“Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
– Genesis 2:7

Fetuses and frozen embryos don’t breath air.

Tom Parker announced his plans to run for chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in Montgomery in 2006: Jamie Martin/AP-NAJ screen shot

Under the Microscope – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — You can’t fix stupid.

There was a time not so long ago when I thought you could. If only the free press would go to great lengths to tell the people the truth, surely enough would listen, I actually proved a few times in my life and career.

Not anymore. Those days, I’m afraid, are long gone. We are now an idiocracy, thanks to Donald Trump and social media.

“Stupid is as stupid does,” Forrest Gump said, according to author Winston Groom.

Dumb is the new smart.

Promoting this point of view from inside the White House, former President Donald Trump made people believe an education is not required in life, and in fact, may put people at a disadvantage vis a vis a close, personal relationship with god – and his antichrist dictator.

NAJ graphic by Glynn Wilson

All you need now is an opinion, a radio to listen to conservative talk all day, a cable TV account for Fox News, and a Facebook page.

Anybody can do that, even a dumb ass like Tom Parker, the elected Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, who cites the Bible in his rulings, even though it’s obvious like most people who use it as a bludgeon he has never actually read it and certainly does not understand it.

Why are we electing judges again? Is it not the case that the founders of this country wanted the judicial branch to be removed from politics? Never mind the “original intent” of the Constitution. That’s for losers and suckers.

“I’m shocked and sickened at the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling — declaring that frozen embryos are considered children,” former U.S. Senator from Alabama Doug Jones said this week in an email blast to supporters of the “Right Side of History” political action committee.

“Led by a Chief Justice who is a Roy Moore protégé, they’ve basically ruled that frozen embryos in test tubes have more rights than women and families trying to have children,” Jones said. “Hospitals and fertility clinics have immediately stopped providing vital IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) services for families because the potential legal liabilities for IVF are now too severe to risk.”

The MAGA crowd is of course cheering, he said.

Tommy Tuberville says he’s “all for it,” even though Jones says, “he had no clue what ‘it’ is and immediately said ‘we need more kids’.”

To state the obvious, how can you have more kids when those who want to have kids but can’t without a procedure like IVF to implant the embryo can no longer get access to the procedure, and clinics who performed that service will now shut down rather than facing criminal liability if one is accidentally dropped and “dies.”

“If you needed any more proof that they are not conservative, this is it,” Jones said. “They are inserting themselves into our bedrooms and into decisions that should be between families and doctors.”

“Add that to Tuberville’s pro-Putin/anti-Ukraine rants that puts our national security at risk and all that the Alabama Legislature is doing — from book bans to even more extremism — and you have a clear blueprint for what these extremists want to do everywhere,” Jones continued. “Make no mistake folks – this ruling opened a gate. It provided a roadmap for other extremist courts and legislatures, both state and federal, that focus on attacking our rights.

“The ripple effect must be combatted,” he said. “We have to stop this now or it will never end.”

Sorry, Doug, my friend, but I’m afraid it’s too late. Our democracy is slipping away, and there appears to be nothing we can do about it. The power of the press in this country is deader than dead.

“We can stop this, in Alabama and elsewhere,” Jones said. “We’ve proven before that there are a majority of Alabamians who are willing to move past extremism and come together.”

Maybe in 2017, but not in 2020, when a majority voted for a lousy Auburn football coach who was actually a resident of Florida, not Alabama. The one million Southern Baptists in Alabama don’t care about facts. They just want an all white, all Christian nation, and everyone else deported back to Africa or Mexico.

But between now and the November election is where “the rubber meets the road,” Jones said, where work has begun to try to win back a state house seat in an upcoming special election next month, and to win back a U.S. House seat in the newly drawn 2nd congressional district, “that will help break MAGA’s hold on Congress.”

“What’s going on in Alabama is heartbreaking and quite frankly too extreme for many to believe,” Jones said. “But everyone needs to understand that what is happening in Alabama will happen all around the country if we are not constantly vigilant and doing what we can to stop these extremists everywhere.”

In an Alabama Supreme Court decision that has rattled reproductive medicine across the country, according to the New York Times, a majority of the justices said the law was “clear” that frozen embryos should be considered children: “Unborn children are ‘children.’”

But the court’s chief justice, Tom Parker, drew on more than the Constitution and legal precedent to explain his determination.

“Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God,” he wrote in a concurring opinion that invoked the Book of Genesis and the prophet Jeremiah and quoted at length from the writings of 16th- and 17th-century theologians.

“Even before birth,” he added, “all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”

Just as the case, which centers on wrongful-death claims for frozen embryos that were destroyed in a mishap at a fertility clinic, has reverberated beyond Alabama, so has Justice Parker’s opinion.

His theological digressions showed why he has long been revered by conservative legal groups and anti-abortion activists, and also why he has inspired apprehension among critics who regard him as guided more by religious doctrine than the law.

In a post on social media, Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, described the opinion as a “beautiful defense of life and the Alabama Constitution.” But critics viewed it as dangerous and deviating from the U.S. Constitution. “Welcome to the theocracy,” wrote a columnist for The Washington Post.

Either way, the opinion was true to form for Justice Parker.

Since he was first elected to the nine-member court in 2004, and in his legal career before it, he has shown no reticence about expressing how his Christian beliefs have profoundly shaped his understanding of the law and his approach to it as a lawyer and judge.

Those beliefs also informed a vision that, his supporters say, made him a dogged and brilliant architect for laying the groundwork that contributed to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 to overturn a federal right to abortion with Dobbs v. Jackson.

In 2022, Matt Clark, the president of the Alabama Center for Law and Liberty, a conservative legal advocacy group, praised Justice Parker for his “courage and relentlessness.” He cited Justice Parker’s writing in past cases as scaffolding for the arguments that successfully challenged Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion and blocks states from banning the procedure before fetal viability, which most experts estimate at about 23 or 24 weeks.

”He picked apart Roe’s logic when it came to viability,” Clark wrote in an essay published by 1819 News, a conservative digital outlet in Alabama, referring to a concurring opinion in a case related to a wrongful-death lawsuit involving a fetus that was lost before it had reached the point of viability outside the womb.

“Fast-forward nine years later,” Clark, who later joined Justice Parker’s staff, wrote.

“When Mississippi asked the Supreme Court to take Dobbs, one of its major points was how Roe’s viability standard didn’t make any sense. And whose writing did Mississippi draw on multiple times to make that point?”

His sharpest critics have not denied his influence.

“What Justice Parker has done is explicitly lay out the road map for overturning Roe v. Wade,” said Lynn Paltrow, the founder and former executive director of the nonprofit Pregnancy Justice, according to an extensive investigation of Justice Parker’s role in the so-called personhood movement that was published by ProPublica and The New Republic in 2014.

Before joining the court, Justice Parker was the founding executive director of the Alabama Family Alliance, a conservative advocacy group now called the Alabama Policy Institute. He had also served as an assistant state attorney general to Jeff Sessions, who later became a U.S. senator and former President Trump’s attorney general.

He was also a close aide and ally of Roy Moore, the former chief justice of the State Supreme Court who was twice removed from the job — first for dismissing a federal court order to remove a granite monument of the Ten Commandments he had installed in the state judicial building, and then for ordering state judges to defy the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision affirming gay marriage.

Justice Parker, who became chief justice in 2019, is now in his final term on the Supreme Court, having reached the court’s mandatory retirement age of 70.

The 8-to-1 decision last week by the justices, all of whom are Republicans, overturned a lower court’s ruling that frozen embryos were not considered children. The justices found that the couples could pursue a wrongful-death lawsuit against a Mobile fertility clinic over a 2020 episode in which a hospital patient removed frozen embryos from tanks of liquid nitrogen and dropped them on the floor.

Critics argued that the decision stood to have far-reaching consequences.

“Justices have crossed a critical boundary to assign personhood to something created in a lab that exists outside of a human body,” the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama said in a statement.

The majority, in its opinion, cited a 1872 statute that allows parents to sue over the wrongful death of a child and found that “unborn children,” including “extrauterine children,” were included in that.

In his concurring opinion, Justice Parker reached further back, citing Genesis: “The principle itself — that human life is fundamentally distinct from other forms of life and cannot be taken intentionally without justification — has deep roots that reach back to the creation of man ‘in the image of God.’”

It underscored the philosophy that has guided him through two decades on the court.

“When judges don’t rule in the fear of the Lord, everything’s falling apart,” he once wrote, citing the Book of Psalms, according to the ProPublica investigation. “The whole world is coming unglued.”

This is language that mimics what George Wallace was saying on the campaign trail for president before he was shot on May 15, 1972, in a Laurel, Maryland shopping center parking lot.

Read more about Parker and his career here.

In 1989, Parker became the founding executive director of the Alabama Family Alliance (later renamed the Alabama Policy Institute), a conservative think tank. At other points in his career, Parker was an Alabama assistant attorney general, deputy administrative director of Alabama courts, general counsel for Alabama trial courts, and director of the Alabama Judicial College. He had been an assistant attorney general under Jeff Sessions, who became U.S. Attorney General under President Donald Trump until Trump turned against him and fired him for recusing himself from the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the U.S. election in 2016.

Parker defeated Robert H. Smith to become an associate justice on the Alabama Supreme Court in 2004 and was sworn in on January 14, 2005. He was re-elected in 2010. In 2016, Parker successfully sought a third term as associate justice.

On June 5, 2018, Parker won the Republican nomination for Chief Justice over incumbent Chief Justice Lyn Stuart, although seven current and former Alabama Supreme Court justices publicly supported Stuart over Parker in the primary, two of whom — despite being Republicans — would contribute to Parker’s Democratic opponent in the general election.

Parker went on to defeat the Democratic nominee, Circuit Judge Bob Vance, in the general election on November 6, 2018. The campaign was marked by negative television advertising in which Parker’s campaign ran ads accusing Vance (who was supported by a moderate coalition) of being backed by “leftist billionaires” and in which Vance’s campaign ran ads saying that Parker was “another Roy Moore” who would bring more “chaos and controversy” to Alabama. It was also notable for the significant support Parker received from the trial lawyers via the Progress for Justice PAC.

Like Roy Moore before him, Parker was OK with other trial lawyers in the state, since he was not an advocate for “tort reform.” Even this ruling allows more people to sue hospitals, not to prevent costly lawsuits, as I reported many years ago in the definitive story on how Karl Rove first turned the courts Republican in Alabama.

How Karl Rove Took Over the Alabama Supreme Court and Created a ‘No Win Zone’ for Citizens: How the Corporate Republican Courts Turned From ‘Tort Reform’ to ‘Sovereign Immunity’ for Hospitals and Destroyed Americans’ Sixth Amendment Jury Rights

Parker was sworn in as Chief Justice of Alabama on January 11, 2019. He currently sits on the Board of Jurists at the Blackstone and Burke Center for Law and Liberty, at Faulkner University. He has taken a far right, radical position and been involved in controversies in the past, including supporting white supremacist groups.

As a candidate in 2004, he was criticized by the Southern Poverty Law Center for distributing Confederate flags at a funeral of a Confederate widow. Parker was photographed at the funeral standing between Leonard Wilson, a board member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, and Mike Whorton, a leader with the League of the South. He denied being a member of either group and said he did not consider his actions in either event inappropriate for a judicial candidate.

Parker was also criticized for attending a party in Selma commemorating the birthday of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the Ku Klux Klan. The party was hosted at “Fort Dixie” by Pat and Butch Godwin, operator of Friends of Forrest Inc. and also involved with the League of the South.

In 2006, Parker wrote an op-ed, published in The Birmingham News, in which he criticized his colleagues on the state supreme court for a ruling the previous year in which the court reversed a death sentence for a 17-year-old convicted of murder, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roper v. Simmons. In the op-ed, Parker criticized the Roper decision as “blatant judicial tyranny” and asserted that “State supreme courts may decline to follow bad U.S. Supreme Court precedents because those decisions bind only the parties to the particular case.”

The claim was criticized by legal experts (as well as Alabama Chief Justice Drayton Nabers Jr., whom Parker was then running against) because it contravenes the accepted principle of American jurisprudence that the U.S. Supreme Court has ultimate authority on matters of federal law. Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor criticized Parker’s op-ed in a Wall Street Journal commentary, writing that it was an inappropriate attack on fellow judges and was at odds with the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.

Justice Tom Woodall, then running for his second term as an associate supreme court justice, criticized Parker as a candidate for chief justice in 2006. Woodhall characterized Parker’s views as extreme, called Parker’s op-ed criticizing his colleagues “cowardly and deceitful” and said that Parker “doesn’t handle his cases; he just lets them pile up.”

Parker had the lowest productivity compared to the state’s other new justices, writing only one opinion in his first 15 months compared to 38 by Mike Bolin and 28 by Patricia Smith. Parker attributed slowness to the fact that he had no experience as a judge and because he had to hire new staff members.

A longtime ally and former aide of Roy Moore, whose candidacy for United States Senate was derailed following multiple allegations of romantically pursuing teenagers while an adult, Parker is known for his conservative views. He strongly opposed Roe v. Wade (1973), calling it a “constitutional aberration”, and has written a number of anti-abortion judicial opinions. Parker opposes same-sex marriage and has criticized the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).

Critics see his positions as guided by his religion rather than the law.

Parker in February 2024 espoused the Seven Mountain Mandate that conservative Christians should hold dominion over the seven major aspects of life: family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government.

“God created government, and the fact that we have let it go into the possession of others, it’s heartbreaking,” Parker also said.

Dissent

What may be more significant in a way is the dissent in the decision, written by another conservative Republican, Gregory Carl Cook.

Cook is an American lawyer from Alabama who has served as an associate justice of the state Supreme Court since January 2023.

His dissent in the case starts on page 75. We encourage people to read the full 131 page court ruling here.

Here are a few key excerpts.

“My sympathy with the plaintiffs and my deeply held personal views on the sanctity of life cannot change the meaning of words enacted by our elected Legislature in 1872. Even when the facts of a case concern profoundly difficult moral questions, our Court must stay within the bounds of our judicial role,” he argues.

“Over the years, our Court has repeatedly said the same thing,” he says. “Specifically, our Court has made clear that we are ‘not at liberty to rewrite statutes or to substitute our’ judgment for that of the Legislature.

“Further, our Court has repeatedly made clear that ‘public-policy arguments should be directed to the legislature, not to this Court’.”

“It is not our role to expand the reach of a statute and ‘breathe life’ into it by updating or amending it. It is also not our role to consider whether a law has become ‘stale’ or ‘shelf worn’, he said. “Instead, it is the role of the Legislature to determine whether a law is outdated (for instance, because of new technology) and, thus, requires updating.

“If our Court does ‘breathe life’ into a law by expanding its reach, we short-circuit the legislative process and violate the Alabama Constitution’s separation-of-powers clause. That clause provides that, ‘[to the end that the government of the State of Alabama may be a government of laws and not of individuals, the judicial branch may not exercise the legislative or executive power’.”

“Substituting our own meaning ‘turn[s] this Court into a legislative body, and doing that, of course, would be utterly inconsistent with the doctrine of separation of powers’.”

“I dissent,” Cook wrote, “because the main opinion violates this fundamental principle that is, that the legislative branch and not the judicial branch updates laws by expanding the meaning of the Wrongful Death Act beyond what it meant in 1872 without an amendment by the Legislature. I also dissent because I believe the main opinion overrules our recent Wrongful Death Act case law that requires ‘congruence’ between the definition of ‘person’ in Alabama’s criminal-homicide statutes and the definition of ‘minor child’ in the Wrongful Death Act . Both the original public meaning and this recent caselaw indicate the same result here — that the Wrongful Death Act does not address frozen embryos.”

“Moreover, there are other significant reasons to be concerned about the main opinion’s holding. No court anywhere in the country has reached the conclusion the main opinion reaches. And, the main opinion’s holding almost certainly ends the creation of frozen embryos through in vitro fertilization (‘IVF’) in Alabama.”

“In making this assertion, the main opinion assumes the answer to the relevant question i.e., whether a ‘frozen embryo’ is a ‘minor child’ as that term was understood in 1872 in the Wrongful Death Act by immediately labeling frozen embryos as ‘extrauterine children’ and deeming them ‘unborn children’. In other words, the main opinion assumes that a frozen embryo is a ‘child’ without further context or analysis and does so in the second sentence of the opinion.”

“For all of these reasons, it seems clear to me that a frozen embryo does not fit within the statutory definition of ‘person’ as that term is used in Alabama’s criminal-homicide statutes and thus cannot be a ‘minor child’ under the Wrongful Death Act.”

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