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Show OPINION 1 MOLLY IVINS I f I 1, JOSEPH SOBRAN COMMENTARY - ............ .. . ... - COMMENTARY - - ! Clinton sex scandal making a mockery of presidency Abortionists not just innocent humanitarians Informed citizenship in our great doctrine and the Independent Counsel nation requires a certain flexibility. My Act. Together, they've created a constifavorite moment, so far, was hearing a tutional crisis that confirms the worst scholar on CNN pTesent a biblical fears of critics who have lamented the exegesis of the theory that oral sex does criminalization of sex and the politics." not constitute adultery. Rosen wrote: "Much of the problem By that time, the scandal already had its stems from the ill-defined nature of own logo: "Crisis in the White House," sexual harassment litigation itself, which just like the Gulf War and Dead Diana. often spirals out of control because civil As columnist Frank Rich of The New suits lack th e procedural protections York Times put it, "All Monica, All the necessary to guard the privacy of the Time." By the time we got to the accused and all others with whom he allegations o1 the president's dried semen comes into contact. on a dress preserved by Lewinsky as a "Why, for example, were the lawyers souvenir, even the television reporters for Paula Jones permitted to go on a seem to have concluded there are some fishing expedition into the president's things we'd just as soon not know. sexual history? ... In criminal trials For a brief but heady moment, th e involving serious sexual allegations, like notion that President Clinton would rape, courts scrupulously limit inquiries address us all during half-time of th e into the sexual histories of bo th the Super Bowl game floated before our dazed accuser and the accused ... Confronted eyes. What a ratings spectacular. with questions about sexual relationJames Carville and the usual suspects ships, it's not impossible to imagine that fanned out on the Sunday talk shows, a man or a woman might be inclined to condemning Clinton's enemies with the shade or deny the truth. Of course, lying vigor they deserve. But ,--..,,,,,...-- - - - ---,.---, under oat h is never a the real problem isn't the trivial matter . .But the president's enemies-it's instinct to conceal sexual his friends. Disappointed, indiscretions is, at least, disapproving, disbelieving entirely human, and it's and bitter, most of them not the kind of sin t hat have already concluded we ordinarily associate that it'd be better if the with legalisms such as president resigned. 'obstruction of justice."' I, for one, don't think Why is Starr still here the president's sex life after four years and aphas squat to do with his proximately $30 million job. After 30 years as a spent investigating a 20political reporter, l wish I year-old Arkansas land could report some direct deal? Why didn't he wrap that up years ago, and connection between Clinton's marital fidelity and what does it have to do perfo.r mance in public with sending six FBI office, but I've never been agents and a pack of able to find one. Clinton's lawyers swooping down pr:oblems now are trust on Lewinsky in a hotel and credibility, and both bar and keeping her for are gone. Listening to nine hours without a him talk the morning of lawyer? Jan. 26 about an excellent Justice Antonin Scalia, after-school program fOI kids was painful. not normally one of my heroes, said in If he resigns in the next few days, he bis dissent from the court's decision to can leave a martyT to an unscrupulous uphold the Independent Counsel Act that prosecutor and bad law, a nd perhaps special prosecutors are appointed to something can be done to fix both. li he investigate a particular person and work drags out a techno-legal defense, it's quite their way backward to identifying a apt to be successful. Envision Kenneth crime-unlike ordinary investigators, Starr ttying to convince a Washington who begin by investigating a particular jury to convict Clinton for having con- crime and th en pr oceed to focus on sensual sex wjth an adult, which is what particular individuals. The House Judiciary Committee, this case comes down to, using probably inaclmissible tapes illegally acquired and packed with Republican zealots, is now obvious entrapment for evidence. free to begin its own investigation of the The president's larger problem is not president's sex life, as Rosen notes, legal-it's political. Both trust and "armed with the rough force of subpoena credibility are probably irreparably power and unrestrained by th e relaxed damaged. He cannot lead the country. rules of evidence that apply in civil In one of the most helpful takes so far, trials." And then let's try to convince our Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George best young people that going into politics Washington University, wrote in th e is the highest form of public service. Times 0£ the "explosive collision of two novel, illiberal and dangerously unr.e- Molly Ivins is a nationally syndicated strained areas of law: sexual harassment columnist. The U. S. Supreme Court's most aggressive act of " raw judicial power," in Justice Byron White's phrase, is now a quarter of a century old. It was on Jan. 22, 1973, that the court suddenly realized that all the abortion laws of all 50 states had always been unconstitutional, even if no one had ever understood this before. Since that time, about 40 million human lives have been aborted in this country. That's more than double the population of Australia. As one who enjoys music, I 'm haunted by an odd thought. I sometimes wonder if the next Mozart or Gershwin has been aborted. Not that this is the most important thing about those missing lives, but the question makes the real cost of abortion vivid tome. The Great War, as World War lused to be called, claimed the lives of over 10 million young men, who included poets (Willied Owen) and artists (Henri Gaudier) who were already beginning to make their mark. There were probably others, as nameless to us as the many children in the dumpsters of abortion clinics. The renowned critic Guy Davenport once said 20thcen tuiy art was a casualty of the Great War. Twentyfirst-century art may likewise be a casualty of the war on the unborn. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post chose to mark the silver anniversary of Roe vs. Wade with cover stories in their weekly magazines on the plight of "abortion providers," as politesse now terms the destroyets of incipient human lives. Forty million abortions, and we're supposed to worry about how tough it is to be an abortionist these days. Neither article mentioned the profit motive, which usually preoccupies these liberal dailies. Abortion "providers" were portrayed as selfless humanitarians besieged by religious fanatics. They are, in the words of Jack Hitt in the Times, "helping another person exercise their constitutional right." Making money apparently has nothing to do with their willingness to do what most doctors shrink fr.om doing. "If you do 12 [abortions! in a row, it can make you feel bad," one abortionist told Hitt. Doing just one abortion would be enough to make some people feel rotten, but there's no accounting for taste in these things. The purpose of legalizing abortion, says Hitt, was "to eliminate botched abortions. To that extent, Roe has been successful." So much for the pretense that Roe was an impartial attempt to divine the meaning of the Constitution. It was, as its critics have said all along, a judicial attempt to make public policy masquerading as jurisprudence. Former Justice Harry Blackman, author of the majority opinion in Roe, sees the decision as "a necessary step on th e road to emancipation for women," according to Harold Koh of Yale Law School, who has i nterviewed Bla ckman at length. Li ke m-0st of his colleagues, Blackman wasn't embarrassed to tell us what be --....,.... wanted the Constitution to mean, even if that didn't square with what it had been understood to mean. Noc does the number of abortions trouble him, even now. Of course Blackmun wasn't quite cand id enough to say, in that famous majority opinion, be was consciously advancing his vision of "the emancipation of women." You won't find tnat in the text. Instead, be affected '""""'.......................... to be interpreting the Ninth a~d 14th Amendments, without respect to his own policy, preferences and sympathies. To read that opinion, you'd think be was entirely aloof from contemporary trends and fashions, and that it was sort of a lucky accident that the result just happened to coincide with the "progressive" agenda du jour. How surprised this austere jurist must have been when The New York Times and Washington Post applauded his ruling! In the liberal press it's the abortion "Providers" and their allies in the judiciary who are morally sensitive, and the anti-abortion protesters who are crude and crass. Those protesters don't constitute sympathetic treatment any more than, say, a doomed fetus. Nor does this press display any sense of loss when that doomed fetus is multiplied by tens of millions. If Shakespeare's mom gets an abortion, the only important thing is she's exercising heI constitutional rights. Joseph Sobran i s a nationally syndicated columnist. |
