OK, here I totally cross-over into politics. In part, what I’m about to say is based on my deep devotion to data and evidence, and its interpetation based on a rational framework. The rest, however, is just plain human frustration.
As you’re well aware, today the President tried to distract the press corps from his administration’s embarrassing collapse (the poor response to hurricane Katrina, an unjustified war without a strategy for winning, the information leak scandals, etc.) with what appears to be a wedge nomination for the Supreme Court. His first nomination to replace Justice Sandra O’Conner was Harriet Miers, his own legal advisor. Bereft of any judicial experience, and an apparent screaming example of the rampant nepotism which has led to his administration’s greatest disasters (Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary, Brown as FEMA director), Miers and the President caved under whining from the most right-wing core of the Republican party. His second nomination, replacing Miers’ sudden resignation from the Senate review process, is Judge Samuel Alito.
The scientist in me feared Miers because there was no judicial paper trail on which the Senate could reasonably base its questions and investigations. Alito scares me more, because reading his trail of judicial evidence is a bit like reverse -engineering the atomic massacre at Hiroshima by looking at the scarred and cancerous victims. Rulings against family sick leave for federal employees, dissenting opinions that extoll his support for government enforced notification of a husband by a wife when she seeks an abortion. You may not agree with the idea of abortion, but you ought be to downright scared when the government imposes a social interaction rather than creating a structure for counseling or education to help families through that and other difficult emotional and medical periods.
Jodi and I have been discussing that last issue for the last few days, mainly in the context of California’s Proposition 73 (which proposes to amend the state constitution to add a myopic definition of “abortion” and require unemancipated females to notify their parents of their desire to have an abortion or seek a judicial waiver). We’ve not agreed on everything, but we do agree on a few things: amending the state consitution for such a narrow and specific issue is really a violation of the inherent broad nature of a constitution, and ought to be defeated on that alone; adding unscientific terminology to a consitution is fundamentally dangerous; a wife and a husband who can’t communicate about pregnancy have deep problems that go beyond the pregnancy itself; a government is not purposed with enforcing a social interaction; pregnancy is a very special biological state which, despite the need for a male’s involvement to reach that state, is unique to women and one which must be treated with respect, both for the state and for the woman, so that the rights of the individual are not squeezed in a vice.
Whew. Tough stuff. Anyway, I did one of my rare petition signings tonight, given my frustration with the President’s choices:
“http://political.moveon.org/stopalito”:http://political.moveon.org/stopalito
