Posted by
Jason Cunningham on Tuesday, July 10, 2007 6:21:46 PM
The idea of judicial precedent, known formally as “stare decisis,” receives a lot of mistreatment from liberals, who routinely revere precedent when it suits them and seek to overturn it when it doesn’t.
The first thing to know is that the Supreme Court is allowed to rule against its past decisions; nowhere in our Constitution or laws is this prohibited. This, of course, can work for or against conservatives, liberals or any other group, for it means that no judicial ruling, no legal victory (or defeat), is untouchable for the rest of time. Liberals know this (though you’ll never hear them admit to it), which is why they get so worked up when one of their precious precedents gets attacked.
This is especially true of Roe v. Wade. Whenever the issue of abortion is raised, liberals speak of Roe as thought it were an absolute truth embedded in the fabric of the universe – this despite the fact that the so-called “right to an abortion” wasn’t “found” in the Constitution until a mere three decades ago … and despite the fact that liberals otherwise do not believe in absolute truth. They hold up Roe as though it were written in stone, all the while ignoring most of the truths that actually were written in stone. “Roe v. Wade is the settled law of the land!” they shout (as if anything in this country is ever “settled”).
Okay, Mr. Settled-law-of-the-land-absolute-truth-written-in-stone: How did you somehow find it in your heart, then, to break your precedential sacrament and go against “settled law” when you fought for the pro-homosexual lobby in Lawrence v. Texas (2003)? It was in that case that the Supreme Court reversed direction from a decision 17 years earlier in which it had ruled that states had a right to outlaw sodomy. With its decision in Lawrence, however, the liberal majority of the court suddenly discovered that there really was a right to sodomy written in the Constitution, after all. I must need new glasses, then, because I still can’t find such a right written anywhere.
Listen, everybody dislikes it when decisions don’t go their way. But whereas conservatives try to overturn precedent only when they seek to right real wrongs committed by the Supreme Court (such as “finding” a constitutional right to an abortion), liberals manipulate the idea of precedent in order to gain legal protection for the immoral lifestyles they stand for (e.g., homosexuality, abortion, racial preferences). I have to give credit to liberals for one thing, though: They recognize the importance of precedent and the merits of manipulating it to suit their own interests. In operating this way, however, they show their true motive, which is not the preservation of the legal integrity of our Constitution, or of the personal integrity of Americans, but the right to live free from the law and do whatever the heck they please.