227 - The Ideologies of Ruth Bader Ginsberg

Life Matters

With the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there is a renewed understanding in the American conscience that the purpose of the Supreme Court is to affirm laws that are truly just. It is absolutely essential that we have an understanding of what determines justice from injustice.

If Sandra Day O'Connor was the first woman on the Supreme Court, why is Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG) heralded as the cutting-edge, feminist icon of American jurisprudence? Simple: Political feminism is not about advancing women. It is about advancing ideology.

"There will never be enough women on the Supreme Court until there are nine."~RBG

In this special Life Matters broadcast, Brian Johnston explores the recent film lionizing "RBG", what it really says about society and the Supreme Court, and RBG in particular.

Commissioner Johnston may stun some when he asserts that there is in fact nothing original to Justice Ginsburg's political and legal theory. Even in the 1960's when Ginsburg was working her way through the legal world, her thoughts were not in fact 'unique'. Ginsburg, like many Ivy League graduates of the time, seemed to be expressing 'creative thinking' when in fact they were simply mouthing essential Marxist talking points. In the '60s such statements were not often openly credited to a Marxist worldview. That does not alter the content, nor the academic origins of this ideology to 'fundamentally change' the nature of our society.

In 1848, Marx wrote that a woman, in the 'idealized Communist state' of perfection, would no longer be seen by her husband as 'a tool in his means of production.' She was to control and be her own means of production. The natural outflow of this in the case of childbirth, is that she alone was to control how, when, or if a birth were to take place.

Ginsburg is unhappy with the Roe v. Wade decision because she understands - and proclaims in the program - that it created problems going too far at once in striking down even the mildest restrictions on abortion. (In 1973 California's/New York's/ Mass./Colorado's were all liberal abortion laws at the time.) Her preference is a sweeping decision which would give unlimited-abortion rights, the right to treat the child in the womb as disposable chattel, and to grant this right on the basis of gender; or as the title of her 'bio-pic movie suggests, "On the Basis of Sex".