A response to Kelly Scoles’ letter:

Once more unto the breach, dear friend, to fill the space where fact and logic have gone missing in your first sentence. You mourn the fact that the Dodds case proclaimed abortion was never a constitutional right, a truth. You characterize this as a “tragic consequence” when, again, you have it backwards. Saving a baby from the gruesomely painful death of abortion is not “tragic”, it’s heroic, while a truly tragic consequence occurs with each severed spinal cord or bodily dismemberment of a baby during abortion.

We’ve debated ad nauseum the fundamental question (does abortion kill a small human being, or something else)? The answer can be found before the creation of man in the existence of the Creator, which in Judeo-Christianity recognizes the embryo as a unique, eternal soul. Our debate is like Thomas Aquinas (no relation) debating Friedrich Nietzsche on the issue of God’s alleged death. However, God does describe only man as bearing His mage.

As for the principle of “stare decisis,” it was never intended to be absolute; otherwise we would be required to respect decisions like Dred Scott, (1857), Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): “separate but equal,” and Korematsu v. United States (1944): the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, all once “respected as established law.”

You call for application of “even the scant ethics rules of the Court calling for recusal” of Justice Sam Alito. My ghad, Kelly! “Have you no sense of decency?” (Boston lawyer Joseph Welch at 1954 McCarthy hearing. A little fun full hyperbole.) Drop your political pom-poms for a minute, Kelly, and think of the scabrous shyster Judges, DAs, AGs, and low life lawyers who have systematically tormented Donald Trump for the past four years, to break him. It is an outrage of historical American proportions. You call Justice Sam Alito an “Inquisition Catholic”? The real Inquisition has flourished in the Democratic Party and media these past 10 years.

True as you say, “the Constitution also does not mention “woman.” Is that why radical Ketanji Brown Jackson, Associate Justice, having received an A.B., magna cum laude, from Harvard-Radcliffe College in 1992, and a J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1996, is incapable of defining “woman” during her Senate Confirmation Hearings: “Marsha Blackburn asked the Supreme Court nominee on Tuesday to define the word ‘woman’.” “I can’t” Jackson replied.” This answer was just a secret smack on the lips to her LGBT-WOKE associates.

Incidentally, before the blunderbusses and flintlocks there were matchlocks, and later the glorious rifle.
To clarify, Justice Thomas does not signal out “originalism” as if somehow “dispositive” in Constitutional law. Where do you get this? My favorite Supreme Court Justice was Antonin Scalia, who passed away in 2016 and was the primary proponent of understanding the Constitution by determining original meaning, not “intent”. I can’t imagine why any reasonable person would object to the practice of decerning the law by the method of strict constructionism. That means reading the Framer’s words “as they would have understood them at the time….” Is that a bad thing? You would rather substitute your words for theirs.

“My shtick, as you may know, is textualism. I believe that judges should adhere to the text of the law, and not amend or revise it to accord with what they think the law ought to be. Imagine my delight, then, when I find, in Aquinas’s discussion of the question “Whether we should always judge according to the written law?” the following seemingly categorical conclusion: “Hence it is necessary to judge according to the written law, else judgment would fall short either of the natural or of the positive right.” (Justice Antonin Scalia, Scalia Speaks).

At the kind invitation of my friend Joseph Kern, years ago, I was invited to hear a talk by Justice Scalia at Thomas Aquinas College about looking for “original meaning” while interpreting the Constitution. Security was intense and the speaker, as expected, brilliant and engaging. Even today knowledgeable historians would laugh at the idea of demanding a justice “recuse” himself for the alleged “unethical” act of using “original meaning” method in constitutional research. The “embarrassment” here should lie with critics of the “originalists”, curiously alleging “era-conventional cultural ignorance.” I really want, like mad, to digress at this point. My age provides confusion enough.