“I actually don’t know the answer to that question — I’m sorry — I don’t.”
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Joe Biden had promised black voters in South Carolina that he would put a black woman on the Supreme Court if they voted for him. After a pressure campaign aimed at the Supreme Court’s lone liberal justice who agreed to step down and make way for a black woman, Biden picked between two candidates, one backed by moderates and one backed by radical leftists.
Even while leftists wished that Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s lone black justice, would die after reports that he was hospitalized, they cheered the incredible breakthrough of the first black female, and more importantly leftist, being nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court.
The long contentious hearings had plenty of awkward moments, but the most definitive clash came from a simple question that highlighted the vast moral gap between identity politics and natural rights.
“When does equal protection of the laws attach to a human being?” Senator Kennedy asked Jackson.
“Well Senator, um… I believe that the Supreme Court… um… actually I, I actually don’t know the answer to that question — I’m sorry — I don’t,” she awkwardly replied.
The postmodern leftist notion of human rights revolves around pursuing equity for discriminated groups. Leftists like Jackson have thorough notions about what equal protection looks like for black or transgender people, but no notion of a grander principle that protects all human life.
Jackson obviously found the question uncomfortable because it addresses abortion. And yet even a militant abortion supporter like Jackson ought to be able to tackle the basic moral question of when life begins and when human rights come into play. The Framers are often attacked for refusing to grapple with the moral questions of slavery, yet they did. That they narrowly chose not to break up the country over a monstrous evil did not change the fact that they struggled to reconcile their ideals and the compromises they believed they had to make.
Leftists, like the most hard-boiled defenders of slavery, refuse to even admit that there’s an issue. Jackson’s smirking response would have befitted a Buchanan Democrat pretending not to understand that human slavery might have moral, not just economic, legal implications.
Identity politics reduces every issue to victimhood. The same worldview that makes it all too easy to blame highways and obesity on systemic racism makes it equally impossible for leftist jurists like Jackson to even conceive of life and liberty as natural rights bestowed on everyone. And yet it was this conviction that eventually overturned slavery and segregation.
“Do you have a personal belief though about when life begins?” Senator Kennedy asked Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“I have a religious view that I set aside when I am ruling on cases,” she replied.
Judges shouldn’t rule from theology, but the idea that their religious moral convictions should play no role in basic notions of rights is alien to the words of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.
If religious views of human rights are things to be set aside, then what is the basis for anyone’s rights? Judicial precedent, a “living constitution” that incorporates current academic doctrines, the pursuit of equity? Those are where leftists derive their moral authority and notions of rights.
And yet without that grand conviction that human equality and rights proceed from a higher power, they remain at the mercy of judges like Jackson who can decide when to take them away. And Jackson is unable to even articulate when those rights actually begin which will make it that much more morally and intellectually easier for her to take them away, from babies and from anyone else whose existence obstructs her political ideology and personal biases.
Jackson can’t comprehend rights except in terms of equity. If a group isn’t sufficiently wealthy, healthy, or otherwise successful, the government has to step in and alter the equation. But if a group is all of the above, then the government needs to examine how it oppressed others.
This Procrustean Bed in which the government stretches some and shrinks others in pursuit of the impossible mission of making everyone equal is the only kind of rights leftists understand. And they have no notion of the origin of rights except as a mindless pursuit of leveling everyone, and an atonement for the social sins that resulted in everyone not being equally successful.
Rather than looking back to an origin point, they look forward to a secular utopian “right side of history”, a transcendentalist conviction that one day we will all be made equal, to justify everything they believe and everything they do. And so you can’t ask Ketanji Brown Jackson when rights begin, because they haven’t ended yet. The present is just an unfinished future.
Rights don’t begin with God or with our founding documents, they run backward in time from some inchoate socialist future which they intend to achieve by forcibly “equalizing” all of us.
Jackson couldn’t process the question of when universal human rights come into being, because she doesn’t view rights as universal except in the sense that everyone has the right to be made equal. To assess whether someone has rights, leftists have to know their race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background and other details that indicate where they stand on the equity spectrum. Asking them to articulate rights without reference to equity is like asking Thomas Jefferson where rights come from if there was no Creator or guiding natural order.
What rights does a baby have? According to leftists, the right to be made equal. The only real right in leftist judicial doctrine is the right to have what others have. And the amplification of whatever privileges and benefits are necessary to cut in line in order to achieve equity.
But does a baby have the right to live? That simple question whose parameters the Founders and Framers would have had no trouble understanding, frustrates and infuriates leftist jurists to whom rights are not natural, but relative, and not individual, but collective. While they can amply expound on the plight of transgender Navajo Indians, they can’t offer a decision on the life of a single infant of unknown race and sex because they don’t believe in rights apart from identity.
Leftists can’t affirm natural universal rights, only compare rights relative to someone else.
Ask a leftist to compare my rights to your rights and they can easily do it. A baby can’t have innate natural rights, but must have her rights compared to her mother and to society at large. Stakeholders must be consulted, and papers must be reviewed on the status of women in Colonial America to derive who is the greater victim and who is entitled to more rights.
The question of when human rights are conferred is baffling and annoying to Jackson. In her legalistic worldview, the question “when” is almost entirely irrelevant. It’s like asking “when is racism” or “when is sexism”. The dividing lines in leftist jurisprudence are not based on time or other rational metrics, but the subjective and relative ones of who loses and who gains.
That’s why asking for firm rational metrics for anything is routinely derided as white western masculine thinking in academic circles. Leftists prefer to make decisions based on lived experience which is another way of saying anecdotal subjectivity which leaves plenty of room for personal bias, but none for any meaningful guarantee of rights beyond momentary feelings.
The Founders and Framers were certainly flawed, but they proceeded from an understanding of rights that expanded them, while leftists like Jackson can only contract and reduce them. Where our nation’s founders universalized rights, leftists use equity to deuniversalize them, replacing general guarantees of human rights with situational activism through academic lenses.
They claim that they are expanding rights when all they’re doing is taking away our universal natural rights and replacing them with a ranked caste system of identity politics privileges that can bestow a “right” to a house, a car, or fat-free yogurt, but not the absolute right to live.
Where the Bill of Rights could define free speech as a universal right, leftists have dismantled the ACLU and insist that only the people who agree with them should have free speech. And so it goes for everything from the right to assemble to freedom of the press. Conservatives rightly see this as an unconstitutional double standard because it transgresses universal rights. But leftists only see universal rights as a leveling mechanism that only applies to the extent that it makes people more equal, but not when it does not. And so it’s natural for them to reject the idea that their opponents, who they argue make people less equal, should have free speech.
This is the totalitarian logic of civil rights which has slowly taken away rights from everyone.
Cancel culture is the inevitable result of the impulse to make people equal by destroying those who are perceived to stand in the way of the social activism that is the only source of equality.
Is it any wonder that Jackson can’t articulate or even grasp the concept that universal human rights exist and that they have some origin point in the process of human development?
Jackson’s incomprehension of the question reveals the moral bankruptcy of identity politics.
Identity politics is not making us a better society, more concerned with rights, it’s transforming us from a society that believed everyone had rights to a society which has no concept of rights.
revereridesagain says
A woman’s rights to control over her own body ceases at the moment she conceives. So Saith the Lord, the Creator, and the Virgin Mary! Really, arrangement should be made for all women to cease any other activity except pregnancy and be carefully monitored in special facilities by medical staff and religious authorities because for those 9 months she has the status of a brood mare.
Where’s the sarc button on this thing?
All right all you offended Christian “men” who allegedly love your wives, daughters, girlfriends, sisters, mothers and other females even though they exist outside the uterus and may have the effrontery to want to control their own bodies. Start screaming and quoting “scripture”.
CogitoErgoSum says
With regard to the control a woman should have over her body, yes, she does have the right to control her body and she does have the right to choose. As I see it this right of a woman to choose concerning what to do with her body is exercised when she chooses to engage in the act of human reproduction. Yes, sometimes women are raped and their right to choose is taken away from them but when a woman chooses freely, if the life of another human being begins as a result of that choice and no one can precisely identify the moment when a human being becomes human, I think we should assume that life begins at the moment of conception and human rights are conferred at the moment of conception. The burst of light that occurs when the sperm fertilizes the egg marks the moment of conception and the beginning of life. Whether that life comes from God or is just an accident of the universe seems to me to be another question.
If the link works, here is a video of that burst of light I’m talking about. Apparently the brighter the light at conception the better the quality of the egg – and that is going to lead to additional ethical questions in the future. Are there such things as good eggs and bad eggs and what should we do about that? Should human reproduction be limited to taking place only in a laboratory to insure that only the best human beings are allowed to enter the world? Whether that is the type of world we want is another question we will have to answer.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Xga0labWS4Q
Keith O says
The question of when the rights of a child begin is a complex question.
Does it begin at the moment of conception? When the foetus has a heartbeat? or when the baby is capable of living by itself after a premature birth or when it takes it’s first breath of polluted air after a natural birth?
And the other far more difficult question, which nobody walking this earth can answer, is, at what point does a baby acquire a soul? An aspect of being human that is accepted around the world.
Personally, I have my own views, however, no real answers.
somehistory says
Back before the advent of scans and looking inside the body of a person without cutting them open, a woman who became pregnant, would frequently know that she was, but when she first felt the baby move, it was said to be “quickening.” Or, a coming to life. Truthfully, the baby is alive…from the moment that two …***living****…cells, unite and form what, if allowed to grow to completion, will be a fully developed human. But, this child is so very tiny, that even if there is movement, the mother will not feel it. In this time of “modern” medicine, babies can be seen so much earlier and heartbeats heard so much earlier.
Some women, esp those who have given birth, will recognize the movements at a very early stage…perhaps at three months; whereas, those having a first baby, may assume incorrectly that other things that go on inside are what is causing the fluttery feelings and not recognize her baby until he is large enough to kick her.
Now, I am one who firmly believes that as soon as a woman suspects a pregnancy…she has *engaged* in actions and then is *late*, etc. she should be prepared to make sure her baby has a good chance of growing and being born healthy. There are occasions when the *engaging and late* are not announcing pregnancy, but if the woman refrains from things that could injury a baby, she is not doing any harm to herself for a week or two, or even longer until she confirms one way or another.
The author of children’s books….Dr. Suess, wrote, “A person is a person, no matter how small.” He later denied that he meant an unborn baby and seemed to indicate that he had nothing against baby-killing.
However, what he wrote is true about an unborn baby…he or she, is a person, no matter how small.
The framers of the Constitution and the Bills that go with it, wrote the word “posterity”…as having the same *rights*…given by “our Creator” as any fully-grown adult.
“The Preamble
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/
They said they wanted to “secure the Blessings of Liberty”….to our posterity….the following generations to come are to have the same “blessings of liberty”…the same freedoms. the same “rights”…Life being one and the others can only come to a living person.
An unborn baby has just as many rights as an old codger who is pretending to be president, or a fool who refuses to answer any question she deems could put a full light on her evil soul and keep her off the bench where she hopes to sit and make huge decisions that will affect all…born and unborn…Americans.
She claims a religion, but as noted, if one needs to set that aside, the morals going along for the ride, just how can a person make a *moral* ruling? I personally have to wonder….if her religion is that of the terrorists she helped set free from Gitmo. If so, then she won’t be setting them aside. And all rulings will be without morality.
gravenimage says
Ketanji Brown Jackson Puts the Moral Poverty of Identity Politics on Display
…………….
*Disgusting*. But–as noted, and as I have also noted, this doesn’t apply to a conservative like Clarence Thomas.
More:
The long contentious hearings had plenty of awkward moments, but the most definitive clash came from a simple question that highlighted the vast moral gap between identity politics and natural rights.
“When does equal protection of the laws attach to a human being?” Senator Kennedy asked Jackson.
“Well Senator, um… I believe that the Supreme Court… um… actually I, I actually don’t know the answer to that question — I’m sorry — I don’t,” she awkwardly replied.
…………….
*Just appalling*. How can a judge–a *potential Supremec Court Justice*–be undable to define protection of the law for the individual? This is the very core of American law.
Kepha says
Is it possible that these people believe that that Jenner thing and that Levine thing are as much women as the mothers who bore them? The knots which our elites are tying around themselves and the rest of us would be laughable were it not for their destructive impact on all of society. For Pete’s sake, in good, “woke” fashion, Chinese speakers prior to 1919 didn’t gender their pronouns at all, but they could still tell male from female(that was no intended insult to Chinese speakers; it was, however, an expression of contempt at our contemporary American genderbenders). I do not call our current elites stupid and evil, but I will call them silly and evil.
OLD GUY says
No matter what she will be confirmed, the Democrats will follow suit 100% along with so-called Republicans like Romney.
Lorensacho says
KBJ very properly refrained from taking part in the GOP’s mendacious culture war. She said that her job is to judge disputes not provide the biological definitions the question being totally ire event to her he job.
somehistory says
I strongly disagree. If she doesn’t know what a “woman” is, that would also naturally be that she doesn’t know what a “man” is and men and women are the people who would be going before her in court, and men and women would be representing other men and women in court and she would have to assist in deciding which person or group of people are correct in their arguments.
If she can’t define either, she shouldn’t be making life-altering decisions for either.
And, it is the group of crats who are engaging in a ‘culture war’ by trying to force those of us who know that there are two genders only, and that one cannot become the other…no matter how much one might believe they want to.
The “race” part of the “culture war” is being fed and funded by the same people…and jackson is one of those “people.” Stirring up trouble is what makes the world go around for some people.
CogitoErgoSum says
The answer to the question depends upon the point a which a human being becomes a human being. I really don’t see why this is such a difficult question. If we believe a person is innocent until proven guilty we should also consider a human being to be human from the very beginning of a person’s life until the very end of a person’s life. A human being is a human being until proven otherwise. Human life starts at the instant of conception. I would say it’s actually easier to determine when life begins than when it ends.
somehistory says
I agree. Some people are said to be dead because their “Brain is dead.” but, some of these same people have a beating heart…and the heart depends on the brain in order to keep on beating.
there have been many cases of people appearing to be dead because no pulse could be detected and some were even being prepared for burial when they suddenly came out of whatever condition was making them appear to be dead.
If one reads the Psalms, and the words of Jeremiah, it is clear that God considers the “embryo” as a person. Two “living” cells unite to form a third and in that cell are all of the things necessary to grow into a fully formed human. that “cell” is a new Life, just as worthy as anyone …as any other human …of protection.
gravenimage says
Lorensacho, the claim that a judge who whitewashes pedophilia and Jihad terror is not taking part in a cuture war is risable.
And if she were genuinely unable to identify what a woman is, it is unlikely that she could judge cases involving women’t rights. What else is she ignorant of?
But of course it is unlikely that a mother of two is unable to recognize what a woman is–it is worse than that; she is happy to lie about it to seem “polically correct”.
Keys says
+100
gravenimage says
Thank you, Keys.
somehistory says
http://www.theconservativeinsider.com/never-forgotten-the-lies-about-terri-schiavo/?roi=echo3-68370349208-59882632-629752679cc7e7df34ecd21046ddb8d4
“Never Forgotten: The Lies About Terri Schiavo”
A young woman murdered because her creep of a husband wanted her dead.
Those without morals will destroy life at its beginning, at the point of supposedly nearing an end, and at any time in between if it serves their evil purpose.
gravenimage says
Yes–this was appalling, Somehistory. It wasn’t even going to cost her husband anything; she had family and friends who offered to take over her care. She was deliberately killed. Chilling.