As I showed in my last column, the abortionist majority on the U.S. Supreme Court that issued Planned Parenthood v. Casey profoundly corrupted our country’s governing philosophy. The majority opinion issued with all the force of law negated the positive values of the American founding, and rendered this country’s regime morally illegitimate. The “heart of American liberty,” our highest court now taught, amounted to absolute nihilism, to the existentialist’s autism or to Lucifer’s revolt. As Sohrab Ahmari would decades later write about Anthony Kennedy’s infamous opinion:

[W]hat lies at the heart of liberty, Kennedy argued, was something utterly mystical having to do with figuring out the meaning of life for yourself. And the state, he went on, can’t impose an answer to these mystical questions. Each citizen must figure out for herself what the meaning of the mystery of life is. And if unlocking the mystery of life involves the taking of life, well, the state can’t intervene against that, either.

The Cold War That Both Sides Lost

In a bitter irony, when Casey came down, just six months had passed since our great international rival, the Soviet Union, had seen its system exposed as bankrupt, then abolished. America’s moral claims had not survived the Soviet Union’s by even a year.

I went to a gathering of my friends from Operation Rescue the day after the decision. We sat in our host’s living room, feeling like internal exiles or Russian dissidents. Each of us was stunned to see how many of Ronald Reagan’s appointees to the court betrayed the legal philosophy they’d advertised before taking their jobs. We looked in vain for a wave of national outrage among conservatives who’d fought to win past elections, many citing the need to overturn Roe v. Wade.

We emptied many bottles of wine that evening, and said many bitter things. I remember declaring, “According to Justice Kennedy, we ought to rename this godforsaken wasteland ‘the United States of Abortion.’” A friend of mine muttered, “If that’s freedom, then to Hell with it. Send it straight back where it came from.”

The Dominos Were Falling

I don’t think we overreacted. We could see intellectually, and feel deep in our bones, the vast implications of this demonic redefinition of freedom. All the wildest demands of the Sexual Revolutionaries, radical feminists, and Gay Liberation activists had just been vouchsafed in advance. If America’s very essence amounted to rejecting the search for Truth about life’s meaning, or even the moments when it really begins and ends … . Then our nation had no more anchor. We floated rudderless without a sail, at the whim of whoever holds power.

In their desperation to keep abortion legal, the court’s majority had just multiplied the rest of the Bill of Rights by zero. It had shown that no depths of sophistry were too squalid and rat-infested, but Harvard and Stanford scholars on the Supreme Court would crawl through them, to obtain the political outcome they wanted. What rights could really be safe in a country like that?

The Fix Was In

America had just ceased to stand for obedience to Nature and Nature’s God, and embraced perpetual adolescent rebellion. Our Supreme Court had ruled on the very meaning of freedom, and its solemn answer rang out like the profundities of a sophomore philosophy minor who’d just smoked his second bong. We could fight and win however many elections, but it wouldn’t matter. The justices our politicians picked would go on to betray us, to rule like the rest of our country’s nihilistic elite. The fix was in and the game was rigged.

Just a few months later, the great Patrick J. Buchanan would address the Republican National Convention. The failed presidential candidate would shock the neocon pundits assigned to massage public opinion, and appall the TV commentators, by telling America the truth: That our country now was plunged in a “religious war” between anti-Christians and Christians, the latter defending not so much the Gospel as basic human decency in a guerilla war, “block by block.”
 

 

The Shape of Tyranny to Come

A keen observer of 1992 who’d watched the Los Angeles riots, read the Casey opinion, and listened to Buchanan’s speech could have predicted the future: That any serious pro-life president would choke on fake impeachment trials, see his party’s Establishment backstab him, and lose in a stolen election. The solitary confinement of the January 6 protestors, the abuse of the FBI against concerned parents, the censorship of the media … all of that was baked in the cake once our courts had falsified the very meaning of freedom.

If freedom isn’t yoked to truth, it is merely the tool of the powerful. The seedy, unmourned death of the Soviet Union proved that. America’s depraved, mediocre elites seem determined to prove it yet again in the ruins of our own cities. 

The fact that the Supreme Court will consider a viable challenge to the Luciferian gibberish of Roe and Casey suggests to me that God hasn’t written us off yet. We may yet prove to be Nineveh, rather than Sodom.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”