On May 9, The Hill reports, the US Senate passed — with unanimous consent! — a bill to “formally allow the Supreme Court of the United States Police to provide around-the-clock protection to [the justices’] family members, in line with the security some executive and congressional officials get.”

While sponsor John Cornyn (R-TX) justified the action on alleged “threats to the physical safety of Supreme Court Justices and their families,” the real reason for the bill is no secret. In the wake of a leaked draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, ordinary Americans started showing up to protest outside the justices’ homes, cuing immediate howls about the sanctity of their “privacy.”

Wait, what?

Even if one considers the interests of unborn children more important than privacy, there’s no question that privacy would be a casualty of the ruling. It would allow state legislatures to ignore privacy in at least two areas — women’s uteri and doctor-patient relationships.

If those areas of privacy are less important than the sanctity of life in the eyes of abortion opponents, how is the privacy of Supreme Court justices and their families more important than, as the First Amendment puts it, “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances?”

The Constitution itself doesn’t answer that question. To find what we need, we must instead turn to George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm and the modified version of its utopian scheme’s Seventh Commandment:

“All animals are equal — but some animals are more equal than others.”

Your right to protest the actions of Very Special Important People like Supreme Court justices is subordinate to their right to not be annoyed, embarrassed, or in even the slightest manner inconvenienced by such protests.

If you thought you were reading a column about abortion, you thought wrong.

For that matter, if you thought you were reading a column about privacy, you thought wrong.

You’re reading a column about equality under the law. This little teacup tempest is just the latest in a long list of demonstrations that no such thing exists.

Since the 1980s, America’s Very Special Important People (aka the political class) have availed themselves of a fiction referred to as “free speech zones.” They go where they please and say what they wish — but mere mortals like you are restricted to saying what you wish in locations far removed from them.

Some states have even passed laws forbidding disclosure of the addresses of Very Special Important People — politicians, judges, police officers — to the mere serfs who fork over those Very Special Important People’s salaries, for the privilege of doing as those Very Special Important People demand.

They get to run your life down to the smallest detail, barge into that life at will, and cage or kill you if you resist.

You get to complain about it — for now, anyway, so long as you do so only in places where they won’t notice and pronounce themselves offended by your gall and temerity.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Whether or not Roe v. Wade is overturned, it will be headed the way of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

The Supreme Court decision establishing a broad decriminalization of abortion throughout the United States has been unusually resilient for such a contentious subject. For nearly half a century, the verdict seemed as settled as any could be in American politics, with those favoring greater restrictions content to limit access de facto, rather than risk pushback against drastic changes to what is allowed de jure.

Yet the legal status of such a controversial topic remaining stable for such a period of time was the exception, not the rule.  Beneath the long detente lay decades “of compromising, and dickering, and trying to keep what was as it was, and to hand sops to both sides when new conditions demanded that something be done, or be pretended to be done” — words written more than half a century before Roe, about the issue of slavery.

Essayist Voltairine de Cleyre noted that political compromise set the stage for clashes between opposing camps, regardless of what the laws were on paper. Abolitionists pressed not only against slave owners, but those who thought that slavery  “was probably a mistake” but “were in no great ferment of anxiety to have it abolished.”

It’s particularly ironic that advocates of family planning have forgotten de Cleyre’s reminder of how things can get done by individuals or groups in voluntary association “without going to external authorities to please do the thing for them.”

Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger got the idea from de Cleyre’s anarchist comrade Emma Goldman. Yet as Goldman biographer Richard Drinnon observed, Sanger “guided the movement into respectably conservative channels by emphasizing the need for legislation which would give doctors, and doctors only, the right to impart contraceptive information.”

Sanger had joined with de Cleyre and Goldman not only in promoting personal autonomy for women, but for children between birth and adulthood in Modern Schools.  Yet Sanger ceded to the state the very power over reproductive health she had wrested from private patriarchs, viewing “the personal liberty of the individual” in that realm as “unrestricted and irresponsible.”  Her successors have insisted that organizations like Planned Parenthood can only function with government subsidies — while minimizing the fraction of funds going directly to abortion!

Once again,  as de Cleyre put it, “the direct actionists on both sides” will “fight it out” in contested territory, which this time spans the entire country.  The collapse of consensus will unleash plenty of acrimony, but “pro-choice” and “pro-life” partisans may as well drop the pretense that the government is either.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Abortion: Out Of The Political Trap” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, May 9, 2022
2. “Abortion: Out of the Political Trap” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, May 10, 2022
3. “Abortion: Out of the political trap” by Joel Schlosberg, Miles City, Montana Star, May 10, 2022
4. “Abortion: Out of the political trap” by Joel Schlosberg, Creston, Iowa News Advertiser, May 11, 2022

In the wake of a leaked draft Supreme Court opinion which, if it represents a final vote, would overturn Roe v. Wade, pro-choice advocates are marshaling their best — and worst — arguments against removing that ruling’s protections for abortion.

As always, I’ll refrain from sharing my own opinions on abortion as such. I’m not interested in convincing anyone of anything there, if for no other reason than that I’m not firmly convinced myself.

I won’t refrain from sharing my opinions on poor arguments, though. Both in general and on abortion specifically, they’re quite possibly my top pet peeve.  And the worst argument I’m hearing right now is … the envelope, please …

Overturning Roe would be “undemocratic.”

“Overturning Roe v. Wade Shows the Right Has Nothing but Contempt for Democracy,” Ben Beckett writes at Jacobin. “If the decision stands, it will be a high-water mark for the Right’s project of undemocratic rule …. As the draft decision shows, the Supreme Court is arguably the most powerful weapon the Right has for ruling without and against the people.”

Really? The problem isn’t a matter of fundamental individual rights versus state power, but rather of “democracy?”

Let’s take a look at the three underlying cases:

In Roe v. Wade (1973) the Supreme Court overturned Articles 1191-1194 and 1196 of Texas’s Penal Code. Those articles and that code were passed by a democratically elected state legislature. The Court overturned “democracy” in favor of what it held was a constitutionally protected individual right.

In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Court further expanded its interpretation of those constitutional protections versus Pennsylvania’s Abortion Control Act of 1982, once again ruling against a democratically elected state legislature and in favor of a right to abortion.

In the current case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Association, the Court will rule either for or against Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act —  which, you guessed it, was duly passed by a democratically elected state legislature.

If the draft opinion becomes an actual ruling,  democratically elected state legislatures will once again make decisions on abortion law.

That’s the exact opposite of “undemocratic.” It’s full-blown democracy, tip-toeing through the abortion tulips with bells on and playing a ukulele.

Those who claim a constitutional right to abortion might want to reconsider their fetishistic (and in this case, simply incorrect) appeals to “democracy.” There’s something to be said for protection of individual rights against the whims of majorities — and not only on this issue.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY