Culture Wars Go International

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus of First Things has come out with a wonderful review on Robert Bork’s new book entitled Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges in this months issue:

Countries belonging to the United Nations, many of them antidemocratic and downright tyrannical, cooperate with Western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in creating international laws in order to impose upon their countries measures that they know they could not win by democratic means. “International law,” says Bork, “is not law but politics. For that reason, it is dangerous to give the name ‘law,’ which summons up respect, to political struggles that are essentially lawless.” The international New Class is often deeply anti-American and works hand-in-glove with American NGOs that are hostile to the morality of their own society. The result is that “international law becomes one more weapon in the domestic culture war.” The U.S. Supreme Court has also taken to citing the authority of foreign courts. In one risible instance, in a case having to do with delays in execution, Justice Stephen G. Breyer invoked decisions by the Privy Council of Jamaica and the supreme courts of India and Zimbabwe.

The Supreme Court appeals to a “living Constitution” and “evolving” social standards, but it is mainly the judiciary that is doing the evolving. Bork quotes Justice Antonin Scalia: “What secret knowledge, one must wonder, is breathed into lawyers when they become Justices of this Court, that enables them to discern that a practice which the text of the Constitution does not clearly proscribe, and which our people have regarded as constitutional for two hundred years, is in fact unconstitutional? . . . Day by day, case by case, [the Court] is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize.” Bork comments: “What we call conservatism on the Court is usually a mere holding action; liberals set the agenda and conservatives resist but rarely roll back prior liberal rulings or advance any agenda of their own. The result is a steady movement, occasionally delayed for the moment, of the Constitution to the cultural left.”