When I was a young law student in 1973 at Emory University in Atlanta, the feminist movement was just beginning to take flight. Despite this, these were different times; people were less strident and polarized, and my classmates generally were focused on academics with the hope of landing a good-paying job after graduation.
But this was also a time when much of our body politic was in flux. The Vietnam War was ending, and President Richard Nixon, caught up in the Watergate scandal, had resigned. But trumping all of this was a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which came to be commonly known as Roe v. Wade. Fortuitously, the justice who penned the majority opinion legalizing abortion on a national scale, even as late as the third trimester of pregnancy, Harry Blackmun, was the father of one of my law school classmates, Sally Blackmun.
This coincidence, if one could call it that, of course generated more than the usual amount of interest and discussion by not just my law school classmates, but also our professors, particularly those who taught constitutional law.
At the time, I had not really formulated my views on conservative orthodoxy, and in fact I was a generally self-absorbed future attorney, at the time wanting to be both a litigator and an international lawyer. I had majored in political science and French literature during my undergraduate studies at Duke University, even studying at the Universite d’Aix-Marseille for a semester during my junior year. That summer I would return to France to research and later write an honors thesis about the French educational system, titled “Les Evenements de Mai 1968,” when students coupled with communist labor unions in the Gallic republic sought to overthrow the government and turn the nation far left, even beyond “European socialism.” Bernie Sanders, AOC and the likes of Ilhan Omar would have been proud!
I thus was focused on gaining a legal educational foundation to realize this dream of both becoming a trial lawyer and as an international attorney, coupling this with living in Paris, a city I had fallen in love with while studying in France.
Despite this laser-like mission, I could not help but instinctively react when the issue of Roe v. Wade was brought up! I heard its rationale to be, uttered by some women students in my classes and reinforced by some professors, to be a “woman’s right to choose.” Showing early signs of the rebel I would become later in my legal career – which evolution I chronicle in my autobiography, “Whores: Why and How I Came to Fight the Establishment!” – I reacted by uncontrollably blurting out in class that this “landmark” Supreme Court precedent was more like a justification of a “woman’s right to kill.”
I also could not instinctively accept the notion that the “procreating man” would have no say in the decision to end a life, and my religious beliefs, which at that point in my life I had acquired basically on my own, was that only God could indeed end a life.
Interestingly, my strong views were not generally met with a strong pushback by female students or the professors. Again, these were different times, and I was also at Emory in the South and not Harvard or Yale in the rabidly leftist Northeast.
Later, after years in the trenches as a trial lawyer, witnessing a number of incompetent, reckless, unhinged and corrupt judges on the bench, I also learned to oppose the death penalty, not just because I came to see the legal system as generally flawed and broken, but because, again, I could not justify in my own mind allowing a judge or a jury to make the decision apart from God to take a human life. Indeed, I saw life imprisonment as the penalty for murder to be a much harsher sentence, one that if a court had erred, could at least later be reversed with newly discovered evidence.
Today, especially in the last few months, the nation is witnessing, finally, after nearly a half century, a reevalution of Roe v. Wade and with a much greater appreciation of the “right to life.” For anyone who has had a child and has decided to get an ultrasound to view one’s future offspring, it is clear that there is a living human being inside the mother’s womb, at a minimum at the point when after six weeks the fetus develops a heartbeat. It is thus commendable that a growing number of states are enacting legislation that affirms this right to life and that will undoubtedly wind up before the Supreme Court. Clearly, Roe v. Wade, after decades of irrationally attempting to justify the killing of millions of unborn children, will get a new legal look.
But with Chief Justice John Roberts and his new colleague Justice Brett Kavanaugh – a jurist who thus far seems to want to appease the leftist forces that tried to destroy him, perhaps for fear that with the Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives they are poised to impeach him as their next victim after President Trump, siding with liberal justices of late – the overturning of Roe v. Wade is less than assured, even with a conservative majority on the high court.
Regardless of what ultimately happens, one thing has become clear to me after 42 years as a legal practitioner who has fought against not just a generally dishonest legal system but specifically the politicians in robes who inhabit the bench.
Regardless of what the Supreme Court does, I have come to see an unjust law as not the law, either of God or of his flock. And, this is why I have dedicated my life to standing up to legal tyranny and why you fellow patriots must join me in doing the same.
As the words are written on the packages of even Hebrew National kosher wieners, We the People must answer to a Higher Authority.
In retrospect, my early harsh protestations at Emory Law School to Roe v. Wade were not “hotdogging,” but the spiritual reality of where our country must go if it is to survive as “One Nation Under God.”
Go to www.freedomwatchusa.org and join and support Freedom Watch’s Justice League, to help us enforce the law of our Creator and His Son, rather than the frequently convenient, unjust and immoral law of mankind.
