Gorsuch and Finnis, the Sequel

As you may recall, I predicted here a couple weeks ago that Judge Neil Gorsuch’s Ph.D study with Oxford’s renowned John Finnis would arouse the left, and I was not disappointed! Enter The Guardian:

Oxford scholar who was mentor to Neil Gorsuch compared gay sex to bestiality

Now, before going into the copy, may I observe that from the headline alone, it isn’t certain whether The Guardian means this as criticism or praise for John Finnis. You never know these days with the left.

Anyway, on to the copy:

Before he was Donald Trump’s nominee to fill the vacancy on the supreme court, Judge Neil Gorsuch was the protege of a renowned Catholic scholar at Oxford University who has compared same-sex relations to bestiality and described abortion as the “approved killing of vulnerable innocent human beings”.

During the years preceding his federal judgeship on the 10th circuit court of appeals Gorsuch studied for a doctorate at University College Oxford under the supervision of Prof John Finnis, a 76-year-old Australian legal scholar considered one of the world’s foremost thinkers on the philosophy of natural law. . .

The same year [1992], during a speech at Harvard University in April, Finnis was reportedly booed by campus protesterswho labelled him a “hate monger” and a “homophobe” and compared his invitation to lecture to giving the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan a platform.

So you can see the caliber of the opposition to Finnis and Gorsuch. What was that about “mainstream” again?

A separate article in The Guardian, labeled an “analysis” naturally, attempts to lay into Gorsuch’s inclination to constitutional originalism, and offers up this kind of comic reasoning:

A strict adherence to the founding documents can prove tricky. In 1787, most transportation was by ship or horse, not by plane or motorcar; communication was on parchment and paper rather than through the internet and cellphones; gay marriage was beyond most people’s imagination.

Conundrums can arrive at the level of the word. Solum points out that the seventh amendment, adopted as part of the bill of rights in 1791, guarantees the right to a jury trial in civil cases where the amount in dispute rises above “twenty dollars”.

Trouble is, the word “dollar” actually referred to a Spanish silver coin that was the main form of currency in 1791. Similarly, the reference to “domestic violence” in article four of the constitution does not equate to spousal or child abuse as it would today but to riots or insurrections within the boundaries of a single state.

The world has changed in ways that two-centuries old documents cannot reach. “We have a freedom of speech provision, but when it was written, no one spoke over the internet,” Solum said.

I’ll just let this mind-numbing stupidity rest here on the page, as an undisturbed example of what passes for sophisticated legal “analysis” at The Guardian.

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