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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Activist Architect Of So Much Wrong Legacy Of Moral Rot Brennan Was Politically Correct Before It Was Fashionable.

Dwight Eisenhower once said the two greatest mistakes he made as president were then sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court. One was Justice William J. Brennan.

Eisenhower was lucky he didn’t live long enough to see all the social damage Brennan would do in a near-record 34 years on the nation’s highest court. This congenial rascal helped stamp out prayer and Bible readings in public schools, fought the death penalty, supported racial quotas, defended the right of protesters to burn the American flag, promoted the welfare state and was an outspoken supporter of abortion rights.

Maybe that’s why the liberal media and President Bill Clinton canonized him in maudlin eulogies. Brennan was politically correct before it was fashionable. He was the father of the judicial activists who infect our court system today with the politically motivated decisions.

In an essay published before he died, Brennan wrote: “The genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it may have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and present needs.” Translation: The Constitution says what we judicial kings of the 20th Century say it does, regardless of what the founders had in mind. With that philosophy, Brennan and the other social engineers of the 1973 court made the unprecedented discovery that a woman had the right to abort her unborn baby. Today, this abominable right kills 1.5 million unborns annually in this country and protects the barbaric practice of partial-birth abortion. We’d probably have a “right” to die and to kill grandma, too, if Brennan’s courts had been misinterpreting the Constitution now.

Fortunately, today’s court has begun to rein-in their excesses. Two years ago, the court began hacking away at the reverse discrimination inherent in affirmative action programs. It also started tearing down the suspect wall separating church and state that has been used to censor Christmas plays and muzzle graduation prayer.

We’re not better off today than we were in 1956, when Eisenhower goofed by nominating Brennan. The momentous rulings this so-called hero of individual rights helped craft left behind a moral rot that is tearing at our foundations still.

, DataTimes MEMO: For opposing view see headline: Prolific champion of freedom is gone

The following fields overflowed: SUPCAT = COLUMN, EDITORIAL - From both sides

For opposing view see headline: Prolific champion of freedom is gone

The following fields overflowed: SUPCAT = COLUMN, EDITORIAL - From both sides