The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing this week on pro-abortion Cornelia Pillard, a law professor President Barack Obama selected for an appointment to the most important appeals court in the nation.
Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, is urging pro-life advocates to contact members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to urge them to vote no on sending her nomination to the Senate floor.
Georgetown Law Professor Cornelia Pillard has written some pretty outlandish things — but Senate Republicans are hoping circuit court opinions won’t be added to the list. The President’s pick for the D.C. Circuit Court, one of the most liberal ever nominated, left plenty of Senators scratching their heads at her July Judiciary hearing.
Among her most shocking statements, Pillard has called the ultrasound “deceptive,” argued that abstinence education is unconstitutional, and suggested that pro-life laws only “enforce women’s incubation of unwanted pregnancies” which projects a “vision of the woman’s role as mothers and caretakers.” This, she argues, violates equal protection for women. “I don’t know that there is anyone who has raised more red flags,” said a Republican aide.
During her explosive Senate hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) took her to task in a few tense exchanges over her views, which he called “considerably out of the mainstream.” Interestingly enough, his committee is considering Pillard’s nomination at the same time as Senate Republicans are circulating a bill to reduce the number of justices on the D.C. court by three. Considered by many to be the second most powerful court in the country, the D.C. Circuit Court is routinely criticized for retaining so many judges with such a light caseload.
For now, the Senate Judiciary Committee is the only thing standing between Pillard’s extreme views and a vote before the whole chamber. Contact Committee members and urge them to be the judicial firewall our nation so desperately needs.
Pillard was nominated this summer to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing to question Pillard on the many controversial positions she holds on matters of constitutional interpretation. One belief she holds is that there is supposedly a right to an abortion in the Constitution.
Pillard argues that abortion is necessary to help “free women from historically routine conscription into maternity.”
She has written, “Antiabortion laws and other restraints on reproductive freedom not only enforce women’s incubation of unwanted pregnancies, but also prescribe a “vision of the woman’s role” as mother and caretaker of children in a way that is at odds with equal protection. Renewed attacks on abortion have turned attention to how the Equal Protection Clause, and the right to sex equality more generally, might advance reproductive self-determination.”
The Obama judicial nominee also criticizes anyone opposed to the HHS abortion mandate in Obamacare as “reinforce[ing] broader patterns of discrimination against women as a class of presumptive breeders.”
Pillard also thinks abstinence education is unconstitutional.
Pillard’s visceral opposition to abstinence education, coupled with her copious misinformation on the subject, calls into question her fitness for the position. Under the banner of “sex equality” she attempts to make a constitutional argument that abstinence education denies equal protection to female students.
According to Pillard, abstinence education rises to the level of constitutional violation due to the fact that it is “designed not only to expose students to ideas, but also to shape student behavior.”
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“The abstinence-only approach is permeated with stereotyped messages and sex-based double standards about acceptable male and female sexual behavior and appropriate social roles. Public school teaching of gender stereotypes violates the constitutional bar against sex stereotyping and is vulnerable to equal protection challenge,” she has written.
Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association says it is difficult to exaggerate the extremist views of Cornelia Pillard and her group is calling on the Senate to reject the nominee.
Huber tells LifeNews that Pillard blatantly distorts the manner in which abstinence programs share information and empower health behaviors and mischaracterizes the approach in her writings.
“Her spurious charge ignores the fact that abstinence education programs seek optimal heath outcomes for all students – male and female. She maligns an approach that explicitly advocates a single sexual standard, prides itself in empowering young men and women, and that promotes health and well being of the individual and society in general,” Huber said. “NAEA urges Congress and common-sense citizens to vigorously oppose a nominee who voices a total disregard for the facts about abstinence education and shows a frightening desire to aggressively use the Constitution to promote her radical ideological views.”
