Echoing the “conscience clause” refusals of pharmacists to fill prescriptions for birth control, judges in many states are now refusing to issue rulings in cases of minors requesting “judicial bypass” authorization for abortion. This leaves all such cases to fall onto the remaining judges who are still willing to perform their duties, or, in counties with only one or a few judges, onto no one at all.

A pregnant teenager went to the grand and imposing county courthouse here early in the summer, saying she wanted an abortion. The circuit court judge refused to hear the case, and he announced that he would recuse himself from any others like it.

“Taking the life of an innocent human being is contrary to the moral order,” the judge, John R. McCarroll of Shelby County Circuit Court, wrote in June. “I could not in good conscience make a finding that would allow the minor to proceed with the abortion.”. . .

Judges, however, are starting to opt out. Other judges of the Shelby Circuit Court have recused themselves like Judge McCarroll, and now, according to one judge, only four of the nine judges on the court hear such abortion applications.

Judges in Alabama and Pennsylvania have also said they will not take such cases.

This goes beyond pharmacists’ refusal to do their jobs. Traditionally, retail providers such as pharmacists were free to decline customers; there was no perceived duty to provide service to all, as in an emergency room. (The problem with allowing healthcare to be dispensed on this basis – and under a government monopoly license – has become obvious, but that’s another issue.) Judges, however, embody the state’s obligation – and exclusive authority – to dispense justice to the citizens. For judges to simply declare that they will not uphold, or even act on, laws they personally disapprove is the grossest misuse of their office. It seems to me an obviously impeachable distortion of justice. However, forcing them to act on laws they don’t support may only encourage them to issue unjust rulings obfuscated with disingenuous language. This puts legal-ethics watchdogs in a bind:

Judge McCarroll’s decision prompted 12 experts on judicial ethics to write to the Tennessee Supreme Court in late August. The experts called his action lawless and said they feared that his approach could spread around the nation and to subjects like the death penalty, medical marijuana, flag burning and even divorce.

“Unwillingness to follow the law,” the letter said, “is not a legitimate ground for recusal.”

Helena Silverstein, who teaches government and law at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., and has studied how parental-consent laws work, said those experts might be right in the abstract. But Professor Silverstein wondered about the consequences of forcing judges to act.

“If you require judges to hear these cases when they are morally and, maybe, religiously opposed to abortion,” she said, “they are likely to impose their views on the minor. And that happens.”

I keep wondering how much of our civilization we are going to cede to right-wing religious extremists. They have declared that they will not serve you in their – state-sanctioned – professions if they don’t approve of the choices you make in your life; now they declare that they will withhold justice under the law if they don’t approve of the rights you seek to exercise. And we have seen the long litany of similar invasions: censorship of the airwaves, mandatory religious performances and state-sanctioned religious displays, health clinic terrorism, murder of doctors, increasing restrictions of reproductive privacy, selective enforcement of laws to harass women exercising their rights, pervasive sex panic, censorship and distortion of educational materials, and increasingly the demonization of science and fact that conflicts with their religious beliefs. Our society – the possibility of a life of freedom in the communities we built for that purpose – is being torn apart bit by bit, with no sense of obligation to fellow citizens, no sense of tolerance or community, no respect for the rights and interests of others who seek to live their own lives by their own values. And they’re getting away with it.

Why does no one object? Why do we not defend the rights that once meant so much to us? How is it we take seriously a huge body of primitives in our midst who openly scorn the civil liberties that keep us all safe – and we do not regard them as enemies of civilization? Why do we grant so much deference, in fact immunity to oppositon or even criticism, to a religion of grinding oppression – whatever lip service it pays to higher values – that openly seeks the destruction of the community of tolerance and liberality we once extolled, and of the lives we hoped to live within it?

They have made it as clear as they can: they will openly scorn the law if it prevents their oppressing others with their restrictive values. Is this not a declaration of war upon civilization itself? Obviously any judge who declares openly they will not uphold laws they disapprove of should be impeached. That perhaps invites religious-extremist judges to distort their rulings as a subterfuge, and that too must be guarded against – but an open refusal to uphold the law is the grossest crime a judge can commit. And, beyond acting on those cases, we must call out and forever reject the oppression that part of our society has dedicated itself to imposing on the rest. With the law itself now set at nought by that portion of society that trumpets its hatred for our society, the crisis has come to a head. We must make sure our self-declared enemies, and the self-declared enemies of tolerance itself, have no influence in the society they hate, and we love.

Hat tip: Majikthise.

A Sound of Thunder, a liberally-screwed-up adaptation of the classic, and poignant, Ray Bradbury short story of the same name, hit theaters this weekend. Owing to some sort of mixup, I went to the fillums tonight hoping to see something else that wasn’t playing, and opted for this instead. Mistake.

Still, it has often been said that, if you really love films, you like even bad films. This one offers a few things to think about in the midst of its multivalent badness.

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