linnposts.com

There is a reason I am writing so soon after posting my last blog, something I seldom do, so be forewarned.

I spent last weekend reading Friday’s Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade, the concurring opinions (Thomas & Kavanaugh), the dissent by Chief Justice Roberts, and that of the three liberal justices, Kagan, Breyer, and Sotomayor.

The majority decision made me so angry I had to write something to stay sane.

My first thought after my reading was that the conservative majority did nothing more than offer a previously held opinion in search of a legal justification. It is no wonder Harvard Professor of Law, Noah Feldman, wrote an op-ed in which he said this ruling may go down as one of the worst in history.

You can read it for yourself and make up your own mind, but the dissenters were exactly right when they said that this ruling means that “from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs.”

To rob women of the right to speak for themselves once they are pregnant is in and of itself an outrageous decision for the Supreme Court to make. Adding insult to injury, though, is the fact that one impact of what the court did contradicts all human decency: It allows states to sanction child abuse.

At this moment girls as young as adolescents who are raped have to carry the fetus to term, and those raped by their own fathers will now be forced to give birth to their own sibling.  

How can anyone with a moral conscience believe this is right?

Last week I wrote about trying to keep my head while those around me were losing theirs. I was mistaken. People aren’t losing their head. They’re not even losing their minds. They have lost their moral bearings.

The circumstances I am describing are neither hyperbolic nor hypothetical. Michele Goodwin, Professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, was ten years old the first time she was raped by her father. He got her pregnant when she was 12. She told her story in a NY Times article last year (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/opinion/abortion-texas-mississippi-rape.html).

She said being able to have an abortion saved her sanity, her future, essentially her life.

Not anymore for girls like her who live in Louisiana, Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, Wyoming, with the number of states committing this crime growing weekly.

When it comes to tax policies these states don’t consider a fetus a person who can be claimed as a dependent, but they have no qualms about insisting it is a person when it comes to forcing a twelve year old girl to give birth to her own sibling.

I am trying hard to resist hating politicians and their supporters who believe this kind of child abuse is morally right, but I certainly hate their actions, their hypocrisy, their self-righteousness, their lack of the capacity to show any common decency.

Destroy children emotionally, psychologically, even physically, and then believe that what you are doing is right has to be one of the worst examples of moral depravity we have ever seen in this country.

These people should be thankful the God they believe in is not real, otherwise I am sure they would have already been struck dead by lightning.

The cognitive dissonance created by them is staggering. Actually, morally obnoxious is what it is.

Samuel Alito, speaking for the court majority, called the Roe v. Wade decision “egregiously wrong from the start,” this from the man whose ruling is now having the practical effect of sanctioning the right of states to abuse the children they are supposed to protect.

How utterly shameful that the highest court in the land should make this possible.

I don’t know if the six conservative justices who did this to our country can look themselves in the mirror, but if they never get another good night’s sleep it will be a modicum of justice for what they did.