As speculation swirled around Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s possible retirement, CNSNews.com editor Terry Jeffrey knew what he had to do: lash out at Breyer for his stance in favor of abortion rights. First up was a Jan. 26 article:
Justice Stephen Breyer, who reportedly will be retiring from the Supreme Court this year, claimed in the 2000 case of Stenberg v. Carhart that engaging in a partial-birth abortion is a constitutional right, noting that the procedure involved, as stated in a Nebraska law, ‘deliberately and intentionally delivering into the vagina a living unborn child, or a substantial portion thereof.”
[…]Seven years later, in the case of Gonzales v. Carhart, the court would reverse this opinion and uphold the constitutionality of partial-birth abortion bans. However, Breyer would dissent in that case, maintaining his claim that the Constitution protected a right to kill a partially-born baby.
Note that even though this is supposed to be a “news” article, Jeffrey uses the biased, inflammatory language of anti-abortion activists, such as “partial-birth abortion.”
After Breyer announced his retirement, Jeffrey went on the attack again in his Feb. 2 column. In a tone similar to that of his “news” story, he began with a long-winded story involving Breyer’s father and a case of corporal punishment. He then jumped to a book Breyer wrote in which he argued against originalist interpretations of the Constitution, noting that at the time it was written, flogging was not considered cruel and unusual punishment. Jeffrey then rehashed his earlier Breyer-bashing:
He did not address the question of corporal punishment in 20th-century San Francisco schools.
But in the case of Stenberg v. Carhart, which the court decided in 2000, he did address a Nebraska law that prohibited “an abortion procedure in which the person performing the abortion partially delivers vaginally a living unborn child before killing the unborn child and completing the delivery.””We hold that this statute violates the Constitution,” Breyer wrote in the 5-4 opinion of the court.
History will remember him for claiming that killing a partially born child was a constitutional right.
Jeffrey can apparently think only in terms of one’s stance on abortion, and that anyone who disagrees with him is not only wrong but evil. We would say that’s the wrong temperament for a journalist, but Jeffrey is not being paid by the Media Research Center to be a journalist — his right-wing polemics are what pays the bills.