By Donald A. Collins | 31 August 2022
Church and State
If you favored the June 24th Dobbs decision by the Catholic controlled US Supreme Court, you are in a substantial minority position on the issue of choice.
What dangerous restrictions on human freedoms which may be coming in the next SC term if Justice Clarence Thomas’ views are adopted by his majority colleagues.
Read here Thomas’s comments from the Washington Post.
Biden, other critics fear Thomas’s ‘extreme’ position on contraception. This traitor must be removed from SCOTUS because indications are he tacitly supported the January 6th insurrection through his right-wing cultish wife. https://t.co/dUVOWG7sVo
— Fernando Oliver, Esq. (@Fernand46357857) June 25, 2022
The headline from the Washington Post reads: “Biden, other critics fear Thomas’s ‘extreme’ position on contraception”
It is worth reading the opening paragraphs of that story just to realize the sort of blatant fascistic thinking exists on the highest court in the land.
In an opinion concurring with his conservative colleagues on the Supreme Court to overturn the fundamental right to an abortion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote on Friday that striking down Roe v. Wade should also open up the high court to review other precedents that may be deemed “demonstrably erroneous.”
Among those, Thomas wrote, was the right for married couples to buy and use contraception without government restriction, from the landmark 1965 ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut.
“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote on Page 119 of the opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, also referring to the rulings that legalized same-sex relationships and marriage equality, respectively. “Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous’ … we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”
Thomas added, “After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated.”
In an address to the nation, President Biden denounced Thomas’s explicit focus on the right of couples to make their own choices on contraception — “a married couple in the privacy of their bedroom, for God’s sake.”
You know what most anti-choice pols argue: Abortion should be decided by individual states. The turmoil that has already caused may not be rectified soon, but it could be if enough voters realize this is a possible preamble to the Thomas mindset.
I was overjoyed on January 22, 1973, which the Supreme Court decided in favor of Roe. I financed a 1993 film after the Court added the Casey restrictions to Roe. The film which brought forth the religious positions of all the main stream religions was subsequently reissued and reintroduced in 2003 by a distinguished DC clergyman, Rev. Carlton W. Veazey, entitled “Whose Choice?” which you can view anytime on this web site. Rev. Veazey, who died in August 2021 was the founder of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. One key speaker on this film is the late Sarah Weddington, who at 26 argued the Roe case in front of the Supreme Court.
As a pro-choice advocate before and after Roe, I was a founding board member of several NGOs which provided women both in the US and overseas millions of abortions, also before and after Roe.
I was and am greatly enraged by the religious majority who made the 6/24 Dobbs decision and with those state governments which made their laws medieval. Imagine no allowance for rape or incest or fetal unviability.
But both decisions underlined the inadequacy of Roe and the immorality of Dobbs, the latter ignoring the Constitutional tenet of keeping matters of church and state separate.
Long before Roe my sister-in-law carried a much-wanted baby to birth, a pregnancy which should have been ended, even if nearly at the end of her pregnancy. The baby survived for several months on life support. My sister-in-law, an early diabetic, her sadness increasing, made daily visits to the hospital until her baby died.
In our republic should be governed by secular law, not religious preference! Forcing unwanted pregnancies on American women cannot continue. Half the pregnancies every year in the US are unintended.
The only decisions on abortions should be made between pregnant women and their doctors. So-called late abortions if medically advisable are not matters for government intervention! Whether the present and prior laws read 15 weeks or 24 weeks, such laws are all wrong, because no government should be allowed to interfere in a matter so distinctly private and personal.
My utter disappointment at where we are now can only be corrected by legislation that confirms that full choice must be left to the pregnant mother and doctor alone.
Finally, let’s be alert to the massive deep throat GOP attempts to attack our basic institutions such as currently the FBI for its legal involvement in securing top secret documents from Mar-a-Lago. These hysterical GOP screams against the legal pursuit of clear wrongdoing only reinforces long standing evidence of the standard Trump pattern of trying to undermine our democracy for political gain. If we fail to correct this infamous pattern of deception in the midterms, injustice for women’s reproductive rights and rights for all of us will continue to prevail.
Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote” and “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?”.“What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”: https://t.co/fHuh0CG6JD
“We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”: https://t.co/TA4j7cp1tE
“From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”: https://t.co/lkC2t3E1A9 pic.twitter.com/bQsL2mLBcO— Church and State (@ChurchAndStateN) November 1, 2021
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