Posted by
NYC prof. on Tuesday, November 06, 2007 9:18:01 AM
As far as I can tell, there is not a lot of daylight, when you get down to the nitty gritty, between Fred and Giuliani. Thompson does not even support the pro-life plank in the Republican Party Platform! Nor does he support a pro-marriage amendment, and he also thought it was wrong for federal authority to intervene to save an innocent American citizen (Terri Schiavo) from being tortured to death on the order of a local judge. (In my view, the Nuremberg trials provided ample precedent for either Bush to act, but they decided just to follow the judge's orders.)
I would characterize Thompson's approach to these issues as Federalism ad absurdum. The founding fathers certainly did not countenance the ability of individual states to alter the common accepted meaning of fundamental English words like "person" or "life" or "marriage". Any common sense interpretation of the Constitution would, in my view, endorse the federal clarification of any such terms whose meaning came to be different in different states. It hardly matters if English is the official language of the US if it is a different language in different states, even if it is still called English. Imagine: a 12-year-old gets in trouble, and finds herself 'with child' in PA. So she--perfectly legally now--takes a short bus ride to NJ to have a legal medical clinic cure her 'parasitic infection' (with an abortion)! Isn't this why the Constitution has a provision for amendment?