My latest hyperbolic foray into political stupidity:
Read it over at The Bell Tower
Like the irritating drunk on the plane next to you who won't stop talking, abortion is back in the news and this time, it promises to stick around for a while. Abortion is the original haunt of annoying American radicals. The OG straw men of woman haters and baby killers have been around long enough to collect social security at this point. Justice Alito's leaked decision is not final but it seems likely that the Supreme Court is about to turn Roe into a Row.
This radicalization of political discourse has seeped out of the abortion discussion into the mainstream of American politics. Empathy has vanished in favor of righteousness and each side has constructed a silly, cartoon wicker man of the opposition which they are busy setting fire to like the Russians scorching their fields against the onslaught of Imperial Germany. Nobody hears anything the other faction says unless it pisses them off.
I'm pro-life. I consider an unborn child to be a human being. I don't believe aborting that child is necessarily murder but as the father of two young daughters, I would struggle with such a decision if it impacted any of the important women in my life. Were it my spouse, significant other or immediate family, I would hope that we would work together to determine the best course of action. Whatever the rabid, vagina hat wearing lunatics want to shout at every rally and riot that they infest like incessant mosquitos, a woman should not feel that she has to make such a decision alone and families do not appreciate obnoxious jerks shouting at young women that they should do whatever they want without consulting their families. Under most circumstances, families are far better consultants in these situations than activists, government bureaucrats or even doctors.
Of course that is not true in all cases. Some pregnant women are surely alone or they are surrounded by awful miscreants who do not have their best interests in mind. There are also medical complications where only a doctor can make the decision and the state need not interfere. This is why, politically, I'm pro-choice. Conservatives barely trust the state to issue a driver's license. How is it that we feel compelled to insert the state into a decision best left to a woman, her family, her doctor and any caring support group that might surround her? Why would we trust the state to be a better judge than a woman who is actually carrying a child inside of her?
Whatever the belligerently religious pro-life lunatics who hide rosaries in the bushes around abortion clinics want to shout at you, abortion rarely involves an act of overt evil. These are your mothers, your sisters and your daughters, not murderers. Part of the problem here is the feminist bullhorn that amplifies all the dumbest arguments about abortion. Women deserve equal access to casual sex! Abortion regulation is just another way for men to control women! It's not a baby, it's just a clump of cells! The state has no right to regulate a woman's body! If this were true, prostitution would be a constitutional right, but I digress.
One of the great ironies of modern politics is that progressives constantly complain about an overly wealthy, mostly privileged, super angry and predominantly white version of America. Also, that is exactly what the progressive base of the Democratic party is - angry, privileged, rich, mostly white assholes. As Barack Obama once noted, "We are the ones we've been waiting for." Indeed.
Meanwhile, some on the super "Christian" right seem to have entirely forgotten "that which you do to the least of my brothers" also applies to sisters. It's perfectly reasonable to want to protect unborn life but pretending that you're on some holy crusade without any consideration of women who may be facing any number of challenges is appalling. That includes thinking you know better than the woman who is actually pregnant what is the best course of action. You may think that your righteous pursuit of "justice" at all costs makes you a good Christian, but it doesn't. It just makes you an asshole.
Most Americans do not spend their days posting radical memes on Twitter, protesting in front of judge's houses or barring women from entering abortion clinics. On the whole, Americans are rational, empathetic people. Consequently, there are rational and compelling arguments on both "sides" of the abortion debate that are worth considering if you stop shouting and start listening. Too often, the shouting buffoons drown out the serious thinkers.
NOTE: I use pro-life and pro-choice here, which is what each side wants to be called. The media and their radical audiences can take their pro-abortion and anti-abortion descriptions and shove them into the same trashcan CNN+ finds itself. I'd like to vent about the absolute deluge of alarmist vomit volcanically spewing from the vast majority of our idiotic activist journalism community but it would be a whole other column and I'd run out of adjectives after the first paragraph. Let's just say that much of the media is complicit in amplifying the shouting at the expense of the reasoning.
Overturning Roe:
1. Roe created an enumerated right where one did not exist. The constitution does not mention abortion anywhere and for most of history, it has not been legal. There are challenges to Alito's historical reading on that last point but the judge's opinion is thorough and well reasoned. It isn't some super radical reading of the constitution and in fact, it rectifies a super radical reading of the constitution that the left wants to defend by shouting about precedent. According to Alito, the plaintiffs in the case argued that the Court could not uphold Roe and the Mississippi law simultaneously. Either the court overturns that law or they overturn Roe. Alito essentially calls their bluff.
Progressives were shouting nonsense about settled law and precedent from the rooftops long before this decision was leaked. We can't just upend settled law because we don't like it! Tradition and precedent matter!
Also, abolish the filibuster, pack the courts and eliminate the Electoral College. Basically, settled law and tradition only matter insofar as they forward progressive ends. When they stand in the way of those ends, they are racist relics of a privileged, white male past.
Gee, why doesn't anyone take this seriously?
2. Restricting abortion saves unborn lives. If you believe that an unborn child is a life, as I do, saving them is pretty important. A lot of modern American arguments boil down to which policy saves the most lives, which is silly, but if we count the unborn life from conception as equal to the woman carrying it, banning abortion would save many lives.
Of course, overturning Roe does not ban abortion. It returns the regulation of it to the states and, as Justice Alito points out, the people. But this ruling allows states that would seek to totally forbid abortion an avenue for them to do so. While a ban may save many unborn lives, it puts the liberties of doctors and pregnant women at risk.
3. Federalism. In most circumstances, allowing states to make their own laws and customs is a positive for society. Everything from gun laws to driving laws to education laws are tailored to the geography, population, culture and specific mores of each state. This allows for incredible, peaceful diversity across the US and it empowers people to be able to have a very active role in laws that directly impact them. Returning abortion to the states also returns the issue to the people and it is consistent with this diverse approach to governance. This is sometimes called democracy, which you will often find progressives clamoring for when the numbers are in their favor.
However, federalism also has its draw backs, as we learned from slavery and Jim Crow. Imagine turning the matter of slavery or racial discrimination back over to the states to regulate at their discretion. We would be unlikely to see the reintroduction of slavery or racism the next day but who knows what would happen over time? Natural rights should not be subject to the whim of majorities and just because the government has not provided us with an exhaustive list of enumerated rights is no excuse to curb the ones it hasn't mentioned. In the case of abortion, we have conflicting natural rights: those of the mother's right to choose and those of the life she carries. In other words, it's far more complicated than the protestors screaming from either corner would have you believe.
Upholding Roe:
1. More people could be at risk if Roe is overturned. Trigger laws and the general extremism of the current governing class means that in some states, abortion could be completely banned even in situations where a woman's life is in danger or early in a pregnancy where a woman may not even be aware she is pregnant until it's too late. In some states, radicals have already called for prosecuting women who seek abortions as murderers and using the power of states that restrict abortion to prevent women from pursuing abortion in other states. If that is what you call "pro-life" then you should be unsurprised to find that most Americans think you're out of your mind.
Justice Alito makes a compelling point about the absurdity of viability - eventually, technology may render a fetus viable the moment after conception. However, without this admittedly arbitrary defining line, how far will states go in permitting abortion? Some idiots have indicated that they would support "abortion" even after birth, which is infanticide but, read it for yourself. Those comments were appalling, however Reuters would like to spin them.
No serious person is in favor of infanticide but legalizing and normalizing very late term abortions and partial birth abortions and creating a stigma on children with birth defects or developmental challenges could be the approach of some deep blue states. I'm not sure why those who are celebrating the potential overturning of Roe would consider this a good outcome.
In the current political climate, we seem to have three categories of citizens: radical extremists, those who are subservient to or afraid of radical extremists (these are usually elected officials or corporate boardrooms) and the vast, silent majority who are not interested enough to affect the course of political events until they get very upset. For an example of rival factions taking turns seizing power to kick each other in the beans, study the French Revolution. Extremists driving the abortion laws across the 50 states could produce very bad results.
2. The potential weakening of other unenumerated rights. Interracial marriage is one, gay marriage is another. It's silly to argue that either of these is at any great risk if Alito's decision becomes law tomorrow. Call me crazy but it seems very unlikely that Clarence Thomas is going to pursue the upending of interracial marriage any time soon. However, just because the majority has no interest in curbing those rights at the moment doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about the weakening of their foundations.
Regarding enumerated rights in Federalist #84, Hamilton said:
"For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?"
Hamilton argued against a Bill of Rights because the federal government's powers were enumerated. In other words, if the powers of the state aren't explicitly defined, the state can't do it.
He also argued that articulating government's role in preserving such rights would "afford a colorable pretext" to "men disposed to usurp" to argue that the framers would not have mentioned those rights at all if they did not intend the state to regulate them. In short, a Bill of Rights would imply powers that the framers did not intend. This is exactly what "but, the militia!!" arguments about the Second Amendment are. Hamilton predicted it almost exactly.
Despite this, the entire 20th and 21st centuries have been a case study in the government doing things that it has no power to do. The Anti-Federalists were not wrong, enumerated rights have held up far better than enumerated powers. I'm no lawyer and there are complicated legal constructs for dealing with unenumerated rights but it seems to me that the Supreme Court is the only branch of government with a vested interest in preserving those rights because of its attachment to the constitution. The legislature is a distillation of majority will and the executive is built to act as the arm of the state. Neither can be trusted with prioritizing human rights to the detriment of their own specific agendas. I'll take poorly worded precedents that preserve natural rights over federalism every time.
I don't think abortion is a fundamental right but without some sort of protection, the state has broad latitude to interfere in the private decisions of women, doctors and families. Conservatives should oppose such power wherever it is found.
3. The state does not have the power to grant rights. Government can secure rights but it can neither grant them nor take them away. We are born free. Hamilton again:
"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased."
In other words, you don't have freedom of speech just because some constitution says so. You have it because God blessed you with it (or because you were born with it if the notion of God offends you) and every other living, breathing human has the same freedom whether or not their government wants to secure it or contain it. Just because the Uyghurs can't object to their plight doesn't mean they don't have freedom of speech. It means the Chinese communists and Han supremacists are unjustly silencing them.
The question is, how can society best manage the balance between a woman's right to choose her own destiny and a child's right to live? You might even call abortion an ugly freedom, but I digress.
Currently, abortion is exactly what moderates argued for it to be in the 80's and 90's: safe, legal and relatively rare. If you could confront me in 1992 and tell me that this is where abortion would be in 2022 with Roe on the books, I'd have told you that you picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue. But I was wrong and so were a lot of conservatives of that era.
Roe may be terrible legal reasoning but so long as it has been on the books, abortions have declined and become safer. Only the rhetoric has become more strident. The court could easily uphold the Mississippi law while preserving a federal guarantee of a woman's right to choose and the world would not end. Federalism tempered with constitutional safeguards. Sometimes, the job of the court is to preserve social peace. If you ask me, this is one of those times.
However, even if the court overturns Roe, the only real social remedy is for Americans to stop shouting at each other. Stop threatening. Stop bullying. Stop pursuing radical policies as if the victims of those policies are your enemies as opposed to other Americans. Stop angrily posting Tweets and memes with bad grammar and incoherent thoughts. Stop dressing up like five year olds at Halloween and acting like morons in front of institutions, businesses and private homes. Stop demeaning and dehumanizing the other side of the aisle.
Start listening. Start talking in complete sentences. Start making serious arguments instead of belligerent ejaculations of rage and stupidity. Use your freedom of speech instead of your desperate impulse to disrupt. Self government is the province of grown ups. It cannot be conducted by a bunch of entitled adult babies.
In short:
Stop acting like assholes.