Some states can’t be trusted.
When Roberts invalidated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, he did so under the pretense that certain states could now be trusted, despite their long histories of proving the opposite. With that handwaving and that stroke of the pen, Roberts set in motion the end of Roe by this fantasy that certain states could be trusted to keep the civil rights of all their citizens in sight.
None of those states had proven such, and they have in the wake of his decision gone ahead to restrict the rights of their own citizens, just as he proclaimed would be otherwise. Past is prologue; when someone shows you who they are; so forth. These states were irascibly eager to get back to the business of using the State to restrict the movements—the freedoms—of their residents.
What the end of Roe (never mind the evisceration of the VRA) signals is that the Civil War was fought for no good reason and that all of the changes wrought in the federal government since that time have been a sham and a falsehood. Contrary to the Founding would be the terminology. We necessarily must be stuck in the mud of time. Despite the Industrial Revolution, despite the Civil War, the Great War, WWII, all of the advances and shocks of history; despite all of these growths and transformations, we must seek to stuff women back inside of their bodies.
Because what else can “return the decision to the States” mean? What is the core of states’ rights? It is the idea that the federal government is subordinate and that each state is supreme. It is the greatest irony that the Supreme Court is disseminating and ceding such power, much as that of Amy Coney Barrett sealing the doom of so many of her fellow females with her single vote. It is the worst sort of self-abnegation. It is the torching of one’s essential liberty in the name of essentialism. Woman = body, so get back in that box.
That the demise of Roe seeks to find its origins in the 14th Amendment is the ultimate inside joke for conservatives. None of the Southern states wanted to ratify the 14th Amendment—it was anathema to them, as they saw it as usurping their power. They wanted the power to deny their citizens essential rights, because they saw those citizens as not fully people. So to wield the 14th Amendment in this way, stiletto-like, to disembowel individual rights by way of the very amendment meant to confer individual rights, is orgasmic to these people, the ones who have orchestrated this moment for decades. This is their climax and they feel utterly entitled to it.
Some states can’t be trusted.
We see this now, with Missouri leaning to make it illegal for women seeking abortions to cross state lines to do so (certainly unconstitutional) and with Louisiana signalling that they will codify abortions as murder. Never mind the fact that the body spontaneously aborts blastocysts, embryos and fetuses all the time—we cannot pretend to circumvent or even match nature. We must remain in a state of Nature; that’s the only way we can justify might making right.
We see this now, with sitting senators openly wondering why we shouldn’t delegate back to the states the power to determine whether interracial couples can marry. Without the right to privacy, the state would have carte blanche to insert itself back into this realm. Then we go back to Brown v. Board, back to Plessy, all the way back to Dred Scott itself.
Roberts has become worse than Taney. He has interred himself under Taney’s floorboards.
The Justices truly are blind if they cannot see that the Dred Scott decision accelerated the impetus to civil war. The citizens of the United States saw that the Court was no refuge for individual rights, and the Court became the enforcer, an extension, of the Slave Power, arbitrary derogation compelled through law. You are lower than a man because we say so, the Taney Court ruled. You are less than a person, the Roberts Court will soon declare to females across the country.
Such a decision in 1857 delegitimated the Court then, and it will do the same now. Such a decision brought civil war closer then; it will do the same now.
We see in real time the danger of abrogating federal power and returning such to the states. States’ rights declared that Blacks were subhuman; they mean to do the same with women today. Advocates of states’ rights are just as willing to pervert the law to maintain their hold on power as they ever were. It is raw power they seek to maintain at the expense of everyone else’s liberty—the ability to move and to determine that move. That ability is freedom, and that is what they mean to curtail. Back in the box, ladies. Biology is destiny, and the only winners the Founders intended were the landowning White male types.
(By the by, ever notice how in abortion debates the fetus is always male? This is not a coincidence. In the minds of these forced-birth advocates, no woman should have the right to destroy the male. Like Blacks being in power, it is an utter usurpation of the natural order, a travesty, and the law must be used to counteract it.)
The United States of America, May 2022. An epitaph.