Opinion

July 22, 2013 (FRC) – A lot can happen between now and Congress's August recess — and that's exactly what conservatives should be concerned about. Senate Democrats seem to be banking on the fact that Americans are on vacation and not paying attention, because liberal leaders are trying to slip in a quiet confirmation hearing for Cornelia “Nina” Pillard. A Georgetown law professor, Pillard is the President's latest nominee to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals — and only the second one since President George W. Bush to wait less than two months for a hearing.

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Why the rush? Ed Whalen of NRO's Bench Memos suspects that Pillard (who's been described to him as “less moderate” than the most activist liberal in appellate court history) wouldn't survive intense scrutiny. The hurry, Whalen warns, “seems designed to prevent a careful review of their records. Obama himself has taken forever to make nominations to the D.C. Circuit, and that court remains underworked, so it is difficult to see the justification for the sudden rush.”

Unfortunately for Americans, the Senate won't have to dig too deep to uncover some of Pillard's shockers. Among some of her greatest hits, the former Deputy Assistant Attorney General argues that abortion is necessary to help “free women from historically routine conscription into maternity.” As if her militant feminism wasn't apparent enough, she takes the opportunity in some of her writings to slam anyone who opposes the abortion-contraception mandate as “reinforce[ing] broader patterns of discrimination against women as a class of presumptive breeders.”

A mother of two, Nina wrote a 2011 paper, “Against the New Maternalism,” which argues that by celebrating motherhood, society is creating a “self-fulfilling cycle of discrimination.” Those ideas bleed into Pillard's extreme pro-abortion views, which suggest that technology is somehow manipulating Americans to consider the personhood of the unborn. In one of her most jaw-dropping statements, the President's nominee even criticizes the ultrasound. She believes it manufactures “deceptive images of fetus-as-autonomous-being that the anti-choice movement has popularized since the advent of amniocentesis.”

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As crazy and outrageous as her other comments are, this one is a denial of basic biology! She actually rejects modern science on human development because it conflicts with her hard-core ideology. If that doesn't disqualify someone from the second most prestigious court in America, I'm not sure what does. Except maybe this: Pillard is so fiercely opposed to abstinence education that she has said publicly she would declare it unconstitutional. In “Our Other Reproductive Choices,” Nina argues that abstinence-only curriculum is “permeated with stereotyped messages and sex-based double standards” which, in her mind, makes it “vulnerable to an equal protection challenge.”

“Egalitarian sex education… should reaffirm the value of sexual pleasure for females as well as males.” She argues that too many Christian conservatives see “men's sex drive and sexual satisfaction [as] privileged, while women's is demonized or ignored.” That just proves how little Pillard knows about the people she's criticizing. FRC, ironically, just made quite a few headlines talking about sexual satisfaction — and how it's greater for both men and women when enjoyed in the confines of a lifelong, monogamous, man-woman marriage.

America can't afford to give a lifetime appointment to a radical ideologue! Contact your senators and urge them to vote no on Nina Pillard.

Reprinted with permission from FRC