Supreme Court Leaks and Links.
With the apparent end of constitutionally protected abortion rights foreshadowed in the leak of Justice Alito’s Jackson v. Dobbs decision, I’ve been collecting writing that examines the political geometry of this particular moment. It’s something I’ve been able to navigate personally with a fluidity that I have observed to be uncommon. I don’t take any kind of personal credit for that: I’ve been able to exercise political agency at two very distinct nodes of the map in a way that some people just simply are not afforded access to. Unlike the stories in the New York Magazine piece I’ve linked here, I wasn’t maneuvered by my parents into the political positions I held, and I don’t feel that I’ve had a conversion experience despite dramatically changing my political network and personal beliefs.
Notwithstanding my general discomfort with a lot of John McWhorter’s opinion pieces in the New York Times (and even some major sections of this one), I’m including his piece answering the Supreme Court leak because of one quote: “too often, we fail to credit our political opponents’ morality.” Groups like ADF aggregate people who hold one or another moral opinion about abortion or sex or gender into a movement of people who will, counterintuitively, ignore their conscience in the pursuit of political power. Disarming that starts with a full appreciation of the moral complexity everyone brings to the table. What much of the rest of the writing I’ve linked to here contends with is the idea of the court as the center of power in the abortion fight and the limits of the law in safeguarding our rights. We need to embrace a level of political creativity that matches what has been accomplished over the past ~40 years, and that means questioning and reevaluating what the fight even is. These links are a good place to begin.
Melissa Gira Grant: The Real Fight for Abortion Rights Is Not in the Courts or Congress
“But that also means that there are countless people around you who already know that freedom, certainly now and maybe always, will not come solely from what the law can recognize. Either the law must be pushed to recognize those rights, or those rights must be won despite the law.”
John McWhorter: I’m Pro-Choice. But I Don’t Think Pro-Lifers Are Bad People
“A major lesson I took from those law students was to avoid a tempting, all-too-common misimpression: that if people have views different from yours, then the reason is either that they lack certain information or are simply bad people — that they’re either naifs or knaves.”
Charlotte Shane: ‘Can You Describe This?’
“Laws are foundational to, but not the entirety of, the problem. Whose healthcare in America is easily obtained, or affordable, or kind? How many people are securely housed? How many have adequate and reliable income? Or true privacy—and protection—from their parents, their partners? These deprivations are indiscriminate and personal.”
Sarah Jones: The Abortion Converts
“Reproductive justice advocates have long placed abortion within a broader constellation of moral claims. As they view it, the right to abortion cannot be separated out from the right to food and shelter and health care. That perspective isn’t always shared by liberals in power. On abortion, elected Democrats can be timid, reluctant to alienate voters in difficult districts. On matters like health-care reform, they rarely speak with one voice. The right to abortion gets buried, often, under euphemisms about access and choice; the same is true for the right to health-care writ large. As the Supreme Court’s verdict in Dobbs looms, it is especially clear to me that liberalism lacks the clarity of the right.”
and from the same piece,
“Perhaps the most important message anyone can glean from my story, and stories like it, is that power is achievable for anyone. The Christian right is a minority in its own country. With a combination of fervor and elite alliances that handed it key victories like Bush v. Gore, it will likely win the end of Roe. The response from the left should be rage – a passion to match that of the right – and a commitment to organizing.”
Melissa Gira Grant: Policing Womanhood
“Today, the inheritors of this project of policing womanhood and the rights of citizenship include groups tied to the Christian dominionist movement, such as the “legal army” Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). For these groups, control of gender and sexuality is not fodder in a culture war; it is foundational to their reborn world under white Christian patriarchal rule. ADF’s current CEO, Michael Farris, was a leader in the fundamentalist homeschooling and “parental rights” movements; the latter issue has been taken up recently and forcefully by the Republican Party. Farris has since drafted failed “Stop the Steal” lawsuits for President Trump and supported restrictions on voting rights.”