When Bill Maher and Joe Rogan Make the Pro-Life Case by Michael L. Brown for Ask Dr Brown
A recent article posted on Red State pointed to abortion-related comments made by podcast giant Joe Rogan, suggesting that we can win the pro-life argument by listening to his approach. In the same way, recent comments by the very liberal Bill Maher point to ways that we can have a discussion with pro-abortion friends and colleagues without using religious-based arguments.
To be sure, in order to change hearts and minds, we need God’s help. And under no circumstances should we ever back away from our deeply-held, biblically-based convictions about the humanity of the baby within the womb.
At the same time, when talking with people who do not share our religious values or do not hold the Bible in esteem, there are common-sense, logical arguments we can raise that might just get people to rethink their position.
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At the least, these arguments, especially when tied to people like Rogan and Maher, who are anything but Bible-thumping Christian fundamentalists, might just lower the temperature in the room, allowing for cooler heads to prevail.
Interestingly, it was the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, herself staunchly pro-abortion, who had warned back in 1992 that Roe was built on a flimsy foundation.
As pointed out by New York Times columnist David Brooks on the PBS News Hour on May 5, “Ruth Bader Ginsburg made this point back in 1992, that that decision was so big, she said it’s fragile. It’s — and then law professors, even very pro-choice law professors, have always said, we’re worried about this decision. It’s not a great decision. They liked the outcome. They worried about the decision. So, it was fragile. And so, hanging all that on that decision was always going to be — it was waiting to go off. And then Alito just ran through it. I — personally — there are two separate issues here: Should abortion be a right that people get to enjoy? Should — does the Constitution guarantee that right? And it’s important to separate those two things.”
In Ginsburg’s own words, “Doctrinal limbs too swiftly shaped, experience teaches, may prove unstable. The most prominent example in recent decades is Roe v. Wade.”
Boom!
As for saying that Justice Samuel Alito “ran through it,” I take to Brooks to mean that Alito exposed these very weaknesses in his devastating, leaked opinion. (Prof. Jay Richards rightly noted that, “Because of the outrage of the leak, etc. Alito’s opinion has not [yet] gotten enough credit for being an utterly persuasive and accessible piece of legal reasoning. Notice the social media screamers aren’t engaging his arguments.”)
To quote Alito directly, “Although the Court acknowledged that States had a legitimate interest in protecting ‘potential life,’ it found that this interest could not justify any restriction on pre-viability abortions. The Court did not explain the basis for this line, and even abortion supporters have found it hard to defend Roe’s reasoning. One prominent constitutional scholar wrote that he ‘would vote for a statute very much like the one the Court ended up drafting’ if he were ‘a legislator’, but his assessment of Roe was memorable and brutal: Roe was ‘not constitutional law’ at all and gave ‘almost no sense of an obligation to try to be’. . . .
