CAN'T LET A FEW MILLION DEAD COME BETWEEN US:

A Million Austins (Shawn Macomber, 3/12/2004, American Spectator)

It all began when Chris Danze, a 48-year-old concrete foundation contractor, decided to oppose a massive 10,000-square-foot, $6.2 million Planned Parenthood abortion mill being built in Austin. Planned Parenthood dubbed it "The Choice Project," and anticipated little protest. They expected a procession of signs and bullhorns, and then a return to business as usual. To get an idea of usual, consider that the franchise's more than 1,000 clinics performed almost 230,000 abortions in 2002 alone.

Determined to give them a fight, Danze organized a letter-writing campaign which promised contractors who helped build the complex that they'd never find work in this town again. By November 2003, hundreds of subcontractors had agreed to the boycott, starving the project of lumber, cement, plumbing, portatoilets, windows, roofing, insulation, you name it. Planned Parenthood officials, after initially scoffing at the boycott, were stunned to see construction of the facility grind to a halt.

Eventually concrete supplier Ramon Carrasquillo broke the picket line and poured the foundation this January, mostly because his company, Rainbow Materials, Inc. was drowning under $17 million of debt. Other subcontractors signed on, but only on the condition that Planned Parenthood conceal their identities. Trucks now pull up to the site with black tape over their logos. Planned Parenthood heralded this as a great victory for choice, even posting pictures of "beautiful concrete" on the website.

Tragic as this may be, it is no longer socially acceptable to get in bed with Planned Parenthood in Austin. Contractors have to slink in, hiding their identities like businessmen on a seedy fling. And Danze & Co. may not be finished yet. If scouts uncover the identities of the contractors, they add them to a mailing list of over 60,000 locals, who have promised never to employ them again.

IF THAT WASN'T ENOUGH, last July, the Bluebonnet Council of the Girl Scouts in Waco decided to co-sponsor a Planned Parenthood sex education conference entitled, "Nobody's Fool." The "educators" passed out a book to young girls with chapters on masturbation and homosexuality. The book, which was graced with the Girl Scouts logo, included images of couples having sex and a boy properly wearing a condom. The council went on to name Texas Planned Parenthood Executive Director Pam Smallwood their 2003 "Woman of Distinction." They planned to co-sponsor the conference again this year.

None of this sat very well with John Pisciotta, a Baylor University economics professor, who took ads out on a local Christian radio station urging a boycott of Girl Scout cookies. He cited Danze's Austin boycott as his inspiration.

Before he knew it, the national media picked up the story. Horrified parents began pulling their children out of the Scouts. Several troops collapsed completely for want of recruits. Finally, despite early defiance, local Girl Scouts Director Beth Vivio announced that the group would not sponsor such a conference again, ever.

Friends for Decades, but Years on Court Left Them Strangers (LINDA GREENHOUSE, 3/05/04, NY Times)

When Harry A. Blackmun was named to the Supreme Court, his mother warned that the appointment would change his relationship with Warren E. Burger, his friend since boyhood who had become chief justice the previous year.

Justice Blackmun, in an oral history, described his response: "Mother, it just can't. We've been friends for a long time."

" `Well, you wait and see,' " his mother replied.

"Of course, she knew Warren intimately," he told his interviewer, adding, "and she was wiser than I was."

For most of their lives, the two men from St. Paul had shared confidences, swapped advice and supported each other's ambitions. The dozens of letters that Justice Blackmun saved document a relationship of sometimes startling intimacy.

But, as his mother predicted, serving together on the nation's highest court did affect the friendship. In fact, their 16 years as Supreme Court colleagues left it shattered.

The private lives of Supreme Court justices are often hidden from public view. But Justice Blackmun's voluminous files, opened by the Library of Congress on Thursday, provide an inside look at the personal ties and tensions behind the bench.

During their last years on the court, it appears that Justice Blackmun and Chief Justice Burger barely spoke, communicating mostly through memos. Justice Blackmun's notes to himself, and his annotations on memos and draft opinions from the chief justice, show annoyance, even disdain. The best man at the Burgers' wedding six decades earlier, he did not attend Elvera Burger's funeral in 1994. By the end of their long lives, the two men had become strangers. [...]

The camaraderie between the two continued through the mid-1970's. In the memos he circulated within the court, Justice Blackmun addressed his old friend as "Chief." But letters to "Dear Warren" still went to the Burger home in Arlington, Va. Justice Burger sent birthday greetings in November 1974 with the notation: "I'd hate to think about being here if we weren't both here."

"These have been great years," the chief justice wrote in June 1976 to mark the sixth anniversary of Justice Blackmun's arrival. "I'm glad you've been here. And anyway, there is no peace and quiet & if we must be in the storms & turmoil, it's more fun to be in the Big Storms! Many more."

From Friend to Adversary

But soon, the friendship was in peril. [...]

Certainly the two diverged in their judicial views: in Justice Blackmun's first four years on the court, he voted with Chief Justice Burger 87.5 percent of the time in closely divided cases, but only 32.4 percent in the chief justice's last four years. But justices often maintain friendships across ideological lines. Mutually unrealistic expectations, perhaps, were more to blame for the rupture than differences over legal doctrine. While serving their country at the height of their careers, the two old friends painfully discovered that each was no longer the man he once had been.

Justice Blackmun suggested this in a brief memoir he left in his files. It was a brief tribute he wrote the year after Chief Justice Burger's death at the request of the law review of the William Mitchell College of Law, as the chief justice's alma mater had been renamed.

"I do not know what he expected, but surely he could not have anticipated that I would be an ideological clone," Justice Blackmun wrote. "He knew me better than that. But when disagreement came, his disappointment was evident and not concealed."

Justice Death (George Neumayr, 3/9/2004, American Spectator)

It was no wonder that he could disregard the Constitution so easily; he had disregarded an even more ancient document, the Hippocratic oath, before it. Historians of Roe v. Wade note that Blackmun holed up in the Mayo Clinic's library so as to determine to his tendentious satisfaction that ancient doctors ignored the Hippocratic oath and performed abortions. Hippocrates was wrong, concluded Blackmun. Why, Blackmun asked, did his oath not "dissuade abortion practice in his time and that of Rome?" Blackmun found some source that dismissed Hippocrates as an extremist of his time, having written an oath that came from "a group representing only a small segment of Greek opinion and that it certainly was not accepted by all ancient physicians."

Blackmun referred to the Hippocratic oath's "apparent rigidity." "The Oath was not uncontested even in Hippocrates' day," he wrote in Roe v. Wade, and if Christianity hadn't come along it would never have gained currency. "The Oath came to be popular. The emerging teachings of Christianity were in agreement with the Pythagorean ethic. The Oath 'became the nucleus of all medical ethics' and 'was applauded as the embodiment of truth.' Thus, suggests Dr. [Ludwig] Edelstein, it is 'a Pythagorean manifesto and not the expression of an absolute standard of medical conduct.'"

The irony of Blackmun's pompous pronouncement about the death penalty -- "From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death" -- was lost on him. He had set a real machinery of death, the abortion industry, in motion -- and made sure to find a few deluded disciples like Anthony Kennedy to keep it going.

It seems not just unaware but downright bizarre that Ms Greenhouse nowhere mentions Roe in her rather lengthy discussion of why the two justices fell out.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 12, 2004 5:14 PM