Roe v. Wade Is on Life Support. How The Fuck Did We Get Here?

[Nevilledog]

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/roe-v-wade-supreme-court-draft-decicion-historical-overview-1347283/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/XhBZd


*snip*

At first, Roe v. Wade was not nearly as important as it would later become. Catholics opposed it, but at the time it was decided, most Protestants said that abortions should be legal and evangelical preachers taught that life began at birth. The Southern Baptist Convention — now a pillar of the conservative “Christian Right” — specifically endorsed that view.

What happened? Evangelicals began to get into politics… because of desegregation. When public schools were desegregated in the 1950s, white Evangelicals and Catholics left in droves, sending their kids to so-called “segregation academies,” religious schools that only admitted white people. (Jerry Falwell ran one.) At the same time as Roe was being argued, those academies were found to be illegal, even though white Christians protested that their religious beliefs compelled them to keep the races separated.

Conservative Evangelicals and Catholics had tended to avoid the mess of politics, and rarely agreed with one another, but with courts forcing white Christians to go to school with Black kids, that all changed, and in the late 1970s, the Christian Right was born. Yet there was a problem: preserving segregation was no longer an effective unifying issue. And so, Paul Weyrich, Falwell, and other founders of the Christian Right — in a history meticulously documented by Randall Balmer — seized on abortion instead.

Abortion was perfect. Support for abortion overlapped with support for desegregation, women’s rights, gay rights, and the sexual revolution. If you fought one, you could fight the others too. Plus abortion was an emotional issue that was easily used to whip up anger and indignation, as well as to drive people to the polls (and to donate money).

*snip*

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

1. I hear ya but how we got here is not nearly as important as how we get back to normal.

[UTUSN]

2. Good primer. Even back then there was disagreement on Rowe/Wade, that the way to go

was by grassroots legislation instead of judicial mandate. Plus, the Court didn't clock in the top issues for many Dem constituent groups because the day to day subsistence issues are more concrete. Later we know that Ruth Bader GINSBURG said the argument in Roe should have been on Equal Protection instead of on Privacy.

Killer nutshell from the OP article: "“That’s how we got here: a campaign born in white supremacy, cemented by the wedding of the Christian Right and the Republican Party, and doggedly pursued for nearly half a century. Now embryos are pre-born babies. Now 'originalism' is dogma. Now women’s bodies are property of the state.”

*** On a frivolous note, am always surprised to see a typo or misuse in a nationally published product: "TOW the line" in paragraph 13, instead of "TOE the line."

[Carlitos Brigante]

3. K&Fuckin'R

[anarch]

4. from the article: "Republicans played dirty and won; Democrats played clean and lost." - basically.

[SoCalDavidS]

7. We're Keeping Our Powder Dry nt

[BlueIdaho]

5. With all due respect - Roe v Wade is finished.

The fight now goes to the states.

[bif]

10. I agree. It's history.

[ananda]

6. How? Really?

Remember when we didn't stand up for voting rights
starting in Florida 2000 and continuing?

[localroger]

8. Not so much on life suport as protagonist of a new Purge sequel

...being hunted through the streets by five dangerous loons with military grade weapons and murder in their eyes.

[dalton99a]

9. Kick

Well, over the last decade, there’s been a steady drip-drip-drip of opinions from the Court’s right wing, hedging on just how much respect they have to show. Three years ago, Justice Thomas wrote that a precedent can be overturned based on “the quality of the decision’s reasoning; its consistency with related decisions; legal developments since the decision; and reliance on the decision.” Thomas just made that up; that’s not how the Court normally evaluates precedents. But his views are now in Justice Alito’s draft opinion.

Mostly, though, we’ve gotten to this point because the Right has played the game a lot smarter, and more intensely, than the Left. Senate Republicans broke with a century of tradition to deny even a hearing to Justice Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland. They broke all the rules, and then broke them again when they nominated Justice Barrett after the 2020 election had already begun. Republicans played dirty and won; Democrats played clean and lost.

Worst of all, Democratic voters just didn’t seem to get it. In 2016, the Supreme Court wasn’t even in the top ten list of issues Democratic voters said they cared about. It was in the top five for Republicans. And that was reflected in how they voted. In 2016, supposedly righteous Evangelicals who cared about character and values voted for a vulgar, bullying serial adulterer (and accused sexual predator) who didn’t know the Bible from Fifty Shades of Gray. Meanwhile, many Democrats were too pure to hold their noses and vote for Hillary Clinton because she supported the TPP (anyone remember what that even is?), many others simply didn’t vote at all, and many were blocked by Republicans’ use of Jim Crow style voter suppression.

And make no mistake, the reasoning Justice Alito uses in his Dobbs opinion applies equally to the constitutional right to same-sex marriage, to ‘sodomy’, to contraception, and, yes, to interracial marriage. The constitution doesn’t say those words either, and all of those rights rest on substantive due process: the idea that there is no process that would be “due process” for taking away certain fundamental rights. They are all on the chopping block.

[clementine613]

11. We got here because we have a party who wants to...

... have all women be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen
... all people of color as slaves
... all LGBTQ+ people in the closet (or dead)
... all non-Christians forcibly converted.

That's how we got here.