The fact that “progressives” in their opposition to constitutional textualists/originalists—whom leftists know approach the U.S. Constitution with more rigorous fidelity than do “progressive” Justices—focus almost exclusively on the possibility that Roe v. Wade may be overturned would seem a tacit admission that there exists no constitutional right of women to have their intrauterine offspring slaughtered. The infamous Roe v. Wade is on the chopping block, and leftists are more distraught over the possible decapitation of Roe than they are over the actual decapitations of tiny humans.

In their frenzied fear that human slaughter may be one day be illegal, leftists fume irrationally that the overturn of Roe threatens the constitutional right of stronger, more developed, and powerful humans (i.e., oppressors) to order the killings of weaker, imperfect, unwanted humans (i.e., the oppressed). Well, here’s some food for thought about Roe v. Wade from “progressives” who support the legal right of women to choose to have more vulnerable humans killed—quotes that shrieking feminists may find wholly unpalatable:

• “One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.” (Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law School professor).

• “As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose” (Edward Lazarus, former clerk to SCOTUS Justice Harry Blackmun).

• What, exactly, is the problem with Roe? The problem, I believe, is that it has little connection to the Constitutional right it purportedly interpreted. A constitutional right to privacy broad enough to include abortion has no meaningful foundation in constitutional text, history, or precedent—at least, it does not if those sources are fairly described and reasonably faithfully followed” (Edward Lazarus).

• “[A]s a matter of constitutional interpretation, even most liberal jurisprudes — if you administer truth serum—will tell you it is basically indefensible” (Edward Lazarus).

• “Blackmun’s [Supreme Court] papers vindicate every indictment of Roe: invention, overreach, arbitrariness, textual indifference” (William Saletan, Slate magazine writer).

• Roe “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be…. What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure. Nor is it explainable in terms of the unusual political impotence of the group judicially protected vis-à-vis the interest that legislatively prevailed over it.… At times the inferences the Court has drawn from the values the Constitution marks for special protection have been controversial, even shaky, but never before has its sense of an obligation to draw one been so obviously lacking” (John Hart Ely, clerk for Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren).

• Roe “is a lousy opinion that disenfranchised millions of conservatives on an issue about which they care deeply.” (Benjamin Wittes, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution).

• “[T]he very basis of the Roe v. Wade decision—the one that grounds abortion rights in the Constitution—strikes many people now as faintly ridiculous. Whatever abortion may be, it cannot simply be a matter of privacy…. As a layman, it’s hard for me to raise profound constitutional objections to the decision. But it is not hard to say it confounds our common-sense understanding of what privacy is. If a Supreme Court ruling is going to affect so many people then it ought to rest on perfectly clear logic and up-to-date science. Roe, with its reliance on trimesters and viability, has a musty feel to it, and its argument about privacy raises more questions than it answers…. “[Roe] is a Supreme Court decision whose reasoning has not held up. It seems more fiat than argument…. Still, a bad decision is a bad decision. If the best we can say for it is that the end justifies the means, then we have not only lost the argument—but a bit of our soul as well” (Richard Cohen, Washington Post columnist).

• “Judges have no special competence, qualifications, or mandate to decide between equally compelling moral claims (as in the abortion controversy) …. [C]lear governing constitutional principles… are not present” (Alan Dershowitz, former Harvard Law School professor).

• “In short, 30 years later, it seems increasingly clear that this pro-choice magazine was correct in 1973 when it criticized Roe on constitutional grounds. Its overturning would be the best thing that could happen to the federal judiciary, the pro-choice movement, and the moderate majority of the American people…. Thirty years after Roe, the finest constitutional minds in the country still have not been able to produce a constitutional justification for striking down restrictions on early-term abortions that is substantially more convincing than Justice Harry Blackmun’s famously artless opinion itself. As a result, the pro-choice majority asks nominees to swear allegiance to the decision without being able to identify an intelligible principle to support it” (Jeffrey Rosen, George Washington University Law School professor, former clerk to Judge Abner Mikva).

• “Liberal judicial activism peaked with Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion decision…. Although I am pro-choice, I was taught in law school, and still believe, that Roe v. Wade is a muddle of bad reasoning and an authentic example of judicial overreaching” (Michael Kinsley, attorney, political journalist).

• “[I]t is time to admit in public that, as an example of the practice of constitutional opinion writing, Roe is a serious disappointment. You will be hard-pressed to find a constitutional law professor, even among those who support the idea of constitutional protection for the right to choose, who will embrace the opinion itself rather than the result. This is not surprising. As constitutional argument, Roe is barely coherent. The court pulled its fundamental right to choose more or less from the constitutional ether. It supported that right via a lengthy, but purposeless, cross-cultural historical review of abortion restrictions and a tidy but irrelevant refutation of the straw-man argument that a fetus is a constitutional ‘person’ entited [sic] to the protection of the 14th Amendment…. By declaring an inviolable fundamental right to abortion, Roe short-circuited the democratic deliberation that is the most reliable method of deciding questions of competing values” (Kermit Roosevelt, University of Pennsylvania Law School professor).

• “The failure to confront the issue in principled terms leaves the opinion to read like a set of hospital rules and regulations…. Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution” (Archibald Cox, JFK’s Solicitor General, former Harvard Law School professor).

Roe v. Wade, my friends, is the SCOTUS decision that “progressives” argue absolute fidelity to precedent demands Justices uphold. If they think “lousy,” “indefensible,” “barely coherent,” unintelligible, a-constitutional non-reasoning must be honored in slavish service to the political end of allowing feticide, I hate to imagine what they would have thought about revisiting Dred Scott.

Staci Fox, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Southeast headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia said this about the Alabama ban on human slaughter: “[T]hese laws are unconstitutional and they [pro-life advocates] don’t care.”

It’s remarkable that the Founding Fathers managed to make clear to “progressives” that women have a constitutional right to have their offspring offed without ever uttering a single word about it in the U.S. Constitution.

Here are some quotes from liberal scholars and writers on Roe v. Wade collected by Timothy P. Carney, commentary editor at the Washington Examiner and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute—quotes that shrieking feminists may find wholly unpalatable:

• “One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.” (Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law School professor).

• “As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose” (Edward Lazarus, former clerk to SCOTUS Justice Harry Blackmun).

• What, exactly, is the problem with Roe? The problem, I believe, is that it has little connection to the Constitutional right it purportedly interpreted. A constitutional right to privacy broad enough to include abortion has no meaningful foundation in constitutional text, history, or precedent—at least, it does not if those sources are fairly described and reasonably faithfully followed” (Edward Lazarus).

• “[A]s a matter of constitutional interpretation, even most liberal jurisprudes — if you administer truth serum—will tell you it is basically indefensible” (Edward Lazarus).

• “Blackmun’s [Supreme Court] papers vindicate every indictment of Roe: invention, overreach, arbitrariness, textual indifference” (William Saletan, Slate magazine writer).

• Roe “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be…. What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the U.S. Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure. Nor is it explainable in terms of the unusual political impotence of the group judicially protected vis-à-vis the interest that legislatively prevailed over it.… At times the inferences the Court has drawn from the values the Constitution marks for special protection have been controversial, even shaky, but never before has its sense of an obligation to draw one been so obviously lacking” (John Hart Ely, clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren).

• Roe “is a lousy opinion that disenfranchised millions of conservatives on an issue about which they care deeply.” (Benjamin Wittes, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution).

• “[T]he very basis of the Roe v. Wade decision—the one that grounds abortion rights in the Constitution—strikes many people now as faintly ridiculous. Whatever abortion may be, it cannot simply be a matter of privacy…. As a layman, it’s hard for me to raise profound constitutional objections to the decision. But it is not hard to say it confounds our common-sense understanding of what privacy is. If a Supreme Court ruling is going to affect so many people then it ought to rest on perfectly clear logic and up-to-date science. Roe, with its reliance on trimesters and viability, has a musty feel to it, and its argument about privacy raises more questions than it answers…. “[Roe] is a Supreme Court decision whose reasoning has not held up. It seems more fiat than argument…. Still, a bad decision is a bad decision. If the best we can say for it is that the end justifies the means, then we have not only lost the argument—but a bit of our soul as well” (Richard Cohen, Washington Post columnist).

• “Judges have no special competence, qualifications, or mandate to decide between equally compelling moral claims (as in the abortion controversy) …. [C]lear governing constitutional principles… are not present” (Alan Dershowitz, former Harvard Law School professor).

• “In short, 30 years later, it seems increasingly clear that this pro-choice magazine was correct in 1973 when it criticized Roe on constitutional grounds. Its overturning would be the best thing that could happen to the federal judiciary, the pro-choice movement, and the moderate majority of the American people…. Thirty years after Roe, the finest constitutional minds in the country still have not been able to produce a constitutional justification for striking down restrictions on early-term abortions that is substantially more convincing than Justice Harry Blackmun’s famously artless opinion itself. As a result, the pro-choice majority asks nominees to swear allegiance to the decision without being able to identify an intelligible principle to support it” (Jeffrey Rosen, George Washington University Law School professor, former clerk to Judge Abner Mikva).

• “Liberal judicial activism peaked with Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion decision…. Although I am pro-choice, I was taught in law school, and still believe, that Roe v. Wade is a muddle of bad reasoning and an authentic example of judicial overreaching” (Michael Kinsley, attorney, political journalist).

• “[I]t is time to admit in public that, as an example of the practice of constitutional opinion writing, Roe is a serious disappointment. You will be hard-pressed to find a constitutional law professor, even among those who support the idea of constitutional protection for the right to choose, who will embrace the opinion itself rather than the result. This is not surprising. As constitutional argument, Roe is barely coherent. The court pulled its fundamental right to choose more or less from the constitutional ether. It supported that right via a lengthy, but purposeless, cross-cultural historical review of abortion restrictions and a tidy but irrelevant refutation of the straw-man argument that a fetus is a constitutional ‘person’ entited [sic] to the protection of the 14th Amendment…. By declaring an inviolable fundamental right to abortion, Roe short-circuited the democratic deliberation that is the most reliable method of deciding questions of competing values” (Kermit Roosevelt, University of Pennsylvania Law School professor).

• “The failure to confront the issue in principled terms leaves the opinion to read like a set of hospital rules and regulations…. Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution” (Archibald Cox, JFK’s Solicitor General, former Harvard Law School professor).

Roe v. Wade is the SCOTUS decision that “progressives” argue absolute fidelity to precedent demands Justices uphold. If they think “lousy,” “indefensible,” “barely coherent,” unintelligible, a-constitutional non-reasoning must be honored in slavish service to the political end of allowing feticide, I hate to imagine what they would have thought about revisiting Dred Scott.

Save these quotes to show your pro-human slaughter friends next time they claim Roe v. Wade is the unchallengeable law of the land and reflects immutable constitutional truths.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

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There is a great deal of talk about America’s opioid crisis and what can be done about such drugs.  This has led to a focus on narcotic painkillers.  In reality, America has an addiction problem.  “What might be some of the factors leading to such addictions?” is a slightly different twist to a lot of the attention placed upon the types of drugs being abused.  Could certain trends be connected to this dependent behavior?

In 1960, only 3 percent of men in their prime were not in the U.S. labor force.  Today, that number has risen to 11 percent.   What impact might that have on men and the male psyche?  Is there a connection between a loss of work, government assistance, and substance abuse?

Here’s one possible revelation.  Among non-working men ages 24- 54 roughly half are taking a pain pill during the day.  Two-thirds of those are prescription medicines.

And then there is this: two-thirds of nonworking men who take pain pills use government programs, especially Medicaid, to pay for them.

Economist Alan B. Krueger looked into this in a study released through the Brookings Institution.  He writes that, “labor force participation is lower in areas of the U.S. with a high rate of opioid prescriptions, and labor force participation fell more in areas with a high rate of opioid prescriptions.”   (About 40 percent of non-working men say pain keeps them from working.)

If there is a connection, the question seems to be “did losing work increase drug use or abuse?” or “did more drug abuse lead to a less employment?”  One may wonder too, what the secondary effects from the government’s role might be, if any, in paying for such a large chunk of these medicines.  The study shows a trend, but is it not conclusive. Still, it is worthwhile to contemplate possible links to certain social problems.

This article was originally published by AFA of Indiana.

As the American people prepare to vote on marijuana ballot measures in three states and the District of Columbia, measures which would make the mind-altering substance more freely available, more bad news keeps coming for the well-funded pothead lobby.

In a major terrorism-related case, a participant in the cover-up of the Boston Marathon bombing conspiracy, Robel Phillipos, claimed the drug had so many bad effects on his brain that he lied to federal agents.

The key question, however, is whether the major media will ever start reporting on the substantial evidence linking “cannabis” and mental illness, violence and terrorism.

The “reefer madness” defense for Phillipos, a close friend and associate of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev, would be laughable were it not for the fact that the Boston bombings killed three people and injured hundreds. Martin Richard, the eight-year-old boy killed in the bombing, had been photographed holding a sign that said, “No more hurting people. Peace.”

The pothead defense clearly didn’t work out the way his radical left lawyers had planned; Phillipos has now been found guilty by a jury of lying to the FBI, “despite his claim that he was too high to remember what he had done,” as The Atlantic magazine described the unusual defense.

The son of an Ethiopian immigrant, Phillipos knew that two other Tsarnaev friends removed a backpack containing evidence of the terrorist crime from his college dorm room at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. But he lied about it to federal agents.

His attorney, Susan Church, and her co-counsel, Derege Demissie, had argued that “he smoked marijuana about a half-dozen times that day, and was simply unable to reconstruct his actions during a series of high-pressure interviews with federal agents,” The Boston Globe reported. The Globe said legal analysts were divided over whether the “I forget because of marijuana” defense would work.

Well, it didn’t.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s office, between April 19, 2013 and April 26, 2013, federal investigators interviewed Phillipos five times about the bombing and during each of those interviews Phillipos lied. He blamed marijuana for all of these memory “lapses.”

U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said, “In the wake of one of the most significant events in this city’s modern history—an event which left two young women and a child dead, and many more injured —thousands of ordinary citizens assisted law enforcement in identifying and locating the perpetrators.” However, she said that Phillipos did just the opposite. “He lied to agents when he could have helped. He concealed when he could have assisted,” she said.

He faces eight years in prison for each of the two counts of lying, three years of supervised release, and a fine of $250,000 for each charge.

Incredibly, former governor of Massachusetts and 1988 Democratic nominee for president Michael Dukakis testified on his behalf and said he and his wife had taken him to the 2004 Democratic National Convention as a “special guest.” Dukakis said, “We watched him grow up.”

Based on the defense of his crimes offered by his lawyers, it appears that he grew up into a zombie willing to lie about his knowledge of the worst terrorist incident in Boston history because marijuana clouded his memory.

This provocative legal theory came, not surprisingly, from the far-left. His attorney Susan Church previously served as co-chair of the Massachusetts Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, and regularly conducts “know your rights” seminars at community centers and various immigrant advocacy groups.

Her bio neglects to point out that the National Lawyers Guild was once identified as a Communist Party front. Her co-counsel, Derege Demissie, is a member of the board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.

Church focuses on “immigration law and criminal defense,” and “advocates for immigrants with criminal convictions facing deportation and immigrants seeking immigration benefits in the United States.” She received the “Detention Panel Attorney of the Year” award from the Political Asylum Immigrant Representation project.

Leave it to the ACLU and the far-left National Lawyers Guild to offer marijuana as a defense for lying about terrorism.

The “high out of his mind” defense, though ultimately unsuccessful, does add to the questions about marijuana’s role in the crime, since Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev was a heavy marijuana user and dealer. His older brother, killed in a shoot-out, was implicated in a triple murder involving marijuana being thrown on three dead bodies whose throats were slit.

To add to the intrigue, a sister of the Boston Marathon bombers who goes by the name of Bella Tsarnaeva is also facing a marijuana charge.

The Bergen County, New Jersey, Record reported that Tsarnaeva was arrested after police responded to her home on a domestic violence report and found marijuana. The paper said both Tsarnaeva and her boyfriend, Ahmad Khalil, were indicted on April 10 for possession of marijuana with intent to distribute.

The number of people associated with the bombers and/or the conspiracy has led to speculation that it grew out of a marijuana smuggling operation, possibly with foreign ties. The Tsarnaev brothers were born in the former Soviet Union.

It has long been known that terrorist groups operating in drug-producing regions of the world such as Afghanistan, Colombia and Peru, have been heavily involved in the drug trade.

Despite Phillipos’ failure to blame pot for his lies, Reuters news agency noted that his lawyers called one expert, Dr. Alan Wartenberg, who said that marijuana can “impair memory” and “impair executive functions,” as well as judgment and other brain functions. Wartenberg said younger men’s brains are “more prone to cognitive impairment from marijuana” than those in older men.

Many studies back up the testimony. One study from Northwestern University found that teenagers who were heavy marijuana users had “abnormal changes in their brain structures related to working memory and performed poorly on memory tasks.”

But while the drug can have an extremely negative effect on the brain, the idea that smoking marijuana on a constant basis gets you off the hook for lying about crimes of terrorism has now been rejected by a jury.

Still, how many more “stoners” will be produced if the marijuana ballot measures pass on November 4? The stakes are so high that the Brookings Institution is calling them the “Marijuana Midterms.”

The dope lobby is heavily funded, with much of the money coming from groups associated with billionaires George Soros and Peter Lewis. Other funds are supplied by the marijuana business, which generates repeat customers dependent on the weed.

One analysis shows that in Oregon, the marijuana lobby is spending $2 million on a prime-time TV ad campaign, while opponents have raised a mere $168,000. In Alaska, dopers have raised $867,000 while opponents have only raised $97,000.

In states like California, Washington and Colorado, where marijuana has been legalized, experts are now warning about edible marijuana products disguised as candies, cookies and brownies falling into the hands of kids. The Washington Poison Center warns that, of the reported cases of pediatric marijuana exposures in Washington State, 27 percent were cases involving children from one to three years old.

While drugging kids with marijuana appears to be on the rise, the media seem to be treating these cases as harmless pranks.

The dope lobby, meanwhile, is extremely upset over my previous column examining a connection between high-profile cases of Islamic terrorism and violence and marijuana addiction. One critic called my column “offensive,” saying, “I hope that all TWB readers contact him and let them know what they think of his reefer madness.”

TWB stands for “The Weed Blog,” devoted to all things marijuana-related. It features “marijuana books,” cannabis recipes, and even “grower tips.” It is typical of the consuming passion for the drug that characterizes heavy users.

The editors and administrators are identified by the names “Johnny Green” and “Jay Smoker,” which are obviously pseudonyms for marijuana users and activists. They are determined to portray marijuana addiction in the best possible light.

This is typical of the marijuana mentality that gripped the Boston bombers and their collaborators, until one of them, Phillipos, got caught by the feds and lied. Then he decided he had to blame pot for his mental problems in order to avoid prison.

This article was originally posted at the Accuracy in Media website.