Karl Rove's Court Abomination: Justice Priscilla R. Owens

[UPDATE 5-22-05] Link to summary of Texas Bar Association's rating (poor) for Owen.

[UPDATE 5-21-05] Link to Lou Dubose story (not SALON) re: Willie Searcy and how Owen's corporate activism killed him.

Okay, how arrogant and self-confident can one man be? If the man is Karl Rove, I'd say without limit.

Of all the Bush-related names I can think of none strikes more nausea, bile, hate and vitriol in my heart than that of Karl Rove. I have spent more than my share of daydreaming time imagining him well, 'rapturized', and felt really quite happy afterward. That's a shame isn't it, a peace-loving person being driven by the Machiavellian perversion of just one self-loathing nerd to fantasies like that?

Well, I'm afraid that if there is to be an end to the abomination that Rove has distorted the political party my mother of 80 is now embarassed to be a card-holder of, he will have to go. I'd say just losing him politically would be fine, but he won't get lost. He's a pit bull of Satan (in fact were I Christian I would fear him as the anti-christ). Well, actually, he's just a dough boy who couldn't get laid (by either sex) so he learned that if you're fat and ugly you'd better have power. Then he substituted the orgasm of power for that of sex (imagine if he were actually that addicted to sex--he'd be in recovery forever--but I digress) wait, maybe he's really a self-loathing homo? You think?

Anyway, his abomination preened for Bush, the anti-woman 'Prissy' Owens, is a very good reflection of Rove's inner mind. Do you think she ever whipped out a vibrator to entice her hubby? Naw, neither do I, ergo, perfect anti-sex-because-it-is-"bad" (anti-abortion) cold fish. Brrrr...why are these Theocons so damn dead? Oh, there goes my Id again... sorry.

Even on the conservative, all-Republican bench that the State Supreme Court had become, Justice Owen occasionally stood out among her colleagues, sometimes in tandem with another justice, Nathan Hecht. In no situation was this more so than in cases involving the interpretation of a state law providing for a teenage girl to obtain an abortion without notifying her parents if she can show a court that she is mature enough to understand the consequences.

In one dissent, Justice Owen said the teenager in the case had not demonstrated that she knew that there were religious objections to abortion and that some women who underwent abortions had experienced severe remorse.

Mr. Gonzales, a Texas Supreme Court justice at the time, was in the majority and wrote that the position of the three dissenters was "an unconscionable act of judicial activism" because it would create obstacles to abortion that the Legislature did not enact.

Mr. Gonzales, in interviews with The New York Times, acknowledged that his words were directed at her dissent but said that he remained enthusiastic about her nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

But he has been repeatedly pressed by conservatives to declare that he did not mean her. Recently, he tried to distance himself from the remarks by telling a Senate committee that he was referring to himself, not the dissenters. His apparent explanation seemed to be that it would have been an act of judicial activism for him if he had done what Justice Owen and her two fellow dissenters had done.

Craig McDonald, an official with Texans for Public Justice, said Justice Owen is indeed a judicial activist, "and it is not confined to a few cases over abortion." He said, "She is a serial activist, often in service to corporations and the powerful."