In the brightness of our enlightenment, there exists a dark corner.
In it, like a Brown Recluse, waiting to pounce, is Mankind's ugly
side. Our future, our existence as a species depends upon our ability
to pour light into that corner and drive the silver spike into the
heart of that monster.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/26/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Fox News Reveals: Brett Kavanaugh Does Not Tell the Truth
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
26 September 18
I've always treated women with dignity and respect.
- Judge Brett Kavanaugh on Fox News, September 24, 2018
This is not true. Brett Kavanaugh has not always treated women with dignity
and respect, unless you mean abusing his judicial authority in an attempt
to
prevent a woman from having the legal abortion she wants constitutes some
form of "dignity and respect."
In the one abortion case Brett Kavanaugh has ruled on as a federal judge,
he
treated a pregnant 17-year-old woman with no dignity and no respect, and he
went out of his way to do it. The woman was a Jane Doe fleeing from family
violence in Central America, where her parents had beaten her pregnant
sister so badly she miscarried. Jane Doe was in US custody, she wanted an
abortion, and the US refused. She sued and won the right to an abortion.
The
US appealed and the case reached the US District Court where Kavanaugh sat.
The court ruled to allow Jane Doe (J.D. in the court's opinion), then at
least 15 weeks pregnant, to have her abortion. In an opinion concurring
with
the majority decision, Judge Patricia Ann Millett wrote:
Fortunately, today's decision rights a grave constitutional wrong by the
government. Remember, we are talking about a child here. A child who is
alone in a foreign land. A child who, after her arrival here in a search
for
safety and after the government took her into custody, learned that she is
pregnant. J.D. then made a considered decision, presumably in light of her
dire circumstances, to terminate that pregnancy. Her capacity to make the
decision about what is in her best interests by herself was approved by a
Texas court consistent with state law. She did everything that Texas law
requires to obtain an abortion. That has been undisputed in this case.
What has also been expressly and deliberately uncontested by the government
throughout this litigation is that the Due Process Clause of the Fifth
Amendment fully protects J.D.'s right to decide whether to continue or
terminate her pregnancy. The government-to its credit-has never argued or
even suggested that J.D.'s status as an unaccompanied minor who entered the
United States without documentation reduces or eliminates her
constitutional
right to an abortion in compliance with state law requirements.
Where the government bulldozed over constitutional lines was its position
that-accepting J.D.'s constitutional right and accepting her full
compliance
with Texas law-J.D., an unaccompanied child, has the burden of extracting
herself from custody if she wants to exercise the right to an abortion that
the government does not dispute she has. The government has insisted that
it
may categorically blockade exercise of her constitutional right unless this
child (like some kind of legal Houdini) figures her own way out of
detention
by either (i) surrendering any legal right she has to stay in the United
States and returning to the abuse from which she fled, or (ii) finding a
sponsor-effectively, a foster parent-willing to take custody of her and to
not interfere in any practical way with her abortion decision..
The irreparable injury to J.D. of postponing termination of her
pregnancy-the weekly magnification of the risks to her health and the
ever-increasing practical barriers to obtaining an abortion in Texas-have
never been factually contested by the government.
Ignoring the health risk question, Kavanaugh's nine-page dissent argued for
waiting for Jane Doe to find a sponsor with little consideration of her as
a
person with a complicated problem. His summary of Jane Doe's situation
lacks
Millett's humane concern, as he wrote with dry starkness:
To review: Jane Doe is 17 years old. She is a foreign citizen. Last month,
she was detained shortly after she illegally crossed the border into Texas.
She is now in a U.S. Government detention facility in Texas for unlawful
immigrant minors. She is 15-weeks pregnant and wants to have an abortion.
Her home country does not allow elective abortions.
He might as well say she is just a pawn in the game, she doesn't matter.
Kavanaugh later treats the majority opinion reductively, as if it was only
about abortion ideology, not the time-constrained needs of a 17-year-old
girl. And in doing so, he uses the loaded language of an anti-abortion
ideologue:
The majority apparently thinks that the Government must allow unlawful
immigrant minors to have an immediate abortion on demand. [emphasis added]
And later Kavanaugh writes similarly:
The en banc majority, by contrast, reflects a philosophy that unlawful
immigrant minors have a right to immediate abortion on demand, not to be
interfered with even by Government efforts to help minors navigate what is
undeniably a difficult situation by expeditiously transferring them to
their
sponsors. [emphasis added]
This is not honest, truthful argument. This is tendentious and false.
Kavanaugh makes clear that he would choose a legalistic rigidity requiring
Jane Doe to find a sponsor, regardless of how long that might take or
whether it was even possible. Clearly, delay might make her abortion
medically more difficult, or impossible. That, although he is not
forthright
enough to say so, seems to be Kavanaugh's preferred outcome. That inference
is reinforced by Millett's response to Kavanaugh:
Judge Kavanaugh's dissenting opinion (at 4) suggests that it would be good
to put J.D. "in a better place when deciding whether to have an abortion."
That, however, is not any argument the government ever advanced. The only
value of sponsorship identified by the government was that sponsorship,
like
voluntary departure from the United States, would get J.D. and her
pregnancy
out of the government's hands.
Judicial courtesy presumably restrains Millett from saying outright what
she
clearly describes: that Kavanaugh is arguing speciously and dishonestly.
Jane Doe had already decided to have an abortion. Kavanaugh is not telling
the truth to suggest otherwise. Kavanaugh's argument serves only a
callous,
ideological purpose, lacking any of the human decency Millett expresses in
her conclusion:
The government's mere hope that an unaccompanied, abused child would make
the problem go away for it by either (i) surrendering all of her legal
rights and leaving the United States, or (ii) finding a sponsor the
government itself could never find is not a remotely constitutionally
sufficient reason for depriving J.D. of any control over this most intimate
and life-altering decision. The court today correctly recognizes that
J.D.'s
unchallenged right under the Due Process Clause affords this 17-year-old a
modicum of the dignity, sense of self-worth, and control over her own
destiny that life seems to have so far denied her.
Kavanaugh told Fox News: "I've always treated women with dignity and
respect." That's simply not true. He did not treat Jane Doe with dignity
and
respect. Not even close. As a pridefully professing Christian, Kavanaugh
seems not to have accepted the lesson of Matthew 25:45: "Truly I tell you,
whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for
me."
"I'm a good person," Brett Kavanaugh keeps telling us. But Brett Kavanaugh
doesn't tell the truth.
Would a good person conceal his involvement with government torture and
other human rights abuses? Would a good person conceal his involvement with
mass surveillance of American citizens? Would a good person conceal the
rest
of his record in the executive branch? Would a good person have so much to
hide as Brett Kavanaugh has relentlessly kept hidden? Brett Kavanaugh
refuses to tell the truth.
Does that mean he's a liar? Does that mean he's delusional? Does that mean
he's in deep denial approaching pathological dimensions? Does that mean
he's
an unscrupulous political operative for whom facts are what he says they
are
at any given moment? Does any of this matter? Why should we care why he
doesn't tell the truth? It doesn't matter.
The Supreme Court Justice we deserve would be a reliable truth-teller.
Email This Page
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America,
Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award
nomination
from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
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to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
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