<I enjoyed your response, though I think you're painting with too broad a brush. Forget abortion, hell, forget the twentieth century, and think about slavery. Slavery is morally wrong, period, regardless of what the Constiitution says or doesn't say. It's not wrong for ANY legal or constitutional reason; it's wrong for a moral one. That's how we know it's wrong here, there, and everywhere, and we don't need to look at the laws of any land to know this.>

The Dominionists of the Christian right would disagree with you. According to them since slavery is deemed okay in the OT, it's perfectly acceptable. Slavery, however, illustrates what I wrote earlier. The constitution treated blacks as 3/5 human, but as a governmental instrument it was flexible enough that when society evolved and people came to see slavery as morally unconscionable the document could be amended to reflect that shift.

<This same moral light shines on justices too.>

Depends which ones, the judges on the SC who come from the Federalist Society are Plutocrats first. I suppose it's possible that one or more of them actually believes they're operating from some moral principle, but for the most part like the Straussians they believe in employing religion and moral absolutes, they don't themselves believe in, as an element of social control. They don't care about moral questions as ends in themselves, only as a sop to the rubes, who will then go along with the real agenda. The late John Kenneth Galbraith said ''The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.''

<I wouldn't say that legislating from the bench is wrong if it redresses a clear moral wrong. ("Clear" becomes the battleground, of course.) >

Whether right or wrong, I was merely saying that the so-called liberal activist judges have kept very much within the spirit of the expansion of rights promised by the document, whereas those who claim to adhere to original intent clearly do not. For instance, there is no corporate personhood anywhere within what might be termed original intent. It stems from an SC court clerk's misinterpretation of a judge's comments in 1886, which he then wrote into the record. Clearly the 14th Amendment, which was passed to guarantee the rights of freed slaves was never meant to apply to fictional entities like corporations, which can in no way be termed 'natural born persons'. If Scalia really walked his talk, along with reversing 90 years of precedent on the rights of suspects, he'd be handing down rulings that stripped corporations of rights. Instead this court is all about expanding corporate power even further,

<This is the same impetus behind the expansion of rights you mentioned. It wasn't so much a matter of legal thinking as moral thinking. What complicates matters in our day is a great confusion about moral thinking. We can't "do the right thing" if we don't know what it is. Even if we do know, the person we're trying to help may think we don't and therefore oppose us.>

Well as someone said the best have no resolve and the worst are full of certainty, or something like that. Those who believe they're acting morally when they set out to restrict the rights of others are not only violating the spirit of the constitution, but are what M. Scott Peck referred to as People of the Lie. For him the sin or whatever one wishes to call it comes not from the act itself but from the unwillingness to come clean and atone, and thus one's victims are punished with further unjust action. He gives the example of the Vietnam War - according to him the elite intellectuals who led us into it actually believed that Vietnam would become a staging ground for the Chinese. This of course ignored that the two cultures had been enemies for a couple millennia. As the truth was discovered that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist first and not about to allow his country to be used by his enemies, we could have acknowledged our mistake and stopped the war. Instead we escalated it, punishing the Vietnamese people for our own cultural ignorance. One could go even further back - the allies had promised Ho Chi Minh that in exchange for services provided by the Viet Minh against the Japanese they would receive their independence at the end of the war. Had that agreement been honored the whole history of the second half of the century might have been different.

Moral philosophy requires self examination, I'm no longer a christian, but the gospels say pull the plank out of your own eye. Those who would legislate morality merely project their shadows on the other and then sit in judgement on those unintegrated parts of themselves whose existence they deny. The Dominionists, it seems to me, stem from two great heresies, on the one hand, Calvinism, which says that faith trumps morality and wealth indicates being in God's favor, making it a great philosophy for robber barons, and on the other, 19th century tent revivalism, from which comes the concept of the rapture. Neither have any scriptural justification. In my view the ends ARE the means. Justice cannot spring from unjust actions. Morality cannot result from dishonest intentions. One will never arrive at useful answers from asking the wrong questions.