On the Great Reversal

I’m going to keep this post fairly discreet for reasons which will hopefully never become apparent. Search engines and algorithms are imperfect, but rarely miss the obvious.

And perhaps the radical left pro-death crowd is generating a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing in the wake of the Great Reversal of June 24. Perhaps not. Time will tell. But some of the threats against supporters of life currently circulating on social media are truly unhinged. They reveal some very dangerous thinking, and it is in the human heart that wickedness, murder and all manner of evils always begin.

A Few Thoughts

So, a few thoughts on the Great Reversal and the case which was its subject (for brevity, “RvW”):

1. RvW was always bad law. It needed to go for that reason alone, though there were much better and more moral reasons to reject it. But RvW was legally and technically wrong as well. The idea that mass, legalized b*by m*rder (“LBM”) ever entered the minds of the men who drafted the Constitution is unarguably preposterous, and the “emanating penumbras” discovered by leftist jurists over the years are rightly rejected by the current Court. The only reason to argue RvW constitutionally was to expand the influence of the ruling by making it a federal rather than a state matter. Now the issue must be argued at the state level, as it always should have been, and the results will almost surely better reflect the beliefs of greater numbers of a state’s residents.
2. This is not the end of the matter. Of course it isn’t. 5-4 is way too close a margin. The Democrats will eventually take their eyes off their faltering mess in the Ukraine and get around to the business of packing the Court, as they have previously threatened. The next test case for federal LBM may well end differently.
3. Vaccine mandates helped. The last two-plus years have really opened up some eyeballs. At least one argument for LBM is totally gutted. Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s reaction to the Great Reversal: “No government, politician, or man should tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her body.” Sure. Except when his own government disemploys women who believe they have the right to make choices about what to put in their bodies. The “my body, my choice” position was always pure posturing, but the Canadian government’s COVID policies have destroyed any rhetorical heft that pithy slogan had among the undecided.
4. Wokeness helped. In the last couple of years, it has become clear the social justice crazies will not stop until they burn the West to the ground. Their old arguments were frequently based on “rights”, tolerance and faux-compassion. They fooled many fence-sitters into thinking the radical left actually cares about women. The new favorite radical lefty argument for LBM is basically “Let us kill all the babies we want or we will destroy you.” That’s a little more obviously evil. The remaining fence-sitters are few and far between.
5. Polarization is not all bad. When it makes your neighborhood a better place to live, there is something to be said for polarization. There will be states that ban LBM and states that continue to allow it. The American left/right divide is already so stark that families are packing their bags and leaving blue states for red (and probably vice versa, though I haven’t heard of it). The Great Reversal may well encourage more of that, which is wonderful for the moral fiber of the red states. (Most of the blues were already hopeless.) So now, if you don’t want to pay state taxes where they are used for LBM, just load up that moving van and head south.
6. They were going to hate us anyway. Antemodernist has a great post here about a former pastor chastising Christians for celebrating the demise of RvW. He’s concerned Christians generically cheering the end of a five-decade-long death campaign on social media will make us look bad. If you ever want to see a stunning series of world-class incoherent arguments, this is your post. Antemodernist refers to them as “liquid at the bottom of a dumpster”, which is about right.

Changing Sides

I had a refreshing conversation with a friend last night whose position on LBM has completely reversed over the last three years. She used to see it as a legitimate right in certain restricted circumstances. She now sees the conflict in the world around us as starkly moral. She has come to recognize that the same people who campaigned for phantom “rights” for various groups of militant sinners were perfectly fine with stripping legitimate constitutional rights from their fellow citizens for what they believed was the “common good”, and that many of the things they told us to further their cause (especially about their own intentions) were misrepresentations and flat-out lies.

I am confident she’s not the only one.