Godless: The Church of Liberalism

by Ann Coulter

  This leads to the astonishing spectacle of Teddy Kennedy, in full-dress sanctimony, getting all high and mighty with Supreme Court candidates as if the nominee had done something heinous like drown a girl and walk away from it because he had diplomatic immunity in the state of Massachusetts. Maybe there’s a better committee for Senator Drunkennedy to sit on—one that does not require constant moral grandstanding from the Democrats.

  Fortunately for the Democrats, People for the American Way holds the copyright to the words troubling and concerned. I bet Mary Jo Kopechne was “troubled” and “concerned” about the senator’s leaving her trapped in a car under water while he went back to the hotel to create an alibi. It’s hard to imagine any group of people—who are American citizens—with less understanding of what Americans are like than People for the American Way. Some would say gun owner-ship is part of the Àmerican Way,” but that’s not what they have in mind. They probably thought it was kind of a corny name, but it was the only way people from the Upper West Side of Manhattan and Malibu could push a left-wing agenda on America by stealth. They believe in the most extreme version of abortion rights, the right to an abortion at any stage of the pregnancy, no anesthesia for the baby—just as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln did!

  Of course, if most people agreed with People for a Small Slice of the Upper West Side Way, Democrats might have won a majority of votes from the American people more than one time since Lyndon Johnson was president—and that was twenty years ago, when liberals made up “Watergate” and Jimmy Carter beat the hapless Gerald Ford with 50.1 percent of the vote. For the past decade, Democrats have rarely been able to get Americans even to vote for senators who might confirm judges who support their loony ideas on abortion.

  Senator Dianne Feinstein is a great point person for the Democrats on abortion. Unlike Durbin, Kennedy, and Schumer, she’s not a hack, she never drowned anyone, and the Anti-Defamation League isn’t trying to put her in a lockbox. But most important, Feinstein helps nurture the myth that abortion is a women’s issue. Even Feinstein prefers to cite “polls,” as if she were just trying to represent the people of her state and abortion wasn’t really that big a cause for her personally: “Well, obviously, I come from a state that is 71 percent supportive of Roe. The American people are—according to the latest ABC poll—60 percent supportive of Roe.”

  In a 2000 Los Angeles Times poll that surveyed more than 2,000 Americans over several days, 65 percent of respondents said abortions should be illegal after the first trimester. Seventy-two percent of women wanted to make second-trimester abortions illegal, compared with only 58 percent of men. More than half of the respondents said abortion should be illegal in all circumstances or only to protect the life of the mother or in the cases of rape and incest. Fifty-seven percent said they believed abortion was murder. The article describing the poll was bristling with rationalizations from “gender studies” professors who claimed support for abortion was declining because the younger generation had no memory of the terror before Roe v. Wade. Yeah, okay, maybe. Or maybe it’s that support for all liberal ideas is always at its zenith before people figure out what liberals are talking about. (This is known as “the Howard Dean effect.”)

  The opinion in Roe, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, has gone from being a joke to being the centerpiece of American jurisprudence. Liberals pretend to be shocked that then-judge Clarence Thomas told the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings that he had never debated Roe. This is ridiculous—no one debates Harry Blackmun’s opinion in Roe. It would be humiliating, like discussing the plot of a Will & Grace episode.

  Roe was so preposterous that Supreme Court clerks referred to it as “Harry’s abortion.” Harvard law professor—and Watergate special prosecutor—Archibald Cox said of the opinion in Roe, “Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution.” Stanford Law School dean John Hart Ely said Roe “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe has said that “the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.” Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg has called Roe an act of “heavy-handed judicial intervention” and ridiculed the opinion during her confirmation hearings. A lot of people who favor abortion criticize the opinion in Roe. But no one who opposes abortion says, “I’m against abortion, but Roe certainly is a well-argued opinion.”

  The idea that law students sit around discussing the subtle legal reasoning in Roe v.Wade is absurd. No one talks about the “legal analysis” in Roe, because there is none. Liberals wanted abortion, so they discovered a right to it. And yet Thomas is endlessly attacked for responding to Senator Patrick Leahy’s question during the confirmation hearings about whether he had ever “debated” Roe, by saying, “Only, I guess, Senator, in the fact in the most general sense, that other individuals express concerns one way or the other and you listen and try to be thoughtful.” Patricia Ireland of the National Organization for Women justified her organization’s defense of President Clinton’s sexual harassment after having opposed Clarence Thomas on the grounds that Thomas had “told an absolutely unbelievable story of saying that he had never even discussed Roe v. Wade.”

  Michael Kinsley was still blathering in 2005 about Thomas’s òut-right fib”—even “perjury”—to denounce the idea of Thomas being nominated to chief justice.” Kinsley sneers at the claim of Thomas’s supporters that “he didn’t commit perjury because he testified only that he had never `debated’ Roe, not that he had never `discussed’ it.” I’ll take “discussed” for 10. There’s no there there—there’s nothing to talk about in Roe. Denounce, laugh at, ridicule, attack—yes. Discuss—no.

  For people who pin their hopes and dreams on a right invented out of whole cloth in Roe v. Wade, liberals are real sticklers about what the Bible says. In 2005, the New York Times triumphantly announced that the word abortion is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. Marshaling its evidence, the Times noted that in the index to the Bible, one can find “how many times Jesus talked about the poor (at least a dozen), or what the Apostle Paul wrote about grace (a lot).” But those seeking instruction on abortion “will not find the word at all.” It doesn’t have words like child rape either, but that doesn’t mean Christianity is ambiguous on the subject.

  Incidentally, another text that doesn’t have the word abortion in it is the U.S. Constitution. It doesn’t even have the word privacy. Would that liberals would be as literal when reading a constitution that sets forth specific enumerated rights as when reading the Bible! Liberals are incapable of extrapolating anything about abortion from commands like “Thou shalt not kill.” But they unmistakably see a right to abortion hidden in the Privileges or Immunities Clause.

  Liberals can’t win on abortion in a frank discussion, so they come up with a series of feints, euphemisms, and stalking horses to promote their most sacred belief. They raise procedural blockades to conservative judges, preferring to put the American people to sleep with long exegeses on the history of the filibuster rather than clearly explaining that what they mean by “out of the mainstream” is: “opposes abortion when a girl can’t fit into her prom dress.”

  After the 2004 election, the Democrats took secret polls and determined that they could not defeat Bush’s judicial nominees on ideological grounds. The Democrats’ own polls showed that referring to Republican judicial nominees as radical rightwing Republicans was “the least effective approach.” It wasn’t the conservative judges whose viewpoints were radical, it was the American people’s! Suddenly nothing made sense anymore to liberals who learned about the world from reading the op-ed page of the New York Times.

  Abortion fanatics know they can’t fly under their own flag. So the Democrats use the blacks to front for the feminists. Whenever you see a Democrat getting all worked up about some egregious violation of “civil rights,” I promise you, he’s not talking about disc
rimination against a black person. Democrats don’t care about race discrimination: They are the party of race discrimination! George Wallace, Bull Connor, Bob Byrd—all Democrats! What Democrats mean by “civil rights” is the civil right of a woman not to inform her husband she’s aborting his baby; the civil right of a minor to have an abortion without notifying her parents; the civil right of a woman to plunge a fork into the head of a child as it struggles through the birth canal because it has a cleft lip. That’s “civil rights.” Before we jettison the “living Constitution,” how about inventing a constitutional right not to hear Democrats invoke the phrase “civil rights” when what they mean is “abortion”?

  The vicious smearing of Judge Robert Bork, Reagan’s nominee to the Supreme Court in 1987, was the Democrats’ first open admission that they can’t win on abortion in an open fight. Even Democrats knew they couldn’t scare people by telling them Bork believed in terrible things like parental notification before a minor has an abortion. America to Democrats: So do we. Instead, they had to make ugly allegations that Bork was an evil bigot who would bring back “segregated lunch counters,” in Senator Drunkennedy’s famous phrase. Bork had filed briefs in major civil rights cases and had won the respect of people like Justice Thurgood Marshall. Marshall told Legal Times reporter Stuart Taylor, “I think he’d have been a credit to this Court.” Marshall complained to Taylor that Bork had gotten “a bum deal,” and had been “tarred unfairly as an enemy of black people.” Democrats didn’t care that they were smearing a defender of blacks’ civil rights: The right to destroy human life was at stake!

  Democrats were stymied in their use of the race card to protect abortion rights when President George Bush (41) nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court the next year. The feminists had to call in Anita Hill for a last-minute Hail Mary smear of Thomas as asexual harasser. To preserve the right of women to have sex with men whose babies they don’t want to carry, the Democrats nearly derailed the appointment of the second black justice ever to sit on the highest court in the land. That’s their commitment to “civil rights.” Hill was believed to be lying by two-thirds of the public. Liberals rewarded her with fawning profiles and a “Woman of the Year” award from Glamour magazine.

  But the most outrageous example of the Democrats’ using blacks to front for abortion rights was their ugly racial attack on Judge Charles Pickering. What the Democrats did to Pickering tells you all you need to know about how they use black Americans to protect abortion rights. As a young prosecutor in the sixties, Pickering worked closely with the FBI to go after the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi. In 1966, he testified against Klan member Sam Bowers, on trial for murdering civil rights activist Vernon Darner. After testifying, Pickering and his family needed FBI protection. The Klan later claimed credit for defeating Pickering when he ran for the state legislature. Unlike all the Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee who would later accuse Pickering of racism, he sent his children to the Mississippi public schools, where it was fairly certain they would run into black people.

  Pickering’s real crime was that he was “antichoice.” In 1976, he chaired the subcommittee of the Republican Party’s Platform Committee, calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade. As a state senator he voted to support a human life amendment to the Constitution. And as the president of the Mississippi Baptist Convention, Pickering presided over a meeting where the convention adopted a resolution calling for legislation to outlaw abortion. His most virulent opponents were People for the American Way, NARAL, the National Women’s Law Center, and the Alliance for Justice. NARAL President Kate Michelman declared that Pickering “has an open hostility to a woman’s right to choose.”

  The feminists wanted abortion on demand, so blacks in Mississippi were told to take a back seat. The Democrats used their Goebbels big-lie tactics to claim Judge Pickering had lowered the sentence of a cross-burner because he hates blacks. It didn’t take a lot of investigation to get the real story—even 60 Minutes did it.

  Pickering’s objection to the sentence in the cross-burning case was simply that a wildly disproportionate sentence was being requested for the least culpable defendant. The government struck a deal with two of the cross-burners, letting them off with misdemeanor convictions and no prison time. During the proceedings, it became apparent that the government had made deals with the wrong men—including the ringleader of the attack, who had a criminal record and had once shot a gun into the cross-burning victims’ home. After letting two defendants off with a wrist slap, the Department of Justice wanted the third defendant—a simpleton who had stupidly gone along with the others—sentenced to seven and a half years in prison. There are child-molesters and murderers who serve less time. Eventually, the Clinton Department of Justice agreed with Pickering and requested a sentence of two years in prison. But the Democrats later seized on this case to accuse Pickering of being soft on cross-burners.

  Black Mississippians who knew Judge Pickering and had nothing to gain by defending him refused to go along with the smearing of the judge. On 60 Minutes Charles Evers, brother of murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers and a Pickering supporter, engaged in this exchange with the head of a local branch of the NAACP that was opposing Pickering:

  CHARLES EVERS: You know, maybe you don’t know, you know that Charles Pickering is a man who helped us to break the Ku Klux Klan. Did you know that?

  CLARENCE McGEE: I heard that statement made.

  EVERS: I mean, I know that. Do you know that?

  McGEE: I don’t know that.

  EVERS: I know that. Do you know about the young black man that was accused of robbing the young white woman. You know about that?

  McGEE: Nope.

  EVERS: So Charles Pickering took the case. Came to trial and won the case and the young man became free.

  McGEE: I don’t know about that.

  EVERS: But did you also know that Charles Pickering is the man who helped integrate his churches. You know about that?

  McGEE: No.

  EVERS: Well, you don’t know a thing about Charles Pickering.

  As 60 Minutes reported, Judge Pickering “enjoys strong support from the many blacks who know him. In his hometown of Laurel, four of the five black city council members say they back him, because of all he’s done to improve race relations. And many black attorneys who practice before him say Pickering is fair and first-rate.” The Democrats’ attack on Judge Pickering was nothing but a kiss-ass, spineless, contemptible suck-up to feminists on abortion.

  The day before Kerry won the Democrats’ Best Fake Patriot contest in Iowa, he was on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, calling Judge Pickering “a cross-burning defending judge.” It had been 24 hours since Kerry had sucked up to the feminists, so he had to get that out of the way by blackening Judge Pickering’s name on national TV. While Kerry endlessly bragged about his undaunted valor in Vietnam, it would have been nice if he had ever shown one ounce of courage by standing up to the feminists.

  The Democrats will sell out blacks, blue-collar workers, Catholics, Hispanics, and the elderly. But they will never cross NARAL. The most important thing isn’t the little guy, the poor, the voiceless, civil rights, or the “other America.” The most important value to liberals is destroying human life.

  When a political party seeking votes from the American people views nothing as more sacred than ending human life, it has more to worry about than the risks of casual sex. Republicans aren’t even sending in their A-team anymore—and the Democrats still can’t win. The Democrats are being routed on every issue—gun control, national security, gay marriage, taxes, crime. The abortion ladies are the only ones still to be thrown off the boat. Republicans have won the battle of ideas on abortion, and now it’s just a matter of time before the Supreme Court overturns Roe and allows Americans to vote. The death of Roe is going to be like the death of the Soviet Union, and not only because both events make liberals sad. Roe is already dead, we’re just waitin
g for the official proclamation. Liberals think they can demand a ruling from the Supreme Court that will take all risk out of trysting sex. But the High Court can’t do that any more than penicillin can. Liberals seem not to realize their real complaint is with a Law-maker whose judgment cannot be appealed.

  5

  LIBERALS’ DOCTRINE OF

  INFALLIBILITY: SOBBING

  HYSTERICAL WOMEN

  Liberals are perennially enraged that Republicans are allowed to talk back. For years, this wasn’t a problem, because, in Lenin’s immortal words, they had seized the telegraph office. There were only three TV stations, three major newspapers, and a handful of national magazines, all run by liberals. But at least since Rush Limbaugh got a microphone, liberals haven’t been able to make arguments in a vacuum. The Left’s long-running monologue had become a dialogue, and they didn’t like it one bit. So now they constantly try to re-create a world where they can hurl slander and treason without anyone arguing back. They needed a doctrine of infallibility.

  The appearance of Fox News Channel nearly drove liberals berserk: they were supposed to control 100 percent of news dissemination. When conservatives used to criticize the media, liberals always acted perplexed and indignant at the idea that a TV station could have a political bias. Then Fox News came along, and to listen to liberals, you’d think we were living in a police state. Fox News isn’t even particularly conservative, though it is recognizably American. I believe the one verified atrocity committed by Fox News was the wearing of American flag lapel pins by some anchors after 9/11. Assuming—against all evidence—that Fox News is every bit as conservative as CBS is liberal, it is still just a small beach-head in a universe of liberal-speak. But the mere existence of one solitary network that doesn’t toe the party line has driven the Left insane. Liberals have made documentaries attacking Fox News, written books denouncing Fox News, screamed about “lying liars” on Fox News, and established websites to document the cruel deceptions of Fox News.