Tag Archives: culture

Reverse Roe v Wade?

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That’s part of the goal of an amicus brief being prepared for the Supreme Court for when it takes up the appeal of the Mississippi case Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization (the case itself concerns whether Mississippi should be able to prohibit abortions after 15 weeks).

A coalition of approximately 22 pro-life groups and several legislators collected signatures from more than 300 lawmakers in 35 states in support of the brief, ranging from Michigan State Representative Steve Carra (R-Three Rivers) to Arkansas State Senator Scott Flippo (R-Bull Shoals).
“We’re hoping to accomplish protecting life within our respective states as best as possible,” [University of Michigan Law School] graduate Jacob Weaver [the lead on the brief] told The Center Square. “Roe v Wade was abundantly unconstitutional. It’s now clear that it’s life in the womb, not potential life.”

Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood Action Fund President, demurs.

Mississippi has said the quiet part out loud. The purpose of its blatantly unconstitutional abortion ban is to have the Supreme Court overrule 50 years of precedent and allow states to ban abortions. This is not what the American people—80% of whom support safe, legal abortion—want, and it would deny essential health care primarily to people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and people with low incomes.

Her first is both correct and a cynically done exaggeration. Mississippi has, indeed, said a quiet part out loud: that States, not the Federal government—including the Judiciary—should be regulating abortion access and abortions. There is no particular move to ban all abortions, though, except in the minds of a very few, and in the fetid imaginations of hysterical pro-abortionists.

Next, the fact that Roe has lasted 50 years only illustrates the duration of the error; that duration in no way legitimizes the error. Indeed, Roe itself reversed 150 years of precedent in which the Federal government, correctly, played no role in the matter.

Then there’s the business of polling. Johnson has chosen not to cite the poll she claims has produced that result. I’ll leave aside the exposure over the last 5 years of the utter reliability of polls generally. But aside from her claim, she’s assuming “80%” are evenly distributed across all States—or assuming the legitimacy of a Federal, one-size-fits-all status of abortion preference, so that “80%” of California or Illinois should be able to dictate to Mississippi or Texas the outcome, even if “80%” of Mississippians or Texans adamantly disagree.

No, with States in control of their own domestic matters, as our Constitution holds, the citizens of each State would be, as they should, the arbiters of their State’s abortion laws. Each State then will take care of its own minority populations—which would tend to better protect the lives of minority babies otherwise vulnerable to being killed in their mothers’ wombs.

Finally come Johnson’s two dog whistles: that abortion is health care and that LGBTQ+ might be denied access to abortions. Regarding the first whistle, there’s nothing particularly healthful for the babies in their being killed in the womb. Regarding the second shrill whistle, only biology, not “identification,” can make it possible for a member of the LGBTQ+ community even to get pregnant, much less decide subsequently to want to abort her baby.

The rest of the goal of the Michigan amicus is to restore, under the 9th Amendment of our Constitution, that right of individual States to regulate access to abortion and to abortion itself.

“The power to regulate abortion falls squarely into States’ police powers,” as it did for 150 years pre-Roe.
“We argue this depoliticizes the court and that it returns states to their rightful place in the constitutional scheme,” Weaver told The Center Square in a phone interview.

At worst, the Supreme Court should recognize current, realized medical capability. Roe is essentially a technology-based ruling, setting its abortion threshold to the point at which the baby is viable outside the womb—roughly the start of the third trimester at the time of the Roe ruling. Today’s capability brings that viability far earlier in the pregnancy.

It Doesn’t Get Any Clearer

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The dishonesty of the journalism guild, that is.

Journalism professors at UNC Chapel Hill are protesting a “core values” statement that upholds objectivity as a key tenet of news reporting.

That statement says, in part,

The core values statement, installed two years ago, touts objectivity, impartiality, integrity and truth-seeking….

That business about objectivity and impartiality was scrapped after the journalist “professors” at the school objected. Because, journalists are naturally biased and opinionated (as are we all), and these worthies claim, it would be dishonest for journalists to disguise their biases as well as futile to try. Never mind that opinions could be written on the opinion pages, and even journalists are capable of being objective when they’re writing news articles, which are supposed to be factual.

They just don’t want to be objective or impartial in their…reporting. They want to take sides, they want to push their personal narratives, they want to represent those views as facts. What they insist on reporting are their biases, not the facts of events.

Sadly, though, this is simply an example of how far from Caesar’s wife are journalists and their guild.

Hypocrisy

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Senator Mark Warner (D, VA) claims he now regrets his Progressive-Democratic Party’s push to change the rules governing the Senate’s filibuster.

I would wish we wouldn’t even have started this a decade ago. When the Democratic leaders actually changed the rules, I don’t think we would have the Supreme Court we did if we still had a 60-vote margin on the filibuster, but we are where we are[.]

Maybe never mind, though, since he has his fingers crossed behind his back on that.

But I do believe when it comes to voting rights…if we have to do a small carve out on filibuster for voting rights—that is the only area where I’d allow that kind of reform.

This is the Progressive-Democrat, unwilling to change the filibuster except when a change would be convenient for his personal pet projects.

“King’s X”

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That’s what Progressive-Democrat-run cities are crying against the backdrop of the explosions in crime, including violent crime, that followed their loud and proud defunding of their police forces.

The article centers on Dallas, TX, but that center applies to the myriad other Progressive-Democrat-run cities that have moved to defenestrate their police.

I obviously don’t speak for others, but for my paycheck, I wouldn’t apply for, nor would I accept, a position as a police officer in any of those cities until there occurred a complete turnover of the men and women in those governments. The incumbents have shown themselves entirely untrustworthy, especially by cops.

Innocent people would continue to be hurt—the minority of voters who wanted different candidates elected but lost those elections? Perhaps. However, karma applies to those who sit on the sidelines, too, and the majority of those allegedly innocent minority of voters chose to continue as eligible voters and sit on the sidelines rather than bestir themselves to be voting voters.

Pericles, some years ago, said words to the effect of Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you. Those disinterested ones are experiencing the inevitable outcome right alongside those whose interest includes that defunding.

Utterly Illegal

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And the Progressive-Democrats don’t care. They have the power, so they don’t need any stinking authority, and they’re going ahead: with censorship of what average Americans are allowed to say, even allowed to know.

The White House announced their efforts with Facebook to take aggressive action on problematic social media posts. The administration said they would work to flag and censor anything they deemed to be disinformation about COVID-19.

Biden’s Surgeon General Dr Vivek Murthy:

We expect more from our technology companies. We’re asking them to operate with greater transparency and accountability. We are asking them to monitor misinformation more closely.

Biden himself, through his Press Secretary, Jen Psaki:

“There are also proposed changes we have made to social media platforms, including Facebook….

And

We are flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation[.]

And overt spying on private citizens’ personal communications to facilitate the censorship, per the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Democratic National Committee:

…plans to work with SMS carriers to monitor text messages and dispel misinformation about vaccines.
“If you send a text message to a friend or to a family member or to whoever and it includes whatever they deem as misinformation that somehow you’re going to get a message on your phone from the government,” David Rubin of the Rubin Report.

And the threat, from none other than President Joe Biden (D):

Mr Biden was asked what his message was to social media platforms when it came to Covid-19 disinformation.
“They’re killing people,” he said. “Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that—and they’re killing people.”

Never mind that the censorship is a blatant violation of our 1st Amendment and of long-standing and myriad case law:

As recently as 2019, the Supreme Court reasoned “‘a private entity can qualify as a state actor,’ subject to First Amendment protections….” Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck (2019) …;
“When the private entity performs a traditional, exclusive public function,” Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co. (1974);
“When the government compels the private entity to take a particular action,” Blum v. Yaretsky, (1982);
“When the government acts jointly with the private entity.” Lugar v. Edmondson Oil Co. (1982).

The government doesn’t get to avoid censorship by farming out its censoring to third parties.

And there’s this: it’s well established in Civil Rights law and Supreme Court rulings that private enterprises that are public accommodations (of which diners are a canonical example) may not discriminate, under the 14th Amendment, on the basis of race. It’s an easy extension of that “may not discriminate” to include 1st Amendment speech, and it’s quite clear that Facebook et al., have become, if they weren’t created as, public accommodations.

Us average Americans need to keep this blatant disregard for our Constitution firmly in mind in November 2022.

 

H/t Grim’s Hall