The Soap Box

Judge John Roberts, nominee to the Supreme Court, once filed a brief before the Justices urging them to interpret the law in such a way as to protect a number of anti-abortion protestors, and even a convicted abortion clinic bomber. That is the backstory to a recent misleading television ad produced by a liberal advocacy group which was pulled just as quickly as it was aired. The ad was clearly intended to mislead, and therefore should never have been made. But all of the brouhaha surrounding this failed attempt to smear Roberts also unveiled an ugly truth about the way many in the Republican Party participate in the abortion debate . . . or at least it should have.

NARAL Pro-Choice America was the group which, for a short time, ran the advertisement informing the American public that Roberts was a leading force behind the amicus (friend of the court) brief filed by the Regan Administration in the case of Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic. The term “amicus brief” alone is enough to put anyone to sleep. So to sex up their ad, NARAL implied that, by filing the brief, Roberts therefore was supporting the activities of the anti-abortion protestors who were the defendants in the case. It even went so far as to suggest that Roberts’s brief was in favor of a clinic bombing perpetrated by one of the protestors a full seven years after the case was argued. The ad explicitly states that that Roberts was “supporting . . . a convicted bomber,” but he couldn’t have been a convicted bomber at the time because he hadn’t even committed the crime yet. This is where the ad clearly goes awry.

NARAL intentionally obscured the chronology between Roberts’s brief and the clinic bombing - which is the centerpiece of the ad - for full political effect. They were caught, and so the ad has been pulled. Sadly, the ad will never have the intended effect on Roberts’s nomination, but it will surely succeed in propelling NARAL to the top of the list of advocacy groups seeing their fundraising skyrocket as a result of the confirmation spectacle, which was the primary purpose of the ad to begin with. And that is truly regrettable - both because of the deplorable lows to which political actors will stoop, and because liberal interest groups must stoop to these lows in order to maintain reasonable funding levels.

NARAL contends that everything stated in their ad is factually correct. As with most good misleading political ads, that is more true than not (although perhaps the same could not have been said for the Right’s most recent midleading ads by the Swiftboat Veterans). And what makes the ad’s misleading nature even more of a tragedy is that its logic is also more true than not; the Republican Party does support these anti-abortion protestors. The ad was just aimed at a poor target. Had the impetus for the ad been pulling back the curtain on the abortion debate rather than cashing in on the Roberts nomination circus, some good could actually have been done for the political discourse.

Before moving on to who might have made a better target to illustrate the fuel fanning the anti-abortion flames, Roberts’s involvement in the Bray case should be given a fair hearing.

As NARAL President Nancy Keenan has pointed out since NARAL came under fire, an amicus brief is filed by someone who is not a party to the case at hand, but who interjects in order to offer an opinion on the matter - to try to sway the Justices to change the law in the manner most benefiting the “friend of the court.” In the Bray case, the government’s perspective on why the Supreme Court should find in favor of the anti-abortion protestors was not required. Rather, Roberts offered it because the Justice Department felt it important to weigh in on how the Supreme Court should shape this area of the law. And the unsolicited opinion of the Reagan Justice Department, as put forward by Roberts, is most accurately described as the following: Obstructing and blowing up abortion clinics is not discrimination against women because it is applied even-handedly to men as well as women. Somehow I doubt that logic would stand if it were prostate cancer clinics which were being blown up. Roberts should be thankful that he was only dubiously called the friend of a bomber rather than being exposed as the chauvinist he made himself into with that brief.

Roberts’s aim by taking part in the Bray case was to sway the Court in the direction of making it more difficult to legally obtain an abortion, which has been the Right’s aim ever since they lost the Roe v. Wade decision. He shared the same goal vis-a-vis the Bray case as the anti-abortion protestors who NARAL acuses him of supporting. NARAL’s tactical mistake, however, was trying to make their ad a blockbuster by suggesting that it was the anti-abortion protestors’ methods - i.e. bombing clinics - that Roberts supported. NARAL was merely too clever by half or blinded by their own greed, whichever cliché you prefer.

Had the true purpose of the ad not been to ensure sucessful NARAL fundraisers this Autumn but to directly advance women’s rights, and if Roberts was not the current political scapegoat du jour, NARAL might have pointed out the ways in which other prominent Republicans have indirectly promoted the abhorrent practices of extreme anti-abortion activists. For instance, they may have chosen Chris Smith, Republican Congressman from New Jersey, as their target.

Congressman Smith is no friend of abortion, and he seizes every opportunity to make that fact known. As recently as May 25th of this year, on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, Congressman Smith rose to speak about the “babies being brutally killed by abortion.” He described the medical procedure as “the slaughter of innocent children” and stated that “we want no part of the carnage,” presumably speaking for the anti-abortion community as a whole. At other times, also on the floor of the House, he referred to RU-486 (a pill which can induce abortion in the very early stages of pregnancy without surgery, but with the required supervision of a physician) as “baby pesticide” and Planned Parenthood as “Child Abuse, Incorporated.” “Abortion clinics,” he opined, “are not only killing centers, they are torture chambers as well.”

Were he Brittish, such rhetoric could have Congressman Smith deported under Prime Minister Tony Blair’s new anti-terrorism provisions imposed in the wake of the Al-Qaeda bombings in London. It is not a far leap from talk of killing centers and torture chambers to the kinds of domestic terrorism that occur constantly at abortion clinics in this country - and not just the now-rare bombings. All of the tactics employed by anti-abortion protestors at clinics - obstruction, harassment, even damning patients and their loved ones to hell - are intended to intimidate and shake the will of women attempting to exercise their constitutional right to make unimpeded decisions about the care of their bodies, a right which is essential to the liberty and due process guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

A civil debate about the ethics of this controversial medical procedure can certainly be had, just like the discussions we have about stem cells or cloning. There is room for those who believe abortion is morally wrong, as a matter of religious belief, as well as those who believe it is morally wrong to have medical decisions made by the government rather than by a woman herself. Congressman Smith is not having this debate, and he is surely not alone inside the Republican Party with regard to his views or his rhetoric on abortion. One man is not a barometer for the prevailing sentiment among the GOP; but if members of the Right (John Roberts included) believe, as Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida does, that “abortion is one of the greatest scourges of our time,” then by their own jingoist, anti-Dean standards they must answer for giving aid and comfort to the domestic terrorists who impede, harass, and even kill those who would defend and exercise their constitutional right to keep their bodies free from government intrusion, a fundamental principal of liberty and justice.