14 Dec 2005
Borked

Back in the day, I thought that Robert Bork was unfairly mangled in the Senate confirmation hearings on his Supreme Court nomination, and actually felt almost sorry for him and the personal travails the Democrats put him through.

Now, twenty some years later, I must offer a rousing, if belated "THANK YOU!" to Ted Kennedy (ewwww! yuk! gag - choke - spit!) and other liberals who led the charge to block his nomination. Why this change of heart?

Because of this item from Reason's Hit and Run blog, posted by Jacob Sullum on December 5th. It quotes Bork's views on censorship from a recent issue of National Review, and if this doesn't put a chill in your bones, then you have no claim to be a lover of freedom.

"Liberty in America can be enhanced by reinstating, legislatively, restraints upon the direction of our culture and morality," writes the former appeals court judge, now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "Censorship as an enhancement of liberty may seem paradoxical. Yet it should be obvious, to all but dogmatic First Amendment absolutists, that people forced to live in an increasingly brutalized culture are, in a very real sense, not wholly free." Bork goes on to complain that "relations between the sexes are debased by pornography"; that "large parts of television are unwatchable"; that "motion pictures rely upon sex, gore, and pyrotechnics for the edification of the target audience of 14-year-olds"; and that "popular music hardly deserves the name of music."

I find it hard to believe that a man regarded as one of our finest legal scholars could write such a thing - this is so contrary to the principles that we regard as the bedrock of our freedom that it simply boggles the imagination to consider the damage this fascist (and I do not toss this epithet lightly) could have done from the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States.

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