A Court Supreme

[Stavros]

Radical reactionaries would be more accurate, given their agenda is to reverse the general direction of social changes that have occurred over the past 60 years or so.

Sorry, I don't like 'Radical Reactionary'. Based on the view there is a 'New Wave Fascism' that has been developing in Europe, North America and elsewhere too, a consequence of the crisis of Globalization provoked by the 2007 crash and Covid, and the unhappy marriage of economic and political nationalism, New Wave Fascist would seem appropriate, but is probably too academic.

The confusion deepens because on the one hand, I think the original sin of the Americas is the conflict between the Religious and the Secular. Some would argue, after Tocqueville, that the Christian identity of the early American settlements was never in question, and that they compromised politically precisely because their own conflicts in Europe had led them to the Americas, so the point of principle in politics was not to make the religious identity of the settlement Political, but let it be whatever it was. I see this as a fall-out from the Catholic-Protestant divide, but also the bitter divisions within the various non-Catholic sects.

So I am tempted to re-package Conservatives as 'Religious Fundamentalists' because for the most part this identifies the supporters of Trump and his penumbra, which includes McConnell and friends, and also links their policy preferences to a frame of reference which is more likely to be the Bible than the Constitution, as per Texas.

Here is the additional problem -being a Religious Fundamentalist in the US is to be part of a declining sector of the population.

Below are extracts from an unusually (for the Telegraph) sympathetic article which looks broadly at this issue-

-It points out that medical technology such as ultra-sound has helped refine the chronology of gestation but also impacted issues such as term limits in the debate on abortion, but note too the reference to the concept of 'quickening' which meant that Abortion was legal in the United States until the 19th century.
-The decline of religion and the growth of secular views thus impacts the political geography of those States where the majority vote for one party, but are governed by the losers. This seems to me to thus establish a major long term dilemma for the meaning of democracy in the US.
-So I stand by Religious Fundamentalist rather than Conservative, not least because I think it identifies the losers being in control of the political agenda, in the States, the Supreme Court, and perhaps Congress too. It may also swerve from a Religious determination to a Nationalist one, where the existential threat to the US does not just come from 'radical leftists' who have no God, but the belief that to be an American one must believe in God, Family and Country, closing the circle. In an attempt to end the perpetual conflict between the Religious and the Secular, they are claiming it seems to me, that to be an authentic American means to be a Christian, and there is no compromise on that.

Here are some extracts-

"...the United States is in the middle of a likely-irreversible shift toward secularism. As recently as 2004, a Gallup poll found that 85 per cent of Americans identified as Christian. By 2021, that number had plummeted to 63 per cent and the decline shows no signs of slowing down. Between 2006 and 2021, white evangelical Protestants’ share of the population has declined 37 per cent. Younger Americans are far more likely to be secular – 40 per cent of millennials in Gallup’s poll identified as nonbelievers or had no religious preference. And yet Americans are not becoming less divided over abortion as the influence of religion wanes."

"The success of the US anti-abortion movement in polarising the conflict is not just the result of strategic savvy. The movement has benefited from larger shifts in US political geography and partisanship. Before Roe v Wade, the anti-abortion movement was the strongest in states like Pennsylvania, New York and Minnesota. Republicans were weak politically in the South, which still pledged its fidelity to the so-called Dixiecrats, who had long defended racial segregation.But the movement’s centre of power has shifted south. Now, Democrats have no realistic chance of winning in most Southern states, which are home to solid and increasingly uncompromising anti-abortion majorities. Even Republican voters uncomfortable with abortion bans are unlikely to change how they cast their ballots. That’s partly because of negative partisanship – the hatred of leaders and even voters from the opposite party, which has risen exponentially since the Eighties. The more antipathy voters have for the opposition, the more willing they are to vote for extreme candidates –and to set aside their concerns about sweeping criminal abortion bans. For example, the most recent data we have suggest that a majority of voters in Oklahoma favour abortion being legal under all or most circumstances. And yet that state has passed an abortion ban with no debate."
America’s abortion debate is a chilling reminder of how history can be rewritten at a stroke (yahoo.com)

[Stavros]

To add to my remarks above, I refer those interested to a review in this week's edition of The Times Literary Supplement of Victor Hanson's The Dying Citizen: How progressive elites, tribalism and globalization are destroying the idea of America -but an America which is viewed not just in narrow terms, but without much regard for the facts of its history, as the reviewer points out.

Some extracts-

"One of the bestselling authors of American history is a sixty-eight-year-old Texan named David Barton. If you dip into his seminal work, The American Story (2020), co-authored with his son Tim, you will find a central tenet of Christian nationalism: “The Golden Thread in American history is the superintending Providence of Almighty God”. In Barton’s telling, Christopher Columbus was the saviour of the native Tainos (whom he actually kidnapped and enslaved) and there is no mention of his introduction of African slavery to the Americas.
Barton is a regular guest at Republican fundraisers and on fundamentalist broadcasts, and, while he has no credibility among serious historians, the rise of Christian nationalism in the political arena has increased the demand for similar voices with more academic clout. One of these is Victor Davis Hanson
...In his new book, The Dying Citizen, Hanson leans hard on his classicist background to make a nativist case, celebrating ancient Greece and its formulae for citizenship while studding his prose with learned etymologies. But when it comes to the foundations of the American republic, his history is erratic and blinkered. The founding of America expanded rights for “the vast majority of the resident population”, he argues, “in part because colonial America lacked many of the European mainland’s traditions of class distinctions, primogeniture, peasantry and serfdom”. He has apparently forgotten the nearly 20 per cent of the US population that was enslaved, according to the first census in 1790..."
Clues to the US’s crises | Anne Nelson (the-tls.co.uk)

[tslvr]

Can anyone be correct 100% of the time when their arguments lean one way 100% of the time?

[Lorca81]

The danger of the leaked draft opinion is that it rejects the underlying reasoning behind Roe and Casey, namely that there is a fundamental—albeit unwritten—right to privacy and bodily autonomy protected by the U.S. Constitution. Roe relied on cases going back 40–50 years that protected the right to use contraception and marry someone of another race. In the 50 years since Roe, subsequent cases applied that privacy right to prevent states from criminalizing gay sex and prohibiting same-sex marriage. Basically, this draft opinion calls all of that into question.

[Stavros]

Can anyone be correct 100% of the time when their arguments lean one way 100% of the time?

Depending on what is being claimed -yes. For example, The Earth is Flat/The Earth is not Flat. If one bases the argument on proven science, then the statement The Earth is not Flat, is right 100% of the time. By contrast, the statement, Human Life is Sacred cannot be 100% right if there is no definition of what is Sacred, though for those for whom the word does mean something, then the statement must be 100% correct.

[Stavros]

The danger of the leaked draft opinion is that it rejects the underlying reasoning behind Roe and Casey, namely that there is a fundamental—albeit unwritten—right to privacy and bodily autonomy protected by the U.S. Constitution. Roe relied on cases going back 40–50 years that protected the right to use contraception and marry someone of another race. In the 50 years since Roe, subsequent cases applied that privacy right to prevent states from criminalizing gay sex and prohibiting same-sex marriage. Basically, this draft opinion calls all of that into question.

And this is where Americans must focus their arguments -on what precedent means in law, and in the way law evolves as societies change, as it seems to me that embedded in Alito's argument is the view that because he doesn't like the changes that have taken place in his country, they are to be classed as 'unprecedented' as if this also meant their legal status must be questioned, or even repealed in law. I wonder how this view fares when the 18th Amendment is the matter for debate.

[Stavros]

Further to my posts on the Religious aspect of Abortion, it seems to me that those opposed to it fail to address the critical issue of Pregnancy, in and of itself. Thus they make claims about the existence of life beginning with a 'heartbeat' as the key marker, even though any basic scientist will argue life is contained in sperm and eggs. The circumstances in which a woman become pregnant seem to be either dismissed, or in the case of Rape and Incest, wished away as if they were of no importance, because the foetus is the only concern.

But even here the either/or argument fails to address problems that can arise in pregnancy that make a full term fruitless if the foetus dies in the womb, or the cases where gestation fails to proceed normally -here, for example is one case from a Letter in the Guardian a few days ago. I wonder if even those who claim to be opposed to Abortion in all circumstances, can honestly maintain such a position with such cases -

"I was 33, pregnant and deliriously happy. At our scheduled ultrasound, we learned that our baby had spina bifida and anencephaly – the baby (we later learned was a girl) had neither a skull nor a spine. The chances of her survival were zero, and my doctor scheduled a surgical abortion as soon as he heard the news. The following days were a blur of grief and sadness."
This attack on women’s reproductive rights must be resisted | Letters | The Guardian

[filghy2]

Can anyone be correct 100% of the time when their arguments lean one way 100% of the time?

How about thinking through the implications of your question? If the right answer is ambiguous that surely this is not the right way to resolve it - a handful of ideologues who obtained their majority though political machinations imposing their view even though they don't represent the majority. Most Americans favour allowing abortions, at least in some circumstances.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...n-in-5-charts/

The pro-choice people are not imposing their moral views on anyone else. Nobody is forced to have an abortion if they don't believe it is right, and no doctor is forced to perform abortions. It is the minority of anti-abortionists who want to impose their moral views on others.

If there is no consensus on a question of morality shouldn't it be left to individuals, rather than one group imposing their views on the rest?

[Stavros]

[QUOTE=filghy2;2052554]
If there is no consensus on a question of morality shouldn't it be left to individuals, rather than one group imposing their views on the rest?[
/QUOTE]

The valid point you make does not seem to sway the opinion of the -mostly- men who are making terrifying decisions. The case in El Salvador of a woman sentenced to 30 years in prison because her miscarriage was transformed into 'aggravated homicide'- may sound outrageous, but it is not far from the position emerging in some US States such as Louisiana where a Bill before its House would make abortion Homicide and charge the woman with murder. These cases in these links-

El Salvador: woman sentenced to 30 years in prison for homicide after miscarriage | El Salvador | The Guardian

GOP Crusade Against Abortion Could Lead To Contraception Bans (yahoo.com)

On top of the above, comes the Senator from Montana who wants to know why Turtle Eggs have more protection than a 'pre-born human baby'. You have to wonder if this mature adult knows what Pregnancy is, and what can happen once it has begun. But maybe he isn't that sure about the origins either, or is he going to suggest that Americans be banned from eating eggs? After all, if the Sea Turtle's eggs are protected, what about Hens? Because Hens Have Rights.

Republican senator compares women to sea turtles and eagles in speech against abor
tion rights | The Independent

[filghy2]

The valid point you make does not seem to sway the opinion of the -mostly- men who are making terrifying decisions. The case in El Salvador of a woman sentenced to 30 years in prison because her miscarriage was transformed into 'aggravated homicide'- may sound outrageous, but it is not far from the position emerging in some US States such as Louisiana where a Bill before its House would make abortion Homicide and charge the woman with murder.

One might respect the integrity of their views if they were consistent about the sanctity of life. But in reality most of the anti-abortion zealots show indifference to human life in other contexts; eg they are generally opposed to gun laws, anti-poverty programs and Covid measures and in favour of capital punishment.

This article suggests that the obsession of white protestant evangelicals in the US with abortion is a relatively recent construct of the post-1970s. Prior to that they were relatively unconcerned with abortion and interested mainly in defending racial segregation.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazi...1970s-00031480

There is a parallel here with the rise of gun rights zealotry. Up until the 1970s the NRA was a pragmatic organisation that accepted the need for reasonable gun controls. In both cases fundamentalism seems to have been cultivated for political gain.