society from the precipice towards which we are accelerating – depends far less on political or judicial factors, and far more upon soteriological and eschatological ones. And Mrs. Barret may not make it through what may well be a demonic vetting process.
As an aside, even though I don’t want to make too much of this, but I can’t help but wonder – as I reflect on all the mothers I know, many former students, who scarcely find enough time in the day to spend with their children – how much of that same time – limited for all of us – could Mrs. Barrett give to her still school-age children? Is it possible for a woman to make the top of her law school class, clerk for a Supreme Court Justice, teach full-time at Notre Dame, publish scholarly articles and reach the highest echelons of the law profession – all highly commendable and undoubtedly remarkable – yet still give what attention is requisite for a mother of five biological and two adopted offspring, still very much in their formative years when nothing substitutes for a mother’s undivided care and attention? A miracle of grace, if so.
But here is Pope John Paul II from his 1981 meditation on human work Laborem Exercens:
Experience confirms that there must be a social re-evaluation of the mother’s role, of the toil connected with it, and of the need that children have for care, love and affection in order that they may develop into responsible, morally and religiously mature and psychologically stable persons. It will redound to the credit of society to make it possible for a mother-without inhibiting her freedom, without psychological or practical discrimination, and without penalizing her as compared with other women-to devote herself to taking care of her children and educating them in accordance with their needs, which vary with age. Having to abandon these tasks in order to take up paid work outside the home is wrong from the point of view of the good of society and of the family when it contradicts or hinders these primary goals of the mission of a mother
Note the last sentence in particular. Perhaps her career did not contradict her ‘mission of a mother’, but did it hinder it? Her children are likely well-raised – and they seem so, as their smiles beam forth from a family photograph – but, as the Pope goes on to elaborate, the point of a vocation is not so much that the ‘work’ get done, but that we do the work we’re meant to get done, which redounds to our sanctification and redemption.
Also, I’m with Mark Steyn on the absurd authority and overweening veneration invested in the Supreme Court, and for judges and lawyers in general. The original intent of the founders was that the power of governance should reside with democratically-elected representatives – whom they did not envision would almost all be of the lawyerly profession – and not with nine black-robed justices, treated like the Delphic Oracle, whose very words not only are law, but whose oft-erratic decisions also abolish, usurp and nullify what laws there already be, civic, natural and divine. Debacles and supreme injustices such as Proposition 8 in California, foisting sodomitical ‘marriage’ upon a population that democratically and overwhelmingly rejected such a farce, has been repeated any number of times. And need we elaborate on what Roe vs. Wade, Casey vs. Planned Parenthood, Buck vs. Bell, and the Dred Scott case, have done to America? It’s bad enough having a nation run almost solely by narrow, legally-trained minds, but worse to have those who purportedly run the country – Congress and Senate and the President – to be out-lawyered by other anointed lawyers. The analogous situation applies in Canada. We’ve become an inverted and deformed mirror house of penumbras and emanations, and the Alice-Cooper in Wonderland world in which we live should be no surprise who have had their fingers to the wind.
Time to curb the Supreme Court, limiting its metastasizing power and authority – and that goes not just for the U.S., but for own Dominion.
Is it just me, or do the rosy-hued reports of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s friendship with fellow justice Anton Scalia strike anyone else as a bit odd, all in the spirit of ‘why can’t we al just get along’? Their differences were not ‘political’, as is widely reported, but more fundamental than that, on what it means to be human, not least on whether certain humans – the pre-and-just-born kind – can be cut to pieces or dissolved in chemical fluids. Yet there is Justice Scalia laughing and joking and dressing up in funny costumes with someone holding those very views.
I’m reminded of a scene from the beginning of the film The Exorcist, where the drunk reporter insists to the butler at the evening soiree that he must be German, to which the staid butler retorts ‘I’m not German, Swiss’. To which the reporter mutters sotto voce, as he walks away, ‘Yeah, I better you never went bowling with Goebbels either, you Nazi bastard’.
Will history look back on the aiders and abettors, to say nothing of the practitioners, of pre-born murder, such as RBG, in that light? Will a future generation – not easy to picture, I admit – look back on our own and wonder how were so blind that we could not see the humanity of the unborn? Are we ‘bowling with Goebbels’? Should someone have pointed out to Ms. Ginsburg – and Biden, Trudeau, senior and junior, along with the host of others – that they will be held responsible for the babies they have helped snuff out of existence – and now, we may add the elderly, ill, vulnerable, depressed – and that their own eternal fate hanging in the balance?
Well, now with all that off my chest, perhaps Mrs. Barrett is the woman of the hour – I do wish her all the best, the courage and counsel to enter the lion’s den. After the dismal debate last night – I think debating’s about as done as the hula hoop – those of us on the side of truth and goodness will need all the help we can get.