Roe: The hammer falls
So we don’t have unalienable rights after all, and they don’t come from our Creator. Our Constitutional rights can be taken away at any time. Or, as we discovered a day ago in the gun decision, invented out of thin air.
It is hard to calculate the possible impact of repealing Roe. Most basically, women run the risk, at any stage of their life, of having their life, career, and plans taken away. Not men. Back to the time when women would just disappear from high school or college, and never return.
Single teenagers to 38 year old women who already have three children. There are thousands of reasons for a woman to decide she wants an abortion. You may disagree with any or all. But the essential question is, is a woman an adult with agency to make her own life decisions? Or does the government have a right to make that decision for you?
Beyond that, the simple statement that women and men are not equal is stunning. This takes us back to a time when women were “allowed” to be nurses, teachers, and secretaries and nothing else. When newspapers ran ads, “jobs, men” and “Jobs, women.” When a college department head could tell a woman graduate of his department “If you think I will let you take a grad school position away from a man who’s going to need to support a family, you have another think coming, young lady” and face no consequences. When women couldn’t get credit in their own name. It’s a large step back to the days when women couldn’t own property. Remember those times? When girls “got in trouble.”
Besides consigning women to second class status, this decision calls EVERYTHING into question. The Supreme Court long since abandoned reliance on precedent (when Citizens United overruled 100 years of precedent) and judicial restraint (Citizens United, again, when they literally specified the lawsuit they wanted Citizens United to bring). The concept of the plain meaning of the words in the Constitution were out the window with Heller.
Even logic and common sense were banished when in Shelby County they ruled we were past racism and the states wouldn't take advantage of repealing the Voting rights Act. And deciding on the narrowest possible grounds, even Justice Roberts complained today at the over-reach of the reactionary core of the Court.
Now, even Constitutional rights aren't certain. There is nothing but ideology. The Supreme Court has become the Texas legislature in black robes, justice Roberts is Ron DeSantis with a bigger vocabulary.
The concept that Constitutional rights are conditional and can be taken away by nine reactionaries in black robes is sickening.
Don’t console yourself that, well, it will be legal in California and New York and Maryland. Next up? A nationwide ban. Nationwide criminalization. Trust me, some radical reactionary law firm is working on the test case – or a legislature is writing the law.
Clarence Thomas signaled clearly that same sex marriage and the right to contraception are next on the chopping block. That’s an invitation to every red state attorney general, every county clerk to refuse a marriage license. Or a pharmacist to refuse to fill a prescription for contraceptives. Or a state legislature to restore sodomy laws..
But that’s not the end. “You have a right to remain silent …” “If you cannot afford one, one will be provided for you.” Environmental regulations. (that probably gets deep-sixed next week). Heck, the right to form labor unions. The 40-hour work week. Bans on drilling in national monuments. National monuments themselves. Aid to highways, education, housing. Weather satellites. There is quite literally nothing about modern life that you can authoritatively say is safe from these radical activists.
People should stop claiming these reactionary judges (they are far from conservatives) believe in “the text” or “original intent.” That was a lie when Scalia started pompously declaiming about it and the media shouldn’t allow them the credit for actually believing in a principle. On consecutive days, the court dealt with original intent by saying (in the gun case) that states can’t regulate guns at all unless they can show the founders intent to regulate guns that way. In Roe, they flipped it – the founders didn’t show they approved it so you can litigate it out of existence. By that logic, the previous day they should have said “we see no evidence the founding father approved of AR-15s, so they can be regulated out of existence.” That’s not a legal principle, that’s a word game.
There is little reason to be optimistic about this unscrupulous court.
In case you missed it
The courts: From worst to even worse yet