An interesting article in the NYTimes today about JGR's wife's work re: abortion, etc. (and some adoption stuff for me and Grant)--
WASHINGTON, July 22 - Judge John G. Roberts has left little hard evidence of his views on abortion in recent years and is widely expected to try to avoid the issue in his coming confirmation hearings.
But there is little mystery about the views of his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, a Roman Catholic lawyer from the Bronx whose pro bono work for Feminists for Life is drawing intense interest in the ideologically charged environment of a Supreme Court confirmation debate.
Some abortion opponents view her activities as a clear signal that the Robertses are committed to their cause; supporters of abortion rights fear the same thing. Others say that drawing a direct line from her activities to how her husband might rule on the Supreme Court - assuming that he not only shares her views, but would also act on them to overturn 32 years of legal precedents - is both politically risky and in bad form.
No less a Democratic stalwart than Senator Edward M. Kennedy said, at a breakfast meeting with reporters on Friday, that Mrs. Roberts's work "ought to be out of bounds."
Advocates on both sides have long acknowledged that with this issue, the personal is often political. But Mrs. Roberts has led an independent and unapologetic life that defies any attempt at pigeonholing.
Mrs. Roberts, who declined to be interviewed for this article, was not recruited by Feminists for Life, but sought the group out about a decade ago and offered her services as a lawyer, said its president, Serrin Foster. The group was reorganizing at the time and beginning to focus its work on college campuses. Its mission statement, driven home in advertising in recent years, says: "Abortion is a reflection that our society has failed to meet the needs of women. Women deserve better than abortion."
Mrs. Roberts served on the board of the organization for four years, and later provided legal services. Ms. Foster said that as an adoptive parent, Mrs. Roberts made contributions that included urging the group to focus more on the needs of biological mothers, and adding a biological mother to the board of directors.
Ms. Foster said Feminists for Life was committed not only to ending abortion, but also to making it "unthinkable" by providing every woman with the assistance she needs. Reversing Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that recognized a constitutional right to abortion, is a goal, she said, "but not enough."
In recent years, the group has supported efforts to ban the procedure that critics call partial-birth abortion, which is usually performed in the second and third trimesters, as well as legislation that prohibits transporting a minor across state lines to evade parental notification laws. In previous years, the group weighed in on litigation seeking further restrictions on abortion, but Ms. Foster said that was before Mrs. Roberts joined the board.
"We're not a litigious institution now," Ms. Foster said. "We decided we were not a legal group; we were going to go after parenting resources and pregnancy resources, and Jane was part of that redefinition. She came on at that time." . . . .
After graduating from St. Catherine's Academy, an all-girls' high school in the Bronx, Mrs. Roberts joined the first class of women to enter the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Mass., where she attended Mass several times a week, tutored football players in mathematics, her major, and carved a path as a student leader. A budding feminist even with her traditionalist streak, she was one of four students who represented the student body in a heated dispute when the feminist scholar Marilyn French, who taught at the college from 1972 to 1976, was denied tenure.
"We were the pioneers," said Connie McCaffrey, a clinical social worker at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire who has been a close friend of Mrs. Roberts since they met on the first day of freshman year. "There was a very strong sense of camaraderie among the women who came in that year. And Janey took her responsibilities as one among that group very seriously."
Determined to explore the world, she graduated from Holy Cross in 1976, traveled to Australia on a Rotary scholarship, trekked through Nepal and backpacked around Europe before earning a master's degree in applied mathematics from Brown in 1981 and a law degree from Georgetown in 1984.
The couple married in July 1996, when they were both 41, and friends say they immediately began discussing their desire to start a family, even talking about children at their wedding reception. . . .
In 2000 the couple adopted a daughter, Josephine, and a son, John, through what Ms. Torre said was a private adoption.
This information may have nothing to do with JGR's views, in a direct sense, but it seems to continue to paint a picture of a kind of serious Roman Catholic ethics--which might be interesting in relation to the death penalty, and possibly even of places like the School of the Americas, as it was formerly known, which is protested every year by thousands of Catholics due to the killings of Archbishop Romero and 4 Jesuit priests in Central America in the 1980s.
I have to say, much as I laughed at Flyboy's comments above, unless something truly scandalous breaks, this doesn't look like a candidate that can be reasonably opposed by the Democrats without political damage, the way US politics seems to play out these days. I mean, Robert Bork had close ties to Nixon, was the one who agreed to fire the special prosecutor in the Watergate scandal when two other attorneys general (Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshouse) had resigned rather than carry out the order.
I just have my doubts that there's that kind of rotting corpse in this guy's closet. |
