Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to ever sit on the bench of the country’s highest court, passed away on Friday at the age of 93. The cause of death, according to Newsmax, was complications related to advanced dementia and an illness of the respiratory system, the Supreme Court revealed in a statement released after her passing. O’Connor died in the city of Phoenix.
Chief Justice John Roberts issued a statement about the legendary justice’s passing, mourning her death.
“A daughter of the American Southwest, Sandra Day O’Connor blazed an historic trail as our Nation’s first female Justice,” Roberts statement, which was issued by the court, said of O’Connor. “She met that challenge with undaunted determination, indisputable ability, and engaging candor.”
Here’s more on O’Connor’s life and passing via Newsmax:
In 2018, she announced that she had been diagnosed with “the beginning stages of dementia, probably Alzheimer’s disease.” Her husband, John O’Connor, died of complications of Alzheimer’s in 2009.
O’Connor’s nomination in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan and subsequent confirmation by the Senate ended 191 years of male exclusivity on the high court. A native of Arizona who grew up on her family’s sprawling ranch, O’Connor wasted little time building a reputation as a hard worker who wielded considerable political clout on the nine-member court.
The granddaughter of a pioneer who traveled west from Vermont and founded the family ranch some three decades before Arizona became a state, O’Connor had a tenacious, independent spirit that came naturally. As a child growing up in the remote outback, she learned early to ride horses, round up cattle and drive trucks and tractors.
“I didn’t do all the things the boys did,” she went on to say in an interview conducted with Time magazine from 1981, “but I fixed windmills and repaired fences.”
Unfortunately, when it comes to one of the most important issues of our time, abortion, O’Connor was on the wrong side of history, balking at justices who were seeking to overturn Roe v. Wade, which would allow states to decide whether to ban the practice or not.
“Some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles of morality, but that can’t control our decision,” O’Connor remarked in court as she read a summary of the decision in the case Planned Parenthood v. Casey. “Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.”
A simple, fundamental truth that O’Connor and many liberals seem to miss is that all law, no matter whose side of the political spectrum it’s on, is a moral code. You cannot separate morality from the law. That’s absolutely impossible. Another way to communicate this truth is to point out that it’s not a matter of whether we will legislate morality or not, but whose morality will become the basis for the law we put in place.
Of course, we no longer have this debate as Roe v. Wade was officially overturned in the summer of 2022, by the grace of God.
O’Connor was regarded with great fondness by many of her colleagues. When she retired, Justice Clarence Thomas, a consistent conservative, called her “an outstanding colleague, civil in dissent and gracious when in the majority.”
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