White Christian Nationalists Are On A Religious Crusade To Reverse The Advances Of The 21st and 20th Century

The Christian Nationalists on the U.S. Supreme Court (curiously all of them Catholics, not fundamentalist evangelicals) are laying a foundation for a White Christian Nationalist America that the Founding Fathers sought to prevent with the First Amendment, given their recent experience with centuries od sectarian religious wars in Europe.

Linda Greenhouse, legal columnist for the New York Times, writes Religious Doctrine, Not the Constitution, Drove the Dobbs Decision:

Along with the decision about the praying football coach and the one requiring Maine to subsidize parochial school tuition,Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization belongs under “religion.”

That assertion invites pushback, I’m well aware. But step back from today’s artificial arguments about originalism and history, and consider the powerful social movement that led consecutive Republican presidents to appoint anti-abortion justices and that then drove the abortion issue through the Supreme Court’s open door.

Does anyone really think it was motivated by disapproval of the court’s reliance in Roe v. Wade on substantive due process, an interpretation of the 14th Amendment that accords meaning to the word “liberty” in the due process clause? Is there anyone who believes that if only the Constitution had included the word “abortion,” the anti-abortion movement would have failed to gain political traction? (Although the Dobbs majority treated the absence of the A-word in the Constitution as nearly fatal to Roe all by itself, it is worth observing that the Constitution’s 7,600 words, including its 27 amendments, contain neither the word “fetus” nor “unborn.”)

Neither does it contain the word “woman” or “women.”

No one really buys the argument that what was “egregiously wrong” with Roe v. Wade, to quote the Dobbs majority, was the court’s failure to check the right analytic boxes. It was not constitutional analysis but religious doctrine that drove the opposition to Roe. And it was the court’s unacknowledged embrace of religious doctrine that has turned American women into desperate refugees fleeing their home states in pursuit of reproductive health care that less than a month ago was theirs by right.

To be sure, the Supreme Court has not outlawed abortion. Justice Samuel Alito left that dirty work to the states: Who will rid me of this bothersome right to abortion? But during the nearly two months between the leak of his Dobbs draft on May 2 and the release of the official opinion on June 24, it became painfully obvious to all that if Roe fell, abortion would soon be illegal or all but inaccessible in about half the states. That was the point, after all.

Greenhouse is correct: the Supreme Court has not outlawed abortions. The Supreme Court has outlawed safe, legal abortions. From time immemorial there have been abortions, and abortions will continue. The radical Republican Supreme Court and radical Republican state legislators substituting their fundamentalist religious beliefs for the sound professional judgment of medical doctors have relegated women back to the dark ages of medically unsafe and illegal abortions by criminalizing the doctors who can provide them medically safe abortions.

Not only did that prospect make no difference to the Dobbs majority — the official opinion was essentially unchanged from the leaked draft except for added sections that responded to, and distorted, the dissenting opinions — but Justice Alito actually had the gall to write that “we do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision.” Polls conducted before the opinion’s release showing that upward of two-thirds of Americans wanted to retain a right to abortion offered a hint and were perhaps what led to Justice Alito’s self-righteous declaration: “We cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work.”

Justice Alito took pains to present the majority’s conclusion as the product of pure legal reasoning engaged in by judges standing majestically above the fray of Americans’ “sharply conflicting views” on the “profound moral issue” of abortion, as he put it in the opinion’s first paragraph. And yet that very framing, the assumption that the moral gravity of abortion is singular and self-evident, gives away more than members of the majority, all five of whom were raised in the Catholic Church, may have intended.

A recent essay in my local newspaper, The Berkshire Eagle, by a Congregational minister, John Nelson, was a powerful reminder that in speaking from one particular religious tradition, the court ignored other vital streams of religious thought. “Samuel Alito is as free as any person to hold forth on morals and politics,” Pastor Nelson wrote, “but his opening salvo is backed up with no reflection on the sources, claims or nuances of morality, leaving the impression that the decision was developed through moral bias rather than moral reasoning.” Describing his own response to the decision as one of “fury,” the pastor said that the justices, in their “concern for the lives of fetuses,” overlooked the “lived experience” of women. “To show no regard for a lived experience is immoral,” he wrote.

Indeed, the fetus is the indisputable star of the Dobbs opinion. That is not necessarily obvious at first reading: The opinion’s 79 pages are larded with lengthy and, according to knowledgeable historians, highly partial and substantially irrelevant accounts of the history of abortion’s criminalization. In all those pages, there is surprisingly little actual law. And women, as I have observed before, are all but missing. It is in paragraphs scattered throughout the opinion that the fetus shines.

“None of the other decisions cited by Roe and Casey involved the critical moral question posed by abortion,” Justice Alito wrote. “They are therefore inapposite.” Further on, he wrote: “The dissent has much to say about the effects of pregnancy on women, the burdens of motherhood, and the difficulties faced by poor women. These are important concerns. However, the dissent evinces no similar regard for a state’s interest in protecting prenatal life.”

This was a strange criticism of the dissenting opinion, signed jointly by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. They argued vigorously for retaining the 1992 Casey decision, which in fact, in a departure from Roe, declared that the state’s interest in fetal life was present from the moment of conception. Casey authorized the states to impose waiting periods and “informed consent” requirements that the court in the years following Roe v. Wade had deemed unconstitutional.

Justice Alito knows the Casey decision very well. As a federal appeals court judge, he had been a member of the panel that upheld most of Pennsylvania’s Abortion Control Act in the case that became Casey. Then-Judge Alito, alone on the panel, wanted to uphold a provision of the state law that required a married woman to inform her husband of her plan to get an abortion. In affirming the appeals court’s decision, the Supreme Court in Casey emphasized in one of the opinion’s most vivid passages the unconstitutional burden that the spousal notice requirement placed on women: “We must not blind ourselves to the fact that the significant number of women who fear for their safety and the safety of their children are likely to be deterred from procuring an abortion as surely as if the Commonwealth had outlawed abortion in all cases.” Perhaps that aspect of the Casey decision still rankled. In any event, Justice Alito’s attack on his dissenting colleagues for ignoring the state’s interest in fetal life was seriously misguided.

Of course, from his point of view, Casey didn’t go far enough because the weight the court gave to fetal life was well below 100 percent. The Casey decision was five days shy of 30 years old when the court overturned it, along with Roe v. Wade, on June 24. Given that this was their goal from the start, the justices in the Dobbs majority really had only one job: to explain why. They didn’t, and given the remaining norms of a secular society, they couldn’t.

There is another norm, too, one that has for too long restrained the rest of us from calling out the pervasive role that religion is playing on today’s Supreme Court. In recognition that it is now well past time to challenge that norm, I’ll take my own modest step and relabel Dobbs for the religion case that it is, since nothing else explains it.

It’s not just the Christian Nationalists on the U.S. Supreme Court, but the Christian Nationalists in Republican state legisatures who are on a religious crusade to reverse the advances of the 21st and 20th Century. Clarence Thomas Isn’t The Only One Ready To Reduce Women To Baby Incubators:

If you were disturbed by “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the dystopian story of a totalitarian regime that treats women as property and values them entirely based on their ability to produce babies, you should see what’s going on in Congress right now.

In the past week alone, House Republicans have overwhelmingly voted against a woman’s right to travel for abortion care, to access birth control and to marry someone they love.

Each of these votes was appalling in its own right.

When the House voted last week to ensure that women are able to travel across state lines for an abortion, 205 Republicans voted no. When the House voted Tuesday to codify same-sex marriage, 157 Republicans voted no. On Thursday, when the House voted to protect women’s right to access birth control and other contraception, 195 Republicans voted no.

Taken together, the broader message that Republicans are sending with these votes is even more horrifying: Women should be viewed as little more than baby incubators.

House Democratic leaders lined up votes on all of these bills in direct response to the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade last month, breaking from 50 years of precedent to deny women a constitutional right to an abortion.

Republicans in Congress argued that none of these bills are necessary because the right to birth control and the right to same-sex marriage are safe.

“In no way, shape or form is access to contraception limited or at risk of being limited,” Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) said during Thursday’s debate on the birth control bill. “The liberal majority is clearly trying to stoke fears and mislead the American people once again because in their minds stoking fear clearly is the only way that they can win.”

But this is the same thing Republicans said about Roe v. Wade. And there’s no reason to think the current crop of conservatives on the Supreme Court ― all of whom are there because of their ties to the very anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ legal organization, the Federalist Society ― won’t try to roll back more of these protections. They’ve said so themselves.

“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion when the court overturned Roe v. Wade. He was referring to the rights recognized in Griswold (contraception), Lawrence (sexual conduct with a member of the same sex) and Obergefell (same-sex marriage).

Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito previously called for revisiting same-sex couples’ constitutional right to marry, too. In October 2020, they said the court’s 2015 decision on marriage equality was “undemocratic” and that “the court has created a problem that only it can fix.”

Rep. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) said Thursday that it’s not hard to connect the dots between what the Supreme Court just did and what Republicans in Congress are making very clear they’d like to do when it comes to legislating what women can and can’t do with their bodies.

When Clarence Thomas said he wanted to take away a woman’s right to birth control, some told me that is just his opinion. But now I saw 195 of my Republican colleagues reject protection for contraceptives. This is not just an opinion of one man. This is their plan.

— Andy Kim (@AndyKimNJ) July 21, 2022

Even GOP Rep. Nancy Mace (S.C.), who opposes abortion rights and who celebrated when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, said that barring women from having access to birth control is a step too far. She was one of just eight GOP lawmakers who voted for the bill guaranteeing a woman’s access to birth control. That’s out of 211 House Republicans.

During the House vote on that bill, Mace wore a sign on her back that read, “My state is banning EXCEPTIONS. Protect CONTRACEPTION.”

When I was 16, I was raped. I dropped out of high school shortly after. This trauma turned my life upside down. I cannot imagine a world where my daughter, or any other woman, doesn't have access to birth control or other contraceptives. https://t.co/ygvLp42A3N

— Rep. Nancy Mace (@RepNancyMace) July 21, 2022

Despite so many Republicans voting against these bills, they all passed because Democrats hold the majority. But there’s a good chance Republicans will win control of the House in November. That would put Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) ― both of whom just voted against protecting women’s rights to travel, to birth control, to abortion care ― in charge of setting the chamber’s agenda.

Where is the highest-ranked GOP woman in the House, Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), amid all of these votes aimed at protecting women’s rights? She just introduced a bill barring the use of federal dollars for medical transportation for women going across state lines for abortion care. [It is unconstitutional.]

Of course, even if Republicans win control of the House in the midterms, they’d have to win control of the Senate, too, to control all of Congress. And even in that scenario, Joe Biden will still be in the White House until at least 2024. That means even a GOP-led Congress wouldn’t be able to pass laws rolling back these kinds of protections for women until a willing Republican is in the White House.

But if this week showed anything, it’s that Clarence Thomas is not an isolated case of a conservative ready to strip fundamental protections from women in order to make them more likely to get pregnant, stay pregnant and make babies. It’s virtually everyone in the House Republican conference.