President Ronald Reagan and his Supreme Court justice nominee Sandra Day O’Connor on July 15, 1981. / Public Domain
CNA Newsroom, Dec 1, 2023 / 17:40 pm (CNA).
Former U.S. Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a swing vote who became a key part of the court’s longtime abortion-supporting majority, died Friday. She was 93 and had been suffering from dementia for several years.
Born Sandra Day in El Paso, Texas, in 1930, she grew up on a ranch in eastern Arizona. She was baptized an Episcopalian and later attended Episcopal churches as an adult.
She went to Stanford and Stanford Law School at a time when few women did either. As an undergraduate, she dated future Supreme Court colleague William Rehnquist and turned down an offer of marriage from him. Instead, she married another fellow law school student, John O’Connor.
As a female lawyer during the 1950s, she initially had trouble getting work but eventually joined a prosecutor’s office. She took five years off from practicing law after the birth of the second of her three children to tend to them.
In 1965 she joined the office of the Arizona attorney general, a Republican, after campaigning the year before for the Republican nominee for president, Barry Goldwater, a fellow Arizonan. In 1969 the governor appointed her to fill a vacancy in the Arizona Senate, where she rose to become majority leader. She left in 1974 for a state judgeship, eventually rising to the Arizona Court of Appeals, which is the second-highest court in the state.
O’Connor and abortion
President Ronald Reagan nominated O’Connor to the U.S. Supreme Court in July 1981, fulfilling a campaign promise to name the first woman to the nation’s highest court.
Reagan was unaware at the time of her selection that O’Connor as a Republican state senator in the 1970s supported abortion, according to conservative columnist Robert Novak’s 2007 autobiography “The Prince of Darkness.” When social conservatives erupted over the announcement, Reagan asked his attorney general to check on complaints about her.
The task went to a young aide, who called O’Connor and reported in a memo that she said she could not recall how she had voted on a 1970 bill seeking to legalize abortion in the state — even though she was a co-sponsor of it. (Before the Internet, it wasn’t easy to check such information.)
She also told the aide — Kenneth Starr, who later served as independent counsel investigating President Bill Clinton during the 1990s — that she “had never had any disputes or controversies” with the leader of the pro-life movement in Arizona, according to a memo Starr wrote. But the pro-life leader told Novak a couple of days later that she had frequently clashed with O’Connor, calling her “one of the most powerful pro-abortionists in the Senate.”
Even so, O’Connor’s nomination went forward and sailed through the U.S. Senate.
Once she joined the court, O’Connor’s position on abortion wasn’t immediately clear. In 1986, she voted with the minority in a 5-4 ruling that struck down a Pennsylvania law that required abortion providers to inform a woman seeking an abortion about fetal development and about “detrimental physical and psychological effects” and “particular medical risks” of an abortion.
O’Connor in her dissent called the court’s abortion decisions to that time “a major distortion in the Court’s constitutional jurisprudence” and said the majority’s decision in the case before it, Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, “makes it painfully clear that no legal rule or doctrine is safe from ad hoc nullification by this Court when an occasion for its application arises in a case involving state regulation of abortion.”
But her most memorable abortion vote came in the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which she joined the 5-4 majority in upholding what the court called the “essential holding” of Roe v. Wade that abortion is a “fundamental right” before a fetus is capable of living outside the womb.
In Casey, O’Connor co-wrote the plurality opinion that continued a federal right to abortion for another 30 years.
‘Loosen up, Sandy’
O’Connor was a key player in other landmark decisions as well.
In 1986, she joined the majority in the 5-4 decision Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld as constitutional a state statute in Georgia that criminalized sodomy. (The court overturned that ruling in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas; O’Connor joined the 6-3 majority, though she made a distinction between the two cases because Texas’ law banned sodomy only between two members of the same sex, while Georgia’s statute banned sodomy generally.)
In 2003, O’Connor wrote the majority opinion in the 5-4 decision Grutter v. Bollinger, which upheld affirmative action based on race in public university admissions. (The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Grutter decision in June 2023 in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.)
In 2005, she sided with the 5-4 majority in McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union that found that displays of the Ten Commandments at two state courthouses in Kentucky violated the Constitution.
She is perhaps better remembered, though, for what happened during a social occasion several years after she joined the court.
In 1985, O’Connor went to a black-tie event in Washington where she was seated near John Riggins, a Washington Redskins star running back, who had drunk “a few beers” and two double scotches before knocking over and spilling four bottles of wine on the table.
O’Connor had previously said she had to leave early and was in the process of doing so when Riggins, trying to get her to stay, piped up: “Loosen up, Sandy baby.”
He then passed out.
O’Connor got a kick out of it and got big laughs when she made a reference to it at the beginning of a speech a few days later.
Retirement
O’Connor retired from the court in January 2006 at age 75 to spend time with her husband, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease around the early 1990s. (He died in 2009.)
O’Connor was replaced by Samuel Alito, who has since become one of the most conservative justices and who wrote the majority decision in Jackson Women’s Health Center v. Dobbs, which last year overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
[…]
As William F. Buckley once apologized to Gore Vidal, in a National Review article, Gore’s homosexual activity was quite okay, but it was not okay for Buckley to simply use the word; “bottoms up,” he ended.
Biden might not be certifiably stupid, but he is an evil puppet by now redefining Title IX to include gender identity. Also, at least sorta stupid, given the science–and evidence of underlying problems–which cannot be suppressed forever.
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/executive-summary-sexuality-and-gender
“[….] Compared to the general population, adults who have undergone sex-reassignment surgery continue to have a higher risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes. One study found that, compared to controls, sex-reassigned individuals were about 5 times more likely to attempt suicide and about 19 times more likely to die by suicide [….]”
Mr. Beaulieu;
I was not familiar with the particulars of Mr. Buckley’s apology to Mr. Vidal, so your quoting it – particularly the phrase ‘bottoms up’ gave me a much-needed laugh, for which I thank you.
Were Bishop Gruss my Bishop I would be proud of him and I would tell him so. He had to know in advance that what he said would get him in trouble.
1) He said it
2) He got in trouble
3) He made the proper apology
ergo
4) Mission accomplished
Never apologize for speaking the truth, your Excellency.
Maybe he should have referred to Biden as a moral imbecile. Still harsh, but true nonetheless.
I have said a lot worse about Biden and I don’t apologize for it. Whether his senility has rendered him stupid is an interesting question. He certainly was smart (and unscrupulous) enough to eventually occupy the most powerful political position in the world, even though he is not calling the shots.
Bishops Gruss should have ignored whatever backlash he may gotten from his offhand remark. It was a nonstory that didn’t deserve a reply. Of course, he did just the opposite, offering an apology and even saying that he doesn’t harbor any anger towards this Catholic president who has relentlessly and consistently implemented extreme anti-Christian policies. Apparently, His Excellency does not think there is such a thing as righteous anger. It was a pathetic performance, so typical of what we get from the hierarchy of the Church. We would be much better off if they didn’t say anything.
I think the word, “unwise” would have been more accurate and more acceptable to Pres. Biden and his supporters. Also, the adjective should have been connected with Pres. Biden’s words, not with him personally.
Perhaps you are not aware that at this time in history, children are not permitted to use the word “stupid” in most school, sports, or childcare settings. It antagonizes others and can lead to a counterattack, which for children, often means hitting, slapping, etc. Among older children, insults like this can lead to even worse and more violent retaliation.
If children can’t use the word, adults should set the example and not use the word. There are many words in the English language that can communicate a message without insulting the person.
It’s intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that Bishop Gruss’s choice of this adjective in describing Joseph Robinette Biden Jr is entirely accurate regardless of the offense that the thin skinned cabal may take to it.
stupid stu·pid adjective
a: slow of mind : obtuse
b: given to unintelligent decisions or acts : acting in an unintelligent or careless manner
c: lacking intelligence or reason
thank you
Well Mrs. Sharon, you are correct that we shouldn’t insult others. Especially as Christians.
But I think stupid is a perfectly good word and I hate to see the thought police clamp down on the English language.
Really dreadful obscenities are a routine part of our entertainment industry these days but we get more upset over old fashioned words like stupid. And I’m not picking on you Mrs. Sharon. I just mean our current culture.
Well Sharon, mark me down for “couldn’t care less” what the kiddies are allowed to do. I am not interested in having my use of language confined to what is appropriate for slap-happy toddlers, just because some woke administrator says so. I am not interested in the leftist playbook of suppressing acceptable speech, or distorting it with made up words, but I am sadly aware of efforts in that direction by our “educational” institutions. “Stupid” is a perfectly good English word, which means showing a lack of intelligence or common sense. There are a great many stupid politicians to whom the word applies.Joe Biden is one of them. His mental acuity has deteriorated to an obvious and considerable degree, and his fantasy stories of uncles eaten by cannibals ( along with MANY other proven lies and exaggerations) does not help his intellectual profile.
As for kids hitting each other, I am aware that some schools are so extreme as to prohibit children striking a blow to DEFEND themselves. Here is what I always told my sons: Never let me discover you were the first to hit someone. But if they hit you first, hit them back hard enough to make certain they will not attempt to hit you again. Pacifist is another word for willing victim.
I needed a good laugh this morning. Thank you!