Miers's religious views

[Rick Duncan]

My religious views are irrelevant to whether the Constitution contains a right to abortion. It does not. If it did--if the 14th Amendment said "No state shall enact any law restricting a woman's right to have an abortion"--as a judge I would have to protect that right (or recuse myself if I could not do so in good conscience).
 
But since the Constitution does not contain a right to abortion, my religious views are irrelevant to my faithfully interpreting the Constitution and its silence on abortion.
 
I can not speak to Miers' views about abortion, but I could truthfully testify under oath that my religious faith is irrelevant to my legal views about the abortion liberty and Roe. Indeed, my own views about the wrongness of Roe go back to my pre-Christian life as a secular law professor who was an agnostic only because God was too irrelevant to me to bother to become a committed atheist. Just as Nat Hentoff is a pro-life atheist, I was once a pro-life agnostic/secularist. Becoming a Christian changed my life in many ways, but it did not alter my views about the Constitution. The Constitution said nothing about abortion when I was an agnostic, and it still says nothing about abortion.
 
Rick Duncan 
 


RJLipkin at aol.com wrote:

       Is Rick's recommendation that she "answer that her religious views are irrelevant to her work as a judge" strategic or that she should give this answer because she really believes it since, in Rick's view, it is true? If the latter can Christian conservatives opposed to abortion take any solace in her appointment?  Wouldn't they then need to hope she has secular  reasons for opposing abortion?
 
Bobby

Robert Justin Lipkin
Professor of Law
Widener University School of Law
Delaware




Rick Duncan 
Welpton Professor of Law 
University of Nebraska College of Law 
Lincoln, NE 68583-0902

"When the Round Table is broken every man must follow either Galahad or Mordred: middle things are gone." C.S.Lewis, Grand Miracle

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered."  --The Prisoner
		
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