Rant: What's All This Moderate Stuff?
Jul. 20th, 2005 02:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mishalakI can seem to turn on a television without hearing how moderate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is. Only in America would her true conservatism be called moderate while the activist agenda to support a political coalition from the judicial bench is called conservative.
When I was younger I was a Republican and I believed in the cause, because it was about freedom. The freedom to succeed or fail on your own merits without government interference. The freedom to carry out your own life without busybodies telling you it was illegal. And yes even the freedom to do immoral things that I disagreed with as a young faithful Catholic, like abortion and gay sex, because I believed in it absolutely that principle of equal protection under the law.
In the Texas vs. Lawrence concurring opinion by Justice O'Connor I saw that sort of conservative. She would have struck the law down not on privacy, but on equal protection grounds. Oral and anal sex was not illegal in Texas for straights, why should it be illegal for gays? And somehow this position is seen as moderate rather than as conservative. Meanwhile those judicial activists over on the right loudly complain that she didn't carry out what she was appointed by Reagan to do, overturn all those nasty liberal decisions no matter what the constitution and the law of the land say.
The political language in this country is all screwed up. And there is almost no one left on the court, right or left, that actually believes in consistant conservative or liberal positions rather than torturing case law to do something for their side.
When I was younger I was a Republican and I believed in the cause, because it was about freedom. The freedom to succeed or fail on your own merits without government interference. The freedom to carry out your own life without busybodies telling you it was illegal. And yes even the freedom to do immoral things that I disagreed with as a young faithful Catholic, like abortion and gay sex, because I believed in it absolutely that principle of equal protection under the law.
In the Texas vs. Lawrence concurring opinion by Justice O'Connor I saw that sort of conservative. She would have struck the law down not on privacy, but on equal protection grounds. Oral and anal sex was not illegal in Texas for straights, why should it be illegal for gays? And somehow this position is seen as moderate rather than as conservative. Meanwhile those judicial activists over on the right loudly complain that she didn't carry out what she was appointed by Reagan to do, overturn all those nasty liberal decisions no matter what the constitution and the law of the land say.
The political language in this country is all screwed up. And there is almost no one left on the court, right or left, that actually believes in consistant conservative or liberal positions rather than torturing case law to do something for their side.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-21 06:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-22 04:13 am (UTC)By the way, I checked out your user pictures. Your image seems to change a lot. :O) As if in each picture, you're a different character from a book. It's nifty.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-22 05:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-22 05:12 am (UTC)