Liar Liar Supreme Court On Fire!!!

The lying behind the end of Roe v. Wade

Liar Liar Supreme Court on Fire

Like many people this week I am disturbed by the supreme court’s ruling on Roe v. Wade. But there is something else that disturbs me much more than the final ruling. While I may not agree with it, there is a legal argument to be made that many of the rights that have been declared to be constitutional by the Supreme Court in the last 50 years are on questionable grounds. Ruth Bader Ginsburg made that point years ago when she said abortion rights would be better served if the federal government passed a law allowing abortion with the limitations of Roe v. Wade. This would protect abortion from being overturned by a conservative court who did not believe that privacy rules were a proper foundation for abortion being constitutional. Again, I repeat, I’m not happy with the ruling but I understand that reasonable people and certainly reasonable judges can disagree. What I cannot abide is the degree of lying that has gotten us here with an apparent acceptance by much of the population.

Part of this feeling is ad hominem to me, and part of this comes from my commitment to Judaism. For the former it has always been a part of my psyche to tell the truth and to not lie. Maybe it is because I am not that smart, and it is much easier to remember only the truth than to know to whom I said what, and to have to bring the appropriate comment to the correct person.

The corollary to only telling the truth is that I detest the lie. As I see it, to navigate a life in society we need to have a shared reality. Facts are not owned they are shared. News needs to be factual, and we may have to allow for the interpretive bias of the source, but in the end there cannot be fake news, they are premeditated lies.

I need to be able to rely on what you tell me so that I can have shared trust with you. When you lie or betray me, you challenge the entire foundation for my coexistence with you and others in society.

A lie is a personal insult as well as a destabilizer of my equilibrium in this world. Working relationships are based on trust and honesty. If you work for me and tell me something about my business that ends up being a fabrication, you challenge my business and your role in it. Lie to me and you are fired.

If you are in my family and you lie to me, you weaken the sense of familial unity that is foundational for a family, and you lose the trust that I invested in you. A husband and wife’s interactions are so core to the survival of such an intimate relationship that spouses cannot be compelled to testify against each other in a court of law.

(It must also be said that there are times when a lie is not only permitted but may be required but I will get to it below.)

The other source for my antipathy to lying comes from the importance of truth telling in Judaism.

The Torah forbids perjury in both versions of the ten commandments. We are told, “ You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor “ (Exodus 20:13) . “Neither shall you bear false witness against your neighbor” (Deuteronomy 5:17). In the portion after the Ten Commandments, Parshat Mishpatim, known as the Book of the Covenant (Exodus 23:7) we read, “Keep yourself far from a lie.”

There are other passages which also condemn lying, “…he that speaks false-hood shall not be established before My eyes” (Psalm 101:7).

“There are six things which the Lord hates, indeed, seven which are an abomination unto Him: Haughty eyes, a lying tongue,…”(Proverbs 6:,16–17.)

In Zacharia (8:16) the prophet says, “These are the things you are to do: Speak the truth to one another…”)

There are countless passages in the Talmud and the later codes about the sin of lying, and to be fair there are detailed discussions on when lying is permitted, such as when it is what we would call a white lie. It is better to lie than to embarrass someone, but clearly that is not what we are talking about.

For me perhaps the strongest condemnation may be the voice of my grandmother saying in Yiddish,” Er is a ligner- He is a liar”. I can still feel the scorn and disgust in her voice. You would have thought she was talking about a Nazi.

Christians also have a long and debated literature on the issue of lying. For now, and for reasons that will become obvious allow me to point out that the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that lying is always wrong.

So, what am I so perturbed about this week? The Supreme Court’s ruling to overthrow Wade is a direct result of at least 3 judges lying to the Senate under oath, and to some of the Senators in private discussions in their offices. I assume we have all seen the clips of the last three judges appointed by the Liar in Chief, each asserting that Roe was a 50-year precedent of the Supreme Court, and they would accept it as such under the legal concept of Stare Decisis. There is no room to equivocate that they didn’t say it or mean it. There is no, “I crossed my fingers behind my back” defense for what they did. They knew what the question meant, and why it was asked, and they lied with full intention. All were Catholic and claimed the importance of their religious beliefs. All violated the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

I have never accepted for one second the integrity of President Trump who lies as easily as I breathe. Now we are learning in astonishing detail about his involvement in a coup to not relinquish his position. His lack of public decency was obvious when as a candidate he talked about grabbing women by their private parts. Prior to the Trump campaign, a tape like that would have led to leaving the race that day. Instead, he stood up to the indignation and then condemned everyone else from gold star families to pow John McCain; from Little Marco, to Low Energy Jeb. A Wikipedia file lists 62 people who have received a nick name from him, and some are listed with multiples. His actions on January 6th, now documented by the Congressional panel investigating Jan 6, only add to the list of despicable behavior. I would add one more crime. He lied so frequently and with such complete abandon, he has polluted the country’s ability to cherish or even recognize truthfulness.

But until this week I always held on to the Supreme Court as the last bastion to Trump’s degradation of the truth. If there was to be integrity left in government it was not to be found in the legislature or the executive it was only in the courts, and especially in the Supreme Court. It was the backstop to the lying, the cronyism, the corruption of dark money and thousands of lobbyists with seemingly unlimited money. It was the place where the constitution and the protections in or deriving from it would protect us even or perhaps especially as society evolved. I believed in the process, because that is what I observed of how an old revered but finite document called the Torah was able to be interpreted to allow for new realities in science and human evolution to be incorporated into the ancient text. Judicial interpreters (also known as Rabbis) continually breathed new life into the fixed document. That I believed is what the judges on the Supreme Court could and would do. Until this week when it became clear that the majority had lied to get the position. We now get to eat the fruit from the poisoned tree for a very long time.

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