Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post in a couple of opinions lays out how the white Christian Nationalist GQP is waging a sectarian religious war against Americans. Her colleague Paul Waldman explains this cult represents a tyranny of a minority of Americans who want to impose their views on the majority.
Rubin writes, The Supreme Court’s religion-driven mission sets off a firestorm:
The leaked draft Supreme Court opinion written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. posits not only the total evisceration of constitutional protection for abortion but of an entire line of substantive due-process cases.
[T]he leak itself, while not entirely unprecedented, is further evidence that the court has ceased to act like a court and now conducts itself like a partisan operation seeking to manipulate public opinion.
As would be entirely expected, pro-choice advocates reacted with fury over the news, with an unusually pointed statement from the White House on a pending case: “If the Court does overturn Roe, it will fall on our nation’s elected officials at all levels of government to protect a woman’s right to choose. And it will fall on voters to elect pro-choice officials this November. At the federal level, we will need more pro-choice Senators and a pro-choice majority in the House to adopt legislation that codifies Roe, which I will work to pass and sign into law.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) also issued a blistering statement. “The Republican-appointed Justices’ reported votes to overturn Roe v. Wadewould go down as an abomination, one of the worst and most damaging decisions in modern history,” they said in a written statement. “Several of these conservative Justices, who are in no way accountable to the American people, have lied to the U.S. Senate, ripped up the Constitution and defiled both precedent and the Supreme Court’s reputation.” (The “lie” they refer to is the promise from several right-wing justices that Roe was “settled law.”)
The decision is not final, but does suggest the Supreme Court is ready to launch a radical shift in constitutional law as we have known it for decades. Alito takes aim not only at Lawrence v. Texas prohibiting criminalization of sodomy but, if his reasoning is followed, to Griswold v. Connecticut, which in 1965 protected access to contraception. For the first time in history, the Supreme Court would sweep aside constitutional protection in many contexts for hundreds of millions of Americans, a jaw-dropping extension of government power to control the most intimate personal decisions and to impose a particular set of Christian views on the entire country.
At its core, this Supreme Court’s right-wing majority seems eager to cast aside the restraints of precedent, making good on their supporters’ agenda rooted in Christian nationalism. In assuming life begins at conception (thereby giving the states unfettered leeway to ban abortion ), Alito and his right-wing colleagues would impose a faith-based regimen shredding a half-century of legal and social change.
With polls showing as much as 70 percent of Americans favoring the preservation of Roe v. Wade, unelected justices — in some cases appointed by presidents who lacked a popular-vote majority and confirmed by senators who did not represent a majority of the country — would bring to head a battle between a fading racial, religious and political minority and an increasingly diverse, secular country.
By moving in such a radical fashion, these justices risk setting off a political firestorm and encouraging calls to rein in the court either by “packing” it or by dispensing with lifetime tenure. Justices’ recent overtly partisan speeches, disdain for precedent and now the egregious leak may well permanently damage respect for the court (already in steep decline) — as well they should. For when a court decides to adopt a partisan agenda of one party grounded in values the majority of the country does not hold, it risks revealing itself as a theocratic, agenda-driven body. Robes do not make a court; rather, it is intellectual integrity, humility and restraint — none of which the court’s conservative majority demonstrates.
If the opinion holds, the political tsunami will ensue. More than 20 states have laws that would ban all or nearly all abortions if Roe is overturned. In some cases, states would criminalize all abortions — even in cases of rape or when the mother’s life is in danger. Republicans would be forced to defend such egregious laws.
Democratic Senate candidates are already demanding the codification of Roe in federal law. “We have reached a crisis point, Republicans across the country are outlawing abortion in America and yet somehow too many Democrats have treated and continue to treat abortion rights as an afterthought or an extra credit project,” said Sarah Godlewski, a Democratic candidate for Senate in Wisconsin. “We have had almost 50 years to codify Roe into law. Enough is enough. Democrats need to get off the sidelines and stop ignoring Republican attacks on our reproductive rights. Women will die if we don’t.”
Likewise, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) released a statement vowing, “As a pro-choice pastor, I’ve always believed that a patient’s room is way too small for a woman, her doctor, and the United States government. I’ll always fight to protect a woman’s right to choose. And that will never change.”
Democrats, especially young voters, have been less engaged in the 2022 midterms than their GOP counterparts. That might now change as Democrats, especially women, understand the life-changing implications of how the court might rule. Alito wants the issue to go back to the states — and so it likely will, with devastating implications for women, who now might turn out to vote as if their lives, dignity and autonomy depended on it. For, of course, it would.
Rubin continues, Throw out the term ‘culture wars.’ This is religious tyranny. (currently behind a pay wall).
In using “culture wars,” one would think this was a battle between two sides over hemlines or movie ratings or “lifestyles.” If media outlets keep up distorting language, they’ll to find it hard to explain the firestorm awaiting Roe v. Wade reversal https://t.co/DKSvi2eIMn
— Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) May 4, 2022
Paul Waldman explains, Minority rule is the real reason Roe v. Wade is dead:
In the immediate fallout of the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinionthat would strike down Roe v. Wade, many have noted that this decision will be extremely unpopular; polls show that between 60 and 65 percent of Americans say Roe should remain. The draconian laws Republicans are already proposing at the state level could be even more unpopular.
But if those facts allowed liberals to convince themselves this day would not come, they were clearly misguided. The coming nightmare for reproductive rights is in large part a product of minority rule. It’s what Republicans have painstakingly constructed over the course of decades, and it might take just as long to dismantle it — if Democrats can do that at all.
Note: This advantage is structural in the anti-democratic provisions of the Constitution, i.e., two Senate seats for every state without regard to population or apportionment; and the Electoral College for the presidency, the last remaining vestige of a system designed to appease the slave states, not used anywhere else in the world.
Opinions on abortion have been remarkably resistant to change for the past 50 years. The antiabortion movement’s attempt to convince the public that abortion is murder was a failure, and that likely won’t change in the post-Roe world.
Conservatives know that perfectly well. But the whole point of building the apparatus of minority rule was for moments like this. You don’t have to twist the system in knots and eliminate democratic accountability to do popular things. You do it to stop popular things you don’t like, enable yourself to do things the public doesn’t want, and hold on to power no matter what.
The details should be familiar by now. The Senate gives two votes to every state, so 40 million Americans in California, most of them Democrats, get the same representation as 580,000 Americans in Wyoming, most of them Republicans. That is then levered into the electoral college, which is why the past two Republican presidents took office despite having lost the popular vote.
That (plus unprecedented ruthlessness [lawlessness] in refusing to allow a Democratic president to fill an open seat) gets you a conservative Supreme Court supermajority — appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote, confirmed by GOP senators who represent a national minority — enacting a conservative legal revolution the public never asked for.
That court then validates nearly every effort by state Republicans to insulate their own power through voter suppression and partisan gerrymandering. That will enable them to outlaw abortion over the objections of their own state populations, knowing that district lines have been drawn in a way that predetermines the outcome of elections.
It’s a closed loop, an interlocking system that insulates Republicans from accountability.
There are times when Democrats can overcome it, for example by electing governors in swing states such as Wisconsin and North Carolina. But because it’s almost impossible for Republicans to lose their hold on state legislatures, they can hamstring and undermine the governor much as congressional Republicans did to President Barack Obama and will to President Biden if they take control of Congress in this fall’s elections.
Now consider where they’re going now that Roe is apparently dead. Forget about 15-week bans and six-week bans; a couple dozen Republican-run states will probably outlaw abortion entirely, perhaps with a grudging exception to save the life of the pregnant woman, but only in the most dire circumstances.
But even that will not be enough. GOP state legislators are working to ban abortion in other states; in Missouri, one Republican state legislator has introduced a bill to allow anyone to sue over an abortion that occurred anywhere if “sexual intercourse occurred within this state and the child may have been conceived by that act of intercourse.” Bills in Missouri and Ohio would ban abortions to remove ectopic pregnancies, which never result in a live birth but can kill the pregnant person.
And it isn’t just abortions. In the antiabortion movement, most forms of birth control — including birth control pills, Plan B and even IUDs — are widely and wrongly considered “abortifacients,” the moral equivalent of abortion. Once laws outlawing abortion are passed, this is where the movement will likely turn its attention — and Republican legislators who worry only about primary challenges from the right will face pressure to go after birth control.
Meanwhile, the next time Republicans have complete control in D.C., they’ll push for a nationwide ban on abortion. The planning is already underway.
If your response is to say, “That would never happen — it would be too unpopular,” remember, that’s exactly what some said about overturning Roe. The whole point of minority rule is that you don’t have to worry about what’s unpopular.
Part of the sinister genius of minority rule is that if it is constructed with enough care and comprehensiveness, it can be demoralizing to the majority, which sees no way around it, at least in the short term. That then serves to demobilize the majority and further solidify minority rule.
Overcoming that demoralization will require a psychological fortitude on the part of Democrats, and a commitment to do what Republicans did: to work not just for the next election but for a project that will unfold over decades. Even if you don’t get what you want from one president or one Congress, you have to take small steps until you reach your ultimate goal, knowing victory is never assured and will be a long time in coming.
That’s what the people who wanted to outlaw abortion committed themselves to, and now their victory is here. It can be reversed, but it will not be easy. If liberals aren’t willing to wage that long fight, then they truly will have lost.
Many years ago I read a history of Nazi Germany (the title of the book escapes me now) which quoted one the party leaders of the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party. He described with glee how the Nazis had used the tools of Germany’s democracy against it. “Everything we did was according to the rules of German democracy.” They won elections and passed legislation according to the rules of German democracy. The Enabling Acts, essentially conceding Germany’s democracy to the autocratic rule of Adolph Hitler, was a voluntary act by Germany’s legislature in enacting legislation. Hitler did not come to power by force, but came to power by democratic legislation. (This is an oversimplified rendering of history, but not incorrect).
This is sometimes called either “friendly fascism” or “creeping fascism.” It occurs gradually over time, and becomes normalized, until it becomes all encompassing. The analogy which is frequently used is a line from Carl Sanburg’s poem, “Fog”: Tyranny will come silently, slowly, “like fog creeping in on little cat feet…”
Republican strategists are clearly familiar with this concept. The American Taliban have been following this fascist playbook for decades.
Discover more from Blog for Arizona
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The pay wall is now removed from Jennifer Rubin’s opinion, “Let’s throw out the term ‘culture wars.’ This is religious tyranny.”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/04/culture-wars-diminishes-danger/
In their never-ending quest to turn politics into a game and dumb down the most serious of issues, the media continues to use the term “culture wars” to describe a range of issues in which the right seeks to break through all restraints on government power in an effort to establish a society that aligns with a minority view of America as a White, Christian country. In using “culture wars,” one would think this were a battle between two sides over hemlines or movie ratings or “lifestyles.” If media outlets keep up that distorting language, they are going to find it hard to explain the firestorm that awaits the overturning of Roe v. Wade, if the leaked draft opinion by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. prevails.
The livid reaction from progressive advocacy groups and Democratic politicians across the country about the potential evisceration of abortion rights — and possibly others protected by the 14th Amendment — should tell the media this is not simply about “culture,” nor is it a “war.” It’s a religious power grab by justices who, according to at least two female Republican senators, dissembled under oath about their intentions regarding Roe. The Senate Judiciary Committee should hold hearings and call GOP Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) to testify. If those senators were really duped, they should consider advocating for extreme measures, including impeachment and a filibuster exception to codify Roe.
It’s important to identify the nature of the threat to Americans to understand the reaction that would likely follow a ruling along the lines Alito laid out. A Supreme Court decision that would criminalize abortion, eviscerating the ambit of privacy and personal autonomy afforded by the 14th Amendment, would expand governmental power into every nook and cranny of life — from a doctor’s office in Texas treating a transgender child, to intimate relations in a bedroom in Georgia, to a pharmacy counter in Ohio. Will government dictate a set of views that have not had majority support for decades?
The right-wing justices and their supporters appear ready to reject one of the Founders’ core principles: that religion shall not be imposed by government edict.
Other Republicans have given away the scheme. In his 11-point plan, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, declares: “The nuclear family is crucial to civilization, it is God’s design for humanity, and it must be protected and celebrated. To say otherwise is to deny science.” Put aside the utter incoherence (is it God or science?): The senator is explicitly calling for state power to be used in the service of his religious beliefs.
And it’s no slip of the tongue. As would a number of Supreme Court justices, Scott would impose religious views while refusing to admit his views stem from a particular religious perspective. “Abortion kills human children,” Scott pronounces. “To deny that is to deny science.” Actually, he wants to mandate conduct based on the religious view that humanity/personhood starts at conception.
This is not about “culture.” It is about appropriating state power to enforce theocratically driven positions. Issues dismissed as “culture” or “wokeness” inevitably boil down to whether government will diminish individual rights (e.g., a rape victim’s access to abortion) and supplant decision-making on matters, such as health care, that individuals and families jealously guard.
It wasn’t so long ago that “conservatives” stood for the proposition that government, especially the federal government, should not control the totality of traditions, habits and decisions made in civil society. The family, for example, should remain undisturbed to work out arrangements that reflect its members’ values, faith and views in a pluralistic society. The principle of limited government posits that — unlike totalitarian states that override personal conscience, family and religion — free peoples do not tolerate an all-pervasive government. As Vice President Harris said on Tuesday at an Emily’s List gathering, reversing Roe would be “a direct assault on freedom, on the fundamental right of self-determination.” She continued: “When the right to privacy is attacked, anyone in our country may face a future where the government can interfere with their personal decisions. Not just women. Anyone.”
In sum, the media’s “culture wars” shorthand is an evasion, a refusal to recognize that what is at stake are the rights and lives of those without the resources or power to defend themselves (e.g., travel out of state for an abortion). The Supreme Court is poised to roil the very essence of our constitutional tradition and strike at the heart of a pluralistic democracy. Let’s call it what it really is: state-enforced theocracy, or, if you prefer, religious authoritarianism.
Former Democratic congressman Barney Frank put it perfectly: These people believe that “life begins at conception and ends at birth.” It is a fetus fetish. Once a woman gives birth, they are all “you’re on your own, baby!”
Michele Norris writes at the Washington Post, “The GOP roars about abortion. Then they abandon the children.”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/03/children-women-roe-leak/
What about the children?
For decades, the abortion debate has been about politics and precedent, about religion and reproductive rights, about riling up voters and rewriting laws. Rarely is it about what happens to children once they roam this earth if their mothers are forced to go through with an unplanned pregnancy. Where is the commitment by antiabortion warriors to take up the fight for the babies who will be born under duress?
Short answer? It hardly exists. This is the false piety hidden in the Republican Party’s zeal to roll back a woman’s right to choose. The sanctity of human life is all-important right up to the point when that flesh-and-bone child enters a world where programs designed to support women, the poor or households teetering toward economic ruin are being scaled back by a party that claims to be about family values. Family, for the radicalized GOP, is too often an inelastic framework built around powerful men, subordinate women, and children who will learn how to hurl themselves forward in life, even if there’s no money, few educational opportunities, no job prospects in their future, no proverbial boots with magical straps to lift their fortunes toward the sun.
The pro-life warriors — including legislators who have been rolling back abortion rights at the state level — are silent when it comes to fighting for even the simple principle of enhanced child support enforcement so the men who father these children can provide for the life they create. Let’s not forget that women who seek abortions are disproportionately poor or economically insecure. A 2014 study found that 3 in 4 women who terminate their pregnancies are low-income and almost 50 percent of those women live below the poverty level. Fifty-five percent are unmarried or do not live with the father.
Diana Greene Foster, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, knows what a world without abortion looks like. She spent 10 years tracking thousands of women and reports that women who were denied abortions because of rules around gestation limits were more likely to be single, without steady work, without a partner and without family support five years later. Those women also reported feeling trapped and less emotionally bonded to their new babies compared with women who had abortions and then had subsequent children later in life.
“It is by no means a given that a woman who did not want to have a baby cannot forge a loving and healthy relationship with that child, even if it doesn’t happen right away,” Greene Foster writes in her book “The Turnaway Study.” “But the finding does underscore the adverse circumstances for the child when a woman continues a pregnancy against her will.”
A further irony is that many of the states that have enacted the most restrictive bans on abortion also spend the least money to provide health and economic benefits for expecting mothers and children once they’re born.
The numbers don’t lie when you look at state rankings on maternal morbidity, infant mortality, premature birth, child poverty, birth weight, access to health care, day care, food stamps and housing. Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s draft opinion is about a case that comes from Mississippi — a state that ranks dead last in preterm births, neonatal mortality and overall child well-being.
Some religious institutions do focus on the outcome of unplanned pregnancies. The Gabriel Project, sponsored by Catholic Charities, is a crisis pregnancy center that aims to offer compassionate and confidential ministry to those pregnant and in distress. Clearly, its aim is to reduce the number of abortions, but at least a program such as this centers women and the children they might bear. That rarely happens in political or legal debates about abortion.
The women who contemplate ending their pregnancies never really take center stage in this drama. Their dilemma is framed as simply a choice. Their anguish is subject to moral policing. Their reasons (poverty, abusive partner, age, insufficient life skills) are brushed away by majority White and male lawmakers who have no problem policing women’s bodies but have been howling for months about something as simple as mask mandates. Even women who become pregnant under the most horrible of circumstances — rape or incest — are criminalized under a growing number of state laws if the mother decides not to carry the fetus to term, regardless of the physical or emotional trauma.
The prospect of a United States where abortion is unattainable is no longer an abstraction. Those who have long fought to outlaw the procedure often argue that the child whose life is ended by abortion might be the very person who could discover the cure for cancer — as if the government needs to control women’s bodies to protect the future of the human race.
That argument is wickedly hollow when it comes from lawmakers who are unwilling to invest in helping expectant mothers or providing a stronger safety net for the children they will be forced to bear.
Roxane Gay writes at the New York Times, “It’s Time to Rage”, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/03/opinion/roxane-gay-roe-v-wade.html
(excerpt)
It is stunning that a draft of a Supreme Court ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked before the justices planned to announce their decision, likely next month. It is also telling. Whoever leaked it wanted people to understand the fate awaiting us.
At least, that is what I am telling myself. And thank God somebody did, so we know. So we can prepare. So we can rage.
We should not live in a world where sexual violence exists, but we do. Given that unfortunate reality, we should not live in a world where someone who is raped is forced to carry a pregnancy to term because a minority of Americans believe the unborn are more important than the people who give birth to them.
And we should defend abortion access not only in cases of sexual violence. All those who want an abortion should be able to avail themselves of that medical procedure. Their reasons are no one’s business. People should not have to demonstrate their virtue to justify a personal decision about how to handle a life-altering circumstance.
We should not live in a country where bodily autonomy can be granted or taken away by nine political appointees, most of whom are men and cannot become pregnant. Any civil right contingent upon political whims is not actually a civil right.
Without the right to abortion, women are forced to make terrible choices. These burdens disproportionately fall upon poor and working-class women without the means to travel across state lines to receive the care they need. Despite promises from the anti-abortion movement to support pregnant women and children, the “pro-life” lobby appears to be invested only in the unborn. The same mostly male politicians who oppose abortion so often do everything in their power to oppose rights to paid parental leave, subsidized child care, single-payer health care or any kind of social safety net that could improve family life.
[A]nd there are other disturbing considerations in the draft decision, written by Justice Samuel Alito. Some have expressed the concern that by extending Justice Alito’s reasoning, other hard-won rights — such as the rights to contraception and marriage equality — could be struck down too. That is to say, this decision is opening the door for social progress and civil rights to be systematically dismantled on the most absurd of pretexts.
And this is not a theoretical threat. We are already seeing how several states are trying to legislate trans people out of existence with laws banning gender-affirming health care for children, and in Missouri, a proposed law could extend that denial to adults.
I do not know where this retraction of civil rights will end, but I do know it will go down as a milestone in a decades-long conservative campaign to force a country of 330 million people to abide by a bigoted set of ideologies. This movement seeks to rule by hollow theocracy, despite our constitutional separation of church and state. The people behind this campaign do not represent the majority of this country, and they know it, so they consistently try to undermine the democratic process. They attack voting rights, gerrymander voting districts and shove unpopular legislation through so that they can live in a world of their choosing and hoard as much power and wealth as possible.
Where do we go from here? To protect women’s bodily autonomy, the right to abortion must be codified in federal law. But the possibility of that seems very distant. In their joint statement, issued after the Supreme Court leak, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, did not use the word “abortion” even once. President Biden has barely uttered it during his presidency. It’s hard to believe they are as committed as they need to be to protecting a right whose name they dare not speak. Until the Democrats stop lounging in the middle of the political aisle — where no one is coming to meet them — nothing will change.
The possibility of so many civil rights being rolled back is terrifying. Millions of Americans now wonder which of our rights could be stripped away from us, our friends and family, our communities. The sky is falling, and a great many of us are desperately trying to hold it up.