SCOTUS Reductio Ad Absurdum
Two utterly absurd contradictory decisions in one week
The nation's outrage pulses through the land after last week's infuriating Supreme Court decisions. The obliteration of women's rights paired with the expansion of gun rights in an era of severe gun violence could not be more contradictory or more disturbing.
The decision to overturn Roe vs Wade, eliminating a woman's right to privacy in her own healthcare decisions could not be more wrong or more discriminatory if it had been the striking down of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It is the blatant and breathtaking imposition of an extreme 30% minority religious view upon the female majority of the population, taking away their rights to make the most crucial decision of their lives — whether or not to have a child — and replacing those rights with the complete interference of government in every woman's life, should she become pregnant.
Coming from a religious right viewpoint (never mind that the Constitution is supposed to protect us from a state religion), conservatives always assert their desire to be free of big government and its interference in their lives. How many times during the Trump years have we seen the Don't Tread On Me flags? That's what the whole mask, vaccination, and church-closing brouhaha was about — asserting their right of privacy to do as they please without interference or imposition of mandates from government during a pandemic. It is then outrageous in the extreme and absolutely absurd logically that the same people should champion the ripping away of fundamental rights from all women and the imposition of government-mandated birth of a child for every woman who becomes pregnant. It is extreme in the extreme!
They call their views "prolife," but think of the women's lives that will be lost because they seek an unsafe abortion or take an abortion pill without doctor supervision out of desperation. Think of those who will be lost to suicide because they are not mentally prepared to have a child or who will die from medical issues during pregnancy for which no exception is made in the required pregnancy laws. Think of the children who may face neglect and hardship because they are born into a life where they are unwanted, yet the anti-abortion laws never include provisions for social services to help these children live a decent life after they are born. To the contrary, the red states are known for their lack of social programs to provide a safety net for families in duress. There is nothing prolife about forcing a birth and then telling children and their families, "You're on your own!" no matter what hardships they may face. How many of those kids will live in poverty, suffer trauma and mental illness, and perhaps end in suicide themselves? It is cold hard-heartedness to force women to bear children under difficult circumstances and do nothing to help them.
In contrast to this "prolife" decision of the SCOTUS, we have a decision on gun rights the same week that is nothing less than breathtakingly "prodeath." In the midst of an epidemic of mass shootings, they decided that we cannot restrict the right of anyone to carry a hidden gun in public. One wonders what kind of mental contortions it took to go from obliterating health and reproductive rights for all women, to asserting the most disturbing new gun rights imaginable — the carrying of firearms by anyone and everyone into supermarkets, schools, workplaces, legislatures, and everywhere else that mass gun violence has been known to take place.
Personally, I have whiplash from the contradictory nature of these two decisions! One takes away a firmly established Constitutional right and the other asserts a previously unestablished and socially dangerous new right that will undoubtedly result in many more shooting deaths at a time when all of us are already overwhelmed by mass shooting grief! It boggles the mind and leaves one wondering how the same government body could come up with two such absurdly inconsistent decisions.
It also makes one wonder whether government has any sense or relevance at all anymore. Has it all become strictly a matter of power politics? Now that the Republicans have firmly mastered the levers of power, are they determined to force their ridiculously contradictory religious views on the rest of us? Sadly, it appears so. It appears they are motivated by a kind of religious neofascism.
But the far right should be careful what they wish for. They may stir up the democratic majority to such tremendous outrage that it results in power being irrevocably wrested back from the reactionary extremists at the ballot box. Or… it could be far worse than that. It all depends on just how pissed off people are and to what extent we've had enough and are not going to take it anymore.
So let the crazy right wing gloat and exult. It will not be longlived. At the very least, they have stirred an angry sleeping giant. The real question is, what will that giant do?
