There was nothing conservative about Roe v Wade. This ruling reverses an unconservative one, returning us to the conservative position which was the status quo for 200 years.
Well, mere positions are neither "conservative" nor "unconservative"; they just "are". Conservatism isn't an ideology, at least not in the way that I am using the term. Conservatism in the tradition of Burke is about how to manage change. Being conservative does not mean opposition to change for its own sake, or holding onto a system that doesn't work rather than reforming it (gradually) until it once again fulfills its intended purpose. The Court in Roe did not pull the right to abortion out of thin air, but based it upon careful study of the legal and historical precedents. There was already stare decisis regarding the right to privacy, and its relationship to the 14th Amendment. Roe was simply based on those precedents. So it was, in fact, a genuinely conservative ruling, in that it built incrementally on what had already been developed, rather than being an idiosyncratic innovation. That was 50 years ago, and since that time subsequent jurisprudence has been built upon the principles enunciated in Roe. Ultimately, what's done is done. It's a shame, it's a travesty, it’s short-sighted, it's contrary to the will of the majority, it's an abuse of power, and it's unnecessary, based as it is on a faulty, erroneous understanding of the Bible, the Constitution, the nature of rights, human personhood, and republican citizenship. The Court has done tremendous damage to its prestige and credibility, and I suspect that will have consequences in terms of legislation in the coming years. Right-wingers ought to bear in mind that if the Court can overrule a binding precedent like Roe, it can overrule any binding precedent, including Citizens United, Heller, and a host of other instances of right-wing judicial activism that lacked any basis in the Constitution’s actual text. We've taken an enormous step backward, but I'm confident we will eventually catch back up.
Yeah, I agree with most of what you just wrote. Today I talked to a friend at church who teaches history at a university. He remarked that online learning was a disaster because of all the cheating; the students are spending a ton of money to attend, yet by and large they don't care whether they (or bother to) learn useful information that will help them in their future lives. All they value is the diploma, which they view as a ticket to a better payday. They don't realize that their attitudes and failure to learn are cheapening their diplomas to where they become meaningless in employers' eyes, because employers see how worthless, lazy, self-absorbed, and inept these grads are. I do not think this trend will reverse. Too many people are suffering from a spiritual disease. It goes back to when the Court disallowed teaching about God and leading prayer to God in the public schools. Ever since then, successive generations have become less and less godly, more and more self-centered, & more and more engaged in vices and immorality. Today's students are disrespectful toward adults in general and parents & teachers in particular. They see no reason why they should not cheat, lie, steal, etc. as long as they can get away with it (escape consequences), so it has become like a game to them to push the limits of impropriety and see how much self-reward they can get for nothing. Schoolteachers are at their wits' end, because they have been forced by students' misbehavior and malaise to become babysitters more than educators. The only solution is for these people to accept Jesus' teaching: love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself. Short of a spiritual reawakening within society, I am confident that nothing else will reverse this trend.
No, no, absolutely no! The Court in Roe pulled that so-called "right" straight out of their own anal cavities. It simply did not exist beforehand. They made it up! They took a bit of truth here and a bit there, applied a ton of goo and a few paper clips, and came up with something that didn't belong. Just like bad exegesis of the Bible, it was horrible exegesis of the Constitution. That's why the news media 'talking heads' are totally incorrect when they claim that this Court "took away a right that existed for 50 years;" the right never existed to begin with. What the Roe Court did was to judicially create new law by falsely interpreting the Constitution and by claiming that it supported a new right... a right never recognized or believed in during the previous 200+ years!
Taking their cue from their peers and their parents, who did the same before, in a waterfall-like progression of increasingly unrighteous behaviors & beliefs. Like I say, it started when the Court took prayer out of the schools. That was in the early 1960s, long before Trump became influential. Tiffy, I daresay you have been influenced negatively by Trump. You have Trump on the brain! Some men have a woman on their mind, but you have Trump on yours! Maybe you should try to get over him.
I think what this thread needs is a good, sturdy boat. Because..... .....then we could row, versus wade!
It is not necessary that a right be explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. Alito and Thomas, et al, have fallen into the fallacy foreseen by Alexander Hamilton, who argued in The Federalist Papers that a republic is only allowed to do what the law says it can do, and that the existence of a Bill of Rights would not only reverse this logic, but would also be used as a pretext to infringe rights that the Free Government intended by the Constitution was meant to protect. Saying “it’s not mentioned in the Constitution” does not mean that the States can infringe whatever they please. That is a description of a patrimonial state like Russia under the Tsars. In a free republic established by and with the original and ongoing consent of the people, citizens are not the State’s property. Neither the right to marry nor the right to educate one’s children, among many others, are enumerated in the Constitution. Roe was based on the precedent established in Meyer v. Nebraska, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, and especially Griswold v. Connecticut, which cumulatively found that a right to privacy and the right to control one’s own childbearing are protected under the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment. (The purpose of the 14th Amendment is to empower the federal government to enforce federally chartered rights in States that attempt to abridge them, so it is entirely irrelevant what State abortion laws were at the time the 14th Amendment was ratified.) It is one small step from Griswold to the conclusion that a limited right to terminate a pregnancy is implicitly included in such rights. So, yes, Roe was indeed a constrained and conservative ruling that logically built upon prior precedents of the Court, while still recognizing the State’s legitimate interest in protecting the life of the fetus once viability had been reached. None of this history makes any philosophical sense apart from the traditional Christian teaching regarding personhood that I have labored to summarize and defend on other threads here.
How can anyone get over a disease liable to recur. A Trump vaccine has not been invented yet. WE are ALL still vulnerable.
They’re gaslighting us. Trump appointed 3 of the 6 Justices in the Dobbs majority (2 of which were effectively stolen by a Senate GOP acting in bad faith), and may very well attempt another disgraceful term of office, and he’s out there running his mouth actively taking credit for the Dobbs decision. And his potentially illegal acts in the Jan. 6 insurrection continue to be brought to light, which may prompt his indictment at the federal level. He very much remains a relevant part of the political landscape, unfortunately, as does the radical Senate GOP that enabled him. Two of the other Justices were nominated by a President who lost the popular vote before his first term, so that means that the current majority on the Court consists of judges who were nominated by candidates that the majority of voters voted against at the time. Truth is stranger than fiction. The process is indisputably broken and needs to be reformed. Adopting mixed-member proportional representation for the Senate would be a good first step. The small States would retain their equal representation without the ability to veto what the majority of the population wants to do.
I am quite familiar with unenumerated rights. The alleged "right" in question needed a much stronger basis in the Constitution to be one of those.
I am beginning to hope that Trump runs again and wins, just to witness certain family members and certain forum members going ballistic... ... I'm sure my atheist brother-in-law would have a conniption.
Btw, some may be unaware that the ACNA has a canon law position on abortion, name Canon 8, which says, https://anglicanchurch.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/CURRENT-C-and-C-2019.pdf
I did not mean to imply that you were not. That's where the argument gets a bit "squishy" to me. What are the precise criteria to determine that the basis for an unenumerated right is strong enough to merit Constitutional protection? There is no such list. Alito just made up that "test". It also makes a big difference whether such rights are narrowly or broadly construed. Alito and the other "originalists" on the Court have committed the Tradition Fallacy. Is there a "deeply rooted" tradition in our history and culture of owning semi-automatic rifles, for example? Of course there isn't. Semi-automatic rifles didn't exist for much of our country's history, let alone prior to that. So how does one go about justifying rights that lack historical precedent? By deriving them by implication from better-grounded precedents. One could argue that "arms" in the Second Amendment was referring to those which would be used in military service at that time. Translated into 21st century terms, that means there is a constitutional right for citizens to bear M-16s in State militia service, the way the Swiss militia still does to this day (keeping their weapons at home and whatnot). By analogy, that is in effect what Roe did. Narrowly construed, was there a common law right to abortion? In many places, there was not. Broadly construed, did the States instruct their citizens when and under what circumstances they would have children, or was that left up to the citizens themselves? The latter, obviously. Otherwise, each State had its own rules; some were more permissive than average, others were more restrictive. So it is not that there was no precedent, but rather that there were too many precedents, and which contradicted each other. When there are competing precedents, and no controlling statute, a Judge must choose in favor of the precedent with the greater weight, or equity. This is what the conservative majority that decided Roe did. The Right's problem with abortion rights has nothing to do with the jurisprudence itself. "Substantive due process" has gone in and out of vogue in the Court before. In the early 20th century, substantive due process reasoning was employed in favor of business concerns to strike down child labor laws. It's not a view of the law that's only capable of supporting causes favored by the Left. Criticizing substantive due process or arguing over issues of precedent are just red herrings.
Roe v Wade was premised upon the existence of an unenumerated right to privacy, with the state's law subject to a standard of strict scrutiny which requires the state to show a compelling interest in impinging upon the person's privacy. The difficulty is, even that Court recognized that the unborn child is a human being. They then set up an arbitrary trimester framework to decide when the unborn child actually became a human being. (The trimester framework was later discarded by a subsequent Court (some changes of the justices) in Casey, in favor of a viability test. The problems with this seem apparent to me. The trimester idea was too arbitrary to maintain, but the viability test is almost comparably flawed since the time of viability is a moving target as medical science advances; it is utterly absurd to suppose that a fetus at, say, "week X" is not a person in 1990 but a similar fetus at "week X" is a person in 2020. Such a "standard" is no standard at all, for the fact of human existence is neither legislatable nor subject to judicial fiat. It is no better than decreeing that one has human rights at age 79.999 but no such rights at age 80. Next problem: if people have a right to privacy, once they engage in sexual relations resulting in pregnancy any such privacy right is negated at the very least by the father's legitimate interest in the unborn child; how could the law hold the father liable and responsible for a child without allowing that he has become an interested party to the pregnancy which encompasses that child? But even if we ignore that issue, and apply strict scrutiny, the state clearly has a legitimate, overriding interest in protecting all human lives within its borders, and this interest should be more than sufficient against a woman's privacy right. Moreover, the woman's privacy right should be balanced against the rights of the unborn child to its privacy and its life. You may protest, as you have in a previous thread, your view that the Church does not recognize the existence of a "person" until viability. In a court of law, however, the views of the Church are irrelevant and immaterial. In court, the question must be: does a human being exist? As I posted in that previous thread (with quotes from embryologists and other experts in the field), current modern science definitely identifies the human embryo as a distinct, individual, human life from the moment of conception. Therefore, by law that unique human life must come under the protection of the state when any adult contemplates working mortal harm to him or her, because the right to life has always been recognized in US jurisprudence as the paramount right among all of the human rights. We could grant the Roe Court some grace for their lack of scientific knowledge at the time they sat in judgment. But now we know better, and any Court today would be without excuse in this regard. As surely as a wrongly convicted man may be set free, great injustice was substantially rectified this past week when the lives of numerous helpless unborn children were set free from a sentence of death (as they are sentenced by their ignorant, irresponsible mothers).
You are confusing “life” with “personhood”. My foot is alive but it is not a person. Science has nothing whatsoever to say about metaphysical concepts like personhood. Theories of personhood are testable against our collective moral intuitions. As I have argued here before, the traditional Christian definition based on that of Boethius explains our moral intuitions far better than the empiricist theory of Hume or the dualist theory of Descartes. Science certainly does not dictate that I adhere to conception-personhood. That's absurd. Do you really want to live in a country that doesn’t recognize a right to privacy? Do you really believe the right to privacy - after all the Right’s emphasis on private property - is something Griswold v. Connecticut just pulled out of thin air? What is the point of having a government at all if one cannot depend on that government to compel respect for each citizen’s privacy? In Lockean terms, that is no better than living in a ‘state of nature’. Private property does not guarantee freedom; guns do not guarantee freedom. Only the protection by the State of every individual's private sphere - the person's body, dwelling, and belongings - guarantees freedom. To be so opposed to something that one is willing to argue oneself into holding a view compatible with a totalitarian theory of government - all while claiming this has anything to do with traditional American conservatism - is a clear sign that one’s thinking has gone off the rails. Politics is ultimately about power, not reason. I do not want to live in such a country, and the majority that agrees with me has the greater power, and will not allow a minority of fanatics to turn our free country into a backward theocracy. Progress always wins.
I don't think I'm confusing the two. I've carefully distinguished between life and personhood. What I've said is, the legal standard is "life," so the religious question of "personhood" is immaterial in a court of law. No one is doing away with the right to privacy altogether. Look, the right to privacy is not unlimited. It can't be. Always, various rights must be balanced against each other. For example, under current law you don't have the right to torture your dog even in the privacy of your own home. Nor would you have a privacy right that allowed you to murder a human guest you'd welcomed into "the privacy" of your bedroom. What I'm saying is, the right to life of a human being (which medical science says the embryo is) should always trump anyone else's privacy rights. The right to life is the most fundamental of human rights. But any right to privacy, being unenumerated and thus not important enough to have been either specifically named in the Constitution or remarked upon during many decades of jurisprudence, should be regarded as a lesser, non-fundamental right (thus triggering a lesser standard of legal scrutiny).