We have to start with the basic facts. Most of the major news sources are reporting that the Supreme Court has secretly voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. Obviously, the way case law works is a little complicated. You can’t just wave a magic wand and erase fifty years of precedent. You have to have a case that allows you to render such a decision. The court has done it before. Brown vs. Board of Education reversed Plessy vs. Ferguson.

If we take enough steps back we can even look on with interest. It should be noted that reversing Roe v. Wade doesn’t make abortion illegal necessarily. Essentially it kicks the matter back to the states. Each individual state can choose for itself whether a woman has a right to choose. I imagine the blue states will continue to allow abortions as they have while the red states will immediately put the kibosh on that.

Public opinion is a fickle thing and I’m not sure that the constitution should be interpreted with public opinion in mind. However, it should be noted that more people are in favor of the pro choice view point than those that are pro life. Right around the time of the 2008 election the two positions were nearly even. Since then the tide has slowly turned towards pro choice with 59 percent currently believing that abortion should be legal in most if not all cases.

Without getting into the religious ramifications of any decision, I find the decision itself to be a fascinating microcosm of what is currently going on in the country. We are seeing a growing gap in the numbers of people that support progressive ideas and progressive causes while seeing an increase in conservative ideas and conservative causes. For the life of me I’ve never figured out exactly what to call this gap, but it is significant and it is growing.

Part of the problem is that some Americans have failed to put A and B together. If you want A and A does not happen then it pays to be able to identify who is keeping A from happening. Instead, a large enough percentage get angry at election time and vote for the very people that are stopping progress because the party working for progress hasn’t delivered.

The other part of the problem is that the opposition is good at silencing the will of the people through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and filibustering bills to death. Combine those two elements and you get what we currently got. Meanwhile we brace for the rights of women to roll back five decades as if we were in some sort of perverse DeLorean.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor couldn’t have said it better.  Trump’s and McConnell’s packing of the SCOTUS has now successfully destroyed all hope of the judicial branch protecting our Constitution and the rights it enshrines for all Americans.  Yesterday, the court inexplicably allowed Texas’ game playing with legislation to, as Sotomayor accurately described it,

“…the Court’s dangerous departure from its precedents, which establish that federal courts can and should issue relief when a State enacts a law that chills the exercise of a constitutional right and aims to evade judicial review.” and “…the Court effectively invites other States to refine S.B. 8’s model for nullifying federal rights.”

The court left the law in effect, denying a Constitutionally protected personal right for all women in Texas to control what happens to their own bodies.  Gorsuch’s ruling was so badly constructed by his concocted rationalizations that states have now been provided a roadmap for nullifying any Constitutional right they don’t like.

With the court’s ruling, it’s time to now to test this rewriting of US law by turning the tables by legislating private enforcement against other constitutional rights.  How about a law against individual gun ownership?  Example: anyone caught carrying a firearm, whether licensed or not, can be sued by any individual with a minimum $10,000 award to the plaintiff.  How about a law that bans wearing of MAGA hats?  How about personal enforcement by lawsuits against those who discriminate against minorities like LGBTQ individuals, African Americans, and other racial minorities?  The list is endless where states can simply nullify any federally protected individual right by delegating enforcement of laws against those rights to individuals.  Vigilantism can now displace our entire constitutional judicial system and over 200 years of case law that protects it.

The US is inexorably sliding into a post-democracy era where governments are ineffective at protecting personal rights, allowing one class of Americans to force their belief system onto everyone else.  With compromise no longer possible in our political system, aided by the complete disassembly of our court system, the exclusive right to make policy will fall to the party in control.  Texas is the perfect example of this warping of our political system where the governor, aided by the courts and a single party controlled legislature, is now simply a dictator, nullifying local government’s efforts to protect its own citizens through his arbitrary orders while hiding in the governor’s mansion.  He’s now protected not only by non-existence of corruption laws, but by the SCOTUS itself.

Our only hope of blunting this nullification of individual rights is for states like California, New York, Delaware, and others to take advantage of this activist court’s new legislation from the bench by hitting the very people trying to take away our rights by taking away theirs.  How about a law that allows individuals to sue Fox News every time Tucker Carlson tells a lie?  Yeah, that’s the ticket.  Let’s hit ’em where it hurts.

The funny thing about fear is that it is all a part of the same conversation. Women are afraid that their rights will be taken away after 48 years and that is the big news item of the day. Protesters from the summer and before were finally standing up to rogue law enforcement forcing people of color to live in fear of their lives when they encounter law enforcement. The fear I’m thinking of today is a lot closer to home.

It’s sad when you see that fear first hand. It’s heartbreaking when you see it in your own children. Our daughter’s school had a couple of days of bomb threats this week. Social media is doing what it does and managed to spread all kinds of rumors about what might happen. So, more than half the school decided to stay home yesterday. The principal said those absences would be excused. She obviously understood the impulse.

My wife and I sat there as our daughter cried when we discussed her coming to school today. We left it up to her. Forcing her to go seemed somehow cruel. Yet, she talked a long time about the guilt of avoiding a possible event. It didn’t make sense and yet it made perfect sense. She decided to go and yet the fear she is feeling is unavoidable. We can only hope it dissipates before it becomes a permanent thing.

The source of this fear is the same. The abortion ban, Rittenhouse, our hometown domestic terrorist, rogue law enforcement, and isolated gun nuts all look the same. They are all virtually the same. None of them look like the people they want you to fear. They all look like the people pointing the finger. Funny how that all works out. No one knows the identity of the kid making threats at the school, but the good money says it’s a white male. It almost always is.

Animal behavior can teach us a lot. We have a 100 pound Rottweiler, 16 pound ginger cat, and a ten pound tabby cat at home. The tabby cat has an overactive sense of fear. She somehow channels that fear and turns it into rage as she lashes out at the other two. The dog doesn’t want to be within ten feet of her. Here is this huge and physically imposing animal cowering in fear of something one-tenth his size. I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

Perhaps it’s personification instead. A relatively small group of people are so activated by fear that they induce real terror in the rest of us. We often expect them to look in the mirror and attack the reflection. The opportunists among them somehow manage to take a fear they created and turn around and offer protection from it. When you see it happening in general it makes you angry. When you see it happening to your own family it breaks your heart. When you see a little jackass using the exact same tactics as one of the two major political parties it makes you incredibly sad. The monsters are indeed hiding under the bed and they are pointing the fingers at everyone else. I guess it’s time to sleep with the light on.

Those of you who have come here regularly know my personal feelings on the subject of religion. It is very difficult to approach an issue like abortion without talking about religion. So many of the justifications either way are based on religious views. However, I know so many readers are tired of religion. I get it. So, I will do my very best to avoid the subject completely.

My main source of frustration with this subject is how each side has been mislabeled. The pro-life side is not and really never has been pro-life per se. They are pro-birth. The issue of life is a continuum. It includes quality of life issues for children in general, it involves issues with access to health care, and it involves issues as it pertains to the death penalty and wars of choice. Obviously, it also involves end of life issues. Whatever the source of one’s beliefs, it is very difficult to defend a position of pro-life if one is against easy access to health care, easy access to food and shelter, against the sanctity of life for those accused of murder and other crimes, and against abstaining from international conflicts we have no business of being a part of. To be pro-birth and then anti everything else is really cherry-picking the pro-life position.

Pro-choice is not really a good label either. In an absolute sense it is. Abortion is a privacy issue where each person has dominion over their own bodies. So, the essence is correct in that I acknowledge there is a choice and I acknowledge that it isn’t mine. From there it gets dicey because the opposition wants to call pro-choice people pro-abortion. I don’t know anyone that is pro-abortion. None of us run around and recommend abortions to random strangers. Simply put, if I’m not involved then it’s none of my business.

What is so maddening is that most people want the same thing. In the general sense, we all want fewer abortions and when you look at abortion rates, they consistently have gone down during Democratic administrations. In fact, the rates have fallen more under Democrats than they have under Republicans. That could be random, but I think it has more to do with policy choices and posturing. If you want to reduce the rate of abortions then you reduce the demand for abortions.

You do this through comprehensive sex education and easy access to birth control. You acknowledge that abstinence is the preferred choice, but you also acknowledge that people are going to be sexually active. They might as well know how to do so safely while also knowing the physical and emotional implications of sex. That includes both the good and the bad.

After someone becomes pregnant they should get easy access to top-notch medical care. They need to be treated with love, grace, and respect. That means calmly and lovingly laying out all of the choices they have before them. It means giving them the facts about all of those choices and not alternative facts. If we want them to make the “right” choice then we need to make sure none of the choices are beyond their capabilities. Most importantly, it means completely removing shame from the process.

That’s been the best way and the only way to reduce the amount of abortions that occur in the United States and Texas. Instead, the good folks in the legislature and the governor have chosen a path that won’t really reduce abortions and will just criminalize behavior that’s perfectly normal and reasonable. More than the criminalization is the shame that’s getting attached. Pregnancy is a scary enough time for anyone. Including shame is just cruel and hateful.

Forgive me if you’ve seen this one before, but I don’t recall it being mentioned around here. Apparently, in addition to making abortions illegal after six weeks it will also be illegal to help someone obtain an abortion after that time period.

As regular readers know (and have told me repeatedly) I have hit the religion very hard the last couple of days. So, I’m looking at this from another angle. One of the things they taught us in political science and history was the notion that over the course of a generation the political parties will often switch positions almost entirely.

It’s one of the hallmarks of conservatism to argue that they were the party for civil rights. In a sense it’s true if you are strictly looking at labels, but the thought behind the label is what matters. Conservatives have been against civil rights from the very beginning. In the beginning, they just called themselves Democrats.

Classical conservatives believe in keeping the government out of our bedrooms, personal lives, and life choices. The Republican party abandoned that a long time ago. Instead they want to stay out of your pocketbook but govern your body. It’s just a little ironic that the best argument against conservatives on this issue comes from themselves. At least it comes from what they used to believe.

Of course, Texans aren’t the only ones passing questionable laws. It seems Tennessee is trying to limit access to all vaccines for children. Somehow, the mental gymnastics needed to consider these laws is staggering. They are still overly concerned about bathrooms it seems.

This is all very simple to me. You believe in freedom or you don’t. You regulate activities where other people can get hurt and you allow those other activities to slide. When you are more concerned about where someone goes to the bathroom than what they could possibly do with a gun there is something seriously wrong. When conservative values go out the window then what values do conservatives have left?

It started innocently enough. My daughter was attending a retreat at the church. As a part of the retreat the participants were encouraged to attend reconciliation. Before you attend confession you go through an examination of conscience. That’s a rabbit hole by itself.

She got hung up on several things that alarmed her and I can definitely see why. One of them alarmed me. The examination of conscience said that voting for pro abortion candidates was a sin. So, in other words, voting for Democrats is a sin. Where can I even get started on that?

Okay, I know where. There is no such position politically. I’ve never heard of any politician being pro-abortion. I’ve never met a single person that would classify themselves as pro-abortion. I can’t say the viewpoint doesn’t exist because it is impossible to prove a negative. However, I can assert that the Catholic Church is distorting the truth in a document about truth. The irony is palpable.

The truth is that some people are pro-choice and some people are anti-choice. Anti-choice is a negative term, so we can use the pro-life substitute. The point is that they believe in the sanctity of life. That is not a wrong viewpoint. However, the pro-choice viewpoint is not the 180 degree opposite. It is a belief in privacy and the rights of self-determination over each individual’s body. Most pro-choice people are privately against abortion in most circumstances, but simply leave it to the individual to decide.

That might seem like splitting hairs, but the truth is far different and one of the reasons why the distortion is so hurtful. Truth is a four letter word, but one of the things that pro-choice politicians do is seek other ways to lower abortion numbers. If we follow the facts then we would see that abortion rates have been lower under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents.

Admittedly, one cannot directly attribute any of that to a single policy or decision. It is impossible to definitively say that Democratic policies had anything to do with it. However, it should be telling that when you go back to the Reagan administration you see rates remaining level while they went down under every Democratic president.

There is a difference between posturing and actually doing something. The best way to limit the number of abortions is to limit the demand for abortions. You do that with contraception. You do that with sex education. You do that by financially assisting young families to take off the financial pressure. The church even had a program called “The Gabriel Project” that did this very thing.

However, all of this is just a cursory irritation. The real problem is calling voting for a person a sin. Voting is a choice. It’s a decision that calls for hard choices for anyone that’s a committed Catholic or Christian. Sure, it is hard reconciling our church’s teaching on abortion with a pro-choice position. It should be hard reconciling the church’s stance on life in general with a party pushing the death penalty, wars of choice, and are more supportive of police departments that kill so many unarmed suspects. Wouldn’t that also be a sin?

Wouldn’t it be a sin to support candidates that call for treating refugees as less than human? Wouldn’t it be a sin to support a candidate that places children in cages? Wouldn’t it be a sin to support a candidate that so cavalierly handled a pandemic that over 600,000 Americans died on his watch? We can play this tit for tat game forever as I’m sure Republicans reading this can rattle off a similar list of sins.

The overwhelming point here is that if voting for any particular candidate is a sin then voting for any candidate is a sin. They all commit sins. We all commit sins. We either weigh which sins we can live with or we turn that part of our brain off and pull the lever. Either way, I’m not taking responsibility for what a politician does. Either way I vote they will do something objectionable. I choose to vote for the candidates with the least objectionable positions. That’s what responsible citizens do.