The most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.
—Anthony Kennedy

For Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing those words in 2003, there was no higher authority to cite. He was, after all, quoting himself. Eleven years earlier, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Kennedy had first promulgated this misty, monstrous ode to judicial oligarchy. Back then, our robed masters were groping to rationalize the “right” to abortion they’d woven from whole cloth a generation earlier. In point of fact, nothing in American tradition even hinted that an “intimate and personal choice” to snuff out the life of an unborn child—a “choice” historically stigmatized—had all along been “central to personal dignity.” But Kennedy and four equally willful cohorts, hell-bent on making it so, were reduced to burbling about “attributes of personhood” which were purportedly unfit for regulation by a free society. Democracy? Henceforth, that ideal would be derided as “the compulsion of the state.”

By 2003 when, with transparent self-satisfaction, Kennedy was reaffirming his one-size-fits-the-universe dictum in Lawrence v. Texas,the mystery of human life at issue