Will the Real Paul Pfeiffenberger Please Stand Up?

I got to know hundreds of my co-workers over thirty years at good old Air Products. Sadly, I still see familiar names in the obituaries. Amusingly, I still see familiar names writing Letters to the Editor. “Yup. That guy was an idiot as an engineer when I worked with him in 1975 and he’s still an idiot as a political analyst today.”

Of course, I could be wrong about the identity of the letter writers. The Bob Jones rhapsodizing about the good old days under the Trump administration (“Trump kept Putin in his place!”) might not be the same Bob Jones I worked with. I am pretty sure that the letter from Paul Pfeiffenberger is from the same guy I knew, though. How many Paul Pfeiffenbergers can there be?

Paul wrote, “Every life is precious and should be protected, even those in the womb. Human life begins at conception. We must always respect and love life, not destroy it. It is great to see the Justices correctly interpret the Constitution and facts.”

I hope that Paul read his engineering textbooks more closely than he read the Constitution. There is no mention of when life begins there. Back in 1973, the Justices “interpreted” the 14th amendment to allow individual privacy. Government has no say on the private decision between a woman and her physician to terminate a pregnancy before viability, set at 24 weeks.

The 2022 Supreme Court “interpreted” the 10th amendment as applicable to abortion. “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” In other words, let’s allow fifty individual states to set their own abortion rules. It works so well for marriage. You could marry your first cousin at age 13 in Louisiana, but don’t move to another state because your marriage would not be recognized there.

Paul Pfeiffenberger is about ten years younger than I am. Presumably, he is settled into a comfortable retirement. I hope that he devotes some of his free time to actually reading Justice Alito’s opinion on “Dobbs”. You don’t have to be a constitutional law expert to see that it lacks logic.

By Ed Dufton