The Un-blinding of Lady Justice

Dennis Garvin
Dennis Garvin

Consider Lady Justice, rendered in statue.  Derived from the Roman goddess of justice, her artistic representations, aside from the abstract fringe depictions, is that of a woman who is blindfolded and carries a scale in which are weighed truth and lie.

The implication of the blindfold, in American law, is clear: equal treatment to all, regardless of appearance.  To a blind jurist, it matters little whether someone stands before them in regal garb or rags.  This is as it should be; as we teach our children about the equality of the law and the need for this blindfold.

It should also be observed that the blindfold does not serve as an ear cover, that the judge may hear those whom she cannot see.  Here is where Lady Justice has shown, throughout history, a weakness.

It is said that there is one level of punishment for the rich, a different one for the poor.  This is because the wealthy can hire clever attorneys who, after all, reach into the consciousness of Lady Justice through her ears.

This inequality has existed for as long as mankind and certainly before the USA came into being.  While I acknowledge this and find it distasteful, it is not the issue that prompts me to write.  I write, instead, about what has happened to the blindfold.  The blindfold has moved, as it were, south.  The reasons, all seemingly sound and fair, must still be linked to their implications, their unintended consequences.

First, Lady Justice’s blindfold slipped beneath her eyes for the benefit of Affirmative Action and Feminism.  Understand that I do not condemn or disagree with either of these two initiatives.  It is their very rightness that produces the problem.  You would need to be very obtuse to argue against the reality that Lady Justice now sees the minorities and women who come as petitioners, and permits their preferential treatment.

While I understand the old phrase that ‘an incoming tide raises all boats’ and these initiatives were mere corrections of historical wrongs, we must also agree that, whenever a tide is rising somewhere, it is falling elsewhere.  To confer preference onto one group, you must deny it to another. The modern non-minority and/or male, who bear no guilt for the historical wrongs, are accorded a lesser status before Lady Justice.  You cannot have it both ways.

Yet another slip of the blindfold transformed it into a gag.  This occurred, and continues to occur, in a variety of areas.  The first concerns abortion.  Whether you are for or against, it is a historical fact that the Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade totally ignored the will of the majority.

 The usual arguments pertain about how the law should be above the influence of the masses, but we are a representative democracy.  We depend on an informed, involved electorate to select their representatives to congress who will pass laws with respect to our interests.

Nowhere does our form of government indicate that only the smartest and best be elected, or even the legally trained; further, any candidate campaigning with a slogan about being better than his voters is likely to fail.

It should also be pointed out that abortion became the law of the land without the involvement of a single lawmaker – the Supreme Court virtually violated the separation of powers doctrine to enact this law. A law became a law without any lawmakers. By whatever means, this decision rendered mute the voice of Lady Liberty on the wishes of the American electorate; as mute as, shall we say, the unborn themselves?

Political Correctness has also gagged Lady Justice.  From the highest branches of government down, the Lady cannot speak out on illegal aliens or the clear Islamic origins of the murders at Fort Hood or in Chattanooga.  Lady Justice has been silenced.

The most recent slide of the cloth occurred with the redefinition of marriage.  This was nothing less than the Supreme Court riding roughshod over its own cherished doctrine of Separation of Church and State.

To redefine a religious sacrament in legal terms that neatly fit the predetermined end that was in the minds of the five lawyers who voted in favor, that is more than justicial activism: it worked backward from a desired outcome and scorned an even cursory reference to the Constitution.

 Lady Justice is now the employee of special interests’ views and moral abstractions. The blindfold has slipped far enough south to become a virtual G-string, and Lady Justice is little better than an exotic dancer whose performance- a combination of  entertainment, pathos, sensuality, and farce- is now for the delight of social engineers, not citizens.

The repudiation of the Constitution, the loss of the moral compass of our Judeo-Christian heritage, and the replacement of farseeing jurists by activist buffoons provide us with only one remaining application of this former blindfold.

As with every godless oligarchy, our country will watch as a narcissistic, self- protecting government moves the cloth back northward, placing it around the neck of Lady Justice. The very cloth that made her both blind and approachable in the certainty of fair treatment will become the noose that strangles her.

– Dennis Garvin

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