That today’s culture wars lack a convenient place to pigeonhole Tom Cornell, whose seven decades of activism in the Catholic Worker movement continued until his passing on August 1, shows their limitations rather than his.

In a 2002 profile, Andrew Blackman noted that Cornell “shares common beliefs with liberals and neo-conservatives, communists and cardinals, and he harshly criticizes all of them.” Cornell was the sort of radical for social justice who told liberals that radicalism didn’t mean being “liberal but more so,” since his analysis of the ills of war and poverty traced them to fundamentally “different premises.” He wasn’t any more accommodating to those who professed his anti-abortion position but who seemed to be only  “concerned about people … until they’re born.”

Cornell’s means were just as distinct from partisan politics on either side. In a 2014 interview with Commonweal, he explained: “In the Bible we read, ‘I was hungry and you fed me.’ It does not say, ‘I was hungry and you formed a committee!’ Our thing is just getting down and doing it.”

Cornell’s opposition to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq drew and built on a tradition of Catholic Worker pacifism going back to Ammon Hennacy’s noncompliance with the draft during World War I (Hennacy was the sort of labor comrade Dorothy Day could dub “a pacifist even in the class war”). Cornell was instrumental in legitimizing pacifism as an alternative to just war theology and ensuring, as Karl Hess observed at the American bicentennial, “that when for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exempted from active military duty.”

If, as Hess added, “there are no exemptions for people who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to financially support the bureaucracy that actually does the killing” (since “the state takes money more seriously than life”), that was not for Cornell’s lack of trying. A 1967 petition cosigned by Cornell vouched that living below the minimum income tax threshold was morally preferable to funding the “poisoning of food crops, blasting of villages, napalming and killing of thousands upon thousands of people.”

Raising that income tax threshold would allow more workers of all belief systems to follow Cornell’s example. Meanwhile, the sort of voluntary community organizing pioneered by Cornell and other Catholic Workers to deal directly with social problems could make up for any ensuing budget shortfalls for the functions of the state that aren’t deadly.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “A Pacifist Even in the Tax War” by Joel Schlosberg, Antiwar.com, August 8, 2022
2. “A Pacifist Even in the Tax War” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, August 10, 2022

“What’s the matter with Kansas?” is a question sure to be asked whether or not the state’s voters decide to ratify Value Them Both on August 2.

The proposed amendment would overturn the 2019 Kansas Supreme Court verdict Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt, which Kansas Reflector reporter Allison Kite notes was something of “a state-level Roe.” While among other restraints, “patients seeking abortions must sit through waiting periods and efforts to persuade them against the procedure,” it did reliably guarantee a baseline of access. Though the result was far from laissez-faire, let alone opponents’ fever dreams of state-subsidized abortion on demand, removing it would set the stage for efforts at more restrictive policies up to a near-total ban.

In 2018, Eric Flint took a break from writing an alternate history of the 1630s to foresee that an impending repeal of Roe would not only unleash immediate moves to restrict abortion in “15 to 20 states” but that an equal number would “immediately liberalize abortion back to where it was decades ago before the right succeeded in chipping away at it.” Flint added that the steady liberalization of views on abortion in urban centers nationwide would give the pro-choice side an advantage beyond the relatively even divide between the two at the state level.

A decisive popular veto of Value Them Both would not only reaffirm the right of abortion for Kansans (and for the Missourians who account for nearly half of the abortions in their neighboring state).  It could serve as a model for state-level Roes in other contested states. So could a backlash if Value Them Both’s passing proves to be against the tide of public opinion.

The Garrison Center’s Thomas L. Knapp has noted (“Abortion: No, Dobbs Isn’t ‘Decentralization’,” June 25) that “decisions concerning abortion were largely decentralized to the lowest possible level, that of individual choice … such decisions are now largely centralized into the hands of state legislatures.”

The outcome of Kansas’s referendum could revive Roe‘s decentralization of choice to the individual by decentralizing it to the states.  Then Dorothy and her little fetus too won’t have to travel to Oz.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Pay attention to that woman behind the voting booth curtain” by Joel Schlosberg, Argus Observer [Ontario, Oregon], July 24, 2022

“Recent Supreme Court rulings have threatened the rights of New Yorkers to make decisions about their own bodies and our right to protect New Yorkers from gun violence,” proclaimed New York state governor Kathy Hochul in a statement released from Albany on the first of July.

That New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen struck down New York state restrictions on what items its citizens can carry on their bodies, and that supporters of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision see it as offering protection from violence, shows the inconsistencies in the very divisions entrenched by the Court.

Gerald Ford noted in a 1974 Presidential address that those realizing that “a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have” are nonspecialists who “are a lot better economists than most economists care to admit.” Giving the Supreme Court outsize power to override the legislative and executive branches of government has likewise been the sort of blunder in political strategy made by the most devoted political strategists.

For partisans aiming to scare their bases into line, nothing beats a Supreme Court balanced like Humpty Dumpty on the edge of the wall of polarization between the red and blue states. The toppling of that balance has cracked what protection they gave to civil liberties on one side or the other of the culture wars. The dissipation of what Clint Eastwood called the “liberal dither over Miranda rights” has been made clear by how ignored their overruling by Vega v. Tekoh has been compared to the overturn of Roe v. Wade. And all the efforts of the kingmakers will never unscramble it.

Eric Flint, a science fiction writer whose prognostications are informed by a history of hard-nosed activism, observed in 2018 that the notion that “the Supreme Court is the all-powerful institution in American politics” was disproved by its history.  “Slavery, segregation, slavish obedience to corporate welfare, grossly unconstitutional internment … are gone. Not thanks to the Supreme Court” — whose Justices consistently upheld them all — “but thanks to the struggles of the millions of men and women who fought against these injustices through the various means for mass action in a democratic society.”

The way out of the political disorder that was inevitably going to be unleashed by the Supreme Court’s essentially elitist nature lies in society routing around it, not just via more responsive and local sectors of governance but by expanding the realms of individual choice without waiting for its go-ahead.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “It’s coming from inside the courtroom” by Joel Schlosberg, Reno, Nevada Gazette Journal, July 10, 2022
2. “It’s coming from inside the courtroom” by Joel Schlosberg, USA Today, July 10, 2022
3. “It’s Coming From Inside The Courthouse” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, July 10, 2022
4. “It’s coming from inside the courthouse” by Joel Schlosberg, Sidney, Montana Herald, July 10, 2022
5. “It’s coming from inside the courthouse” by Joel Schlosberg, Elko, Nevada Daily Free Press, July 11, 2022
6. “It’s Coming From Inside the Courthouse” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, July 12, 2022