Two observations about retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens are about to become established fact by sheer repetition. The first—that Stevens is the last Protestant on the court—is not true in any meaningful sense. The second—that Stevens didn’t move left, the court moved right—is madness.
While it’s true that there are no other Protestants on the court—now composed of six Catholics and two Jews, making the Supreme Court only slightly less diverse than cable news hosts, 75 percent of whom are Catholic or Jewish, but also include a Scientologist, a Mormon and a gay—it’s difficult to believe Stevens is any kind of Protestant.
Stevens is more like a pre-road to Damascus Saul. Or maybe the late Justice William Brennan.
It has been said that when asked during his confirmation hearings if he would follow his Catholicism or the Constitution, Brennan should have answered: “Neither.” (Only one senator voted against that cheap leprechaun. Guess who!… That’s right: Joe McCarthy.)
Stevens’ overall career-average may be less ridiculous than Brennan’s, but in one respect, Stevens was a standout: He was the most fanatically anti-religious justice in modern times.
In the 1989 abortion case, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, for example, Stevens argued that a state law that defined life as beginning at conception violated the First Amendment by—yes, establishing a religion. The abortion law, he said, gave “a theological answer to the question of when life begins.” (You’ve all heard of the First Church of When Life Begins, United, haven’t you?)
Fortunately, Stevens didn’t read far enough to see that the Bible also condemns murder generally, or he might have voted to strike down all laws against murder.
In the 2002 school voucher case, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, Stevens argued that an Ohio program giving poor parents tuition aid to send their children to schools of their choosing also violated the establishment clause. Stevens admitted that the public school system in question was in “crisis” and also that the new schools were freely chosen by the parents.
Still, he said, because the program did not forbid parents from using the tuition payments at religious schools, the state was using “public funds to pay for the indoctrination of thousands of grammar school children in particular religious faiths.” That money should have been used to indoctrinate children in subjects such as animal rights, Gaia theory, anti-Americanism and fisting etiquette!
Speaking as a Protestant, and not a “Protestant,” we’re happy to see Stevens leave the court.
Stevens’ claim that he hasn’t moved left, the court has moved right, if stated during a mental competence hearing, would have earned him a straitjacket and a handful of Thorazine.
But because Stevens’ self-characterization comports with the legal left’s position that the Supreme Court’s failure to enact the entire platform of the Green Party constitutes “conservative judicial activism,” it has been reverently repeated.
It’s true that on a few issues, Stevens didn’t change. He has long found any religious practice not crushed by the government to be an “establishment of religion.” Stevens has also never been an enthusiast of tenuous claims to free speech rights, voting to uphold city restrictions on strip clubs in 1976 and voting to uphold a law that prohibited the burning of the American flag in 1989.
But on many other issues, such as race discrimination, Stevens swung so far to the left that his earlier opinions would be unrecognizable as having been written by the same man.
In 1978, Stevens was not only in the majority in University of California Regents v. Bakke, but he wrote the opinion holding that the school’s race-based admissions program violated Title VII and ordering the university to admit Bakke.
In another case of government race-based classifications, Fullilove v. Klutznick (1980), Stevens ridiculed the idea of race-based “remedies” being applied to every ethnic group under the sun.
Adopting Justice William Rehnquist’s view that the specific history of blacks in America makes their claims unique, Stevens wrote: “Quite obviously, the history of discrimination against black citizens in America cannot justify a grant of privileges to Eskimos or Indians.” (Remember when you could use terms like “Eskimo” and “Indian” without being accused of a hate crime?)
Unlike blacks, who were “dragged to this country in chains to be sold in slavery,” Stevens said “the ‘Spanish-speaking’ subclass came voluntarily, frequently without invitation, and the Indians, the Eskimos and the Aleuts had an opportunity to exploit America’s resources before the ancestors of most American citizens arrived.”
Now fast-forward to 2003, when the court considered the race-based admissions policy at the University of Michigan. The school automatically awarded 20 points—one-fifth of the total points needed for admission -– to every minority, including not only blacks, but also Hispanics, Indians, Eskimos and Aleuts.
This time, affirmative action for Aleuts was just peachy with Stevens, who came up with a ludicrous procedural objection to the lawsuit, basically concluding that no one ever has standing to sue for race discrimination in college admissions. I guess he figured it was time somebody did something about the University of Michigan’s long, shameful history of discriminating against Aleuts.
That’s quite a change from the Justice Stevens of Fullilove, who compared government affirmative action programs to Nazi policies, saying if the government “is to make a serious effort to define racial classes by criteria that can be administered objectively, it must study precedents such as the First Regulation to the Reich’s Citizenship Law of Nov. 14, 1935,” translated in Volume 4 of “Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression.”
Whatever you think of Stevens’ newfound admiration for government racial preferences, it’s preposterous to say, as Stevens did, “I really don’t think I’ve changed all that much.”
If liberals will lie about obvious facts from the last few decades, such as Stevens’ dramatic swing to the left, how can they be trusted to tell the truth about a 200-year-old Constitution?
• High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton (1998)
• Slander:Liberal Lies About the American Right (2002)
• Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (2003)
• HowTo Talk To Liberals (If You Must) (2004)
• Godless: The Church of Liberalism (2006)
• If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans (2007)
• Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America (2009)
• Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America (2011)
•Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama (2012)
•Never Trust a Liberal Over Three-Especially a Republican (2013)
•Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole (2015)
•In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! (2016)
•Resistance Is Futile!: How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind (2018)
She also writes a popular syndicated column every week published at Breitbart, DailyCaller, Townhall, FrontPage, Yahoo, Takimag, VDare, and dozens of newspapers. (As well as the eponymous, AnnCoulter.com!)
Coulter has been a major media personality for more than 20 years, after starting on MSNBC their first day on air in July 1996.
She has appeared on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, PBS’s Frontline, The Today Show, Good Morning America, The Early Show, The Tonight Show, Good Morning Britain, Yahoo News, and a slew of other U.S. and international TV shows. She was the cover story of Time magazine on April 25, 2005, and has been profiled in scores of other publications, including TV Guide, The Guardian (UK), the New York Observer, National Journal, Harper’s Bazaar, The Washington Post, The New York Times and Elle magazine. In 2001, Coulter was named one of the top 100 Public Intellectuals by federal judge Richard Posner.
A Connecticut native, Coulter graduated with honors from Cornell University School of Arts & Sciences and received her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School, where she was an editor of The Michigan Law Review.
After practicing law for a few, very long years in New York City, Coulter moved to Washington to work for the Senate Judiciary Committee, where she handled crime and immigration issues for Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan. From there, she became a litigator with the Center For Individual Rights in Washington, DC, focusing on free speech, congressional power, and race discrimination cases.
Within a year, Coulter took a short leave of absence from her law firm to write her first New York Times bestseller, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton.
- Investigate This! - Wednesday January 5, 2011 at 4:42 pm
- Liberals Give ‘Til It Hurts (You) - Thursday December 30, 2010 at 10:17 am
- Scrooge Was A Liberal - Thursday December 23, 2010 at 7:41 am
