How disappointing that L. Phillips Runyon III resorts to ad hominem arguments (“Decisions have become about views,” June 30) to advance uncivil dogma while refusing to argue the merits of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision vacating Roe vs. Wade: “What has become clear in the early 21st century is that Supreme Court decision-making isn’t based on preserving and occasionally refining legal precedents, but on advancing personal views of individual judges.”
That a former New Hampshire Superior Court judge advances such antipathy to reasoned judgement and expects us to wallow in biased catechism without his own reasoned arguments surely does not promote understanding nor civil dialogue. Regardless of one’s personal stance toward abortion and the purported rights thereto, the court’s majority made four fundamental arguments:
— The 14th Amendment is a “process” clause and not a tool to advance imaginatively divined “substance liberties.”
— Historical precedent fundamentally girds Constitutional analysis and, in this case, is dispositive.
— Casey and Roe were seriously flawed and cannot sustain constitutional muster, in law or in science.
— Stare decisis is not imperturbable, as the history of its various constraints surely supports.
Runyon knows that privacy rights related to telephone calls, etc., rely on alternate constitutional readings and are not rooted in a right to privacy per se to the extent allowing abortion. Such a right would disallow mandates forcing inoculations with an experimental genetic therapy, and would allow prostitution and a host of other untenable “privacy” matters, equally addressed by the Dobbs majority decision.
We beg Runyon, jurist that he is, to bless us with arguments on the merits of the ruling, not only to allow us insight into his experience and judicial understanding, but to advance civil discourse in lieu of personal belittlement.
Peter W. Allen
Temple