1. I've always believed that abortion should be constrained -- but that the decision, within those constraints, should be up to the mother. That is why I favor keeping abortion legal -- but confined to the early stages of pregnancy.
2. I am personally pro-life, in that I believe in encouraging pregnant mothers (I will not say "birthing people"!) to deliver their babies. That is why I have donated for over ten years to an organization that supports new mothers with expenses.
3. The Alito draft decision should never have been leaked. The leak has done serious damage to the Supreme Court. The left has certainly been prepared to destroy institutions, norms, and precedents to protect its power and privileges.
4. The decision itself is elegant, and neatly captures the irreducible essence of the issue: abortion is different because it potentially involves a human life. You can keep the rest of the social liberalism of the Court, but that is the boundary.
This week's show will be slightly different from the norm: we'll focus on clips and topics, rather than guests -- and that, hopefully, will mean more input from the callers (unless you are all watching football on opening weekend).
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This week's Torah portion includes several laws about conduct in civic and personal life, the common theme of which is boundaries -- setting bounds to what one may do at home, at work, and even in the battlefield.
One noteworthy passage concerns Amalek, the evil nation that attacked the Children of Israel as they made their Exodus from slavery to freedom. Deuteronomy 25:17-19 commands Jews to obliterate Amalek's memory.
The South African government accused Israel of genocide on the basis of a story about Amalek in the Book of Samuel, in which King Saul was commanded to wipe out the entire evil Amalekite nation.
Because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quoted this week's portion -- "Remember what Amalek did to you" (25:17), the South African government claimed he was commanding soldiers to commit genocide.
It was an absurd and malevolent misreading of the Bible and of Jewish tradition. The commandment, as observed by Jews today, is to remember the evil of Amalek and fight ...