Sam Brownback has always been one of those fuzzy-headed dim bulbs who cannot see any issue except in terms of his own personal experience. How he regards anything is largely a matter of how it personally strikes his severely limited, and apparently uneducable, imagination. He belongs on a front porch in the Ozarks with a piece of straw in his mouth, but, sadly, he’s got a seat in The World’s Greatest Deliberative And Sometimes Folksy Drawling Body. He pulled his intuition-driven ignorance out for display in the Roberts hearings, with a heartwarming paen to mentally disabled elevator operators and fetuses, whom he (no doubt rightly) regards as cognitively equal to himself:

BROWNBACK: . . . [W]e talked a lot about the disability community, and well we should, and the protection needed for the disability community. And that’s important, because I think it really helps people that need help, but it helps the rest of us to be much more human and caring.

Senator Kennedy is helping me with a bill because a number of children never get here that have disabilities. Unborn children prenatally diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome and other disabilities — I don’t know if you know this, but there was a recent analysis, and 80 percent to 90 percent of children prenatally diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome never get here — never get here. They’re aborted in the system.

And people just say: Look, this child’s got difficulties. And we even have waiting lists in America of people, today, willing to adopt children with Down’s Syndrome. And we will protect that child — as well we should, under the Americans with Disabilities Act and other issues — when they get here.

But so much of the time, and with our increased ability of genetic testing, they don’t get here. Diagnosed in the womb, system that encourages this child to be destroyed at that stage — and this is all in the records.

And we are the poorer for it as a society.

All the members of this body know a young man with Down’s Syndrome named Jimmy. Maybe you’ve met him, even. He runs the elevator that takes the senators up and down on the Senate floors. His warm smile welcomes us every day. We’re a better body for him. . . .

And Jimmy said to me the other day after he hugged me; he said “Shhh, don’t tell my supervisor. They’re telling me I’m hugging too many people.”

And, yet, we’re ennobled by him and what he does and how he lifts up our humanity and 80 to 90 percent of the kids in this country like Jimmy never get here.

What does that do to us? What does that say about us. And I would just ask you, Judge Roberts, to consider — and probably you can’t answer here today, whether the individuals with disabilities have the same constitutional rights that you and I share while they’re in the womb.

ROBERTS: Well, Senator, I appreciate your thoughts on the subject very much [blah, blah, evasion, evasion, . . .]

This is idiocy at its finest.

Let’s take another look at the money quote:

“individuals with disabilities have the same constitutional rights that you and I share while they’re in the womb.”

Disabled fetuses have the same constitutional rights as Sam Brownback or even citizens of normal intelligence?

A brief digression: Here we know Roberts is jerking the Senate around, because there’s a clear and unambiguous answer to the question: “No.” Fetuses do not have the same constitutional rights as citizens because they are not persons in either the philosophical or the legal sense. There is, of course, a multi-prong movement underway to write fetuses into the law as if they were persons, in every place possible, in the apparent hope that enough saying so will make it true - but there is as yet no definitive law to change the unbroken historical precedent that they are not legal persons. The fact that Roberts could not bring himself to speak this simple truth shows how much pandering he’s doing.

But that Brownback could - apparently in all seriousness - ask this question shows how clueless he is. Obviously, Brownback is maneuvering to create legal personhood for fetuses. But I am tempted to take him at his word when he says that what motivated him on the issue is the plight of disabled fetuses (if it makes sense to talk about mental disability in an organism with no organized cognitive processes). He seems to really believe that it constitutes some sort of discrimination not to give birth to a disabled child. This makes sense only if you believe the fetus is a person (otherwise there’s no one to discriminate against), but it’s not clear whether Brownback means all fetuses are persons, or only disabled ones are - a particularly bizarre turn of the imagination. More to the point, he just seems to be so confused he doesn’t know what to think, and can’t work through the issue by himself. (Snarky thought: I wonder if Brownback holds up little notes to his aides that say “I may need to ask a question about bioethics”?)

The implications of Brownback’s stumbling intuitions are particularly offensive: not only that women have some sort of obligation to gestate an unwanted fetus, but that they have an even greater obligation if that fetus has some sort of diagnosable “disability”. And presumably this “argument” extends to more severe, non-cognitive disabilities as well (at least, we agree that live-born, independent persons with disabilities have fully equal moral standing with all other persons, so, if we are going to grant moral standing to disabled fetuses, there are no obvious grounds for distinguishing between them on the basis of degree of disability). Thus, women are, by his lights, morally obligated to gestate, against their will, even hopelessly doomed, or at the very least horribly compromised, fetuses. In other words, Brownback’s heartwarming affection for Jimmy the huggable elevator operator turns women’s medical necessity on its head: no longer is severe deformity or even unviability a justification for terminating a pregnancy, but it is now a kind of civil rights argument forcing the woman to carry a pregnancy against her will. The worst cases would then be the ones that most greatly erode women’s autonomy. And, of course, if you are required to carry a pregnancy that is essentially hopeless, out of regard for poor little Jimmy, obviously you would be required to carry one that could potentially result in a healthy infant.

Someone smarter than Brownback could be accused of being crazy like a fox - stumbling his way to reducing women to breeding machines for both healthy babies and anencephalic monsters alike. In fact, he’s probably just too dumb to understand the meaning of what comes out of his own mouth, but the end result would be the same if anyone took him seriously.

I have to say, too, that he does no favors to the disabled community with this drivel, either. For a group of full moral persons fighting for acceptance on equal terms with other such persons, it is not an advance to be lumped with undeveloped fetuses. I know there are disability-rights groups who object to the abortion of fetuses with diagnosed disabilities because they think it erodes the position of, or our respect for, full persons with similar conditions, but even so, to claim that disabled fetuses have a right against abortion because they are just the same as disabled persons makes those persons indistinquishable from the fetuses. (Talk about infantalizing the disabled! Brownback is fetalizing them!)

Hat tip: Uncle Sam’s Cabin