The “evangelical” on my T.V. screen was asked about the propriety of organized religious influence in the political arena, and he responded by mentioning that Christians had played influential roles in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. What he failed to mention, either because he just doesn’t know, or because he would rather not let the facts get in the way, is that there were Christians on both sides of those conflicts and that the losing side, the Tories and the slave owners, were supported by those “Christians” who were opposed to an expansive view of human freedom. So opposed that they were willing to kill and die to perpetuate repression.
In our day, we're obviously destined to get at least a small piece of the same action, and it’s all being done under the name of “pro life”. “Pro life” is inherently anti liberty, and is anti American because of that. It spreads in a way that's very innocuous sounding, because it's disguised by some extremely effective propaganda.
The battle cry of the culture war is “we need conservative judges to return us to the original intent of The Founding Fathers, because liberal judges have given a personal privacy right to our people, and no such right was written into the Constitution.”
Another thing that was not written into the Constitution is “the government shall have the authority to intrude upon the personal privacy of the citizens”, but we’re told that the power to outlaw birth control and abortion exists anyway. Clearly, “judicial activism” is in the eye of the beholder.
Things started innocently and peacefully enough. In the fifties some states had Catholic legislative majorities, and laws were passed that prohibited the use of birth control. Doctors were literally prosecuted for trying to prescribe the pill. Of course the Supreme Court eventually put an end to that, because this is America. The Court basically said “the government can’t make people have babies or not have babies. What people do with their own bodies is protected by the freedom that was acknowledged when The Founding Fathers wrote our Constitution.” When abortion was decriminalized a few years later, the Court again cited personal privacy, and then said that women can control their own bodies during the first six months of pregnancy. After that, all hell broke loose because the ideological progeny of those who earlier fought in opposition to freedom can’t stand the fact that some people will use their freedom to make “wrong” decisions.
The religious right says that The Founding Fathers would howl if they could hear that freedom loving Americans have decided to keep the government out of our bedrooms. The truth is they will writhe in eternal pain if we're ever dumb enough to let the government far enough in to check if you are using birth control. Do you think the intent of the troops who died fighting for General Washington was to give people their freedom, or to keep power in the hands of King George? Answer that one question and you know everything you need to know about “the original intent of The Founding Fathers”. They clearly sought to create the utmost in human freedom, and we shame their name by fashioning facile legal arguments designed to argue otherwise.
Evangelicals in large numbers could sleep very soundly at night knowing that they had sentenced a rape victim to the living hell of carrying a constant reminder of her complete and utter degradation inside her body for nine months. Tell me that that sort of person does not sound like someone who would die fighting to protect the right of one person to own another as personal property.
This all may sound largely hysterical, but we may well be, at the most, one Supreme Court nominee away from completely losing the line of cases that created the personal privacy right that most of us take for granted. In elementary school in the fifties we were openly taught that Americans have a privacy right that ranks up there with free religion, speech, and press. Have conservatives prohibited our schools from being able to teach the same thing today? They've put literally hundreds of federal judges in office who openly fear too much freedom (“strict constructionists”), and have had huge legislative support ever since Nixon told the world that there was something redeeming about being a member of the Archie Bunker style “silent majority”. Will our next generation have to be taught that it's perfectly alright for the government, rather than their own intellect and conscience, to dictate how and when and where they can choose sex partners?
We can work against abortion without attacking privacy, and people of good will of all political stripes know the turmoil and hurt that the abortion decision has brought. I think that we would all love to help. What we cannot do, however, is force patients to allow a bureaucrat to sit in the examining room while they meet with their doctors. What we cannot do is willy nilly kill abortion providers for the purpose of making a political statement. And, yet, some “religious” people join in sessions where it is openly said that this is exactly what their god does command. What we cannot do is allow religious fanatics to take away so many of our rights that violence also begins to look like a way for us to fix things.
Personally, I could stay out of the “right to choose” struggle if it was possible to have both abortion prohibition and freedom. In the abstract, I would clearly find a world with no abortions a preferable place. But it's impossible to fashion a grant of governmental authority that is expansive enough to order a woman to carry a brain dead baby, or one fathered by her own father, to full term, and that does not also have the potential to literally impact every aspect of our lives. Try to picture a system of law that says that the government can monitor and regulate all of your reproductive decisions and acts, but has to leave you alone otherwise. If that isn’t the exception swallowing the rule then nothing is. But that is exactly where we are headed if we don’t wake up and view this fight realistically.