Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Papal Court

(Reprinted from the issue of November 17, 2005)

If Judge Samuel Alito is confirmed to the Supreme Court, a majority of the justices will be Catholics: John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Alito himself. To say this is unprecedented would be a wild understatement. Until recently, I don’t think there has ever been more than one Catholic on the Supreme Court at a time.

To the liberal, feminist, or Protestant bigot, this may savor of a Popish plot. Some pundits see it as the result of a recent alliance, once unimaginable, between Catholics and evangelical Protestants.

But the most interesting comments I’ve seen come from Gerard V. Bradley, a Notre Dame law professor, and Bernard Dobranski of the Ave Maria School of Law, both of whom are quoted in The Washington Post.

Bradley says that four of the five (Anthony Kennedy being the exception) are drawn together by their “moral traditionalism,” but also by their shared “honest view of the law and of the role of a judge.” They are also heirs to a Natural Law tradition, which, Dobranski notes, is out of favor in secular law schools, but resurgent among conservatives.

You can almost sense the presence of a single Aristotelian even in a crowded room. He’s always the guy asking the pertinent questions and rolling his eyes at vague, evasive answers. He insists on defining his terms. He assumes that things have specific, knowable natures and he is averse to the idea that they can change radically, or (in a word he is unlikely to be caught using) “evolve.”

He is often, though not always, a Catholic who has inherited Aristotle through the Thomism that has formed the Catholic tradition.

The Aristotelian disposition is evident in the way Scalia and Thomas won’t stand for the woozy idea that the U.S. Constitution is a “living document” whose essential meaning defies apprehension, but shifts like sand dunes over time. And this is what separates them from Kennedy, who thinks and talks in a secondhand Hegelian idiom of progress, with the Constitution constantly undergoing a metamorphosis that seems to be inscrutable to everyone but a few lawyers.

The simplest way to put it is that conservatism is Aristotelian, and liberalism is Hegelian. The frustrating thing about liberalism is its rejection of common sense and, ultimately, of any firm intellectual limits. This is why its jurisprudence amounts to hair-splitting nonsense. It can reach any result it wants.

No wonder Scalia heaps ridicule on Kennedy’s goofy opinion, in the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey case, that “at the heart of liberty” is “the right to define one’s own concept of the universe,” et cetera, which Scalia has aptly, if irreverently, dubbed the “sweet mystery of life” doctrine.

What Samuel Johnson said of one mediocre poet might be said of Kennedy: “A man might write such stuff forever, if he would abandon his mind to it.” (Kennedy has also opined that sodomy is protected by the same “right.”)

This is why it may be premature to celebrate (or deplore) the Court’s coming Catholic majority. Assuming Alito’s confirmation, there may be five Catholics, but I count only four Aristotelians. Kennedy seems to feel free to define not only his own concept of the universe, but, even worse, his own concept of the Constitution.

Still, liberals should be trembling. From their point of view, the Supreme Court may soon strip away not only the precious right of abortion, but our even more fundamental right to define the whole doggone universe!

Just so there’s no misunderstanding about this, God Almighty defines the universe, and all we poor creatures can do is try to think straight about it through the faculty of right reason He has endowed us with by making us in His image.

It’s not our “right,” except in the sense that it’s our duty. Thinking straight about His creation is a way of obeying His will; wishful thinking (of the liberal kind, for instance) is a form of rebellion.

To my mind, these are the real stakes underlying the current debates about the Supreme Court. Is the Court going to recognize objective reality, or is it going to keep defying the Natural Law by asserting arbitrary “rights”? The apparent Catholic majority is only the surface manifestation of this deeper question.
 
French Follies

The Muslim rioters in France have spurred a great deal of alarmed commentary, but little of it has addressed what seems to me a key angle: not “Islamism,” but socialism. The mixed economies of Europe, combining capitalism with “social democracy,” have promised benefits they can’t afford and assumed costs they can’t meet.

France has a congested welfare and regulatory system that is hard enough to maintain even for its own citizens, but inevitably becomes explosive when also made available to limitless numbers of immigrants. Religious differences merely aggravate what would have been an insoluble problem anyway.

So now the huge and unassimilated immigrant population, including its children, has been taught to expect the government to provide it with jobs as well as other benefits, none of which are forthcoming. It’s too late to tell these people to go home, when France, having long since welcomed them in, is their home.

Socialism is an incurable disease. The only answer to it is not to catch it in the first place. Once you catch it, it’s just a matter of time before the fever, nausea, and agony wrack your body.

Take a good look at France today. We have a welfare state too. Our turn will come.
 
Queen Camilla?

Britain’s Prince Charles and his new wife, the former Camilla Parker Bowles, his longtime mistress, have just popped over for a pleasant visit to our country. I’ve always liked her and hated the cruel treatment she has gotten in England for the crime of being less glamorous than the late Princess Diana.

Despite some legal impediments, however, she may still wind up being queen, according to high-level gossip reported in Vanity Fair. At present her title is Duchess of Cornwall, but these things can change.

One little thing: The duchess is still a divorced woman. Not that such facts can inhibit modern royalty for long, but Charles, after all, is the future head of the Church of England, so the plot thickens just a bit; still, with an agreeable archbishop of Canterbury, who has already helped make this marriage possible with timely reforms in his church’s rules, the situation should be resolved more easily than the marital affairs of, say, Henry VIII, who had a Pope to deal with.

Fortunately, Pope Benedict XVI won’t be asked to settle this one.


SOBRAN’S finds blasphemy and idolatry oddly mixed in the worship of Lincoln. If you have not seen my monthly newsletter yet, give my office a call at 800-513-5053 and request a free sample, or better yet, subscribe for two years for just $85. New subscribers get two gifts with their subscription. More details can be found at the Subscription page of my website.

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Joseph Sobran