Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died yesterday. I do not know her that well, and actually know her more by reputation than any research of my own, so I am sorry for her friends and family and offer my condolences, but I am not personally affected.
Unfortunately, the death of a Supreme Court Justice at this particular period of time means that nobody has even had time to properly grieve for her before the political takes started. (And in an all too typically crass move, Trump and McConnell have already indicated they'll do the best they can to fill her position quickly. Like... the very same evening the news broke. They couldn't even wait a day to say anything.)
I am... well. I'm upset enough that I don't want to escape into fiction, but not willing to join the chorus of voices on Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr or wherever, and I'm not even sure what I really want to say.
So I figured I'd write some things out here.
For anyone who doesn't understand how monumentally 2020 has been f-ing with everyone, let me explain this small portion of it.
In 1973 Roe vs. Wade made abortion legal. There's a bunch of other things to say about our conservative and liberal beliefs, but this is the one that has galvanized quite a few Christians to become single-issue voters, and thus has created a base that people in power have used and abused to turn 'Christians' into people who support almost the exact opposite of what Jesus preached.
That's harsher than I normally try to be, but I'm pretty annoyed right now so I don't feel like softening it. But I'll provide a bit more background on how I came to that conclusion.
I mentioned that I was raised Catholic, right? 11 years of Catholic schooling here...
And we talked about the church's stance on the issues of our day. Abortion, contraception, assisted suicide, etc. were just some of them. What I recall the most was this:
If your argument is that life is precious, you have to be consistent. If you want to say that you are 'pro-life' and care about unborn babies, you should also be 'pro-life' and against the death penalty. Also against assisted suicide for the elderly, and various other things. (We also went to pro-life rallies, I think there's even a picture in a newspaper of my sister and myself at one of them. Mom was pretty much one of those single-issue voters, too.)
I do not and have not accepted the Church's teaching on a lot of things, but I can respect the consistency of this position.
As for why I don't accept their teachings, well... initially I tried reconciling my position through what nowadays would probably be called 'evidence based' policies. I recall readings on the various topics, like the cost of life imprisonment vs. the costs - in jail and legally - of the death penalty, and similar readings on abortion.
Given that women still had abortions when it was illegal (and were more likely to do it in dangerous and risky fashion, so women were more likely to die of back-alley abortions), give that abortions generally came from unwanted pregnancies (which can be prevented through... oh, I don't know, maybe contraception), I would say my views at the time leaned more towards what eventually became called the 'safe, legal, and rare' position. (I also saw an article discussing a South American country that made abortion illegal, and it has some rather unexpected consequences. Like, oh, lots of mothers in prison rather than taking care of their other children.)
I don't want to digress too far in discussing my evolving views on the issue - I'll repeat a story I related before, though. I had a discussion with some of my more conservative relatives where I was arguing for the policies it takes to make abortion truly rare. Like contraception, financial support for single-mothers, etc.
What I remembered the most of that discussion was how every possible policy option got shot down. If you created a scholarship to college for a single mother, for example, then she is actually getting more help with college than my cousin... who didn't do anything wrong an didn't make any mistakes and surely is more deserving of such help. (That's the subtext, not specifically what was said.)
And I think almost everyone knows the 'christian' position on contraception, even though making Abraham's descendants as numerous as the starts might have been important back in his time and probably isn't all that important now that we've reached a population in the billions. And even though it generally means parents either wind up with lots of kids (I'm one of six. I love all my siblings, but that's a lot to deal with financialy), or they generally just can't have sex. The rhythm method is not really reliable, you see. And, well... I don't think only having sex when you're ready to have a child is very good for a marriage. Not unless they're both asexuals or something.
Anyways, long story short is although I don't think it's deliberate and I don't think they truly mean to... their position essentially results in punishing young girls in particular for having sex outside of marriage. Girls, because of course the boys don't suffer the consequences, and because even though grown women can and do have abortions this issue is mostly associated with unmarried teenagers. Even though grown married women have gotten abortions as well.
It's not even consistent in that regard, by the way. Some girls have sex outside of marriage and get pregnant, others don't. So some of them are then weighed down by the need to raise a child in a society where child care costs about as much as you can make at a minimum wage job, and good luck going to school when you've got a baby to feed, and yet if you don't go to school (or college in particular) you're probably going to be stuck in one of those low paying jobs for the rest of your life. In other words, this is also just one piece of the whole 'cycle of poverty', whereby people who are born without any resources find it almost impossible to break out of it no matter how hard they work.
So anyways. Reversing Roe vs. Wade is the type of short-sighted and oversimplified solution that is probably not going to have the results they expect, but is really easy to persuade people to support. All you have to say is 'think of the millions and millions of innocent babies! It's practically another Holocaust, killing those who least deserve it.'
What I wanted to focus on, though, is how the people on the right have used this goal to justify anything and everything. I'm not even sure how many of them are good-faith actors who sincerely care about unborn babies lives, and how many have just realized that this is a handy way to power. (Single issue voters! You can overturn all the social security measures FDR put in place, and all you have to do is show you're fighting to stop abortion and nobody cares. Nobody you care about, at least.)
What this pandemic has shown - to those who aren't so caught up in that over-simplified goal - is how bereft of moral principles those on the right have become.
After all, if you truly care about the sanctity of life, if you truly think the deaths of unborn babies is a horrific crime - how can you possibly support an administration that has caused the death of a couple hundred thousand Americans?
I will give the average Americans I run into credit for being sincere in their beliefs, even if I disagree with them. I can not do the same for the political forces that use those beliefs to get into power.
They have lost sight of everything. Of their values, their principles, their morals... they compromise all of it and claim it's justified.
And in the end, they're just as bad (if not worse) as those they claim to stand against.
The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg comes at a particular trying time for a bunch of reasons. Creating a conservative Supreme Court has been a goal of these people for a very long time, in the hopes of overturning Roe vs. Wade.
Mitch McConnell argued that they had a right to prevent Obama from nominating a Supreme Court Justice back in 2016. He came up with some ridiculous argument about letting the election decide, even though pretty much everyone knew he was really doing it because he hoped to get a Republican in office who would nominate a conservative justice.
He succeeded.
Now, in a moment of glaring hypocrisy if you thought he actually believed his argument in 2016, he and Trump are going to do their damndest to replace RBG with another conservative judge. One that would finally give them that conservative majority.
The stakes are high - and all it took was undermining the American system of government, lying, capitalizing on the worst in human nature, allying yourself with racists and bullies, enabling a government that allowed a pandemic to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans... but hey, they may finally get that conservative court they wanted.
All it took was everything that made them 'the good guys'. They have no morals or principles. They don't stand for life, they don't stand for truth and justice, they don't stand for a nation where 'all men are created equal'.
But yeah, okay. They might manage to overturn Roe vs Wade, make abortion illegal, and make more women die in risky illegal procedures while arresting and throwing in jail mothers and forcing young teenagers to have children that will then make it exceedingly difficult for them and their children to ever get out of poverty.
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