The False Justification Underlying the Supreme Court’s Anti-Choice Violation
We all knew this was coming. Though not yet official, the leaked draft opinion indicating that the Supreme Court will be bucking precedent to rob the right of legal abortions from the American people, if they live in one of the shit states, appears poised to happen. To those who thought I was overreacting in 2016, when Trump won the presidency thanks to our enslaver-designed election system, you can fuck right off, again. Those of you who had some forethought knew that Trump’s presidency would mean more than just having to live through his destructive neofscist idiocy and listen to his chili-diarrhea-gargle voice every day for at least four years. As the uber-right’s willing shit-shoveler, that piece of shit helped rig the judiciary for the majority of the country, including the Supreme Court. Now, that gang of pompous egotistical gown-wearing ghouls is further fucking us all.
The reactionary bigots who control the Supreme Court would have us believe that in overturning Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood they are not abusing their unchecked power to satisfy their own regressive agenda, but instead are correcting judicial overreaches by earlier iterations of the court. The leaked draft opinion, written by Shitsock Alito, frames the undoing of protecting the right to abortion not as being becaus of a corrupt moral ideology rooted in political opportunism, which it is, but rather as a defense and reaffirmation of “states’ rights,” that old chestnut of the far-right which stands in for any issue of state-enforced misogyny, racism, or other bigotry.
Whenever a conservative or fascist defender of “the good old days” champions the cause of “states’ rights,” and gathers the inbred lambs to their cause, they neglect to state the obvious: rather than fighting for the right of states to protect their people from the federal government, they are fighting for the right of states to harm their people, without protection from the federal government. They do not want the federal government to be able to protect people from the harmful, ignorant, and selfish decisions of state legislatures.
State governments have not protected their people from harmful actions of the federal government, ever, as far as I know. The only way they protect the rights of people is by giving them the right to violate other people’s rights.
They never invoke “states’ rights” when they want to do something good, that actually helps people. No legislator has ever bemoaned their state being unable to provide food or medical care or housing to their people because of restrictions imposed by the federal government. It’s only when they want to do some heinous oligarchic shit and a branch of the US government tells them to slow their roll that they get all puffed up and jabber on about violations of constitutional rights.
“States’ rights” rhetoric originates with slavery and the fight of slave-states to uphold the evil institution. Then it was used to defend the rights of many of those same states to enforce segregation and Jim Crow laws. It’s been invoked to restrict voting rights, combat marriage equality, and control women’s bodies. It is a dog whistle, used euphemistically by the powerful to restrict and violate the rights of certain people, typically the most disempowered in society.
There are times when states should be able to act independently, when they are acting on behalf and in service of their people. There are decisions that are not best left to the states, however, particularly when those states have a history of being malicious and untrustworthy, and enact laws not supported by the majority of people even in their own constituencies. When state governments shit on democracy and rule their populations as authoritarians, they don’t deserve to have their rights upheld; that is when the federal government is needed to protect the rights of the people from their own states.
For those of libertarian leanings, as many Republican voters claim to be and as Alito is claimed to be, acts like this should be seen as an affront. Libertarians, who claim any act of government control is tyranny, can’t in good faith argue that control by a federal government is inherently worse than by a state government, especially when it is a case of the former limiting the control of the latter. This is a case where the federal government was actually on the side of freedom and individual rights. There’s nothing more personal than a person making decisions about what they do with, or what is done to, their own body, and violating their personal autonomy and individual liberty is tyrannical. If a government restricting people’s ability to own all the guns they want or making them pay taxes is unconstitutional, then a government restricting people’s ability to control their own bodies and lives damn sure is, too.