Members of the Supreme Court and the Republican party are apoplectic that one of SCOTUS's super-double-secret draft opinions has been leaked to the public. Apparently, they are the only people in the country with an absolute right to privacy that isn't enumerated in the Constitution.
See, this draft opinion is totally unfavorable to Roe v. Wade, a 50-year-old ruling which the majority of the American population favors. Its author, Justice Alioto, argues that Roe was an egregiously wrong decision that should be overturned in toto. The ruling, which is set to be announced sometime in June, is a triumph for originalism -- the idea that if the Founders didn't think to mention it in the Constitution, it is forbidden to think of it now. And try as I might, I cannot think of another Scotus ruling discerning and affirming an unenumerated Constitutional right being overturned. It is as unprecedented as the leak that exposed it.
For fifty years Republicans, conservatives, evangelical Christians, misogynists, fascists and assorted fruitcakes have labored mightily to see Roe thrown into the dustbin of history. They objected to its affirmation of a woman's power over her own body. They decried its elevation of the Court's authority over a state's sovereignty. They rejected the foundational idea that the Constitution, not their interpretation of the Bible, was the law of the land. They insisted that " unborn" and “preborn” were existential rather than a philosophical concepts.
Now it seems their labors have finally succeeded.
For years, as successive liberal majorities on the Court edged the country into the modern era, conservatives have complained that the justices were finding rights that simply weren't there. Not just regarding abortion, though that was the first and galvanizing right to be discerned; but the rights of LGBTQ+ persons to live lives of their own choosing and marry the people they loved, the right of people of color to first-class citizenship. The list goes on- -but maybe now it won't.
If Roe was wrong because it proclaimed an unenumerated right, then every unenumerated right that has been celebrated in Court decisions over the years is up for grabs.
We are entering a new epoch of our history. I don't like it. It scares me: first because of what its continuation portends, and second because of what it might require to stop it.
God save these United States.
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