Define the Words

I have been listening to the senate confirmation hearings for SCOTUS appointee Ketanji Brown Jackson the past several days, and here are some takeaways so far:

•Can't define what a woman is ('hesitant to do so in this context')

•Can't affirm that she has a hermeneutic or philosophy of interpretation (has instead a 'methodology' not founded on any principles or commitments)

•Can't define 'viability' with respect to a fetus (instead knows that the court—the court—has determined, somewhere and at some point, what and when 'viability' is…but doesn’t know that determination, either)

What is a woman? What is a person? What is human life? What are the underlying principles that govern how our governing document is to be understood—the document which is the very foundation underlying the most prosperous, powerful, advanced, civil, free society that has ever existed? These questions touch on issues that are at the very core of western civilization, and two of three are at the core of human civilization, while the other at least encroaches on it in principle.

So here we have a person who is being considered for the responsibility of making policy decisions about these issues. Yet, she is not even able to offer a basic, working definition of what these issues are, or of the very terms without which these issues don’t exist as things at all.

In other words, she can’t define the terms, but she is going to be responsible for deciding the laws that decide how you operate with respect to the issues. And you will either be on the right or the wrong side of those laws. In what universe is that ever a good idea?

Maybe more to the point, when it is ever a good idea to trust someone who doesn’t have the basic integrity to be straightforward about what they really believe?