Analysis, not advocacy by Stefan Beck

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Dec 31, 2005 03:38 PM

Analysis, not advocacy

by Stefan Beck

Jeff Hart offers further response to Richard John Neuhaus:

Richard Neuhaus understates what actually happened in his magazine First Things in 1999.
First Things ran five (commissioned) articles under the overall heading "The End of Democracy?" (He now says that some people thought the question mark unjustified--that is, they thought democracy in fact had ended with Roe vs. Wade!
Walter Berns and Gertrude Himmelfarb removed their names from the masthead of First Things. Mr. Berns protested that the magazine was "close to advocating not only civil disobedience but armed revolution."
The spirit of Che Guevara must have been near at hand.
Robert Bork objected to Neuhaus’s observation that we "have reached the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime."
Yet Neuhaus nevertheless gave moral assent to the laws that protected his own rights and liberties.
In my Making of the American Mind I said that Roe represented judicial overreach since it prempted the jurisdiction of all 50 states, they having the abortion matter under consideration. It seems clear enough that laws made by legislatures, when unsatisfactory, are more easily corrected than Court decisions. However, the position that Roe was "illegal," or that it renders the American "regime," as Neuhaus caled it, "illegitimate"--a synonymn for illegal--clearly is fantastic, and beyond extreme.
We see now that Roe and related Court decisions now are in contention. I have observed that the demand for abortion, absent in 1900 and 1950, is present now because of the "women’s revolution." My view was that the demand will probably increase as a result of the successful women’s revolution. Again, that was analytical. No one has challenged that analysis, but some have responded by disapproving abortion, which is irrelevant to my analysis, but which they evidently are more comfortable doing. And because my analysis is obviously correct. The demand for abortion is a derivative of the fact that millions of women, having long-term plans, want to control their reproductive capacity. Is that anything but obvious today?
I also said that I was offering "political analysis," indeed repeated that, evidently not repeating it often enough. That is, not advocacy. I said that I did not know how the abortion matter would play out.
Addendum: A CNN/USA Today Poll has shown that 65 percent of the American people now oppose repeal of Roe while only 29 percent support repeal, more than 2-1.

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