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June 9, 2008

Exclusive: Constitutional Incoherence

Luke C. Sheahan

A perpetual thesis of my writing is that colleges and universities today do not equip their students with the basic tools of learning or in any way impart to them fundamental civic literacy in American ideals and institutions, economics, history, or other matters essential to making informed and reasonable statements and judgments about current events and other topics of imminent import. This state of education threatens civic engagement, an essential component of our Republic if we are to remain a country of free men. I find yet another example of this disturbing phenomenon at the University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point (UWSP).

Last month, UWSP student Roderick King made quite a scene on campus and a splash in the news by vandalizing a pro-life display. The pro-life student organization at UWSP, Pointers for Life, had set up a display of wooden crosses on the university green in memoriam for fetuses legally aborted in America. Mr. King, who is also a student senator, started to pull out the crosses and throw them on the ground yelling at members of Pointers for Life as they filmed him. The video can be seen here on YouTube.

I would like to pull out one quote from Mr. King at the beginning of the video that forms the crux of his expressed beliefs and finely illustrates my above mentioned point:

In 1973 it was made a constitutional right for a woman to be able to have an abortion. It's not your responsibility. Since it's a right you don't have the right to challenge it.

Wow. Let's take a proverbial walk through this together. First, according to Mr. King, the Supreme Court created a right to abortion in 1973. The way it is usually argued is that the right to abortion and privacy, and other such dubious rights, are "discovered" in the "penumbras formed by emanations" from the First Amendment's implied right to free association, the Third Amendment's ban on quartering soldiers in citizens' houses, the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against "unreasonable search and seizures," and the Ninth Amendment's statement that the mere fact that privacy or abortion are not explicitly listed as rights cannot be used "to deny or disparage other (rights) retained by the people."

Specious reasoning on the part of the Court to be sure, but that's not our focus here. Here, we merely wonder why Mr. King believes the Supreme Court can create rights, instead of merely explicate or discover them. He seems simply to have no idea what he's talking about. He has no constitutional rubric through which he can interpret constitutional statements to the point where he egregiously misconstrues the Court's own decisions and arguments. Clearly most citizens cannot be constitutional scholars but they can at least put a minimal amount of thought into their views before they take such drastic action on behalf of those views. Mr. King certainly has not.

Not only is his view constitutionally incoherent, it's also dialectically unsound. Which brings me to my next point: Let's cede Mr. King's dubious point that the right to abortion is indeed constitutionally sound whether it was discovered or created. Does the fact that one right not explicitly listed in the Constitution or Bill of Rights is recognized by the Court mean that other rights that are explicitly stated - namely, the First Amendment's right to freedom of speech - can then be abrogated?

Mr. King seems to think so. He believed that since abortion was declared a right, Pointers for Life could not publicly challenge it. Interesting. So, the right to abortion apparently didn't exist until January 22, 1973, when the Supreme Court created it, then it immediately became unchallengeable. So is every decision of the Supreme Court above public reproach or just the ones Mr. King likes? I hope Mr. King would agree that Dred Scott v. Sandford and Plessy vs. Ferguson were appropriately challenged.

Does this guy really want us to do what this Canadian university's student government did, and try to ban pro-life advocacy all together? Maybe, but then our country would not be free and it would not be America. Maybe that's what he wants, which of course, would only prove my point.

Luke Sheahan currently works as a Program Associate at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education in Philadelphia, PA. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.

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