A Legacy of Lost Liberty

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - July 8, 2005

Right at the beginning of the extended weekend on which Americans were celebrating the 229th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement. There followed, in rapid succession, various encomia for the first woman on our nation's highest tribunal. In testimony of the symbolic importance of her 24 years on the Court, she, in contrast to her fellow justices, has already had a federal courthouse named in her honor. Since she was appointed by President Reagan in 1981 to assume the spot vacated by Potter Stevens, she has often provided the swing vote on some of the most contentious issues before the Court.

Most legal scholars and media pundits of all persuasions have been stating that the swing for which she will be most remembered is the blow she delivered on abortion and on the understanding and underpinning of freedom she penned in the 1992 Planned Parenthood of Southeast Pennsylvania versus Casey decision.

"At the heart of liberty," she wrote in an unusual joint opinion co-signed by Justices Kennedy and Souter, "is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." It was the exaltation of a most radical form of subjectivism: the individual has the "right," she posited, to define, and therefore determine, what even the universe means. The cosmos, human life, and existence are not "givens" that all of us need to accept and to which we need to conform; they are rather fully malleable to become whatever we in our "freedom" say they mean.

There was great irony she announced her retirement when she did, because her conception of freedom is markedly different from those who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence which we were celebrating. They affirmed as a self-evident truth that all men "are endowed by their Creator" with the "unalienable" right to life, which is of course the foundation to any inviolable right to liberty or the pursuit of happiness. For them, human life was a clear given, not something the meaning of which others determine.

After a long experience with Nazi and communist totalitarianism, Pope John Paul II repeatedly affirmed that freedom is not the ability to do whatever we want, but the capacity to do what we should. For the person to be free, freedom must be bound to the truth, to reality, to the way we and the world are and are called by our nature to be. Freedom divorced from truth does not make the person free, but a slave to his or her ideas and, very often, to the ideas of others.

Justice O'Connor's notion of liberty leads to chaos, because if each of us is "free" to determine and act on our own notion of freedom, then there are no real rights, no real basis for laws, and therefore no protection. If a mother is free to determine for herself the meaning of her life and the meaning of her child's life, and thus to decide that her unborn child's life will have no value in her conception of the universe, then there is no logical basis for any of us to stand secure if someone bigger and more powerful than we decides that our more humanly developed lives have no value in their conception of the universe.

President Bush now has the opportunity to make good on his 2000 and 2004 campaign promises to appoint a strict constructionist to the court, one who does not take the "liberty" to define for herself the meaning of the Constitution, but one who accepts it as a datum and applies it justly in accord with what those who wrote it meant by it. Any candidate who sees in the text of the Constitution a right to privacy allowing mothers to put an end to the life of their unborn children is not a strict constructionist. Catholics have a duty always to pray for the President, but Catholics should pray for President Bush in particular at this moment. Millions of present and future Americans' lives depend on it.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.