Sunday, September 14, 2008

What? Losing Roe Isn’t Enough To Make You Shake Hands And Fight Together? by Anthony McCarthy

There is a temptation among those of us with the leisure time to read and write blogs, to concentrate on absurdly small matters instead of what’s truly apocalyptic. At times we can match the corporate media in ignoring what’s important in favor of, literally, nothing.

It was no neat trick to predict that if Obama was the Democratic nominee that the Republican’s dirty tricks machine would use the divisive Spring campaign for the nomination against him. Anyone who couldn’t have foreseen that has to be too dense to be reading this blog. What we are seeing now in the Republican dirty tricks campaign against Obama, would have been used in reverse if Hillary Clinton was the nominee. Again, if you can’t see that, you are not reading these words or are probably a Republican monitor.

I almost got dragged into a comparison of the words, hurtful and those pretended to be hurtful, on both sides of that grudge match, but I’m not going to become part of the McCain-Palin campaign.

Having reviewed both lists, continuing to talk about them is absolutely stupid and exactly the kind of thing that has won Republicans the right to overturn everything that was gained with so much struggle and bloodshed over the past hundred-fifty years.

Somewhere in the media, one of the alleged “Hillary holdouts” was quoted as saying that she didn’t care about Roe because she was beyond having to worry about being pregnant. I very much doubt that this was a supporter of Hillary Clinton. Certainly it’s nothing a supporter of her policies would ever say. For the rest of us, maybe it needs saying again. Here, from an op-ed by Cass Sunstein

It is relevant here that many people, including McCain running mate Sarah Palin, believe that abortion is unacceptable even in cases of rape and incest, and there is little doubt that if Roe is overruled, some states will enact that belief into law.

To anyone who has forgotten, John McCain is the oldest person ever nominated by one of the two national parties for president, he has had serious health problems including cancer. The prospect of Sarah Palin becoming president during the next term are probably better than her not becoming succeeding a President McCain. Even if he didn’t die, he caved in to the ultra-right to choose his VP, do you think he wouldn’t for his Supreme Court nominees?

For anyone freed from having to worry about their own unwanted pregnancy and too self absorbed to worry about other women’s rights, Sunstein points out that literally everything is in danger of being lost to exactly the kind of Supreme Court nominees that both McCain and Palin have announced they will appoint.

For the future of constitutional rights, there is a broader point, which involves the fragility of many constitutional principles. Of course the Supreme Court tends to move slowly, but some conservatives who speak of "strict construction," and of "legislating from the bench," have something quite radical in mind.

For them, these are code words. They seek to appoint judges who will overturn not merely Roe, but dozens of other past decisions. For example, they want judges to impose flat bans on affirmative action, to invalidate environmental regulations, to increase presidential power, and to reduce the separation of church and state. Some Republican appointees to the Supreme Court have already called for significant changes in constitutional law in these domains.

McCain-Palin not only would deny women the ownership of their bodies, they’d brick over the glass ceiling once and for all. Maybe younger people don’t remember but within living memory it was legal for a man to tell a woman “Sorry, honey, but all our girls start out in the typing pool”.

Would a rational person risk, literally, undoing all the advances of the Civil Rights amendments over the piddling list of Freudian fantasy wrongs?

No.