Linda Greenhouse, the NY Times' Supreme Court columnist, observes that "some justices have drifted quite far from their ideological starting points. Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens and David Souter come to mind. All were Republican-appointed justices … who ended their careers as among the most liberal members of the court they served on."
She asks if Chief Justice John Roberts — the Court's other conservatives she sees, evidently, as hopeless — might someday join Blackmun et al.s' ranks. (He has, but only on occasion.) The law itself as well as life's teachings opened their eyes to more civilized vistas of our human community.
While reading Greenhouse's column, I recalled, duh, that such intellectual expansions are not limited to the federal judiciary. The same sort of expansiveness effects much of the liberalism in institutions of higher education — some scholarship of organized religion, too.
Right wingers are forever decrying universities' pontificators of liberalism, although students' tyrannical monitoring, in ridiculous end-of-sessions' "evaluations" of professors, has withered what professors were once expected to do. The point, however, is that university liberalism tends to germinate and flower upon higher examinations of what's what — not, necessarily, that universities are hellbent on poisoning the minds of youth with truths and inconvenient facts.
As to this occurrence in the academic fields of religion, I cite the case of Prof. Bart Ehrman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A fundamentalist Christian when young, his graduate religious studies at Princeton led to a true epiphany. This transfiguration he recounts in his authoritative Misquoting Jesus: "It finally occurred to me that if I really thought that God had inspired this text [and] if he went to the trouble of inspiring the text, why didn’t he go to the trouble of preserving the text? Why did he allow scribes to change it?" Thus did Ehrman's Christian fundamentalism — or any Christianity, for that matter — go the way of Blackmun's conservative jurisprudence.
For John Roberts, we can hope. Intellectual growth is not always thwarted; sometimes, the intellect looks at history and yells Go.