Monday, May 9, 2022

Discussing why overturning Roe v. Wade is a bad decision

 So, Roe v. Wade being overturned is a terrible decision. And, we're starting to see why, just looking at how the republicans are salivating to roll back other rights. Mitch McConnell is talking about a nationwide abortion ban. Marsha Blackburn claimed that Griswald v Connecticut is also constitutionally unsound prior to this ruling, which could imply intentions to restrict birth control. Some have feared that Obergefell vs Hodges, which legalizes gay marriage, could also be impacted. This is the big problem with repealing Roe v. Wade. Roe. V. Wade wasn't just a case of judicial activism out of nowhere like the right claims. It was a case that expanded the precedent of other court cases that followed from the right to privacy. It was actually based on Griswald v Connecticut, which ensured access to legal birth control under the same logic. Roe v. Wade was just an expansion of that right. And I got news for you, gay marriage? Also based on similar legal logic.

So if you pull out Roe from this house of cards that so many personal rights and freedoms surrounding sexuality are based upon, the entire thing starts to collapse. Because by establishing overturning Roe as precedent, claiming that previous precedents were wrong, it weakens those precedents in other court cases allowing them to be overturned. This is BAD. Very BAD. This is what the court is doing. It's playing with fire here. And while the right might be okay with that, wanting to go back to the conservative 1950s socially, most people don't want to live like that any more, and that would be horrifically stifling. 

The right loves to claim that the left engages in judicial activism. They think if the founders didn't explicitly intend something or it isn't explicitly mentioned in the constitution, that it shouldn't be recognized legally. That's what "textualism" and "constitutionalism" is about. But that's a horrendously regressive stance, and one that undermines so many personal rights and freedoms that even conservative Americans largely enjoy today. If you overturn Roe, you weaken the others, and allow them to be repealed too. because Roe doesn't exist in a vacuum, it was one domino in a larger row of them that established many of the rights to privacy and freedom that we have today. 

This decision that the court is planning to make is extremely dangerous. And while the right loves to claim that the court is to be above the fray of politics, uh, the court is political. It's true that in the past that they may have been an institution that was apolitical and above the fray, but after the 1960s, after the right started engaging in moral backlash politics against the court for not being uniformly conservative and ruling their way, they started politicizing court rulings, pushing extremist conservative judges like Bork, Scalia, and Thomas. And in the more recent age, they've used their institutional power to delay obama from filling Scalia's seat with a replacement, and then Trump nominated 3 judges of his own. And now they're trying to repeal Roe. This is a political coup. The right rejects sound legal logic regarding Roe and other legal rights because they wanna force their morals on the population, and now that they have the seats, they're going for it.

I know I tend to downplay social issues. I mean, my main dogs in the fight are stuff like economics. UBI, healthcare, free college. But, i feel a need to defend my view on social issues here. I don't care about idpol and all that crap, but generally, I am libertarian. I personally think you should be free to live your life as you want without interference, and I do resent the right trying to impose their religiously inspired morality on us, weakening our rights in the process. That's wrong. And even worse, it's "unAmerican" in my opinion. 

This decision is a travesty.

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