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.