Patrick Link

“The Bush administration caught a break when the Supreme Court handed down a compromise on June 29. Ruling 5–4, the justices preserved key portions of the Pennsylvania law but also upheld Roe, striking down the portion of the Abortion Control Act that placed an “undue burden” on the mother’s efforts to seek an abortion, which was just the spousal notification requirement. The court also overturned the trimester standard governing abortion restrictions in favor of the looser concept of “viability.” Sandra Day O’Connor, writing the majority opinion, expressed a degree of exasperation with the Republican administration’s continued efforts to attack Roe: “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt. Yet 19 years after our holding that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy in its early stages, Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), that definition of liberty is still questioned. Joining the respondents as amicus curiae, the United States, as it has done in five other cases in the last decade, again asks us to overrule Roe.” Justice O’Connor’s opinion also included a good deal of concern for the institutional damage that would happen if the court were politically whipsawed to overturn the settled precedent of Roe: “A decision to overrule Roe’s essential holding under the existing circumstances would address error, if error there was, at the cost of both profound and unnecessary damage to the Court’s legitimacy, and to the nation’s commitment to the rule of law. It is therefore imperative to adhere to the essence of Roe’s original decision, and we do so today.” In his dissent, Chief Justice William Rehnquist complained that the court had rendered Roe a “facade” and replaced it with something “created largely out of whole cloth” and “not built to last.” “Roe v. Wade stands as a sort of Potemkin village,” Rehnquist wrote, “which may be pointed out to passers-by as a monument to the importance of adhering to precedent.”
― John Ganz, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

“The head of the Los Angeles Fraternal Order of Police told CBS Evening News, “I believe that the rap music promotes, by its very language and by its very actions—promotes violence against authority and, consequently, violence against law enforcement.” The music was “infecting young people with hate and bigotry,” editor Philip Gailey wrote in The St. Petersburg Times. “No amount of government aid to the cities will be able to repair the damage the hate rappers are doing to race relations. They are as sick as any Klansman.”
― John Ganz, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

“Within a decade, South Africa would find itself teetering on the brink of an all-out war with Cuba and Angola.”
― Leopold Scholtz, The South African Defence Forces in the Border War 1966-1989

“The essays Trilling wrote in the later 1930s and 1940s established the position of his epochmaking The Liberal Imagination, his Cold War liberal triumph of 1950, which sold nearly 200,000 copies. This book is perhaps the essential one, alongside Trilling’s 1947 novel The Middle of the Journey, in rethinking the whole era of liberal political theory. By canonizing Freud for Cold War liberalism, the mature Trilling ratified the abandonment of the Enlightenment, the vilification of progress for fear that it always serves as pretext for terror, and above all the psychic self-constraint at the core of liberal thought.”
― Samuel Moyn, Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times