Empathy, Schmempathy

"Oh, Cold-hearted Orb that Rules the Night" -- Thy Name is Rush Limbaugh!


I laugh when I hear the Republicans cry about "empathy." They want a judge lacking in what anthropology has proven to be the most human quality: a feeling of mutual identity with another person. But until the Japanese invent Robo-judge, we're going to be stuck with real human beings in the courts, taking both the law and their own backgrounds into account.


What the pro-lifers fear is that "empathy" is a synonym for pro-abortion. That is, an empathetic judge would necessarily sympathize with the plight of living unwed mothers over that of their unborn child. They want to bar all emotion, ruling solely as Strict Constructionists on the literal meaning of the Constitution.

But is this really true? Are pro-lifers not motivated by empathy for fetuses? The blood-spattered baby carriages suborned by the followers of Randall Terry would seem to argue otherwise.


If the US Constitution allowed for the burning of babies on the Altar of Baal, would these strict constructionists be so adamant in setting aside emotion in favor of legalistic minimalism?

"Well, yes Ma'am, we understand you don't belive in child sacrifice, but the Constitution permits it. The LAW is the LAW."


I suspect some of these conservatives, who also form the ranks of the torture supporters among us, would stand with Roland Freisler in support of the Nuremburg Race Laws. After all, if it's the law, it's legal by definition.

Ad astra per mortem

I found this quotation today on Roger Ebert's journal. It's from Vincent van Gogh, on the journey from life to the stars:

Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why? I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age, would be to go there on foot.

I go there on wheels, or like a spark when the light switch is flicked off. Where does it go? The stars were aborning 13 billion years ago and their light reaches us just now from across the painted ceiling of the universe. It took Michelangelo to paint God on the Cistine Chapel; what God paints us on the frescoes of the sky?