Supreme Notoriety

The Notorious RBG is dead. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was until this month a United States Supreme Court Justice. This is the highest court in the land, and has the power to annul legislation if it contradicts the constitution, and to overrule a president if his decrees are deemed out of order. As Justices are appointed by presidents, each one represents to some extent their patron’s worldview. President Obama appointed sound liberals, Reagan sound conservatives. Mr Trump, who prefers the latter, is about to appoint his third.

I much prefer British judges’ quiet anonymity to their American colleagues’ fame and, in Ginsburg’s case, fanbases. So why was this judge so popular? Why were teary-eyed mourners keeping vigil outside her former place of work? It was partly in admiration of the Jewish woman’s tenacity and determination to overcome a chauvinistic judiciary and get to the top. It was also because they admired her liberal values which are so very much in fashion. In the 1970s in particular, she fought against sexual discrimination against both men and women. She helped change the law, arguing for a female Air Force employee who was denied housing allowance on account of her sex, and a widower who was denied state benefits when a widow in the same circumstance would have received them.

President Trump and his Republican friends in the Senate are keen to replace her ahead of November’s election, even though they objected to Obama doing so in his election year. American liberals are therefore especially upset because their heroine may be replaced by someone of more conservative sensibility. In particular, the famous Roe vs Wade ruling, a 1973 landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court which confirmed a pregnant woman's liberty to choose to have an abortion without ‘excessive’ government restriction, may be under threat. This has been seen as a victory and rallying call for American liberals, and one which might potentially be overturned by a more conservative bench of Supreme Justices. The Notorious RBG told the New York Times in 2009:

“Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious.”

Admire her though I do, I think it a tragedy that the fight for legal equality between the sexes should claim the murder of unborn children as one of its badges of success. Ken Ham estimates that since 1973, 61.6 million American babies have been legally killed. Stalin is said to have killed 9 million and Hitler 11, so Roe vs Wade has far more blood on its hands. What a shame that RBG and her fans couldn’t see the irony of fighting for women's rights while destroying millions of young females in abortion clinics. 

Image by skeeze from Pixabay