On the morning of the inauguration, according to news and eyewitness reports, the streets near Georgetown University were blocked by a fleet of limousines and police on motorcycles. It was for Joe Biden, attending Mass on campus at Dahlgren Chapel. It was a sign that would now mark the presence of Joseph Biden, the risen Joe Biden, ascending to a post of high honorifics. Bereft of both knowledge and wisdom, he will nevertheless stand in the high councils of state, with an entourage of cars flashing lights to herald his progress.
The cars assembled at their post conveyed a message, as inescapable as it was portentous: Here, in a chapel, affecting to be in communion with his Church, is a man who has trumpeted his rejection of the most central moral teachings of the Church. During the presidential campaign he offered, as one of the prime accomplishments in his political life, that he helped to defeat the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. With that stroke he managed to preserve, unimpaired, the right to kill an unborn child at every stage of its life. We have had a sense of what it means to “give scandal” or to misinstruct the faithful about the teachings of their own Church. But now it is done even more dramatically, with the presence of limousines to convey the point: that you can be a prime defender of the right to abortion at every stage and for any reason – nay, you can even exult in public for your achievements in securing that “right” – and still be a “good Catholic.”
Twenty-one years ago, when Robert Bork was nominated to the Court, Joe Biden was the chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. In Bork, Biden was faced with a notable conservative who had been famously dismissive of natural law. For Bork and others, natural law simply furnished a set of airy slogans to which liberal judges appealed when they sought to evade the discipline of legal reasoning. Those antics gave natural law a bad name. Bork found a surer guide to judgment in the “positive” law – the law that was “posited” or enacted in statutes or in the text of the Constitution.
The cars assembled at their post conveyed a message, as inescapable as it was portentous: Here, in a chapel, affecting to be in communion with his Church, is a man who has trumpeted his rejection of the most central moral teachings of the Church. During the presidential campaign he offered, as one of the prime accomplishments in his political life, that he helped to defeat the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. With that stroke he managed to preserve, unimpaired, the right to kill an unborn child at every stage of its life. We have had a sense of what it means to “give scandal” or to misinstruct the faithful about the teachings of their own Church. But now it is done even more dramatically, with the presence of limousines to convey the point: that you can be a prime defender of the right to abortion at every stage and for any reason – nay, you can even exult in public for your achievements in securing that “right” – and still be a “good Catholic.”
Twenty-one years ago, when Robert Bork was nominated to the Court, Joe Biden was the chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. In Bork, Biden was faced with a notable conservative who had been famously dismissive of natural law. For Bork and others, natural law simply furnished a set of airy slogans to which liberal judges appealed when they sought to evade the discipline of legal reasoning. Those antics gave natural law a bad name. Bork found a surer guide to judgment in the “positive” law – the law that was “posited” or enacted in statutes or in the text of the Constitution.
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