I think we’re all waiting with knowing trepidation for the contorted and corrupt decision that will be coming out of the Supreme Court next summer. The decades long alliance between Republican big business and the social conservatives had to eventually reach this point or risk utter collapse. This is the payoff for the religious right’s support.
I hope that everyone realizes that this is just the FIRST part of the campaign, of which the ultimate goal (as I assume we all know by now) has nothing to do with children and has everything to do with removing women from the public sphere and any positions of influence or power.
Abortion is the first goal, simply because it is the right that provides the greatest and ultimate autonomy to women and because it is the easiest to sell to those mushy ‘independents’ and to the Republicans and religious who hate the idea of woman’s equality, but at the same time recognize how unpalatable that is to the majority of the population. It’s a difficult moral topic for many, many people and inevitably falls into gray areas that most people are not interested in deeply exploring. It’s a topic that lends itself to absurd shock graphics as opposed to nuanced arguments, binary moralizing, and allows those who oppose it to create a false dichotomy between the idea of an ‘innocent child’ and their ‘monstrous mother’.
But the end goal is not really to create more unwanted children. It’s to keep women pregnant, and/or forced to be attached to some man through marriage, or forced into a “maternal” role against their will (and all the enormous time this would require). This is conjecture, but I’m basing this on both past legal frameworks and comments made by leadership in the Republican party or religious right. Making abortion illegal won’t, on its own, force woman into this state. It just constrains all the possible choices if you get pregnant. Other laws are required. Anyway, here’s how I see their overarching plan:
- Make Abortion illegal
- the big hurdle — this prevents women from retaining agency over their own sexual lives and forces them into motherhood, or possibly death, against their will — except the wealthy and connected, of course, as it’s always been.
- Make Birth Control illegal again
- This might end up being a surprise to some younger people but this is (and has been) a goal of the religious right in concurrence with their anti-abortion program. Before 1965 it used to be illegal for married couples (and single women) in 26 states to use any form of birth control. This is their next target after abortion.
- Make cohabitation before marriage illegal
- Another thing that used to be disallowed or outright illegal across much of the U.S. before the later half of the 20th Century. In fact, there are a few states that still have anti-cohabitation laws on the books to this day. They currently aren’t enforced, but that could easily change once this court gets a chance to revisit Lawrence v. Texas.
- Remove no fault divorce
- Prior to the 1960s, it used to be much harder to get divorced. I have no doubt they wish to make things much more difficult to end a marriage as this is also one of the things the religious right blames for society not looking like the world of Leave it to Beaver, as if it ever did. This also would force many women to stay in marriages they otherwise would leave, leaving them vulnerable to the next, monstrous, and unspoken (but you can read between the lines when people like Todd Akin open their mouths) agenda item
- Dispensing with laws making rape within a marriage a crime
- This is the big one. The terrorizing one. The one that all the others exist to support. If you put all those others together with this as the dark end goal, then pushing a significant number of woman out of the public sphere, turning them into handmaidens is much simpler. Every relationship, every marriage holds with it an implicit threat. Either give up a sexual life entirely, or exist under the ‘protection’ of some man, forced to hope for continued benevolence. This ALSO why so many of these abortion laws make NO exception for rape or incest, because, ultimately, the people pushing them are pro-rape and pro-incest.
Obviously, they will also need to attack LGBTG rights, but that is also clearly on the agenda.
These assholes are trying to recreate a world that was dispensed with because, frankly, it was nightmarish and terrible for everyone. EVERYONE. They are evil and the world they create will not be the one they are hoping for.
