The Trumpscum SCOTUS Anti-Abortion Bounty Hunters Present the New Catholic Fascism as Tikvah Fund Bari Weiss and First Things Ross Douthat Show Their Support
David Shasha
The Trumpscum SCOTUS Anti-Abortion Bounty Hunters Present the New Catholic Fascism as Tikvah Fund Bari Weiss and First Things Ross Douthat Show Their Support
In order to properly understand the full extent of the dangers presented by the Trump Alt-Right Nationalist White Christian Fascism, it is vital to assess the role of The Tikvah Fund and First Things religious extremists in the process.
As I was processing the calamitous, but expected, Trumspcum SCOTUS ruling Overturning Roe, the only thing I could think about was the central role of Rabbi Meir Soloveichik in the Religious Freedom Grift which has become so central to Trump’s “Grab ‘Em By The Pussy” sexual immorality Gaslight:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/21G7xLlrmfA/m/XuIQPMUsCAAJ
Indeed, it is hard to forget the indelible image of Trump’s “Bible Photo-Op” which brought his degenerate sexual immorality and Libertine sleaze into a clash with Religious Extremism:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/975wF5BV550/m/Cc7J63_rAgAJ
Putting the lie to this Grift, I wrote an article on the way in which Trump’s criminal mishandling of the COVID pandemic led to a perilous reshuffling of religious priorities, as lockdowns took hold and communal gatherings became Superspreader sites:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/FWKgn7JRAJc/m/E2mybV-tCQAJ
Trump’s corruption has completely altered my own life as a religiously observant Jew.
The Religious Freedom Grift was reconfirmed just three days after the Overturning Roe decision, when the same extremist radical Catholic SCOTUS majority ruled in favor of School Prayer at the proverbial 50-yard line:
Merrick Garland-blocker Neil Gorsuch said it all:
“Here, a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a brief, quiet, personal religious observance doubly protected by the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment. And the only meaningful justification the government offered for its reprisal rested on a mistaken view that it had a duty to ferret out and suppress,” Gorsuch wrote. “Religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech. The Constitution neither mandates nor tolerates that kind of discrimination.”
Nothing in the prayer was “brief, quiet, or personal” as we have seen this very public and very ostentatious Take-A-Knee-For-Jesus routine play out in a way which serves to promote Christian Supremacy, that should make Jews very uncomfortable.
https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/672/santa-fe-independent-school-district-v-doe
Jews have seen bullies like Coach Joseph Kennedy throughout our history:
Joseph Kennedy, a Marine veteran, was an assistant football coach for the Bremerton High School (BHS) varsity team in 2008 when he started a tradition of kneeling and praying after games. Some students later volunteered to join him. In 2015, a school administrator addressed the issue with the coach after an opposing team complained. After an investigation, Kennedy was later placed on administrative leave and barred from “participating in any capacity in the BHS football program.”
Denying religious and cultural pluralism and interfaith tolerance by privileging such Christian prayer, the Leonard Leo Moscow Mitch interloper Gorsuch did the usual Trumpscum Projection:
“Kennedy’s private religious exercise did not come close to crossing any line one might imagine separating protected private expression from impermissible government coercion,” Gorsuch wrote on Monday.
“Learning how to tolerate speech or prayer of all kinds is part of learning how to live in a pluralistic society, a trait of character essential to a tolerant citizenry,” the court added.
The last thing any of these Catholic Fascists want is a “pluralistic society.”
As Katherine Stewart brilliantly argued in her 2020 New York Review of Books article, the Religious Freedom Grift is not about Religious Freedom at all:
This version of “religious liberty” relies on two basic assumptions. The first is that the religion in need of protection of its liberty almost always belongs to a particular family of socially conservative Christianity. It then follows that if a commitment to human equality, a right to best-practices medical care in all medical settings, or reproductive self-determination forms the basis of your sincerely held religious beliefs, there is no liberty in this movement for you. The second is that the exercise of this liberty always involves a target group: whether that’s LGBT Americans, members of religious or ethnic minority groups, nonreligious Americans, or women in need of reproductive health services, even to save their lives, Christian nationalists, it seems, will find an object for their condemnation—even as they attempt to justify it by a false narrative of persecution.
The value of “religious liberty” for the religious right is therefore less about denial of services to particular people in need, and more about uniting and rallying support behind the broader religious-right movement. I saw this in action at the 2019 Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., an annual gathering of Christian right activists. A panel featuring people for whom anti-discrimination law poses a supposed threat to their “religious liberty” included Joanna Duka, a Christian calligrapher in Phoenix, Arizona.
Sadly, we have seen Trumpscum Jews like Soloveichik unashamedly promoting the Grift and its implicit Anti-Semitism:
After praising Trump and Pence, he even denied the Alt-Right-induced uptick in Anti-Semitism:
For anti-Semitism in America, I don’t know if it’s actually rising. I do know that social media allows for the expression of hate in a variety of new ways. It allows some of the most hateful things to be said with the cloak of anonymity.
It is the typical Tikvah Trumpscum denialism.
In my first post after the tragic Overturning Roe decision, I presented a set of articles, led by Soloveichik’s ally First Things editor R.R. Reno, which affirmed his abiding connection to Whore of Trump Coney Barrett and Utah Trumpscum Seditionist Senator Mike Lee:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/G2AlYEpdRtI
As a corrective to the New Catholic Fascism, I once again re-posted the excellent article from Zeramim on the Halakhic ruling on Abortion by 18th century North African Sephardi sage Rabbi Yehuda ibn Ayyash, that extremist Ashkenazim like Soloveichik do not know, and likely do not care about:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UdaevoTLfXjrkmOHfVfij1CCzBYhK2A_7vKh5aCodUU/edit
Naturally, Soloveichik is a longtime contributor to First Things:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_fs8wonYLfhONdKPKTgFt_aoi6GPoJ2uhDFcWOfKuTk/edit
We have seen how this works in real time at the recent Tikvah Fund Jewish Leadership Conference, which featured arch Trumpscum Fascist radicals Yoram Hazony, Mike Pompeo, DEATH SENTENCE, and Tikvah Chairman Elliott Abrams, himself a former Trump Administration official:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/TiAbcFlCxjo/m/Ve9DM30tAAAJ
If you have the stomach, here is the gruesome video evidence, which you can subscribe to:
Some of it was broadcast on C-Span:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?520889-3/governor-ron-desantis-speaks-jewish-leadership-conference
And here is video of the DEATH SENTENCE protestors:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h7ENfLVQ6E
The Wall Street Journal published two letters from Conference attendees that effectively doubled-down on Tikvah’s relation to the New Fascism:
Here they are in full, under the title “They Called Us Nazis for Attending a Jewish Conference”:
Arriving at the Tikvah Fund’s Jewish Leadership Conference, I had an experience similar to James Taranto’s (“DeSantis Weathers a ‘Spasm’ of the Woke,” op-ed, June 14): I was greeted with the call of “Nazi!” I found this rather upsetting, since I have two uncles, two aunts and 10 first cousins who were murdered by the Nazis.
How sad that listening to Ron DeSantis, a governor who signed a law that prohibits “classroom instruction . . . on sexual orientation or gender identity” before the fourth-grade, qualifies one as a Nazi. On further reflection, I was very pleased to see that in a city of eight million people, there were only about 25 demonstrators and probably twice as many police guarding the event.
Seymour M. Cohen
New York
Please let Mr. Taranto know that the “older conference attendee” at the Jewish Leadership Conference that he describes as being harassed by protesters was me. I am a 73-year-old and a staunch supporter of Israel. As for being called “older”: I still play ice hockey twice a week and my medical practice is quite active. But Mr. Taranto’s point about the craziness of the protesters was right on.
Henry Lerner, M.D.
Newton, Mass.
The letters tell you all you need to know about how these Neo-Con racist Jews have fully merged with the White Christian Supremacy of miscreants like DEATH SENTENCE. And what was truly “Jewish” about a list of speakers that fully lined up with the Lysol agenda is really beyond me. It is all very distasteful and deeply disturbing.
I have for many years also zeroed in on the dangers presented by ambitious Trumpscum Yoram Hazony and his leadership of what he has called the NatCon movement, also rooted in the same Christian Fascism:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mIGjVlWpqgYgp24AabfaDqm-8jngdKbn7ZqN99Jpnpo/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DxHkOp4KpryDXxhnRSzmWg3McaUV0CcsWPvAmV7uJpo/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R-gc2MyjXbCYOB8HGjpUdQnFOunETAcmErWPHOSZ4y0/edit
These pillars of the New Fascism were joined at the Conference by Tikvah Tablet all-stars Liel Leibovitz and Bari Weiss, members of the younger Jewish Neo-Con generation, whose reactionary Straussian tendencies bode poorly for our collective future.
Pitbull Leibovitz has hailed the Trumpscum SCOTUS as a “Microcosm of America,” in spite of the fact that it was not democratically elected, and that its Right Wing Federalist Society supermajority was put into place by Republican presidents who did not win the Popular Vote:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/3I3aEzqgadA/m/Osodm4iLCAAJ
Not that any of them care about the views of the American people, who continue to support Upholding Roe in large numbers:
Minority rule has become the refuge of the Right:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/01/05/democracy-january-6-coup-constitution-526512
In the past few years, Leibovitz has also become a regular First Things contributor, joining his fellow Neo-Catholic radicals Meir Soloveichik and Ross Douthat:
https://www.firstthings.com/author/liel-leibovitz
I particularly enjoyed his recent Poptrash Comic Book movie version of Trumpist “Alternative Realities”:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/rvXnnN6bKKw/m/vWdZKRJeFQAJ
Ike Perlmutter is still Kvelling!
Not sure about Ta-Nehisi Coates.
The centrality of The Tikvah Fund has become increasingly apparent, as what is left of the organized, institutional Jewish community – rooted in racist White Jewish Supremacy – is moving resolutely to the Hard Right.
Which was made eminently clear in the 2021 Pew Research Report on a fractured and weakened American Jewish community:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aumJU1VzaWupahVJvRlpp6iICo48MiETuFDFw0qtUfQ/edit
Indeed, Self-Hating Sephardi Trumpscum David Suissa promoted the Tikvah Fund Jewish Leadership Conference with a cover story in his pathetic Jewish Journal of Los Angeles:
The Right Wing Fascist Intersectionality uniting First Things and The Tikvah Fund can be seen in the work of Ross Douthat and Bari Weiss, both of whom chimed in on the Roe decision in fascinating ways.
Douthat, like so many of his Trumpublican allies in public office, did not do the expected victory dance in his first article after the decision:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/25/opinion/roe-abortion-politics.html
He did express amazement at the start of the discussion:
By any reasonable political science theory, any normal supposition about how power works in our republic, this day should not have come.
He then gleefully attacked Cultural Elites and did his best Troll the Libs schadenfreude:
Across all those years the pro-life cause also swam against the sociological and religious currents of American life, which have favored social liberalism and secularization. It found little vocal support among Hollywood’s culture-shapers and crusaders for social justice, or the corporate entities that have lately embraced so many progressive causes. It was hampered by the hiddenness of the injustice it opposed, the voicelessness of the constituency on whose behalf it tried to speak.
And it worked against the weight of the American class hierarchy, since pro-life sentiment is stronger among less-educated and lower-income Americans — exactly the wrong constituency to start with, according to cynics and realists alike, if you want to pressure the elite or change the world.
More, the pro-life movement has had to succeed twice. It’s entirely true that the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade is the work of a somewhat accidental supermajority, created by the haphazard interaction between judicial mortality and Donald Trump’s unlikely victory.
But then immediately went into fear mode, given how deeply unpopular the Abortion decision is with the mass of Americans:
But the story doesn’t end here. While the pro-life movement has won the right to legislate against abortion, it has not yet proven that it can do so in a way that can command durable majority support. Its weaknesses will not disappear in victory. Its foes and critics have been radicalized by its judicial success. And the vicissitudes of politics and its own compromises have linked the anti-abortion cause to various toxic forces on the right — some libertine and hyperindividualist, others simply hostile to synthesis, conciliation and majoritarian politics.
Douthat does in fact have some sense of the illiberal and anti-Democratic aspects of the Trump White Christian Nationalist Fascism, as he moves from his usual Ratzinger-loving Opus Dei Catholicism to a more conciliatory Pope Francis Social Justice Catholicism:
But there are other possible futures. The pro-life impulse could control and improve conservative governance rather than being undermined by it, making the G.O.P. more serious about family policy and public health. Well-governed conservative states like Utah could model new approaches to family policy; states in the Deep South could be prodded into more generous policy by pro-life activists; big red states like Texas could remain magnets for internal migration even with restrictive abortion laws.
This duplicity is in keeping with his current First Things article “A Gentler Christianity”:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Eqz2NElziRM/m/FJ9YhTc0AwAJ
But in spite of all the ambivalence and vacillation, he ends up doubling-down on the Troll the Libs mandate which has become the branding rule of the New Fascists:
Moreover, certain redoubts of contemporary progressivism have a grimmer spirit — unhappy, sterile, future-fearing — than the youthful atmosphere of 1960s liberalism in which the abortion rights movement won so many victories. If Alabama and Mississippi aren’t the best advertisements for the pro-life vision, neither are Seattle and San Francisco necessarily brilliant advertisements for where uncut social liberalism ends up.
It reminds us of the deeply ironic fact that the New Fascism ties together the Roman Catholic Church and the Confederate Republican Party in a way that eerily reminds us of the tremors that shook the 1960 presidential election:
https://www.history.com/news/jfk-catholic-president
But in the opposite way.
What was once a deep-seated fear of the Vatican control in American nativist circles, has now turned into a required religious union for those who lead the march against Abortion and other Civil Rights being targeted by Pornographer Thomas.
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/24/roe-wade-clarence-thomas-contraception-same-sex-marriage/
The Trump SCOTUS supermajority is exclusively Catholic radical:
Maureen Dowd has perceptively reviewed this radicalism in her instant-classic article “The Radical Reign of Clarence Thomas”:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/3vjp37ZGg-k
In spite of the fact that Douthat raises the possibility of a more Progressive Trumpublican attitude towards the Family and political governance, he resolutely ignores the fact that his beloved Catholic Fascism is a deeply anti-democratic movement which seeks to create a massive government surveillance state policing women’s bodies, that ultimately seeks to support Rapists and purveyors of Incest as we move into a world where Back Alley Abortions can become the rule in Red States.
Never forget the final scene of “Chinatown” and its nightmare vision of an authorized Incest Dystopia, which will become the new reality for girls and women unable to avoid the black hand of the Trumpscum SCOTUS and its “Handmaid’s Tale” policing apparatus:
https://www.shmoop.com/chinatown/incest-symbol.html
https://www.newsweek.com/dystopian-handmaids-tale-invoked-describe-leak-scotus-roe-draft-1702789
And then of course there is Tikvah Whore of Trump Bari Weiss:
https://www.commonsense.news/p/the-post-roe-era-begins?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
The most striking thing about the article is its militantly calm demeanor, demanding that we lower the heat on the Abortion issue.
Its passive tone should come as a shock to those of us who read her overheated attacks on Wokeness and Cancel Culture, which do not have this calmly evenhanded approach; preferring instead to utterly decimate the enemy and mark the Libs as the enemies of Civilization without mercy or calm reflection.
Indeed, the very next Weiss post, written by guest contributor Emily Yoffe, returned to her usual manic Troll the Libs hysteria, attacking President Biden and the purported elimination of Due Process rights for college students accused of sexual misconduct:
https://www.commonsense.news/p/bidens-sex-police?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
It is a perfect example of how Troll the Libs works:
Then Donald Trump was elected president, and Betsy DeVos, decided to reform what the Obama administration had done. In one of the most uncharacteristic acts of that chaotic presidency, DeVos went through the lengthy and burdensome process of writing actual regulations (the Obama administration had only issued “guidance”). The rules she released were, on balance, careful and thorough, providing necessary protections for the rights of both accuser and accused. I spent several years reporting on what was unfolding on campuses, and I wrote at the time that the DeVos regulations were an example of an immoral administration doing the moral thing. (See, for example, here and here.)
It is a classic Whore of Trump strategy, which is typical of the Tikvah Tablet universe, as it attacks Democratic political leaders while implicitly supporting the Lysol Agenda:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/MBv7Kkr0O4A/m/JrmDUBFPAQAJ
What we see in Weiss’ Overturning Roe article is an intense concern for bothsidesism:
We know that some Common Sense readers feel extremely gratified by Dobbs. We know that others are scared and worried about what other rights might be under threat. One of the things we value most about this community is that we have different views about highly divisive subjects. What we share is a commitment to civility, respect and honest conversation. Even—especially—in deeply emotional moments like this one.
Echoes of the Charlottesville Trump:
https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/15/politics/trump-charlottesville-delay/index.html
It is all so deeply ironic, given the fact that the “Common Sense” Substack cash bonanza has been relentless in its attacks on the Left, attacks that are never ever “balanced” with opposing views or any concern with presenting both sides of an issue:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/bari-weiss-curious-silence-on-conservative-cancel-culture
Indeed, her Post-Roe article makes no reference to Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society Trumpscum SCOTUS packing and the critical role played by Fascist leader Moscow Mitch in the corrupted political process:
In spite of being a married Lesbian, keeping her off the First Things contributor list, Weiss participated with “Don’t Say Gay” DEATH SENTENCE at the recent Tikvah Fund Jewish Leadership Conference:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/H3syv1_dXu8/m/WbgGHEV1AQAJ
I have even referenced the apparent confluence of ideas that links DEATH SENTENCE and Weiss in a Proud Boys White Nationalist Cancel Culture WOKE Trumpdance:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/gdrXbeebjOM/m/ysZ78w_7BgAJ
This is what Whore of Trump Tikvah Tablet Intersectionality looks like, as Weiss references her mentor Alana Newhouse:
https://www.commonsense.news/p/how-we-changed-our-minds-in-2021-82f
Note well the attack on the Federal Government with its implicit Confederate call for States’ Rights:
One thing I keep thinking about is a piece that Alana Newhouse, the editor in chief of Tablet, wrote for us last year about the urgency of state power—the dawn of a renewed federalism in the 21st century.
“For decades, a strong federal government was the preferred soldier for me, and for many people I knew,” she wrote. No longer. In the era of lockdowns and vaccine passports and, especially, the emergence of social credit systems, federal power no longer looked so benign.
“In the face of this seemingly omnipresent power, where can one find shelter?” she asked. Her answer: the states. Don’t like the lockdowns in Brooklyn? Move to Miami. Don’t like the income tax in Los Angeles? Consider Juneau.
“In ways the founding fathers did not foresee—or did they?—we seem to be facing something quite unexpected. A new era of the states is upon us,” Alana wrote.
The two bastard children of Zalman Bernstein are very concerned not to rock the schnorrer boat, as we saw with Newhouse’s poorly-written and diffuse article “Everything is Broken”:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/GpmRv_HvRm4/m/6SayA5fLCwAJ
As always, it is all about Troll the Libs COVID anti-Science denialism, led by her personal hero, the quack Norman Doidge:
Norman looked at us sympathetically. “I don’t know how else to tell you this but bluntly,” he said. “There are still many good individuals involved in medicine, but the American medical system is profoundly broken. When you look at the rate of medical error—it’s now the third leading cause of death in the U.S.—the overmedication, creation of addiction, the quick-fix mentality, not funding the poor, quotas to admit from ERs, needless operations, the monetization of illness vs. health, the monetization of side effects, a peer review system run by journals paid for by Big Pharma, the destruction of the health of doctors and nurses themselves by administrators, who demand that they rush through 10-minute patient visits, when so often an hour or more is required, and which means that in order to be ‘successful,’ doctors must overlook complexity rather than search for it ... Alana, the unique thing here isn’t that you fell down so many rabbit holes. What’s unique is that you found your way out at all.”
It then leads to Trumpist Projection of the most venal sort:
Let’s say you believe the above to be hyperbolic. You never fell through the cracks of the medical system; as far as you understand it, there are plenty of ways for a resourceful person to buy a home in America these days; you easily met a mate and got married and had as many children as you wanted, at the age you wanted to have them; your child had a terrific time at college, where she experienced nothing at all oppressive or bizarre, got a first-class education that you could easily afford and which landed her a great job after graduation; you actually like the fact that you haven’t encountered one book or movie or piece of art that’s haunted you for months after; you enjoy druggily floating through one millennial pink space after another; it gives you pleasure to interact only with people who agree with you politically, and you feel filled with meaning and purpose after a day spent sending each other hysteria-inducing links; maybe you’ve heard that some kids are cosplaying Communism but that’s only because everyone is radical when they’re young, and Trump voters are just a bunch of racist troglodytes pining for the past, and it’s not at all that neither group can see their way to a future that looks remotely hopeful ... If this is you, congratulations. There’s no need to reach out and tell me any of this, because all you will be doing is revealing how insulated you are from the world inhabited by nearly everyone I know.
With a Troll the Libs Alt-Right anti-Elites flourish:
For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc. Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as “American”—conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country. This wasn’t a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.
And that leads us right back to Weiss and her States Rights Trumpism:
In many ways the possibilities of that are promising. Covid and crime and school choice have made that abundantly clear.
It is always COVID that is the default, as has been the case from the Trumpscum SCOTUS:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/aeIYxc3xS1s/m/2Y9_bHdvEgAJ
Weiss is so over it!
Both First Things and The Tikvah Fund represent important Conservative institutional components that are tilting religion to the institution of American Theocracy.
In contrast, Talmudic Judaism’s eminently flexible position on Abortion is rooted in a legal understanding of Life as fully beginning a month after childbirth, which is reflected in the laws of mourning that prevent sitting Shiva for a fetus or newborn:
https://hakirah.org/Vol23Weiner.pdf
We understand that Catholicism has a very different position on the matter, though it is not at all relevant to a secular democratic jurisprudence which is Constitutionally prohibited from imposing religious mandates.
What we are ultimately seeing in the Overturn Roe ruling, and the likely dismantling of other Civil Rights under the leadership of Pornographer Thomas, Rapist Kavanaugh, Whore of Trump Coney Barrett, and the other Trumpscum Catholic radicals on the Court, is the forced imposition of a set of radical religious values in contravention of the Establishment Clause:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Establishment_Clause
This imposition of Catholic Fascism is the first step in establishing an American Theocracy that will ultimately erode our Religious Freedom and the Civil Rights that we have come to expect in a Democracy.
It is the destruction of that Democracy in favor of minority rule which has become a prime desideratum in the First Things Tikvah Fund SCOTUS Intersectionality.
David Shasha
The End of Roe Is Just the Beginning
By: Ross Douthat
By any reasonable political science theory, any normal supposition about how power works in our republic, this day should not have come.
The pro-life movement has spent half a century trying to overturn a Supreme Court ruling that was presumed to reflect the enlightened consensus of the modern age. It has worked against the public’s status quo bias, which made Roe v. Wade itself popular, even if the country remained conflicted about the underlying issue. Against the near-universal consensus of the media, academic and expert class. Against the desires of politicians who were nominally supportive of its cause, the preferences of substantial portions of American conservatism’s donor class.
Across all those years the pro-life cause also swam against the sociological and religious currents of American life, which have favored social liberalism and secularization. It found little vocal support among Hollywood’s culture-shapers and crusaders for social justice, or the corporate entities that have lately embraced so many progressive causes. It was hampered by the hiddenness of the injustice it opposed, the voicelessness of the constituency on whose behalf it tried to speak.
And it worked against the weight of the American class hierarchy, since pro-life sentiment is stronger among less-educated and lower-income Americans — exactly the wrong constituency to start with, according to cynics and realists alike, if you want to pressure the elite or change the world.
More, the pro-life movement has had to succeed twice. It’s entirely true that the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade is the work of a somewhat accidental supermajority, created by the haphazard interaction between judicial mortality and Donald Trump’s unlikely victory.
But it’s also true that the anti-abortion side already built an apparent high court majority the standard way, in the Reagan era, by supporting Republican presidents who won big, popular majorities and appointed a raft of justices whose philosophy was supposedly opposed to the liberal policymaking of the Warren court.
When three of those justices, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter and Sandra Day O’Connor, voted to effectively uphold Roe in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, their decision clearly aspired to be a permanent settlement, a call to end “a national controversy” with “a common mandate rooted in the Constitution.” The pro-life movement was an always-marginal and embattled cause, and in that moment it did seem defeated.
Yet 30 years later, here we are. And for all the contingency involved, future scholars of mass movements will find in the pro-life cause a remarkable example of sustained activism against substantial odds, of grass-roots mobilization in defiance of elite consensus — of “democratic virtues,” to borrow from the political scientist Jon Shields, that would be much more widely recognized and studied if they had not been exercised in a cause opposed by progressives and the left.
But the story doesn’t end here. While the pro-life movement has won the right to legislate against abortion, it has not yet proven that it can do so in a way that can command durable majority support. Its weaknesses will not disappear in victory. Its foes and critics have been radicalized by its judicial success. And the vicissitudes of politics and its own compromises have linked the anti-abortion cause to various toxic forces on the right — some libertine and hyperindividualist, others simply hostile to synthesis, conciliation and majoritarian politics.
The pro-life movement is inevitably bound to some kind of conservatism, insofar as a anti-abortion ethic is hard to separate from a conservative ethic around sex, monogamy and marriage. But among its own writers and activists, the movement has understood itself to also be carrying on the best of America’s tradition of social reform, including causes associated with liberalism and progressivism.
The late Richard John Neuhaus, the most eloquent pro-life intellectual of my youth, was once a left-wing pastor who marched with Martin Luther King Jr., and he saw the fight against abortion as proceeding from the same universalist premises as the civil rights movement. Contemporary advocates of pro-life feminism like Erika Bachiochi have linked their critique of abortion to the views of 19th-century feminists and suffragists, portraying an abortion rights politics as a fundamental evasion of society’s true responsibility to women.
At the same time the pro-life movement’s many critics regard it as not merely conservative but as an embodiment of reaction at its worst — punitive and cruel and patriarchal, piling burdens on poor women and doing nothing to relieve them, putting unborn life ahead of the lives and health of women while pretending to hold them equal.
To win the long-term battle, to persuade the country’s vast disquieted middle, abortion opponents need models that prove this critique wrong. They need to show how abortion restrictions are compatible with the goods that abortion advocates accuse them of compromising — the health of the poorest women, the flourishing of their children, the dignity of motherhood even when it comes unexpectedly or amid great difficulty.
These issues may be secondary compared with the life-or-death question of abortion itself, but they are essential to the holistic aspects of political and ideological debate. In any great controversy, people are swayed to one side or another not just by the rightness of a particular position, but by whether that position is embedded in a social vision that seems generally attractive, desirable, worth siding with and fighting for.
Here some of the pathologies of right-wing governance could pave a path to failure for the pro-life movement. You can imagine a future in which anti-abortion laws are permanently linked to a punitive and stingy politics, in which women in difficulties can face police scrutiny for a suspicious miscarriage but receive little in the way of prenatal guidance or postnatal support. In that world, serious abortion restrictions would be sustainable in the most conservative parts of the country, but probably nowhere else, and the long-term prospects for national abortion rights legislation would be bright.
But there are other possible futures. The pro-life impulse could control and improve conservative governance rather than being undermined by it, making the G.O.P. more serious about family policy and public health. Well-governed conservative states like Utah could model new approaches to family policy; states in the Deep South could be prodded into more generous policy by pro-life activists; big red states like Texas could remain magnets for internal migration even with restrictive abortion laws.
And it is not only the pro-life movement that could alienate the conflicted middle in the post-Roe world. The pro-choice side is presently in danger of jettisoning its time-tested rhetorical moves in the name of progressive political correctness and refusing to compromise its maximalist policy demands.
Moreover, certain redoubts of contemporary progressivism have a grimmer spirit — unhappy, sterile, future-fearing — than the youthful atmosphere of 1960s liberalism in which the abortion rights movement won so many victories. If Alabama and Mississippi aren’t the best advertisements for the pro-life vision, neither are Seattle and San Francisco necessarily brilliant advertisements for where uncut social liberalism ends up.
All of which is to say that any confident prediction about this ruling’s consequences is probably a foolish one. There can be no certainty about the future of abortion politics because for almost 50 years all policy debates have been overshadowed by judicial controversy, and only now are we about to find out what the contest really looks like. It’s merely the end of the beginning; the true end, in whatever settlement or victory, lies ahead.
From The New York Times, June 24, 2022
The Post-Roe Era Begins
By: Bari Weiss
We knew it was coming and yet it still feels like a shock. Yesterday the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion.
I spent the day reading through the 6-3 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and trying to tune out the noise on Twitter, though it’s hard. I saw on social media that gay marriage and maybe even contraception were next on the chopping block, and I frantically texted a judge I know hoping for clarity and comfort. It’s a good weekend to take a deep breath and stay offline. Read the decision for yourself, not through the manic lens of Twitter.
What’s clear is that this decision heralds a new era in American politics. In the country’s 13 states with trigger laws, including Texas and Alabama and Missouri and Tennessee, abortion is already or will very soon be illegal. In six other states, governors and state legislatures are expected to impose new restrictions. And in another 10, new restrictions are on the table. Dramatic change, which will alter the lives of American women and their families, is sweeping more than half the states in the union.
There are so many questions that remain unanswered.
Political ones: Will Democrats attempt to pass a national law, in the mold of Ireland or France, legalizing abortion under, say, 14 weeks? Will the kind of violence we have seen against pro-life centers over the past few weeks spread more widely? How will the majority of Americans who opposed the repeal of Roe come to see the Court in the wake of this decision?
Practical ones: What happens when a woman in San Antonio drives to Albuquerque to terminate a pregnancy and the authorities in Texas demand that New Mexico extradite her?
And cultural ones: How did we wind up with a feminist movement that is policing our ability to say the word woman, but has been unable to safeguard second-wave feminism’s most important victory?
In the coming days we’ll bring you reporting and analysis on such questions.
One thing I keep thinking about is a piece that Alana Newhouse, the editor in chief of Tablet, wrote for us last year about the urgency of state power—the dawn of a renewed federalism in the 21st century.
“For decades, a strong federal government was the preferred soldier for me, and for many people I knew,” she wrote. No longer. In the era of lockdowns and vaccine passports and, especially, the emergence of social credit systems, federal power no longer looked so benign.
“In the face of this seemingly omnipresent power, where can one find shelter?” she asked. Her answer: the states. Don’t like the lockdowns in Brooklyn? Move to Miami. Don’t like the income tax in Los Angeles? Consider Juneau.
“In ways the founding fathers did not foresee—or did they?—we seem to be facing something quite unexpected. A new era of the states is upon us,” Alana wrote.
In many ways the possibilities of that are promising. Covid and crime and school choice have made that abundantly clear. But what meaning does “the laboratory of the states” have to the young woman raped in Missouri or Louisiana and unable to afford to travel to a state where abortion is legal?
We know that some Common Sense readers feel extremely gratified by Dobbs. We know that others are scared and worried about what other rights might be under threat. One of the things we value most about this community is that we have different views about highly divisive subjects. What we share is a commitment to civility, respect and honest conversation. Even—especially—in deeply emotional moments like this one.
There are those who claim that the time for nonviolence has passed. That desperate times call for desperate measures. That we are in a war and in a war the normal rules of politics must be suspended. These are the same people who turn a blind eye to—or justify—those threatening the lives of Supreme Court justices with whom they disagree. The same people who, in another time, justified violence against abortion providers.
We could not disagree more strongly with this view.
We know that it’s chic these days to write off virtues like civility and decency and humility and grace. We believe those things are the only way forward. That the only alternative to violence is persuasion and argument.
We hope that in some small way Common Sense is able to facilitate that exchange, to provide a forum for good-faith argument, to make it easier for people of varying backgrounds and opinions to forge a greater understanding, not with an eye toward papering over our many differences or the profound moral and medical and political implications of yesterday’s ruling, but with the hope that that might make living together more possible.
We think that spirit was captured in two conversations about abortion that we hosted on Honestly. If you take a walk or a drive this weekend, give them a listen:
Why You’re Right—And Wrong—About Abortion. With Caitlin Flanagan.
The Yale Law Professor Who Is Anti-Roe, But Pro-Choice. With Akhil Amar.
From Common Sense with Bari Weiss, June 25, 2022