Search the Community

Donald Trump, whose Supreme Court appointments eventually overturned Roe vs. Wade, has stuck his finger into the wind and decided his best chance at a second term lies with pretending that abortion isn't really a big issue. The right, which only cares about (a) banning abortion and (b) whether Trump can win (in that order), is mostly in a bubble, taking him "seriously but not literally:" They sense that Trump will say whatever is most likely to get him elected and will roll with whatever progress the fundies can make on banning abortion. He doesn't really care about the issue beyond how it affects his election chances, and they're fighting a long game. The left -- who would rather indulge magical thinking than, say, making abortion actually legal or prosecuting insurrectionists on time -- is already writing his political obituary and and even fantasizing that Florida will "turn blue" during the next election. This isn't to say that a Trump victory is inevitable or that abortion won't cost him Florida, but one must read any political commentary these days with an eye on separating the wishes of the author from reality. I mildly exaggerated on my first commentary link. The Newsweek piece, by Democrat cheerleader David Faris, does in fact attempt a more-or-less cool-headed analysis of how Trump's latest flip-flop on abortion might play out. I think Faris gets it half-right:Image by pjedrzejczyk, via Pixabay, license.You must therefore wonder how this group of high-propensity voters that is absolutely critical to any Republican victory this November is going to take this news. My guess is "not well." While some Republicans might be satisfied with the end of Roe and abortion bans or impossible restrictions in 21 states, the most religious white evangelicals want total victory. And Trump just told them they won't get it. Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, issued a statement almost immediately after Trump's video dropped saying that she was "deeply disappointed," although still committed to defeating President Joe Biden. While we shouldn't expect his position to cause dramatic change in his white evangelical support, even a few points could be determinative it what looks like it is going to be an extremely close election. The other problem here for Trump is that, unlike him, people who care about restoring reproductive rights are not stupid. He did not say whether he would sign an abortion ban if it crossed his desk, a tightrope he will not be able to walk all the way to November without being pressed for a firm up-or-down answer. In private, he has previously said that he would sign a 16-week national abortion ban. And throwing up his hands and saying "let the states decide" still leaves tens of millions of furious women living in states where abortion has been completely banned -- including Electoral College battleground states like North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia and Florida -- or partially banned, like Wisconsin. [bold added]Faris is dead wrong about the evangelical vote: First of all, anti-abortionists have been working for decades to make abortion illegal and know that their gains are safe at worst with Trump in charge. Second, this part of the electorate is firmly within the Orange Echo Chamber. See take seriously but not literally above. And consider its support of Trump despite his serial philandering, sleaziness, and criminality. This is more of the same, and they will overlook it, too. With these people, Trump could get away with murder, as he once boasted. Faris is, however, correct about those of us facing -- or who have daughters facing -- an adulthood in which an accident or a crime might condemn them to the dangers of an unplanned pregnancy and the decision to (a) assume the lifelong responsibility of parenthood at a time not of their choosing or (b) forfeit that responsibility in the hope that a random stranger will properly care for their newborn child. The second piece is also more cool-headed than I let on. Its assessment of Florida is as follows:Tuesday's twin rulings on abortion from the Florida Supreme Court -- one letting a deeply restrictive, DeSantis-backed anti-abortion law go into effect, the other permitting an abortion-access initiative, Amendment 4, on the November ballot -- have upended political certainties in the Sunshine State. Last week, no one was talking about Florida as a swing state; now, with abortion at center stage, it's not beyond the bounds of the possible that, with an overwhelming majority of Floridians -- including a majority of Republicans -- in favor of reestablishing abortion rights protections, the Democrats will be able to use this issue to drive a wave of supporters to the polls in November. ... Yet such is the state of disarray in the Florida Democratic Party that, even with the huge assist the Supreme Court has given them by turning abortion into the central issue of the upcoming vote in Florida, it remains a long shot for President Joe Biden to mount a successful challenge for the state's Electoral College votes. [bold added]The piece then looks at the situation in other states where both parties are competitive and abortion has become a ballot-box issue. Regarding Florida, I think Trump can lose non-Evangelical Republicans on this issue, unless they buy his shtick about being non-committal on the issue or somehow don't pay any more attention to abortion than they have had to in the past. And I agree with Faris that he might not have to lose that many voters for it to matter -- since Democrats now have good reason -- Biden himself sure isn't one -- to show up and vote. My take is that abortion will hurt Trump, but perhaps not enough to keep him out of office; and that it will definitely hurt his party down-ballot. -- CAVLink to Original

Writing at The Hill, Juan Williams contends that voters hoping to legalize abortion are a force to be reckoned with in the upcoming election:Nativist Republicans hope to cash in on this gang leader's recent rise to power in Haiti at election time. (Image by Voice of America, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)It was the biggest issue in the 2022 midterms, halting a promised "Red Wave," of Republican victories. Last year voters in Virginia gave Democrats the majority of the state legislature after Republicans backed a 15-week ban on abortions. And this year, abortion rights are likely to be on the ballot in several states where activists are pushing to make abortion access a right in the state constitution. Some of those states are critical to the outcome of the race for the White House, including Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania. States with lots of Republican voters, including Kansas and Ohio, are among the six states that have already voted to approve state constitutional protection for abortion. In fact, so far, voters have backed abortion rights every time it has been on the ballot. [links omitted, bold added]Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump, who helped cause Roe vs. Wade to be overturned with his Supreme Court appointments, is hoping nativism and xenophobia will come to his rescue:Trump is trying to cloud over the abortion fight by loudly demonizing immigrants. The only way that can work is if most of the country joins in the immigration hype.This, Williams suggests, is due to the economy not being a clear win for him in this election. I don't think Williams is completely right. Although Trump certainly doesn't deserve more trust on the economy, I think he probably still has that to a degree. That said, I think Trump is definitely working to make the non-crisis that is immigration into the centerpiece of his campaign, at least in part to distract from abortion and his general unfitness for office. It will be interesting to see how this strategy pans out. People concerned about abortion are unlikly to forget the issue. Maybe some who are concerned about abortion (and believe "Honest Don" when he claims to want abortion legal up until 16 weeks) and worry about importing Haitian gangs might vote for Trump -- but also Democrats for Congress. -- CAVLink to Original

The "same people" (to apply a tribalistic phrase from the right to that tribe) who for decades complained (sometimes with justification) about left-wing jurists "legislating from the bench" will no doubt turn around and celebrate a ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court to the effect that frozen embryos are children:Alabama's Supreme Court has ruled that frozen embryos are children under state law and subject to legislation dealing with the wrongful death of a minor, stating that it "applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location." The court issued this majority decision in a lawsuit brought forth by a group of in vitro fertilization (IVF) patients whose frozen embryos were destroyed in December 2020 when a patient removed the embryos from a cryogenic storage unit and dropped them on the ground.Parts of the majority opinion and the lone dissent are illuminating. In today's cultural climate, I find myself compelled to label the above skit SATIRE. The ruling appears to be an application of the state's theocratic "personhood" amendment to an 1872 law:[Justice Jay] Mitchell, however, wrote that the clinic was asking the court "to recognize an unwritten exception for extrauterine children in the wrongful-death context" and that the law "applies to all children, born and unborn, without limitation." "It is not the role of this Court to craft a new limitation based on our own view of what is or is not wise public policy," Mitchell wrote. "That is especially true where, as here, the people of this state have adopted a constitutional amendment directly aimed at stopping courts from excluding 'unborn life' from legal protection." Chief Justice Tom Parker, concurring with the opinion, wrote "that even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory," which he argued was set in policy when Alabama voters approved the 2018 amendment. [links omitted, bold added]The dissent contests neither the arbitrary, mystical definition of human life, nor the implied purpose of government being to implement religious morality, rather than to protect individual rights. It is nevertheless interesting for its historical points:Justice Greg Cook, who filed the only full dissent, wrote that the Wrongful Death Act does not define the term 'minor child,' and that its meaning has remained unchanged since it was first written in 1872. Cook also noted a 1926 opinion from the Alabama Supreme Court that held that the law "did not permit recovery for injuries during pregnancy that resulted in the death of the fetus." "There is no doubt that the common law did not consider an unborn infant to be a child capable of being killed for the purpose of civil liability or criminal-homicide liability," Cook wrote. "In fact, for 100 years after the passage of the Wrongful Death Act, our case law did not allow a claim for the death of an unborn infant, confirming that the common law in 1872 did not recognize that an unborn infant (much less a frozen embryo) was a 'minor child' who could be killed." [bold added]Please note that even during times when Americans were generally more religious than they are now, fetuses were not treated as if they were fully human under the law. I am not optimistic about the prospects for abortion remaining legal anywhere in the United States if this case makes it to the current Supreme Court, which overruled Roe vs. Wade, or an even more theocratic one if Donald Trump gets elected again. The best imaginable outcome of that would be a patchwork of states with reproductive freedom (which is an unbearable idea to today's right) and those which treat potential human beings as actual ones for the purposes of the law. If the left ever needed to get serious about something, it is making reproductive freedom legal, and that clearly entails enacting a rational, secular definition of human life into law. -- CAVLink to Original

Within an analysis of the last election, the following sentence caught my eye:[T]he liberal positions won big in Ohio's two ballot measures to enshrine the right to an abortion and to legalize marijuana. [links omitted]Liberal positions? I support both of these, but I am not a "liberal" -- at least in today's twisted sense of the term that implies leftist. Liberals might, however imperfectly, support reproductive rights and the freedom to ingest whatever one wants, but these are pro-liberty positions, and they contradict other "liberal" positions, such as decriminalizing petty theft or surgically mutilating children below the age of consent and without their own parents' consent. Nevertheless, many people lump such disparate positions together, based loosely on which party campaigns on them at the moment, much to the detriment of their own understanding of politics and the advancement of any genuinely good positions they might hold, such as the "liberal" right to abortion or the "conservative" right for parents to raise their own children. Two cases in point are evident from the very article under discussion, and they manifest in Democrats and Republicans seeing lessons for each other -- while getting the wrong message for themselves -- after each election. Since this piece is by a leftist, we'll start with it. As I noted the day after the last elections:When abortion becomes the major issue on the ballot, and there is a clear choice, being anti-abortion will lose any election not dominated by religious voters.This article focuses on the educated, affluent voters found in suburbs and other similar areas. These voters are not particularly religious, but they also aren't particularly leftist, as attested by the fact that they delivered wins to Glenn Youngkin in the previous election cycle, and used to trend more Republican before Roe was overturned and Republicans were safe to preen about abortion (i.e., pander to religious voters) without having to face the consequences (i.e., voters suddenly having to worry about their daughters being forced to bring unwanted pregnancies to term). The GOP is screwed with these voters unless it changes its position on abortion. The writer at Vox rightly sees this -- but then starts hallucinating as soon as the whole smorgasbord of other liberal positions comes to his mind:School choice as bait for abortion restrictions? Reproductive freedom as bait for in-school grooming? Both parties are guilty of baiting and switching. (Image by Anne Nygård, via Unsplash, license.)Abortion politics have played a huge role in this since 2022, but the shift in the suburbs and with more affluent college graduates predates the Dobbs decision ending the federal right to an abortion. In Virginia and Pennsylvania, politics around schools and education, gender identity, and crime all joined abortion as issues that voters kept top of mind. "In conjunction with abortion is the other layered-in kind of Republican social agenda that is just so repellent to the country," a Democratic campaigner in suburban Bucks County told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "Voters in the largest swing county in the most important swing state uniformly rejected that." [bold added]Read the bold and ask yourself how the author -- who discusses Glenn Youngkin earlier in the same piece -- is now coupling woke nuttiness about "gender" and academic egalitarianism, with abortion. It was the woke nuttiness that got Youngkin into office on the backs of the same voters who just took him down a peg over abortion. (For the sake of showing that my point is subtler than just "economic" vs. "law and order" vs. "social" issues: If I might take the liberty of speaking on behalf of such voters, I will note here that I support the right of consenting adults to marry, period, for which "gay marriage" might be shorthand. This is not the same thing as supporting the woke "gender" agenda in elementary school. I find religious opposition to "gay marriage" repugnant and I am repulsed by efforts to "educate" children about "gender" that amount to grooming them. I am an atheist, by the way.) When Democrats manage to frame getting borderline pornography removed from school libraries as "book banning," they can sometimes smuggle in a victory for that kind of nonsense, but it's a losing issue for them in isolation (among voters who aren't overwhelmingly "blue"), just like abortion is for the GOP. And speaking of woke nuttiness and Glenn Youngkin, he provides the corresponding example of the other political tribe overplaying its hand after a win. Youngkin was elected because the bloc of voters under discussion were upset about unnecessary school closures during the pandemic and did not appreciate "gender" propaganda being directed at their young children or their children being kept in the dark about academic awards for woke/DEI (i.e., egalitarian reasons). That was his mandate, so what did he try to glom onto that in the last election? An abortion limit:Virginia Democrats' success will spell doom for Youngkin's proposed 15-week "limit" on abortion, which would ban the procedure after 15 weeks with exceptions for rape, incest and medical emergencies. Democratic legislators in Virginia have previously used their senate majority to block bills restricting abortion access and they had promised to do so again if they maintained control of the chamber.As one of these voters, I have come to dread every election because the Democrats are happy to construe my support for, say, reproductive freedom, as also support for, say mutilating underage children -- and Republicans take my concerns about, say crime and government looting (i.e., property rights), as license to ram their religious strictures down my throat. Partisans on both sides seem oblivious to the idea of personal liberty, and quite eager to read overarching mandates for their own particular takes on tyranny into any vote I make. Anyone accusing this bloc of voters of moving into either party is delusional or attempting to be manipulative. Conformative fealty to a laundry list isn't clear thinking, if it's thinking at all. -- CAVLink to Original

Image by Gayatri Malhotra, via Unsplash, license.After what sounds to me like a uniformly underwhelming debate, it appears, at least according to Matt Drudge's numbers as of this morning that Nikki Haley decisively won. As of writing, we have: 43% Nikki Haley, 25% Vivek Ramaswamy, 15% Ron DeSantis (!), 13% Chris Christie, and 4% Tim Scott. Haley's total is more than the second- and third-place finishers put together. Since Haley has momentum and is the main non-Trump candidate aside from Ron DeSantis, this would suggest that the smart money is on her as the best chance for the GOP to rid itself of Donald Trump in this election cycle, rather than continuing to lose elections and alienate independent voters (for starters) for another four years (also, for starters). But if Donald Trump is the most immediate threat to the GOP (and to liberty, via the two-party system), its stand on abortion is a much more potent and longer-term threat, as yesterday's results once again indicated. Two of those things we used to call Tweets should show the depth of the problem -- which, big picture, shows that the Republican Party is at best a temporary check on the Democrats, rather than a long-term home for those of us who value liberty. The first tweet, by the execrable Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, shows that the anti-abortionists in no way are wondering whether their goal should be reconsidered. The money quotes from the long-form post are, "Giving up on the unborn is not an option. It's politically dumb and morally repugnant." and, "So let's keep fighting for our country's children, and let's find a way to win." This appeal to a deeply wrong view of morality amounts to We lost on messaging, since the goal -- enslaving women to fetuses -- is immoral and there is no earthly argument to do so, or way to motivate about half the electorate to accept it. There is a saying that goes something like, "You can't reason a person out of an opinion that person did not reach by reason." Vance demonstrates this in spades: He doesn't stop and think Hmmmm. Maybe "the unborn" don't have rights because they aren't individuals, yet, or Lots of people don't seem to accept my idea of what constitutes a human life. Perhaps I should rethink that. This doesn't mean that Vance and other pro-lifers can't consider this question rationally; but the fact is, they aren't. The anti-abortionists overwhelmingly hold their position on faith, and based on religious teachings they exempt from the kinds of questions they would (or should) correctly ask of any other knowledge claim -- such as that morality lies outside the province of reason. (It doesn't.) There is much more to say about this, but time does not permit, so I shall close with the second tweet, by historian C. Bradley Thompson, author of America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It:The most potent force in American politics today is young women between the ages of 18 & 35. And the Republican message to them is ________?Religious Republicans often call themselves "values voters," but the above quote is much more in line with a rational (but too often, vaguely, inconsistently, and implicitly-held) grasp of values. What Republicans seem uniformly oblivious to, is what is obvious to many young women: Outlawing abortion threatens their lives (because pregnancy is always medically risky) and futures (as any halfway conscientious parent or prospective parent will know), and for what? Satisfaction of the alleged demands of an alleged being that noone has proved exists in thousands of years of time to do so. Women are correct to rebuff the Republicans as long as they continue to champion the alleged rights of "the unborn" at the expense of the living. -- CAVLink to Original

Anyone who, like me, has been left politically homeless by the mindless lurch of the conservative movement to theocratic/nationalist populism, knows that just about the only things conservatives get excited about these days are banning abortion, Trump!, and banning immigration. But what do they dread? In the vein of understanding today's right, it might be useful to take a look. Capitalizing on last week's find of sites that today's barely-recognizable "right" regards as "better than Drudge." I have found a listicle of "12 Absolutely Insane Examples That Show Just How Far the U.S. Has Fallen." The piece doesn't really elaborate on why its author deems each item indicates American decline, but it is nonetheless interesting to take a look at it. The piece provides a news link and a brief excerpt for each item. Below, I'll just list each item and provide my own thoughts: A social media influencer that returned a couch to Costco after using it for more than two years is telling her followers to buy all of their furniture from Costco because "you can return it when you don't like it anymore." -- Maybe: A major retailer with a generous return policy sounds like a sign of prosperity to me. The fact that some people take advantage of others is hardly news. While it might be a sign of cultural decline that this "influencer" isn't a little embarrassed to admit taking advantage of generosity, I don't see how the people who claim giving to "the poor" is a virtue are going to solve this problem. From now on, a high school diploma will no longer be necessary [to join the Navy] ... "assuming they're able to score 50 or above on a qualification test." -- Yes: This is disturbing, but not news: Government schools have been failing students for decades now. Unfortunately, while some conservatives support school choice, there is no principled effort on their part to separate government from education. If America is to have better schools, it should get out of the way of the private sector. Three years ago, the city of Portland decriminalized the possession of all drugs.-- No and Yes: So long as someone isn't violating the rights of others, the state has no business dictating what he can or cannot consume. Decriminalization of drugs is a step forward out of the depths of Prohibition (i.e., "the war on drugs"). What is a sign of decline is lack of law enforcement against real crimes and zero opposition to the welfare state. Places that decriminalize drugs simply must enforce laws against real crimes, and drug users should bear all costs of their habits. Rather than rally behind Prohibition, conservatives should support strong enforcement of legitimate laws and the repeal of the welfare state. While it is not the purpose of government to save drug addicts from themselves, those two things would go very far to cause more people to be a lot more cautious about drug use. D- and F grades ... are being abolished at Western Oregon University -- Maybe and No: Higher education has been declining for decades and this is yet another step in that decline, to the degree that this reflects a trend. But see also grade inflation. I don't see this as particularly newsworthy. In the sense that we are at least still free to choose which college we can go to, this is definitely not a sign of decline. There are plenty of better schools to attend, and any American worth his salt will pick one upon hearing about this. From this point forward, every police officer in El Paso, Texas will be forced to ask for the preferred pronouns of every person that they encounter -- Yes: It is within bounds for a government agency to have a code of conduct for its members. That said, at a time when the government needs to repeal bad laws (prohibition and the welfare state) and enforce legitimate laws, it seems very odd to make what is at best a matter of evolving etiquette into a major priority -- by either law enforcement or the people who started this special pronoun business (i.e., by calling their favorite ghost He/Him.) and are now complaining about it. A group of migrants that was caught on camera physically attacking cops in Times Square was ... released without even having to post bail. -- Yes. Immigration should be completely legal and legitimate laws, e.g., against assault and battery, should be enforced. The left and the right are both wrong on this one. A group of pro-life activists in Tennessee face 11 years in prison for praying and singing outside of [sic] an abortion clinic -- No and Yes -- Directly below the blurb, the excerpt reads, "They were sitting peacefully [sic] in the lobby of the abortion center." They were trespassing. They should have "prayed and sang hymns" somewhere else. The fact that these "peaceful" "protesters" are in legal trouble is not a sign of decline. That the anti-abortion right is making so much progress is a sign of decline and it says something that they'll champion actions that they'd censure -- were they taken by political opponents. The first step in changing a broken political system is to work within that system, and show respect for legitimate laws. The 24-year-old aide to U.S. Senator Ben Cardin that was filmed having gay sex in a Senate hearing room will not be charged with breaking any laws -- No: This is gross, but pornography and consensual sex are not (and should not be) illegal. I assume whoever was in charge of that building deemed it not worth pursing criminal charges for any damage or exposure to pathogens to others caused by that act, if there was any. Violent carjackers are fearlessly roaming the streets of Washington D.C., and anyone that resists one of those young carjackers can end up dead. -- Yes. The fact that this is not particularly newsworthy speaks volumes. As one of our Founders might have put it, The fact that the owner of this land is a citizen of China neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg (Image by Federico Respini, via Unsplash, license.)The Chinese and other foreign buyers are purchasing millions of acres of U.S. farmland, but nobody knows exactly how much farmland they now own and very few of our politicians are interested in stopping this practice. -- No. This xenophobia is an example of the decline of the right, but it is good to know that America still respects the right of individuals to own property. Since these buyers and investors are, as individuals, subject to our laws, and could have their property seized in the event of war, there is no issue with "this practice." So many radical Muslims have moved into Dearborn, Michigan that the Wall Street Journal is referring to it as "America's Jihad Capital" -- No and Yes. If I recall correctly, it's support for Palestinian butchers by residents and some officials there that earned Dearborn that ignominious title. It is not a sign of American decline that some locales become ethnic enclaves. What is a sign of decline is the brazen antisemitism there (homegrown or otherwise) -- and the homegrown variety in our whitebread prestigious colleges. It is ridiculous to blame the free movement of people for blatant antisemitism. It doesn't cause anti-semitism and it distracts from the very real problem of its rise among people who have lived here all their lives. A teacher in Massachusetts that had a spotless record for 23 years was fired after she revealed the truth about what was really going on (e.g., preferred pronouns used without parental knowledge or consent) in her school. -- Yes. See government schools above. Rather than preen and feign persecution about the poor "Christian" teacher, why not get to work privatizing our schools?American decline is a cultural problem and it has been going on for decades. As if this isn't disturbing enough, the right, which once was at least a decent handbrake on the left, blatantly (1) complains about some things -- such as private property and personal freedom -- that we still have going for us as if they are signs of decline and (2) fails to take the initiative on fixing some things -- like education or prohibition ("the war on drugs") -- that have been broken for a very long time. In some respects, I find the list more alarming than the examples. -- CAVLink to Original

USA Today reports on a proposed amendment to Ohio's constitution legalizing abortion. It will come up for a vote in November, but with a twist. This comes after the governor there signed into law a ban on the procedure when there is detectable cardiac activity in a fetus."For sure, I think folks are really paying attention," said Heather Shumaker, director of state abortion access for the National Women's Law Center, which supports the amendment. That's especially true in states where Republican-controlled state governments have imposed strict limits on abortions in the year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. "We know that ballot measures have emerged as one of the most promising strategies to preserve abortion access." [bold added]It is good to know that, absent the Democrats adopting what I see as a workable strategy -- of focusing on explicitly legalizing abortion -- it is being implemented anyway. Activists on both sides of the reproductive freedom debate will be watching closely, trying to hone tactics for future statewide battles. Two things already stand out regarding what the anti-freedom side is trying. First, if I read the story right, there is an attempt to move the goal posts on what it will take to pass the measure:A special election on Aug. 8 could change the prospects for passage. Now, ballot measures in Ohio need a simple majority, 50% plus one, to amend the state constitution. Under the proposal being voted on next month, the bar would be raised to 60%. Support in the new survey for the abortion-rights measure, at 58%, would fall just short of that level. [bold added]Second, we have an attempt to re-frame this as a parental rights issue:... Protect Women Ohio, a coalition opposing the proposal ... describe the measure as "anti-parent," arguing it undermines the authority of parents to make decisions about abortion and gender assignment issues for their minor children.Let's look at the text of the measure as reported by Ballotpedia:Abortion is completely banned by local ordinance in Lebanon, Ohio. (Image by R.P. Piper, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)Article I, Section 22. The Right to Reproductive Freedom with Protections for Health and Safety A. Every individual has a right to make and carry out one's own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on: contraception;fertility treatment;continuing one's own pregnancy;miscarriage care; andabortion.B. The State shall not, directly or indirectly, burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with, or discriminate against either: An individual's voluntary exercise of this right orA person or entity that assists an individual exercising this right,unless the State demonstrates that it is using the least restrictive means to advance the individual's health in accordance with widely accepted and evidence-based standards of care. However, abortion may be prohibited after fetal viability. But in no case may such an abortion be prohibited if in the professional judgment of the pregnant patient's treating physician it is necessary to protect the pregnant patient's life or health. C. As used in this Section: "Fetal viability" means "the point in a pregnancy when, in the professional judgment of the pregnant patient's treating physician, the fetus has a significant likelihood of survival outside the uterus with reasonable measures. This is determined on a case-by-case basis.""State" includes any governmental entity and any political subdivision.D. This Section is self-executing.Setting aside the question about pregnant minors, I fail to see how this amendment could undermine the rights of parents, particularly to prevent their children being surgically mutilated as is so currently fashionable on the left. This strikes me as both dishonest scare mongering and a trivialization of the one serious issue buried under the ridiculous false alternative between "gender fluidity" and opposition to any and all sexual reassignment surgery, including for adults. This measure isn't perfect, but if I lived in Ohio, I'd vote against the August measure and for the above proposal. -- CAVLink to Original

At Slate is a good update on the state-level aftermath of Dobbs, as far as pro-choice states go, with the main focus being on Maryland. As with practically anything these days, the news is mixed: Blue states are working to ensure "access" to abortions, including for non-residents. I've explained the good and bad of this before in "Free Abortions vs. Abortion Freedom:"Image by Emma Guliani, via Pexels, license.[Access] is a word the left does not use in the same way normal people use the word. Many (if not most) people would regard access to contraceptives in a political context as being free to purchase and use them. But at least since before the ObamaCare debates, the word access has been code for "obtain at someone else's expense," much in the same way Southern planters had "access" to manual labor in antebellum times. This kind of "access" was wrong then and it is wrong now, even if the form has changed from chattel slavery to forms of government theft and redistribution that everyone is way too comfortable with.So, to get the bad news out of the way, blue states are, to varying degrees, finding new ways to make people pay for other people's abortions, such as by funding medical training or even providing financial aid outright to women seeking abortions. The state should protect a woman's right to an abortion. It has no business picking anyone's pockets to pay for anyone's abortion. The good news is that these states are working to fully legalize abortion and to shield providers from the laws of other states that have wrongly criminalized abortion:Democratic Gov. Wes Moore recently signed a new law that prohibits Maryland entities from assisting in abortion-related investigations and court proceedings that originate in other states, shielding abortion providers and out-of-state patients from other states' restrictions. Another new law helps protect patients by barring electronic medical records about their reproductive health care from being shared across state lines without consent. ... And next year, Maryland residents will vote on an amendment that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution, making it much harder for any future Legislature to take them away. A poll from the Baltimore Sun and the University of Baltimore found last year that 71 percent of likely Maryland voters would support such an amendment. [link omitted, bold added]The shielding measure is one I hope other states adopt given that some states have atempted to extend their tyranny across their borders by such means as criminalizing helping pregnant minors (!) travel to obtain abortions elsewhere. -- CAVLink to Original

Ahead of a November vote in Ohio to make reproductive freedom a (state) constitutional right, I recently noted:[T]here is an attempt to move the goal posts on what it will take to pass the measure...I am glad to see that the attempt went down in flames yesterday, as Ohioans overwhelmingly defeated a proposal to raise the threshold to pass a constitutional amendment:I'm glad her side won, but I must say that's an interesting question coming from someone protesting against holding yesterday's election at all. (Image by Becker1999, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)The measure would have raised the threshold for approving future changes to the state constitution through the ballot box from a simple majority -- 50%, plus one vote -- to 60%. The outcome of Tuesday's special election maintains the lower bar that has been in place since 1912 and could pave the way for approval of the proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot in November that seeks to protect abortion rights. A July poll from the USA Today Network and Suffolk University found 58% of Ohio voters support the effort to enshrine abortion access in the state's founding document.Ohioans rejected the proposal by a 56% to 44% margin, meaning there is reasonable hope that abortion will be protected by the state constitution after the November elections. -- CAVLink to Original

Some sleep-deprived thoughts about a farcical news story... *** "Hugh Akston?" she stammered. "The philosopher? ... The last of the advocates of reason?" "Why, yes," he answered pleasantly. "Or the first of their return." -- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, p. 308. *** NBC's recent story is borderline hilarious when one momentarily suspends the context of severe cultural rot and political danger it represents. It even has its punchline as its title: "Trump criticizes Republicans pushing abortion bans with no exceptions: 'You're not going to win'." That's right: The man who angered or annoyed so many Americans that he lost the presidency despite toting up history's second-highest popular vote total is advising his party to moderate its stance on that losing issue -- while refusing to step aside in favor of a more electable candidate. To be fair, though, Biden could well be the one person running who could get Trump elected again... And with in-kind media campaign donations like this story, I wouldn't bet against it. Here's Trump, playing the media like a fiddle, on Meet the Press:Trump said members of his own party "speak very inarticulately about [abortion]." "I watch some of them without the exceptions, etc., etc.," he said, referring to conservatives who don't support abortion exceptions in cases including abortion and rape. "I said: 'Other than certain parts of the country, you can't -- you're not going to win on this issue. But you will win on this issue when you come up with the right number of weeks.Aside from the already-noted irony of Trump coaching his party on how not to lose elections, Trump is to blame for overturning Roe vs. Wade. The piece goes on about this at some length:President Joe Biden's campaign fired back at his remarks shortly after the interview, painting him as "the reason" the issue has taken center stage in the past year. "In Donald Trump's own words: he is the reason states across the country are able to ban abortion and are putting women's lives in danger," Ammar Moussa, a Biden campaign spokesperson, said in a statement. "He's repeatedly bragged that 'nobody has ever done more' for abortion bans, and it was 'an honor' to have appointed the justices who eliminated Roe v. Wade. "Now, facing an election where he has to defend his deeply unpopular actions, he refuses to give Kristen Welker the honest answer on his support for banning abortion nationwide...Good response, but this came only after Trump -- with the free platform given to him by the media -- got to pretend to be the voice of reason in a debate that he got to pretend he didn't reignite, and that he got to pretend just needs someone to broker a good deal. Trump's base will eat this up and everyone knows this, including the interviewer, who should know by now not to expect a straight answer from Trump about anything. It is hard here to apply the maxim of not attributing to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity: This will only solidify his support in the primary and make it hard for any alternative to develop enough of a following to cause the others to drop out. The resulting large field persists and splinters Trump's opposition, which could defeat him behind one candidate. Politically, this is terrible news for the Republican Party and for America, because it makes the Trump-Biden match-up 70% of Americans don't want all but inevitable. It is also bad culturally: Most people don't have the understanding of how philosophy drives history that Ayn Rand teaches. Cultural change happens one mind at a time, and has to reach a critical mass before the politics follows. In this analysis, politicians are the end result, not the drivers of a debate. But that doesn't mean politicians can't impede cultural change. Obviously, dictators can, but so can candidates in a declining republic. Trump's dismissal of both facts (in the form of not admitting his role in the abortion debate) and principles (in the form of treating this debate as if it's as mundane as a group choosing where to go to lunch) -- and the knowledge that his personality cult will buy it hook, line, and sinker -- will demoralize many lower-level intellectuals on the right. This demoralization can manifest as some giving up altogether, because they think that there is no audience for serious debate. It can give others either the excuse to join in because they are cynical or self-censor themselves, "going along to get along" just to keep an audience in the hopes of having some influence on some issue. Bastiat (Image by unknown artist, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)All of these are understandable, but mistaken reactions. News media, particularly television, is a poster-child for applying Frederic Bastiat's "broken window" parable more widely than economics. We see the crowds who show up to worship Donald Trump -- but not vastly larger number of people who hate/are tired of/never liked him. We also don't see the large numbers of people who want abortion to be legal, at least early in a pregnancy. We do get to hear Trump rightly name abortion as a losing issue and wrongly tout himself as a solution. I didn't see the interview, but I bet it was a softball and the interviewer didn't really challenge any of that in the moment. Even if I'm wrong, television does not lend itself to deep discussion, such as what the abortion debate demands, or to developing a full historical context, such as what Trump's slick answers deserved: That's why so many people dismiss it, often rightly, as sound bites coming from talking heads. Television, at least as it is usually produced, is a poor medium for serious discussion, so you rarely see serious discussion if that's where you get your news. (This situation cannot last forever: Best case, the culture improves enough that television itself improves or people become much less reliant on perceptual-level media for news. We should work to realize that best case scenario!) The conservative movement wasn't exactly a bastion of good, revolutionary ideas before Trump, and it is obviously less so after Trump cowed it into submission. We see this with the legions of mindlessly loyal Trumpists and with the cowing or pandering of such figures as Ben Shapiro or the late Rush Limbaugh to Trump's base. Such intellectuals at best fail to appreciate the unseen but influential demographic of thoughtful people who would be receptive to a good alternative, if only someone would present one. There are people who can change their minds over time, and who will, in turn provide a basis for a better political climate in America. The process takes a long time, on both the retail level (of persuading individuals) and the wholesale level (of holding elections about substantial issues again). This is the context that real, positive change requires, and persuasion about ideas important to liberty is the opportunity anyone blindly panicking about "the seen" forfeits. -- CAVLink to Original

The Democrat won in an important race for a seat on Wisconsin's supreme court yesterday, and it would behoove the Republican Party to take a moment to ask itself why:Image by Gayatri Malhotra, via Unsplash, license.At the center of the race, however, was abortion rights. The state Supreme Court is widely expected to decide the fate of the state’s restrictive 1849 abortion law in the near term. Several of Protasiewicz’s television advertisements emphasized her support for abortion rights and slammed “extremists” on the other side. Kelly, who refrained from saying how he would rule in such a case, was endorsed by three groups that oppose abortion rights, and he provided counsel to another Wisconsin group that opposes abortion rights. [bold added]Another story notes:The Wisconsin Supreme Court may also be asked once again to rule on a challenge to a presidential election. In 2020, the court threw out a challenge brought by former President Donald Trump with conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn joining the liberal members of the court. While a majority of the justices refused to hear Trump's challenge to the election, three justices on the seven-member court wanted to take up the case.Both stories discussed elections, but with different slants, with the leftist NBC News focusing on the court's role in how Wisconsin draws its electoral maps and the right-wing Newsweek noting the court's reaction to one of Donald Trump's loony 2020 electoral challenges. But both outlets note that this election could end up costing the GOP House seats if questions arise about how congressional districts are drawn up. The GOP, which these days runs as "not the Democrats" while only actually getting excited by banning abortion or being Donald Trump's lapdog has only itself to blame for losing a majority in that court for the first time in 15 years. -- CAVLink to Original

When the populists who infest the GOP (and enable the theocrats) are feeling cocky, they are fond of using the abbreviation FOFA, meaning f--- around and find out. It is too bad that neither a sense of irony, nor introspection, nor a willingness to learn from reality are parts of their tool chest, because the GOP could use all three: There was a clear lesson from yesterday's election for the Republican Party, which has once again failed to thrive under the orange thumb of Donald Trump. That lesson is When abortion becomes the major issue on the ballot, and there is a clear choice, being anti-abortion will lose any election not dominated by religious voters. The connection is so obvious, even today's news media noticed:Abortion rights advocates won major victories Tuesday as voters in conservative-leaning Ohio decisively passed a constitutional amendment guaranteeing access to abortion, while those in ruby-red Kentucky reelected a Democratic governor who aggressively attacked his opponent for supporting the state's near-total ban on the procedure. In Virginia, a battleground state where Republicans pushed a proposal to outlaw most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, Democrats were projected to take control of the state legislature after campaigning heavily on preserving access.(Good: The Virginia result should keep stealth holy roller Glenn Youngkin out of the GOP presidential race, which is already too crowded.) Two governor's races were instructive here. In Kentucky, polls had tightened between the Democrat incumbent and his Trump-endorsed rival ahead of the election. The not-exactly popular governor aired a pro-choice commercial (embedded here) that went viral and was able to beat back his anti-abortionist challenger. Meanwhile, in Mississippi, incumbent Republican Tate Reeves eked out a victory against his Democrat opponent, who had received lots of out-of-state funding. I see him as the (illusory) exception that proves the rule. Although roughly 40% of that state's voters are black and bloc-vote for Democrats, that constituency is not quite as on board with abortion as I think the Democrats hoped. Mississippians, black Democrats included, are generally more religious than voters in other parts of the country. Black turnout is often low, too. Brandon Presley's focus on Reeve's corruption and on the issue of whether the state should collect information about residents getting abortions elsewhere simply wasn't motivating enough to drive black Democrat turnout. (And the heavy out-of-state funding Presley received probably drove turnout for Reeves.) Mississippi, by the way, is a lesson for Democrats, too: Long experience tells me that, had Presley won, we'd never hear the end of crowing about Mississippi "turning blue," along the way to the "progressive" element of that party overplaying its hand and giving pause to voters who might otherwise support a sane Democrat because of abortion. Sane Democrats and other proponents of reproductive freedom can breathe a sigh of relief after yesterday. -- CAVLink to Original

An anti-abortionist conducts a post-mortem on his party's recent failed attempt to prevent abortion from becoming enshrined in Ohio's state constitution:Republicans in the Ohio General Assembly called the special election earlier this year after a well-funded group of pro-abortion organizations succeeded in getting an amendment on the ballot this November that protects a virtually unlimited right to abortion in the state. If Issue 1 had passed, the abortion amendment would have needed 60 percent of the vote to become law.At least Shane Harris starts off being honest about why there was a move to raise the bar to amending the state's constitution. What is more interesting is where he goes next in his 1300-word-plus editorial:Image by Element5 Digital, via Unsplash, license.Convincing voters to make a change to a seemingly less democratic process was always going to be a difficult task. Moreover, GOP leaders in the state initially denied that Issue 1 had anything to do with abortion -- a line even the most credulous voter could see right through. This gave off the unavoidable impression (one encouraged by well-funded liberal groups) that Ohio Republicans were trying to unfairly change the rules at the last minute in order to thwart the democratic will of the people. That notion undoubtedly motivated "No" votes from large numbers of Democrat and Independent voters and likely some Republicans as well who saw the question as more a matter of preserving the principle of "majority rules" rather than a pro-life issue. To be sure, there is a valid and compelling argument to be made about why writing and amending state constitutions via a simple majority vote is a bad idea. For starters, it allows deep-pocketed special interests to mobilize a relatively small number of voters in low-turnout elections and effectively bypass the legislative process to enact laws that are often far out of sync with where the state is politically -- which is exactly what is happening in Ohio right now. [bold added]While I was glad in the short term to see that this move didn't kill the attempt to protect abortion via amendment, I am under no illusions about how flimsy that "protection" will be. As Brian Phillips recently argued in the case of California -- and our Founders understood when they created a republic rather than a democracy -- a democracy affords no protection for individual rights against the will of a mob. That is the "compelling argument" to be made for raising the threshold to amend a state constitution, and it could have made Issue 1 into a winner. That the Republicans seem not to understand that and are furthemore so bothered by such a small obstacle to their cause, speaks volumes. Unfortunately Republicans weren't motivated by that better argument. If they were, they wouldn't have waited until an abortion measure looked likely to pass by about the same margin as defeated Issue 1. Indeed, if they cared about individual rights and had a rational case that a fetus is an individual, they could have sought to pass a personhood amendment, then worked to make it harder to amend the state constitution. That is exactly the opposite of what they did. The rest of the article is a muddle because: (a) the author never contests the idea of "preserving the people's power" as being synonymous with democracy; and (b) his protestations that the GOP "dance[d] around the abortion issue" while emphasizing other (more rational) stands by the Republicans leading up to the vote ring hollow. Frankly, given that a majority in Ohio think abortion should be legal and the GOP has only religious dogma behind its assertion that abortion is murder, "dancing around" that issue was about the only hope it had. Leave it to Republicans to make a genuinely good idea look like a fool's bargain. When Harris concludes that his side needs to "creat[e] a culture of life," he sounds like he realizes on some level that political change requires cultural change. But cultural change requires individuals to change their minds, one at a time, and "abortion is wrong because god says so" is not an appeal to reason. Perhaps, deep down, many Republicans, Harris included, understand this, and know that shady tactics are their best hope of political success. In the meantime, a reasonable proposal to make Ohio's state constitution has been a casualty of the crusade against reproductive freedom, and -- as Harris himself notes -- taxpayers will soon be wrongly forced to fund abortions. -- CAVLink to Original

NBC News reports that the party that spent the last presidential term swooning over Trump as supposedly some kind of natural Alinskyite has decided to borrow yet another page from the left's playbook: relabeling. Never mind that conservatives routinely make fun of the left for doing exactly this: They seem to think that they can go from making fun of, say, the "alphabet brigade" every time a new letter or symbol gets added to LGBT one moment -- to changing "pro-life" to some term-to-be-named-later for their anti-abortion crusade -- the next. And without anybody noticing:Image cropped from screenshot of the Center for Reproductive Rights, I believe this use to be protected under U.S. Copyright Law as Fair Use.Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said the polling made it clear to him that more specificity is needed in talking about abortion. [(!) --ed] "Many voters think ['pro-life'] means you're for no exceptions in favor of abortion ever, ever, and 'pro-choice' now can mean any number of things. So the conversation was mostly oriented around how voters think of those labels, that they've shifted. So if you're going to talk about the issue, you need to be specific," Hawley said Thursday.Has Hawley seen a map of where abortions remain legal lately? (Blue, above.) The piece is mute on whether Hawley, who helped confirm anti-abortionist Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, offered any more specifics as to what his own position on reproductive freedom might be, or which specific legal stand on abortion his party should stake out and clarify. Let me help. Either a fetus is a human being, and all abortion should be outlawed as murder, or it is not, and abortion should be treated under the law like any other medical procedure. I support the second position, but I could at least muster some respect for an opponent who would openly state and offer a rational justification for even the former position. But that is not the kind of "specificity" that surfaced in the Republicans' closed-door meeting:Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., summarized Wednesday's meeting as being focused on "pro-baby policies." Asked whether senators were encouraged to use a term other than "pro-life," Young said his "pro-baby" descriptor "was just a term of my creation to demonstrate my concern for babies."How insulting and infantilizing is that? At least leftists occasionally appear to have semi-plausible reasons for changing their sleazy terms. This, to use a term even Hawley might understand, is as subtle as a fart in church. The reason voters react differently to the term pro-life these days is because, with Roe overturned, there is now a real danger -- as seen in the numerous Republican states that have banned abortion since -- that a "pro-life" "pro-baby" (i.e., anti-abortion) politician will be able to do the same if elected. In other words, previously Republican-leaning voters, who used to feel safe ignoring the term "pro-life" now know they can't. Voters know this, and they'll still know it if and when anti-abortion Republicans -- too cowardly to state their actual aims openly and too sneaky to give up on them -- relabel themselves in the same way leftists relabeled "corporate responsibility" to ESG, or "global warming" to "climate crisis" not too long ago. -- CAVLink to Original

Tad, the right to procure an abortion in the third trimester in DC is not a right to an elective abortion in that interval, only a medically appropriate abortion, as determined by the physician. Sounds reasonable. If during that last trimester, the pregnancy has to be terminated to save the health or life of the mother (extremely rare, I imagine), then the halt of fetal life and the spoiling of the would-be guardians' project is part of the bad fortune of nature. The health and life of the mother cannot be sacrificed to someone else's personal project involuntarily. (And perhaps a woman forced to carry [denied legal power of elective abortion of] an unwanted fetus/infant through that interval to full term should be compensated by the state. I'm undecided about this, because it seems to treat the personal services of the woman as in imminent domain, which looks suspiciously like treating her as for public use.) During the Roe era, around the country, there were a few times that a physician performed an illegal abortion in the third trimester, abortions in circumstances that were prohibited by state law implemented in conformance with Roe. Those physicians were charged with murder or manslaughter. (Where on earth, Tad, did you get your information on history of this? Got a link to particular cases?) Late term abortions are typically requested by women in which medical issues have arisen. It is a standard practice of the anti-abortionists to switch attention to those late-term abortions in order to take attention away from the first trimester in which 93% of abortions are performed and point of viability by which time 99% of abortions take place. The anti-abortionists' reach in state law now is to drive the legal limit for elective abortion so early in the pregnancy that by the time the pregnant woman realizes she is pregnant, it is too late to get a legal abortion. And that reach is not the end of the reaching. The continuing aim, as those folks readily proclaim, is to criminalize abortion at all stages of a pregnancy. I expect the RC Bishops would want to go further and reverse legalization of the Pill (1964). But the fact is that American Catholic laity take the Pill, and that reversal is not going to happen without a revival of mysticism throughout the citizenry at the level of the Dark Ages.

Dick Morris explains why he thinks abortion will not have a major impact on the midterm elections. Here's the nut of his argument:Since the public had long since embraced a nuanced, compromise view on the issue, it was plain that whoever moved to the center first could win. But, sensing a political chance to make a big score, the Democrats held to their position of demanding abortion with no restrictions. Republicans, however, saw the writing on the wall and congealed around the compromise put forward by Senator Lindsey Graham(R-SC) of allowing abortion in cases of rape, incest, and danger to the life of the mother and for any reason in the first trimester. Remarkably, the right to life movement acquiesced in this change opening the door for a massive conservative victory. Armed with the Graham compromise, Republicans hit the airwaves in September and blunted the Democratic attack ads by saying that they opposed a federal mandate and that they would support the Lindsey Graham compromise. This argument totally disarmed the Democratic left since it relieved women of the worry that their own right to an abortion, in their home state, would be curbed. [bold added]The above reminds me of two things. First, how many times have you heard Republicans gloating that "all the Democrats had to do was sound sane" following some electoral loss? The Republicans apparently remembered their own advice concerning abortion. (I think abortion should be legal until birth, but absent a well-reasoned and well-articulated case that voters are familiar with, I acknowledge that my position will sound nuts to many of them. Conversely, the abortion should be illegal, no exceptions position is so inhuman that even those who hold it know that they will lose an open fight. In today's political context, neither side would win an election.) Second, and more important, this reminds me of Ayn Rand's argument that compromise on basic principles only benefits the evil:Muddy premises are as bad for the mind as muddy water is for the body. (Image by Chandler Cruttenden, via Unsplash, license.)The three rules listed below are by no means exhaustive; they are merely the first leads to the understanding of a vast subject.In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins.In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins.When opposite basic principles are clearly and openly defined, it works to the advantage of the rational side; when they are not clearly defined, but are hidden or evaded, it works to the advantage of the irrational side.We see this working twice in Graham's compromise... First, as I have indicated elsewhere, the Democrats' support of abortion is compromised in part by its package-dealing it with paying for it (i.e., the welfare state). The case for abortion as a right is also damaged by widespread ignorance of what rights are across the political spectrum. Democrats who (rightly) want a woman to be free of the lifelong obligation of an unchosen child shoot themselves in the foot by (wrongly) being fine with forcing uninvolved third parties to accept an unchosen obligation to pay for the procedure. This is inconsistent and further muddies the concept rights in the minds of a public that needs to accept it in order to see why abortion should be legal. Second -- and for Graham, the big payoff -- that compromised stand and widespread confusion have given cover for conservatives (of all people!) to lay out the following Big Lie: The GOP has basically staked out the pre-Dobbs status quo that it just upended as its own 'reasonable' position! I do not find it "remarkable" at all that the "pro-life" anti-abortionists who have been waging guerrilla war against abortion for decades would accept this camouflage: I can almost hear them shriek with joy: Put those harlots back to sleep so we can continue the Lord's work undisturbed! The public's thinking is muddled, and absent a serious, intense, and likely prolonged campaign of "moral suasion" in favor of abortion, it will continue to be seduced by the idea that there is no need to decide the issue on a federal level one way or the other ... while the anti-abortionists continue to work for the day they wield enough power to outlaw it completely. Until enough people wake up and start fighting for reproductive freedom from the moral high ground (i.e., from correct, clear, and uncompromised principles), theocrats will continue to pretend to be open to "compromise" while working towards the day that it will be Too Late for the vast majority of Americans who are inclined to legalize abortion to do so. -- CAVLink to Original

Scrolling through Instapundit for the first time in quite a while this morning, I happened upon the following Glenn Reynolds post, which I quote in its entirety:THE RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE A HOW-TO MANUAL: We Are Re-Paganizing. "A world that embraced infanticide would not necessarily look anything like Nazi Germany. It would probably look like ancient Rome. Or, indeed, twenty-first-century Canada." [formatting and link in original]Reynolds and other bloggers there occasionally mention Rand's works, including Return of the Primitive, and that often using the stock phrase we see above. In fact, the book clocks in at 68 hits according to Google. My memory serves me correctly that such references are used to pillory "the left," e.g., Ayn Rand's Return of the Primitive: a warning for the rest of us, a how-to guide for the left. This apparently includes even when the left manages to get an issue right, like abortion. While one can hope such references cause a few readers to pick up the book, the one above is both amusing and frustrating: Anyone aware that Ayn Rand supports a woman's right to an abortion will see the irony of using one of her works to imply that abortion is "primitive." But the irony hardly ends there: Rand's philosophy of Objectivism -- the perspective from which she wrote that book and which enabled her to make so many of the "prophecies" conservatives tout when it suits them -- also leads to the conclusion that America's founding principles are secular and that religion is actually antithetical to our country's ideals and well-being. Her student, Leonard Peikoff argues this at length in "Religion vs. America," where he notes in part:Religion means orienting one's existence around faith, God, and a life of service -- and correspondingly of downgrading or condemning four key elements: reason, nature, the self, and man. Religion cannot be equated with values or morality or even philosophy as such; it represents a specific approach to philosophic issues, including a specific code of morality. What effect does this approach have on human life? We do not have to answer by theoretical deduction, because Western history has been a succession of religious and unreligious periods. The modern world, including America, is a product of two of these periods: of Greco-Roman civilization and of medieval Christianity. So, to enable us to understand America, let us first look at the historical evidence from these two periods; let us look at their stand on religion and at the practical consequences of this stand. Then we will have no trouble grasping the base and essence of the United States.Regulars here know where this is heading. I recommend curious passers-by read -- or listen to -- the whole thing. The West has been shaped by two competing influences, Greco-Roman culture (which gave us the philosophy behind America's founding) and Judaeo-Christian tradition, which is the antithetical religious influence. "Re-paganizing" is a smear of abortion akin to smearing atheists as leftists, like Dennis Prager does both wrongly and as if it's a bodily function. Most conservatives know that Rand -- an atheist -- wasn't a leftist. Likewise, infanticide (as the linked article notes was practiced by the Romans en route to equating it to abortion) is wrong (and opposed by Ayn Rand for the same reason she supports abortion. But none of that stops the antiabortionists from using infanticide to tar abortion advocates or anyone else who doesn't take the Christian religion on faith, as "primitive" by citing Ayn Rand -- of all people! -- in cargo-cult fashion. If antiabortionists are happy to spout such ignorance or play it so loose with facts, why should we listen to them at all? -- CAVLink to Original

I see. Alaska Colorado New Jersey New Mexico Oregon Vermont DC Those have no statutory gestational limits. I gather they have opted to put the decisions into the hands of the medical profession. I like it. Thanks, Tad, for this information of which I was unaware. I mentioned upstream that 99% of abortions in the US are prior to the point of viability. It will be interesting to see if that changes as the years go by in those jurisdictions with no statutory gestational limits. I bet they do not. Similarly, will watch for change from the 93% that occur in the first trimester, which is the term in which the anti-abortionists are having some success in drawing the line for criminality. (By "anti-abortionists," I mean in the law. I've Catholic friends who would never have an abortion, but who are for legality as in Roe. I've one atheist MD friend who would not perform an abortion at any stage (I think he meant elective abortion, not medical-necessity one), but he also has supported legality of abortion as in Roe.) The significance of candidates for federal office, especially Senate or President, concerning the abortion issue is mainly whom they would nominate or ratify as a Justice on the Supreme Court. There are abortion legal controversies headed to the Court, and I'm sure there will be for a long time to come. If Thomas, for example, were to kick the bucket soon (he is the same age as me, Donald Trump, King Charles, and the State of Israel), a replacement who is not an anti-abortionist could be some help with protecting the autonomy of women in making their life. AMA

"Abortion on demand" is a different thing than a right to procure an abortion. The former means someone else (taxpayers) is being forced to pay for the service. The latter is only a right to pay someone for an abortion and that party's right to provide it. (Furthermore, if there are no doctors willing to perform the abortion, even if it is a legal one, then they cannot be forced to do so.) I erred in writing "first trimester." I should have written "second trimester" because it is near the end of that one (~26 weeks) that viabiity of the fetus will typically be reached, and viability is the exact proper legal turning point. (So: A. Where do you stand on legality of elective abortions until the point of viability in a pregnancy?) Abortions should be permissible in the law at the option of the pregnant woman until the developing embryo/fetus has a reasonable chance (judged by the attending physician in the individual case) of sustained survival outside the womb, with or without artificial support. That, as you likely know, is what is meant by "the point of viability." It is not that this is the mark of personhood, and for sure, just as with any neonate, the little one continues helpless to survive and develop further without close adult care. Rather, it is the mark at which adults not the mother can in principle take up the project of bringing the potential toddler, walker, and talker to actuality without impressing the mother into the service of their project. All of the legal rights in play are rights, correctly conceived, among feasible caregivers of the potential child. From the time the developing brain of the fetus has gone from resemblance of a vertebrate brain to mammalian brain, to primate brain, and begun to acquire features of a distinctly human brain, I think the potential child has reached a stage at which it should be especially precious to the human community—a profoundly serious possible project—and would-be guardians should be taken for right in wanting to bring such a fetus to actual child and their possible project have legal standing of a parent raising a child. Fortunately, by that stage, the fetus, if normal, has reached viability and is rightly protected (I say) against intentional harm until birth, as under Roe. So, until viability, termination of the pregnancy should be simply elective by the pregnant woman (meaning it's legal to engage a willing doctor to perform the operation or prescribe the chemical). No special condition threatening the health of the mother need obtain; the woman to that point should be able to simply decide she does not want to carry to full term and live birth. Overwhelmingly, abortions in the US are during the first trimester; women mostly have made their decision by then. It would seem therefore that keeping abortion legal at least through the first trimester is especially important for the liberty of women to maintain their own life plans.

Image by Gayatri Malhotra, via Unsplash, license.Diana Greene Foster, author of The Turnaway Study, which compares the consequences of having an abortion vs. being denied one, offers six predictions regarding what the Supreme Court's expected overturning of Roe vs. Wade will mean for the women who will be denied abortions as a result. This article is worth a full read for several reasons, the most important of which is that it can help those of us who support reproductive freedom tie this issue to reality. It's one thing to say, correctly, that an embryo is only a potential human being, and has no rights, and -- again, correctly -- that the only person who should have a say in the matter of whether a woman carries a pregnancy to term should be that woman. But it is quite another to be able to project what that means in real-life terms to someone facing that difficult choice. Just put the baby up for adoption! (as one Justice basically put it) is a popular, and very thoughtless response to the question. This piece will show just how thoughtless. Before I list a summary of the predictions of depriving women of control over their own bodies, let me note an observation that comports with my own experience as a young man:What we found is that decisions about abortion and pregnancy are often driven by the desire to be a good parent. Among people seeking abortion, 60 percent already had children and 40 percent said they want to have a child in the future. Far from being irresponsible, the women we interviewed knew full well what is involved in having children and wanted to wait to do so under the right circumstances. Most commonly, those seeking abortion said they were not financially prepared to take care of a child. Others said it wasn't the right time for a baby or that they wanted to focus on the children they already had. In other words, many people, like my grandmother, choose to wait to have children until they are better able to support a family. [links omitted, bold added]For me and my girlfriend at the time, it turned out to be a false alarm, but I remember facing the terrifying possibility of having gotten someone I wasn't sure I wanted to marry pregnant at a time I was undecided about having children -- and when neither of us was at all ready to be a decent parent. The consequences of an unwanted pregnancy are serious, especially for a woman, as we can see from the six predictions, which I list below in bold and briefly summarize in italics (or with a representative quotation). Foster elaborates further on each within the piece:Wealthier Americans will still get abortions. Lower-income Americans will have children at the wrong time. -- About a quarter of women who might have otherwise had abortions will end up giving birth.People who are pregnant and don't want to be will face serious physical health risks. -- A full-term pregnancy is riskier to a woman's health than a medically-supervised abortion.Few people will place their children for adoption. -- "We found that when someone has gone through the literally life-threatening process of staying pregnant and giving birth, the vast majority -- about 90 percent -- choose to parent the child."More unwanted births now will result in fewer wanted births later. -- This is often due to the lingering financial hardship caused by having an unplanned child.Those unable to get an abortion will experience economic hardship and curtailed life ambitions. -- Foster notes many hardships for the woman here. All will profoundly also affect any offspring.More children will be raised in poverty and strain. -- As noted previously, and Foster elaborates on psychological consequences.Foster ends her piece with a hard-hitting contrast: Between her two grandmothers, one of whom had had an abortion before having her children when she was ready to, and one who placed her own child up for adoption, and whose life was much harder than it might have been, had she been able to have an abortion. My biggest criticism of the piece is that it never names abortion as a right, which it most certainly is. Until and unless proponents of reproductive rights stand up for abortion as a right -- and this emphatically excludes forcing other people to pay for it -- they will never gain traction to codify this right into law -- no matter how dire the consequences for those who will suffer directly or indirectly due to its denial. -- CAVLink to Original

The following interesting identification appears in a Vox story about a ruling against a particularly odious anti-abortion law in Texas:With SB 8, Texas legislators not only passed a restrictive abortion ban but they empowered ordinary Texans to interpret and prosecute the ban. That compounds the risk for physicians who provide abortion care, in some sense, because they don't know the conditions under which they can do so -- or who might bring a $10,000 lawsuit against them for doing their jobs. [bold added]This brings to my mind the following quote by Ayn Rand regarding how truly vile and dangerous such vague laws are:Image by Katie Moum, via Unsplash, license.It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision. Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific and stable; it is not the known that breaks men's spirits, but the unpredictable. A dictatorship has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear. [bold added]While we aren't living under a dictatorship, Rand's point stands; and it is interesting to note how Republican officials have responded to attempts by physicians to achieve clarity on what procedures they can perform:"Physicians have been begging for guidance [...] since SB 8 went into effect," Molly Duane, senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told Vox in an interview. "No one from the state has provided any guidance, and in fact the only thing the attorney general's office has done is file their own lawsuit challenging some guidance from Health and Human Services -- the federal department that oversees the practice of medicine -- saying that a federal statute called EMTALA which allows abortion care and any other care in an emergency, that that shouldn't apply in Texas."Observe that, when push comes to shove, if there is a choice between achieving something actually good that they have a reputation for favoring (e.g., law and order), vs. banning abortion, banning abortion wins. The article is too kind to note that Republican lawmakers might have been grandstanding in the good ole days of Roe, when they could pass whatever laws they wanted without having to worry about the unpopular consequences of enforcing them. That might well be true. But look at how they are behaving now, when the opportunity to make their own laws clearer presents itself. -- CAVLink to Original

They certainly do replay on and on statements of Trump's taken out of context, and these are easily spotted. After all, we are not confined to television or radio. We can look up full remarks on the internet. Television does de-contexting with Trump's remark about being dictator for his first day in office. Serious business instead requires looking into specific plans he and his campaign team have lain out for what he would direct being done during his coming administration (assuming the practical conditions that he gets the nomination, gets more electoral votes than his Democratic opponent, and then does not have his actual edicts among those proposed overruled by the judiciary). We should look also into what "emergency powers" the Executive has; that facility is a regular step in states that have transitioned from democratic republic to dictatorship. As opposed to much of the political talk on television, we should take seriously the charges of prosecutors and the verdicts of juries or judges. Prosecution wins so often in the cases they bring, even with procedure stacked so heavily in favor of the accused, because prosecutors select for prosecution only cases which, with the evidence they have, are highly likely to result in conviction. Trump has been adjudicated in a civil trial to have committed a rape. That is something to be taken more seriously than mere allegations or talk on partisan television. It is not objective and not credible that every time a judge or jury rules against one's favored candidate or Party (what some of the Party imagines would be in the Party's interest) the decision was made due to outside pressure or bribery or political preferences. A judge recently ruled in Illinois that keeping Trump's name off the Primary ballot would be unconstitutional. To pass off the decision as simply favoritism towards Trump is not rational. The rule of law in this country is not a joke, not a farce, and not comprehensible to those who would rather talk about people than the ideas and reasoning in our legal system. Again, the most important case before the US Supreme Court last year halted a Republican Party effort to have State Legislatures have more power in deciding election outcomes.* Passing off the Court decision to the Court being against success of the Republican party would be plum ignorant. I don't think so. It seems there must be a focal event (such as the murder of MLK) or violence organized by organizations with a specific civil-disobedience or resistance-to-government purpose, focused by its leadership for a particular date of gathering (such as busting into the Capitol and busting its security staff on 6 January 2021, and a lot of those criminals are locked up, unavailable for a rerun). In a speech in Waco several months ago, candidate Trump urged supportive population in general to gather in New York on a court date he had coming up—gather and protest the legal proceedings against him or anyway such was going to happen spontaneously and with violence. Few, if any, showed in the street. Relatively few had shown up at his inauguration (I imagine too many were too frail with age for that sort of assembly.) Even with a Presidential candidate himself advocating or rationalizing or predicting violence over an unfavorable election outcome, I'd bet a Coke there will be civil order. Pro-Choice and anti-abortionists were vehemently opposed across decades, but there were only a few acts of violence (arson of abortion clinics). Overwhelmingly, people will stay here in this country and not commit violence, even under law they rate as highly unjust, to have a peaceful place under law to live.

A synagogue in Florida has legally challenged that state's ban on abortions after 15 weeks on the bases of that state's constitutional right to privacy, and religious freedom. The attorney filing the suit sounds like he's on the right track in this quote:In an interview Tuesday, [Barry] Silver said when separation of religion and government crumbles, religious minorities such as Jews often suffer. "Every time that wall starts to crack, bad things start to happen," he said, noting that DeSantis signed the law at an evangelical Christian church.But the piece continues, noting that the suit claims "the act prohibits Jewish women from practicing their faith free of government intrusion" and goes on to cite a religious scholar on the matter:"This ruling would be outlawing abortion in cases when our religion would permit us," said Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, scholar in residence at the National Council of Jewish Women, "and it is basing its concepts of when life begins on someone else's philosophy or theology." [bold added]This may be true, but the United States is a secular republic with a constitutional ban on the establishment of religion. If an embryo were an individual human life (it isn't), an abortion would be a murder, and sanctioning a religious exemption for it might as well excuse any act, so long as religion were cited as a motive. The Supreme Court has ruled that religious beliefs are not a defense against a criminal indictment. The charge was bigamy, and a proper defense would have invoked the right to contract. (Image by Unknown (modified by Ubcule), via Wikimedia Commons, public domain -- copyright expired.)Any cursory review of history or even of current events should give one pause about this rationale, considering the kinds of barbarity religions have routinely excused or even urged their followers to commit across history up to and including the present day. It is bad enough to have a theocratic abortion ban on the books; replacing said ban with a legal precedent that subordinates rule of law to the whims of religious leaders is even worse. I can understand suing on the basis of privacy as a stop-gap legal tactic: It is far from ideal, but it can preserve some protection for reproductive rights until efforts to fully legalize abortion can succeed. But opening the door for the even further subordination of individual rights to religion is to play around with gasoline in a room already on fire. In a secular state, one may practice one's religion in any respect -- so long as doing so does not violate the individual rights of others. This principle protects us from, say, being imprisoned, tortured, or murdered for "heresy," by subordinating adherents to every religion to rule of law. For the same reason, "religious freedom" cannot provide the justification for performing any act -- even if it is or should be perfectly legal on the grounds of individual rights. Abortion should be legal because (a) an embryo is not an individual human life and (b) the woman carrying that embryo has the right to decide what to do with that part of her own body. Full stop. If abortion is against a woman's religion, nobody will stop her from remaining pregnant. And that is the full extent -- for an individual -- to which religion should have a role on the question of abortion. -- CAVLink to Original

Since the Democrats control the press and have (long since) rejected the idea of objective reporting, it should be borne in mind that they have motive, means, and opportunity to lie about Trump, exaggerate about him, take his statements out of context, and so forth. This absolutely includes lying about his personality and about his various alleged transgressions. I'm sure they would be perfectly willing to lie about it under oath, too, because they call it "their own truth," and they think, in pure primacy-of-consciousness fashion, that if it's widely enough believed, that makes it true. (They have also found that they can "make it true" by simply having one of their judges rule that it's true, without evidence and without cross-examination.) As a result, I can't be sure that Trump is anywhere near as bad as they say, and I don't see how anyone else can be sure, either. I am worried about the religious wing of the Republican party. I know such people actually exist. Peikoff even mentioned them in The DIM Hypothesis. However, I think that the overly religious people are a liability to the Republicans, because they drive people of other religions (or of no religion) out of the party. I also think Trump knows this, and this is why he has recommended compromise on abortion for electability purposes. I also think that the Democrats have motive, means, and opportunity to exaggerate how much influence the religious people have, because they know full well that religion drives people away from the Republicans, and that's to the advantage of the Democrats. This misleads the religious people themselves into thinking they are more influential than they really are, and that, plus the fact that the Democrats are deliberately trying to poke the religionists to make them crazy, leads the religionists to make louder and more ridiculous demands, which only helps the Democrats more, even if only by turning would-be Republican votes into non-votes. As a result, I can't be sure that the Republican party as a whole is really as religious as they say. But we don't have to rely on the press. Trump and Biden both have actual track records. What were things like from 2016 to 2020 when Trump was actually President? I don't remember a dictatorship. (Although Roe vs. Wade being overturned was a low point and has ultimately led to chaos.) I remember the whole government bureaucracy trying to sabotage everything Trump did -- I remember them trying to impeach him because he caught Biden getting bribed by Burisma in Ukraine -- but I still think things were much better than they were from 2020 to 2024, when we did have a (Covid) dictatorship for a while. Yeah, and that would have worked, too, if those January 6th rioters hadn't barged into the Capitol and... oh, wait... Trump was supposed to have arranged that... but why would Trump disrupt his own party's rejection of the vote count? Hmmm... (Actually I don't think it was illegal to reject electoral votes, and I don't think those processes are there merely to be ceremonial rubber stamps... in fact, fraud might be a good reason to reject electoral votes...)

For years, I've heard complaints from the less-liberty-friendly parts of the conservative movement that the news aggregator Drudge Report, lost its mojo when Donald Trump won in 2016. Today, I see that one of the few conservative sites I still respected, Issues and Insights has joined that bandwagon en route to providing a sort of short, annotated bibliography of alternatives. Before I get to that, let's consider the following complaint about a recent set of headlines at the the site started by Matt Drudge:This Monday, for example, the top of the fold featured a long list of links to stories about Trump's alleged mental lapse (while completely ignoring Biden's more egregious one the day before), plus links to stories pumping up the left's current favorite Republican, Nikki Haley. The stories listed that day were almost entirely from a handful of (mostly) liberal-leaning news outlets -- AP, Politico, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, SFGate, the Guardian.Does anyone in the conservative movement know how to play Devil's advocate anymore? Might the reason so many of these stories come from leftist partisan media be that right-wing partisan media have become largely a pro-Trump echo chamber? Have conservatives memory-holed the idea that a true friend is one who is willing to talk about bad news? If I were a Trump supporter, I'd be concerned about signs of mental decline. Might the case be not so much Matt Drudge leaving the conservatives so much as they left him? (Here's a Trump toady who incidentally notes the post-Trump change in the conservative movement.) And finally, is it really news to Biden's opponents that he is quite the senile "embalmed Soviet corpse of an incumbent," as Dan Hannon recently put it so aptly? Sorry, Issues and Insights, but Our guy isn't as senile as their guy is weak sauce as a defense and the fight song for a ship of fools. I&E even stoops to Trump's rhetorical style, dismissing Nikki Haley as a "neoCon" and "the left's current favorite Republican." This pro-capitalist reader of I&E wonders: Will that site start kowtowing to Trump's economically illiterate protectionism? His anti-American xenophobia? His threats to misuse government to punish political opponents? With those questions in mind, here is their list of recommended sites that are "better than the Old Drudge:"It may remind you of it, but this is not your father's Drudge Report. (Screen shot by the author. I believe my use of this image is protected as fair use under U.S. copyright law.)The Liberty Daily is the most Drudge-like in appearance -- same font, same general layout, same use of red to flag hot stories -- but has a tendency to add lots of zing and nicknames, such as Crybaby RINO NeverTrumper Adam Kinzinger or Bribery Biden, NeoCon Nikki Haley. Discern Report and Off the Press sport more modern front pages. Whatfinger, which describes itself as "The Conservative answer to the Drudge Report" and aspires to be "The Greatest Aggregate Link News Site On Earth" has a huge mélange of stories from conservative news and blogs. But we find ourselves increasingly drawn to Citizen Free Press, which has taken Drudge to the next level and is almost entirely a long list of links.I will admit that these sites can be useful in the same way as Drudge -- which was never perfect and has always tended to sensationalize things. Indeed, they might be more useful than the original now in the sense that, just as one should slum around in the likes of the Huffington Post or Mother Jones to get news the right ignores and get the pulse of the left, one should do so with sites on the right -- whatever "the right" means now. I'll close with a link from each site: Don't Listen to Woke "Pastors", Christians Can't Just "Agree-to-Disagree" on Degeneracy -- The Liberty Daily (The story should -- but won't -- bother anyone who says America is a "Christian" country. The aggregator is my pick of the litter for "looniest Drudge alternative." Also: I am not cherry-picking. This one is from The Federalist.) Healthcare Students Still Forced to Inject Vaccines -- The Discern Report (Nobody's being forced to do anything, here. I am old enough to remember when being anti-vax was "for hippies" and when a conservative would acknowledge that an institution can require such things as proof of vaccination as a condition for membership or patronage.) Supreme Court To Hear Abortion Pill Case -- Off the Press (This site seems the most substantive of the lot.) 89% of 'American Elites' Back WEF's Plan to Ration Meat, Gas, Electricity for General Public -- Whatfinger (Mostly substantive, but seems comfortable with that brain-dead, populist term of blind rebellion, "elites." This site has layout options.) Inside America's Covid Lab ... Deadly viruses manipulated in Wuhan-style experiments. -- Citizen Free Press (Like most of these other alternatives, there is pandering to populist nuttiness about covid.)Novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand and historian Brad Thompson declared conservatism dead long ago. They were correct to do so. Whatever the right has become, it isn't even conservative in the sense of pretending to be pro-capitalist or pro-individualist. It pains me to see people who call themselves conservatives turning off their minds and descending into mere populism, which might win elections -- so theocrats and nationalists who have very anti-American agendas can carry them out in the name of patriotism. I do appreciate I&E bringing some new news aggregation sites to my attention, including helping me more quickly learn what the other other side is saying about any given issue. -- CAVLink to Original