A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on August 31st, 2009 in General

It seems like only yesterday when my good friend Rosi Efthim issued a general warning about Ted Kennedy’s legacy. In reality, it was way back on Friday – two days before Ross Douthat made her warning necessary.

Douthat pits Ted Kennedy against his sister, Eunice. This is entirely, apparently, without ever talking to either Kennedy sibling. I’m sure he’d have mentioned it if he had, but he feels free to provide a decision on what Eunice would have done about the health care bill before the Congress – she, “would have written it a different way.”

Perhaps that’s true. It’s certainly true that she worked with several influential groups to make the Democratic Party safe for pro-life people. And I have to say that she was successful in doing so. But since Eunice Kennedy helped found Democrats for Life, I think she would probably be found advocating for the Pregnant Woman Support Act – something that Douthat seems to forget to mention. Whereas Douthat seems to lump Eunice Kennedy in with the “just say no” abstinence-only pro-lifers that the Republican Party largely represents, the truth is a very different matter.

But then Douthat is adhering to the creative writing axiom, “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.” You can tell that when he dribbles out the line, “In 1992, Eunice participated in the last significant effort to push the Democratic Party away from abortion on demand…” Where has that ever been the official line of the Democratic Party? Only in the minds of conservatives who are too busy trying to make reality fit their ideology.

What really bothers Douthat is that Kennedy opposed the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. According to Douthat, Kennedy led a “demogogic assault” against Bork. Here, Douthat cites the case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, but Anthony Kennedy is also assailed by those on the right for “finding a right to sodomy” when he voted to keep the government out of people’s bedrooms in Lawrence v. Texas. Besides, if you look at the full text of Kennedy’s speech, you find it to be well-argued and well-reasoned (or see a closer examination of the speech).

The first problem was Bork’s kowtowing to Richard Nixon during the Saturday Night Massacre. And Kennedy is absolutely right that anyone who bows to the President’s will rather than uphold and defend the Constitution is unfit to sit in judgment of Constitutional cases. Conservatives love to quote Kennedy saying that Bork’s America would be a great step backwards – but they always neglect the preceding paragraph where he backs those words up with Bork’s own record:

Mr. Bork should also be rejected by the Senate because he stands for an extremist view of the Constitution and the role of the Supreme Court that would have placed him outside the mainstream of American constitutional jurisprudence in the 1960s, let alone the 1980s. He opposed the Public Accommodations Civil Rights Act of 1964. He opposed the one-man one-vote decision of the Supreme Court the same year. He has said that the First Amendment applies only to political speech, not literature or works of art or scientific expression.

Under the twin pressures of academic rejection and the prospect of Senate rejection, Mr. Bork subsequently retracted the most neanderthal of these views on civil rights and the first amendment. But his mind-set is no less ominous today.

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

The problem that conservatives have with this is that Kennedy opposed Bork because of his ideologically driven decisions. He then projects Bork’s views onto Eunice Kennedy and, in his mind, creates a very satisfying view. But it is entirely of his own making.

Douthat also fails to mention two more things about the Bork nomination (conservatives always seem to forget these things): 1) Ronald Reagan was warned not to push for a right-wing ideologue on the court – and that was exactly what Bork was (in fact, he was one of only three people whose appointment was opposed by the ACLU); and 2) the following Republicans voted against Bork’s nomination – Lowell Weiker (Ct.), Bob Packwood (Or.), Arlen Specter (Pa.), John Chafee (RI.), Robert Stafford (Vt.), and John Warner (Va.). In addition, two Democrats voted for Bork’s nomination – Fritz Hollings (NC) and David Boren (Ok.).

So Teddy Kennedy’s fact-based “demogogic attack” convinced six Republicans to vote against Bork, but couldn’t convince two Democrats to vote against him? And this means that Eunice Kennedy would have favored Robert Bork in what way? But I can find no record of Eunice speaking against Kennedy’s speech or the failure for Robert Bork to be affirmed.

Nor is it entirely clear that abortion will be included in the health care bill that will eventually get through Congress – something that Douthat takes as being virtually assured. But that’s as much a work of his over-active imagination as is his view of Eunice Kennedy’s work on national health-care. Unfortunately, “entirely in his mind” is a criticism that is too often too true about conservatives.

And as predictable as the attempts to sully a liberal’s reputation once he is dead and can no longer defend himself.

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