Pre-Born, You're Fine ✑ Preschool, You're Fucked

Anthony McIntyre ✒ “Just look at the faces of the great Christians! They are the faces of great haters" - Friedrich Nietzsche.

SCROTUS - shower of six ball bags

Religion in general and the the religious right in particular has long harboured a hatred of women’s rights, relentlessly seeking to push back all advances made in the field. Institutionally and instinctively adverse to recognising women as genuinely equal, it is religious hatred of women's rights that was the moving force behind the US Supreme Court’s decision to remove constitutional rights for women with its reversal of Roe-Wade. Consistent with the theme of there being no hate like Christian love, the decision by SCOTUS will not be acknowledged by Hate Theology as anti-women but shall instead be spun as pro-child. George Carlin long ago nailed that lie.

They’re not pro-life. You know what they are? They’re anti-woman. Simple as it gets, anti-woman. They don’t like them. They don’t like women. They believe a woman’s primary role is to function as a broodmare for the state. You don’t see many of these anti-abortion women volunteering to have any black fetuses transplanted into their uteruses, do you? No, you don’t see them adopting a whole lot of crack babies, do you? No, that might be something Christ would do!

As for children, Carlin had this to say:

Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don't wanna know about you. They don't wanna hear from you. No nothing! No neonatal care, no daycare, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you're pre-born, you're fine. If you're preschool, you're fucked.

This point was today amplified by Brid Smith speaking in Dublin at a protest outside the US Embassy: “It’s alright to control women’s bodies but don’t control access to guns." Sandy Hook & Uvalde, the religious right have their priorities sorted. But worry not, instead of protection from guns, real children can reap the value of thoughts and prayers.

Roe-Wade was a defining moment in US jurisprudence. It saw the highest court in the land decide that the country's constitution protected a woman's right to access an abortion. The then Burger Supreme Court was by no means a bastion of liberalism. But the Nixon appointee, Justice Harry Blackmum wrote a lengthy opinion approving abortion in which he was supported by another Nixon appointee, Justice Lewis Powell. These two, added to the liberals already in the court, ensured the safe passage of Roe-Wade. The decision led to a substantial improvement in Women's rights and access to health care in a country where abortion had been prohibited from the 1800s when women were not allowed to vote or hold political office.

Now all that progress has been reversed as the status of women moves from citizen to chattel, just as it was in the bible. This week's decision is no surprise. Normally not the type of outcome to be expected on the watch of the Democrats, it was made possible because this SCOTUS is a Trump court. The Trump administration had stacked the Court with right wing conservative judges including the religious whack job Amy Coney Barret. Trump had been clear that he would appoint Justices who would reverse Roe-Wade. In this he was assisted by the oleaginous Mitch McConnell who moved on dubious grounds to successfully block an Obama nomination. Team Biden, playing with the hand Trump dealt, has been left impotent in the face of it.

The upshot is that Justice Brett Kavanaugh who voted to reverse Roe Wade can now decide to rape a woman and then insist that she carries the pregnancy to its full conclusion and deliver his child. The woman would have few if any rights against him in the matter. An "appalling vista" is how it might be best described.

The thing is, that despite the best efforts of Hate Theology and Domination Theology, and Mike Pence's call for an outright ban on abortion in every state, denying abortion is likely to be even less successful than alcohol prohibition was back in the 1920s and 30s. That too was driven by religious puritanism, defined by Henry Louis Mencken as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy."

Happy are the Hateful for theirs is the Kingdom of Another's Pain.

⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.