The "conservative values" of the Democrat Party

[dude1394]

victory

The Democratic Party absorbed some serious blows from Madison Square Garden last week, but the harshest indictment may have issued from farther down Broadway, in a federal district court.

There a judge named Richard Conway Casey declared "unconstitutional" a law signed by President Bush to ban the practice of partial-birth abortion. The ACLU lawyers challenging the ban - a law opposed by most Senate Democrats, including John Kerry and John Edwards - declared themselves enormously pleased. "This is a great day for women's health," ACLU attorney Talcott Camp said as she departed the courtroom.

In case anyone was still listening, Judge Casey went on to describe the practice in question as "gruesome, brutal, barbaric and uncivilized" - and oh, by the way, a cause of "severe pain" to the expiring child. Although bound, the judge believed, to rule against a law not in precise accord with Supreme Court holdings, he expressed deep skepticism at the testimony of ACLU witnesses. Judge Casey did not believe "the purported reasons for why [the procedure] is medically necessary; rather they are theoretical or false" - which is about as close as you can come to being called a perjurer in a federal courtroom and still leave through the public exit.

It is not a happy state of affairs, for a legal cause and for a political party, when this counts as a victory. Never mind that the presiding judge has just found their own case to be deeply dishonest as to the medical facts. And never mind that last fall Democratic senators like Mr. Kerry were presumably relying on the same false information (falsified sounds more like it) when, browbeaten by the same lawyers and activists, they voted against the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. All that seems to matter to Ms. Camp and her fellow attorneys is that they got what they wanted - another "great day" - and so it's on to the next courtroom.