Point of View

Richard Cizik, the National Association of Evangelicals' vice president for governmental affairs, admitted letting "out a whoop" after learning of last week's Supreme Court decision that upheld a 2003 federal law banning partial-birth abortions. I don't know about you, but I can't remember the last time a Supreme Court decision provided evangelical Christians with an occasion for whooping it up. Normally, Supreme Court rulings make us feel more like throwing up than whooping it up.

A federal law outlawing partial-birth abortion—a gruesome procedure of indescribable barbarity perpetrated against partially born babies—was actually passed by Congress in both 1995 and 1997. On both of these occasions, however, it was vetoed by President Bill Clinton, the most morally-challenged man to ever occupy the Oval Office.

Thanks to Clinton's contemptible colleagues in the Democratic Party and their willingness to walk lockstep with their valueless leader, neither of Clinton's vetoes was overturned. Barbarity against partially born babies was permitted to continue unabated in these United States.

In 2003, our congressional representatives, acting in accordance with the will of their constituents, once again passed a bill banning partial-birth abortions. This time—thanks to the fact that a new president in possession of a moral compass was residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—the congressional bill was signed into law.

Immediately thereafter, judicial despots clad in black robes and seated on lower courts began frantically swatting at the new law like it was a horsefly at a Sunday picnic. Successfully swatting it down in short order, along with the will of the American people and the powers of our executive and legislative branches of government, this handful of tyrannical judges were able to bog down Congress' ban on partial-birth abortion in the slough of today's judicial appeals process.

Until last week's Supreme Court decision, partially born children were still being legally and brutally exterminated in America, while Americans showed little if any interest in any baby other than Anna Nicole Smith's.

Upon hearing of last week's Supreme Court decision, Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, thanked God that the abominable practice of partial-birth abortion had finally come to an end in America.

Others were not so grateful. Shockwaves were felt through the ranks of radical feminists as they heard for the first time the Supreme Court's affirmation of a law regulating an abortion procedure. Up until last week, the "Supremes" had stridently defended abortion at any time, by any method, and for any reason.

Writing for the Court's four dissenting justices, Ruth Bader Ginsberg—a radical feminist and former General Counsel of the ACLU—called the Court's affirmation of the federal ban on partial birth abortions "gravely mistaken." According to Ginsberg, the Court's decision not only "jeopardizes women's health and places doctors in an untenable position," but will also fail to save "a single fetus from destruction."

In other words, so what if her colleagues on the Court ruled against her and the feminists' "Ya-Ya Sisterhood"? There is still more than one way to skin a cat, or in this case, abort your baby. After all, America's women are still free to kill their babies at any time and for any reason during pregnancy. They just can't have abortionists partially delivering their babies, piercing their skulls, and vacuuming their brains out anymore.

To cry gator tears over whether or not women can safely abort their babies during the whole nine months of pregnancy and over whether or not money-grubbing abortionists can ply their trade without encumbrances, while at the same time showing such blatant disregard for the innocent life that is being taken is totally unconscionable to me.

How can a woman like Ruth Bader Ginsberg live with herself? How does someone like her end up on the Supreme Court? There was a day in America when someone like her would have been seen as a monster. Today, however, she sits on our highest court and makes up the laws of our land, and I do mean makes up the laws of our land.

Much of what passes for law today is nothing more than the imaginative inventions of Supreme Court justices like Ruth Bader Ginsberg. All one needs to prove this is Ginsberg's own written dissent in the Court's affirmation of the partial-birth abortion ban. According to Ginsberg, women have the right to have a partial-birth abortion because it has been "declared again and again by this Court." The reason she gives for her staunch opposition to banning partial-birth abortions is the fact that it is "at odds with our jurisprudence" and therefore "should not have staying power." In Ginsberg's mind, the law is whatever she and the other "supremes" say it is. Furthermore, once they've spoken, their word is immutable and henceforth requires the American people's unquestioning obedience.

Although Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in last week's Supreme Court decision, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a separate opinion in which he boldly declared that "the Court's abortion jurisprudence, including...Roe v. Wade, has no basis in the Constitution."

Interestingly, Ginsberg and Thomas may actually agree that there is no such thing as a woman's right to an abortion in the United States Constitution. The difference between the two justices, however, is in their drastically different opinions concerning the role of the Court. Justice Thomas believes that the Court's role is to merely interpret the Constitution and existing laws. Ginsberg, on the other hand, believes that the Court's role is to rewrite the Constitution and make up the laws.

When I consider the makeup of the current Court, the unlikelihood of future justices like Thomas being confirmed to the Court by a Democrat-controlled House and Senate, and the likelihood of a liberal Democrat or moderate Republican being elected president in 2008, something tells me that we better whoop it up while we can.

We evangelicals better savor last week's Supreme Court decision. Who knows when there will be another for us to whoop it up about? All I can say is: God help the babies, have mercy on our nation, and please pass the Maalox.

Don Walton is founder of Time for Truth Ministries and a full-time evangelist and conference speaker. For more information visit www.timefortruth.org.