The Iraqi Constitution

From Baptist Press comes an article, citing something called the United States Commission on International Freedom, saying that the recent draft of the Iraqi constitution fails to protect individual rights and religious liberty. What were the geniuses in the "Christian community" expecting? The US went to war on behalf of Shiite Muslims and has methodically helped to destroy the oldest Christian communities in the world. Did they suddenly think that PCA and SBC churches were going to take root?

I've discussed the foolishness at the heart of evangelical warmongering on other occasions, so let's just quickly note that warmongering liberals at The New Republic are also worried about the new constitution. The editors at TNR write, "Leaked drafts of the constitution call for the application of Islamic edicts, not civil law, in matters related to marriage, divorce, and inheritance. This will mean stripping many Iraqi women of rights that, ironically enough, they were afforded even under Saddam Hussein's brutal dictatorship."

Peter Beinart (whom Al Mohler has effusively, and with great silliness, praised) and company are hoping that James Madison will arise in Iraq like a Phoenix from the flame: "We recognize, of course, that the future of Iraq is now largely in Iraqi hands. And we hope that the Iraqis, in recognizing this, will exhibit the sort of statesmanship that has so frequently eluded the Middle East in the past." Wow, talk about delusional.

What does the new draft of the constitution say? Read it yourself. Here is an excerpt from Article 1:

"Any individual with another nationality (except for Israel) may obtain Iraqi nationality after a period of residency inside the borders of Iraq of not less than ten years for an Arab or twenty years for any other nationality.

"An Iraqi may have more than one nationality as long as the nationality is not Israeli."

And how 'bout this from Article 5:

"The Iraqi people are one people, unified by belief and the unity of the homeland and culture. Anything that exposes this unity to danger is forbidden."

"The state shall take responsibility for combating moral and behavioral depravity and encourage people and agencies to spread virtue, providing it help and support. The state shall ensure harmony between the duties of woman toward her family and her work in the society and equality with men in the fields of political, social, and economic life without conflicting with or disturbing the provisions of the Islamic shari'a."

And I see that we went to war to provide universal health care, according to Article 7:

"Iraqi citizens have the right to enjoy security and free health care. The Iraqi federal government and regional governments must provide it and expand the fields of prevention, treatment, and medication by the construction of various hospitals and health institutions".

Naturally, freedom of speech will be protected in Iraq under the new regime:

"There is no censorship on newspapers, printing, publishing, advertising, or media except by law."

Let freedom ring! Have we have vanquished evil yet?

More Non-Natalee News

Nitwits over at World Magazine are excited that women are joining the Iraqi military. Here is more on this trend from USA Today and here are a few of my thoughts on the absurd notion that men should send their wives, sisters, and daughters into war.

Was Srebrenica a Hoax?

London police trained in Israel, learn to gun down unarmed Brazilians.

Did delegates at this Disciples of Christ hoedown all forget their Bibles? Oh yeah, they don't really believe in that "doctrine" stuff anyway. It's waaayyyy too divisive. They merely believe in "unity" and "Jesus." In other words, typical lawless Christians.

Speaking of lawless Christianity, here is a piece originally published in the NY Times spotlighting "ministries" by tattoo-laden Christian punk rockers. In his commentary on the Sixth Commandment, Rushdoony said, "The personal application includes markings, cuttings, and tattoos of the body, for the body must be used under God's law, and all such acts are forbidden in the law, whether for mourning, as religious marks, or for ornamental or other uses (Lev. 19:28, 21:5). Tattooing was practiced religiously to indicate that one adhered to or belonged to a god; it also indicated that a man was a slave, that he belonged to lord or owner. The believer, as a free man in Christ, indicates, Christ's lordship by obedience, not be servile markings: the body is kept holy and clean unto the Lord. The persistence of a mark of slavery among men is indicative of man's perversity."

More lawless Christianity. A reader tells Gary DeMar that the NT abrogates the death penalty. DeMar responds. In the incident with the women taken in adultery, there needs to be a distinction between civil and juridicial forgiveness. In the civil sphere, there must be restitution. Likewise, religious forgiveness presupposes civil forgiveness. In this case, Jesus is asked to make to make a pronouncement regarding civil law with respect to adultery. However, the witnesses withdrew their accusation, so there was no civil case to be sustained. In short, there is no condemnation of the death penalty here by Jesus.

In 2004, the Border Patrol undertook a survey asking detained illegals if they had heard of a U.S. government amnesty plan for illegal aliens (61 percent had) and whether the amnesty plan influenced their decision to cross the border (45 percent answered that it did). Naturally, the Border Patrol ceased the survey and attempted to cover up the results. Quite typical of this administration.

Good stuff from Joe Sobran, who says that neither side in the "terror war" has an incentive to stop:

We should stop talking about it as if it were a war. It’s a clash of wills. The enemy is obscure, but can’t be fought or defeated as if he were a state. He has no vital secrets or single mastermind that can be found by, say, taking, questioning, and torturing captives.

“He,” in fact, is a loose federation, not a centralized power. His numbers aren’t huge, but he has millions of sympathizers who share his hatred of us. He has no ambition to conquer us or destroy our freedoms; such talk is foolish. “Democracy,” if that’s what you want to call it, isn’t at stake. The enemy merely wants to harass and shock us until we stop irritating him.

And our government has no intention of doing that. It will keep doing what it does, and he will keep retaliating. This will go on indefinitely, since neither side can force the other to do what it wants. What costs can random acts of terrorism against a few civilians impose on the politicians who make the decisions? Don’t such acts in fact reward and encourage them?

What incentive could cause President Bush to change his course? Every new terrorist act fortifies his determination not to change. Nothing he does gives the enemy any reason to change, either. He even profits by the stalemate. From his point of view, the Iraq war isn’t futile.

Phil Johnson with a nice post on Evangelical faddishness.

Here Come the Judge...and More

So what about Judge Roberts? At this point, I can do little more than shrug my shoulders at the question. My friends in the "pro-life and pro-family" community seem to have made up their mind, however. My inbox is overflowing with emails from the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, and various other para-church ministries who so frequently lose their way wandering between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Man. If Bush had appointed Larry Tribe these characters would be trying to convince Christians of his judicial fitness. In any case, they are metaphysically certain that Roberts is their guy--and let's face it, they aren't to be trusted. So we're on our own. What do we know about Roberts? Not much, and that is the problem. Roberts appears to be a pillar of the Washington establishment who has no firm allegiance to strict constructionism. One more stealth nominee by the GOP. Is he more likely to morph into Antonin Scalia, or David Souter?

Iraqis unable to fight on their own:

About half of Iraq's new police battalions are still being established and cannot conduct operations, while the other half of the police units and two-thirds of the new army battalions are only "partially capable" of carrying out counterinsurgency missions, and only with American help, according to a newly declassified Pentagon assessment.

Are they unable, or unwilling? I would guess that there is little incentive for Iraqi soldiers as long as Americans will fight on their behalf.

The war is over. Iran won!

Another bad week in Iraq.

Did the War Make Us Safer?

Is the public starting to slowly awaken from a Fox News induced stupor? According to a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, 54% of Americans now believe the war has made the United States less secure.

In October 2003, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld penned a memo questioning whether our actions in the war on terror were producing positive results. Rumsfeld wrote, "We lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"

New investigations by the Saudi government and an Israeli think tank have provided some of Rumsfeld's missing metrics. The separate analyses found that the overwhelming majority of foreign fighters in Iraq became radicalized by the war itself. Rumsfeld’s fear that American policy would create rather than deter terrorists is coming to fruition.

Defenders of the war claim that terrorists have made Iraq a central front in the battle against the United States. Mr. Bush says, ''The terrorists know that the outcome [in Iraq] will leave them emboldened or defeated. So they are waging a campaign of murder and destruction." According to Mr. Bush and his apologists, the US military must fight terrorists in Iraq, "so we do not have to face them here at home."

The argument made by Bush and the neocons begins with the presumption that there are a finite number of potential terrorists that can be penned up in Iraq and dealt with accordingly. In fact, the pool of anti-American fighters has likely grown as a response to the invasion of Iraq.

In a report published earlier this year, the CIA admitted that the war in Iraq was a major recruiting device for Bin-Laden and his minions. The report states that, "Iraq...could provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills and language proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are 'professionalized' and for whom political violence becomes an end in itself." The report also states that foreign jihadists "enjoy a growing sense of support from Muslims who are not necessarily supporters of terrorism."

Reuven Pay, author of the Israeli study, says that the vast majority of foreign fighters entering Iraq had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda before Sepember 11th—and have nothing to do with Al-Qaeda today. In fact the case studies indicate that most foreign fighters consider the Iraq war to be an attack against the Islamic religion and Arab culture. Indeed many religious leaders throughout the Islamic world have issued edicts defending jihad in Iraq as justified in the face of aggression. "I am not sure the American public is really aware of the enormous influence of the war in Iraq, not just on Islamists but the entire Arab world,” says Paz.

The findings of the Israelis and Saudis have been buttressed by the work of Robert Pape. Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago, has written “Dying to Win: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism.”

According to Pape, suicide terrorists aren’t acting out of hatred for "freedom." It isn’t Britney Spears, McDonald’s or a distaste for ‘The Federalist Papers’ stoking the fires of Islamic rage. Indeed, the problem isn’t even principally Islamic fundamentalism-- the problem is occupation. “The central fact,” says Pape, “is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.”

But why don’t all occupations spur suicide terrorism? Here is where religion comes into play. When a religious difference exists between an occupying regime and the subjects of occupation, terrorist leaders are able to demonize the occupying power more vociferously. So while Bin Laden could make his arguments about the “infidels,” his claims have actually been substantiated by the presence of large numbers of American troops in the Middle East.

Pape’s critics argue that 9/11 occurred before the invasion and occupation of Iraq. They are conveniently forgetting the stationing of some 40,000 troops on the Arabian peninsula during the 1990's and the perpetual embargo of Iraq, not to mention uncritical support by the US for the Israeli occupation.

The time has come to reconsider our ill-conceived strategy of occupation, nation-building, and meddlesome interventionism. Our national interest and common sense demands it.

It's Getting Better All the Time

Paul Craig Roberts continues to catalog the decline of the American economy. Over the last couple of years, Roberts has done yeoman work chronicling the collapse of America's industrial machine. What I haven't seen, however, are concrete solutions to the problem. Roberts would clearly support restrictions on immigration, but I'm not sure what he would do regarding trade policy. Is trade protection the answer to the problem?

A couple of interesting pieces by Steven Sniegoski over at the Last Ditch. Here he discusses the illegality of Iraq war in light of the Nuremberg Standards and here he discusses American and Israeli policy in Uzbekistan. The latter is an important essay that underscores the silliness and hypocrisy at the heart of the democratist pabulum spouted by Bushian neocons.

Something rarely seen in the press is a free-market case against corporate behemoths like Wal-Mart. One study concluded that Wal-Mart received $1 billion in various subsidies. Carney describes the various subsidies provided for just one location in Florida:

In MacLenny, Fla., for example, state and local governments subsidized the distribution center from beginning to end. The county gave Wal-Mart the land for free and built the roads to get there. Between the local and state governments, taxpayers footed the bill for the plumbing, the recruiting and the job training. Finally, Wal-Mart couldn't lure any workers unless it could find somewhere for them to live. Unfortunately, rents in MacLenny would be too steep for new workers earning Wal-Mart's wages. In a free market, Wal-Mart would have to raise its wages to cover the cost of living. Instead the federal government volunteered to make up the difference by subsidizing the new housing that went up to accommodate the new workers.

The war so far has cost $314 billion. Isn't it nice to have the party of fiscal responsibility in power?


This is typical of neocons. Mona Charen, who has always supported mass immigration accompanied by "assimilation," now thinks deportation of Muslims would be a good idea.

And here is some unbelievable nonsense from British historian Nial Ferguson, who seems to think that the colonization of Europe by Islam is a positive good. Ferguson is frightened that his British fellows might recall the prophetic words of Enoch Powell and try to prevent the swell of Islamic immigration into Europe. Ferguson says:

The settlement of Western Europe by Muslims is now an irreversible phenomenon; moreover, it seems bound to continue more or less inexorably, whether legally or illegally.

Such demographic shifts and processes of colonisation are the tides of history; mere laws and fences can no more halt them than Canute could stop the sea coming in. Nor are they invariably a bad thing. Moorish rule was hardly a disaster for Andalucia, as anyone who visits the Alhambra can see. It was contact with the more numerate and scientific Muslim world that helped propel Western Europe out of the Dark Ages.

No, the problem today is not immigration per se; it is the fact that a pernicious ideology has been allowed to infiltrate Europe's immigrant communities. And that has happened because we have blindly allowed our country to be a haven for fanatics.

In case you haven't heard, last week wasn't so good in Iraq. After Sieff wrote this, another 150+ civilians died over the weekend.

The Center for Immigration Studies released a report on births to immigrants from 1970-2002. Among the findings:

* In 2002, 23 percent of all births in the United States were to immigrant mothers (legal or illegal), compared to 15 percent in 1990, 9 percent in 1980 and 6 percent in 1970.

* Even at the peak of the last great wave of immigration in 1910, the share of births to immigrant mothers did not reach the level of today. And after 1910 immigration was reduced, whereas current immigration continues at record levels, thus births to immigrants will continue to increase.

* Our best estimate is that 383,000, or 42 percent, of births to immigrants are to illegal alien mothers. Thus births to illegals now account for nearly 1 out of every 10 births in the United States.

* The large number of births to illegals shows that the longer illegal immigration is allowed to persist the harder it is to solve, because these U.S. citizen children can stay permanently, their citizenship can prevent a parent’s deportation, and once adults, they can sponsor their parents for permanent residence.

* The issue of births to illegals also shows that a “temporary” worker program would inevitably result in the permanent addition of hundreds of thousands of people to the U.S. population each year, exactly what such a program is supposed to avoid.

* The dramatic growth in births to immigrants has been accompanied by a significant decline in diversity. The top country for immigrant births C Mexico C increased from 24 percent of births to immigrants in 1970 to 45 percent in 2002.

* In 2002, births to Hispanic immigrants accounted for 59 percent of all births to immigrant mothers. No single cultural/linguistic group has ever accounted for such a large share of births to immigrants.

* Immigrant mothers are much less educated than native mothers. In 2002, 39 percent lacked a high school degree, compared to 17 percent of native-born mothers. And immigrants now account for 41 percent of all births to mothers without a high school degree.

* The states with the most dramatic increase in births to immigrants in the last decade are Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Nebraska, Arkansas, Arizona, Tennessee, Minnesota, Colorado, Delaware, Virginia, and Maryland.

* Immigrants account for such a large percentage of births because they have somewhat higher fertility and are more likely to be in their reproductive years than natives. Nevertheless, the differences with natives are not large enough to significantly affect the nation’s overall age structure.

* Immigrants who have arrived over the past two decades, plus all of their U.S.-born children, have only reduced the average age in the United States from 37 to 36 years.

* Looking at the working-age (15 to 64) share of the population also shows little effect from immigration. With or without post-1980 immigrants and all their U.S.-born children, 66 percent of the population is of working age.

* While immigration has little effect on the nation’s age structure, each year new immigration (legal and illegal), plus births to immigrants, adds at some 2.4 million people to America’s population, making for a much larger population and a more densely settled country.

Is Iran Next?

Yet another leaked British memo has come to light. British Defense Secretary John Reid penned a document for Tony "Poodle" Blair indicating that American troop levels will decline from the present level of 138,000 to 66,000 by 2006.

In his column today, Justin Raimondo argues that withdrawal is largely a pretext for future adventurism in the Middle East. Raimondo cites a 2004 Strator analysis, which reads in part, "the Bush administration went in with a strategic goal: to acquire projection capabilities from within Iraq that would allow Washington to pressure the entire Middle East, from Iran to Saudi Arabia to Egypt. This would be impossible if U.S. troops were bogged down in a guerrilla war with no end in sight."

Raimondo also leans on the analysis of Chalmers Johnson in arguing that the real game plan is to establish bases in the region from which to project military power into Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

Is any of this plausible? With the disaster in Iraq, who would think about invading elsewhere in the Middle Eastern snake pit? Is it reasonable to think that our Clausewitz wannabes at the Pentagon will jump out of the frying pan and into the fire?

Unfortunately, Don Rumsfeld practically accused the Iranians of masterminding the most recent suicide bombings in Israel. Rummy said, "We know that Iran has been on the terrorist list. We know that Iran has been assisting Hezbollah and other organizations and moving equipment and people down through Damascus into Beirut and down into positions where they can attack Israel for years and years and years and years."

Meanwhile, down at Moonie Central, otherwise known as the Washington Times, the neocon machine, relying on Kurdish sources, is spinning a story accusing Iran of aiding and abetting terror strikes in northern Iraq. That the insurgency in Iraq might draw from those unappreciative of the occupation cannot be uttered.

Finally, we already know that covert operations have started in Iran using the Saddam-trained MEK to destabilize Iran.

Here we go again...

The London Bombings--Are We Winning Yet?

In case you haven’t been reading the “conservative” press recently, you may have missed out on the real message behind the London bombings. It turns out, you see, that the bad guys are on the run.

David Frum says the bombings were less ambitious and sophisticated than prior al-Qaeda attacks, suggesting “that the ability of the terrorists to carry out attacks against Western countries has been seriously degraded.”

Frum also asks whether the lack of suicide bombers, as with the Marid bombing, indicates that Islamists may be having difficulty recruiting suicide bombers in the West.

Writing in FrontPage Magazine, Ben Johnson says that one lesson from the London attacks is that the Iraqi war is not a distraction from the War on Terror, but the central front in that battle. According to Johnson, the insurgent Islamists are losing in Iraq and the bombings represent an increasingly desperate attempt by al-Qaeda to drive the U. S. from the region. Johnson argues that bin-Laden and his minions fear the “liberation of Iraq” because of the “potential to change the dynamics of the entire Middle East.” Johnson continues:

Although Osama bin Laden is likely surrounded by Green Berets in the mountainous no man’s land straddling the Afghan-Pakistani border, his minions demand Allied withdrawal from Iraq, because that is the terrorists’ bleeding wound. Iraq has become the terror war’s valley of Armageddon, the decisive battleground between good and evil – and as in eschatology, evil is losing.

Coalition sacrifices brought democracy to Iraq and saw paralyzing fear drown in a sea of ink-stained fingers. A democratic, pluralistic, majority-Muslim nation in the heart of the Islamic world could demonstrate the superiority of Western values and inspire a chain-reaction throughout the region, drying up jihadist recruitment.

National Review editor Rich Lowry echoes the sentiments of many on the Right when he writes, "We are facing a global insurgency of Islamic militants who will hit anywhere, from Mosul to London. Their goal is totalist. They want, first, to drive us from the Middle East, then, to establish a caliphate there, and finally, to absorb the West into their theocracy."

Lowry says that we can take comfort in the fact that al-Qaeda has not hit our shores. "Such an attack" Lowry writes, "could take place tomorrow. But that it hasn't yet is probably some testament to the efficacy of the Patriot Act, the immediate detention of hundreds of Muslim immigration violators after 9/11 (most, no doubt, innocent of any evil intention, but perhaps a crucial handful not), and tighter border control in general."

As Justin Raimondo has written repeatedly, these arm-chair warriors are living in Bizzaro World, where up is down, black is white, left is right, and slavery is freedom.

In truth, the London bombings demonstrate in spades that the war in Iraq has not made western nations more secure. The so-called “flypaper strategy,” i.e., that we are fighting terrorists in Baghdad so that we won’t have to in Boise, also appears to have backfired.

That al-Qaeda attacked in the UK and not the US should not be terribly surprising. Norwegian intelligence sources uncovered al-Qaeda planning documents some time ago outlining a deliberate strategy to focus attacks on Europe rather than the U. S. in an attempt to split the “coalition of the willing.” Previous attacks in Spain were largely successful in securing Spanish withdrawl from Iraq. I would guess that the Brits won’t leave as quickly, but public support for the war in the UK is slim, and there may yet be a backlash against the Blair-led government.

That the Brits were unable to foil a sophisticated and coordinated attempt, while hosting the G-8 summit with all the security such an event entails, shows that the terrorists may be holding back somewhat—an unpleasant thought, to be sure.

So why did al-Qaeda strike London rather than Stockholm or Bern? Is it because they hate "British values," or does it have to do with British and American foreign policy?

I hope to write more soon about this later, but I just can't gin up the motivation at the moment. Stop back soon.

Happy Fourth

"War? What war? And now over to Greta van Sustern, on the beach in Aruba." This is good stuff:

Fox News is rapidly becoming an essential if faintly horrific guide to the American soul, a kind of cross between an organ and a tumor. Fox is certainly not the only offender -- its cable competitors CNN and MSNBC are chasing the same ratings, and are guilty of similar sins -- but it's the most egregious. Those who have watched Fox News recently must feel as if they had fallen into a bizarre time and logic warp out of Philip K. Dick, where 9/11 never happened (except when necessary to drum up support for the war on Iraq, which also doesn't exist except when it has to be defended) and we've returned to those happy summer days when lurid, sexually charged murder cases and shark attacks were not just the most important stories, they were the only stories.

But Fox's all-consuming interest is in the Holloway case, upon whose resolution the fate of the republic apparently rests. Tuesday, a short news segment opened with a live report from that epicenter of world news, Aruba, with a grim-looking reporter standing on the beach, intoning something ominous about Holloway. On Monday, its news programming was even more dominated by Holloway (a highlight was when Geraldo Rivera suggested putting military pressure on the Dutch marines to help find her body) and lovingly detailed accounts of the gory Florida shark attacks. John Gibson opened his "The Big Story" show by intoning "This is a Fox News alert" -- then proceeded to inform his viewers of the urgent news that a boy who was attacked by a shark had his leg amputated, before going on to interview a shark expert. The contrast between Fox's resolute avoidance of showing bloody images from the war in Iraq and its nearly pornographic immersion in shark bites and unsolved murders, was glaring. Only death or bloodshed with high entertainment value gets on Fox.

Gay marriage goes global, with Spain and Canada endorsing sodomite unions.

British elites wanted a multicultural society, and now they have one. More than 300 African boys are missing and have apparently been used as human sacrifices in bizarre religious rituals.

Zbig Brezinski on the Bushian penchant for fiction.

Uzbekistan, an offshore torture center in the war on terror, has taken to persecuting Christians. I wonder if the administration will lean on them.

If Karl Rove goes to jail, will he make a friend? Does it really seem likely that Rove was this foolish?

The O'Connor Court. It is absolutely maddening to me that for most of my life, I've lived in a country where the most important matters of civil and public life have been determined by which side of the bed Justice O'Connor rolled out of that morning. Below are a few snippets from the NY Times.

On affirmative action:

Just two years ago, she wrote the opinion for the 5-to-4 majority that upheld affirmative action in university admissions. Earlier, in a series of decisions interpreting the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection, she led or joined 5-to-4 majorities that viewed with great suspicion government policies that took account of race in federal contracting, employment and electoral redistricting. Her view was that the government should not be in the business of counting by race.

On religion and public life:

Beginning with her earliest years on the court, Justice O'Connor adopted her own test for evaluating whether government policy amounted to an unconstitutional establishment of religion. Instead of a three-part test that the court used, she asked whether the government policy under review conveyed to nonadherents the message that they were "outsiders, not full members of the political community."

This led her to vote to prohibit public prayer at high school graduations and football games, but to insist on equal access for student religious publications and clubs. In 2002, she voted with the 5-to-4 majority that upheld the use of publicly financed tuition vouchers at religious schools. In her opinion this week concurring with the 5-to-4 majority that declared framed copies of the Ten Commandments hanging in Kentucky courthouses to be unconstitutional, she said the Constitution's religion clauses "protect adherents of all religions, as well as those who believe in no religion at all."

And finally, on abortion, O'Connor provided the deciding vote in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The Casey decision in 1992 upheld the central holding of Roe while using a different legal justification. The right to privacy was discarded while substantive due process and the “liberty” clause of the 14th Amendment were invoked to overturn Pennsylvania's limited abortion restrictions. Two quotes from Justice O’Connor’s majority opinion will sufficiently demonstrate the inanity of this woman:

The Roe rule’s limitation of state power could not be repudiated without serious inequity to people who, for two decades of economic and social developments, have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.

O'Connor's appeal to substantive due process, undergirded by extreme individualist and egalitarian ideologies, was completely at odds with the rule of law and stripped a sovereign state of its rightful privileges, all in the name of preserving the “fundamental right to choose.” The precedent establishment by the Rehnquist Court in Casey was also employed when the Supreme Court overturned Texas’ sodomy law in the Lawrence decision.

Also, recall that just a few years ago, O'Connor provided the crucial fifth vote to strike down Nebraska's ban on what were called "partial birth" abortions.

Good riddance, judge.

Enjoy the remaining liberties you posses in our land by blowing a giant hole in it with Chinese pyrotechnics.