Comic Dave Smith reveals a great truth: Integrity is the irreplaceable ingredient of trust. Somehow the Democrats and progressives have completely abandoned integrity for opportunism and expediency.
1. See? The Washington Post still has it’s uses! Virtually every article about yesterday’s leak of the Alito draft of a potential SCOTUS ruling reversing Roe v, Wade (including mine last night) states that no previous Supreme Court decision had leaked to the press before it was released. Experts who the public has good reason to trust also have made the same claim: Neal Katyal, for example, the former acting solicitor general, tweeted that this was “the first major leak from the Supreme Court ever.” He called it the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers. It turns out that a previous SCOTUS landmark decision was leaked. Interestingly, as the Washington Post revealed, it was…Roe v. Wade!
From The original Roe v. Wade decision also was leaked to the press:
The Supreme Court clerk who leaked the story, Larry Hammond… clerked for Justice Lewis Powell. …Hammond confided in an acquaintance he knew from the University of Texas School of Law that the Roe ruling was forthcoming. The acquaintance, a Time staff reporter named David Beckwith, was given the information “on background” and was supposed to write about it only once the opinion came down from the court. A slight delay in the ruling, however, resulted in an article that appeared in the issue of the magazine that hit newsstands a few hours before the opinion was read on Jan. 22, 1973…
Chief Justice Warren Burger was livid….There are obvious and profound consequences if litigants and the public are tipped off to the result in a case before it has been formally announced and adopted. Burger sent a frantic “eyes only” letter to all the justices demanding that the leaker be identified and punished. Burger even threatened to subject law clerks to lie-detector tests if no one was forthcoming. Hammond [told Powell]…what happened and offer[ed] his resignation. Powell would not hear of it and called Burger to tell him that Hammond had been double-crossed.
…Burger showed mercy to Hammond and gracefully accepted his apology… Hammond survived as Powell’s clerk and even served an additional term for the justice before leaving the court to join the Watergate Special Prosecution Force. The story of Hammond’s close call became legend to other clerks on the court at the time and has been passed down as a cautionary tale over time.
Amazing! Admittedly there’s a big distinction from a clerk’s indiscretion resulting in a decision being made public a few hours early and a deliberate leak a month before the the final opinion will be announced, but still, that was a leak, and the leaker wasn’t even punished!
2. The law school rot connection. Several commentators have made an alert if frightening observation that there is a connection between the almost unprecedented leak and the unlawyerly conduct of law students, law faculty and administrators at such institutions ar Harvard Law, Yale Law and Georgetown Law Center. Bari Weiss, the New York Times self-exile who writes at substack notes in “The Shocking Supreme Court Leak”:
How did we go from that ethos to a world in which—leaving the possibility of some kind of Russian or Chinese hack, or a more banal security breach, or someone pulling the draft from the garbage—one or more clerks are undermining the institution itself?…[I]t captures, in a single act, what I believe is the most important story of our moment: the story of how American institutions became a casualty in the culture war. The story of how no institution is immune. Not our universities, not our medical schools, not legacy media, not technology behemoths, not the federal bureaucracy. Not even the highest court in the land.
…I called up one of the smartest professors I know at one of the top law schools in the country… Here’s how he put it: “To me, the leak is not surprising because many of the people we’ve been graduating from schools like Yale are the kind of people who would do such a thing….They think that everything is violence. And so everything is permitted.”
He went on: “I’m sure this person sees themselves as a whistleblower. What they don’t understand is that, by leaking this, they violate the trust that is necessary to maintain the institution.”
3. This is why I pay to get Glenn Greenwald’s substack essays. In “The Irrational, Misguided Discourse Surrounding Supreme Court Controversies Such as Roe v. Wade,” the investigative reporter neatly explains why Supreme Court criticism is so, well, ignorant. He writes in part,
Every time there is a controversy regarding a Supreme Court ruling, the same set of radical fallacies emerges regarding the role of the Court, the Constitution and how the American republic is designed to function. Each time the Court invalidates a democratically elected law on the ground that it violates a constitutional guarantee — as happened in Roe — those who favor the invalidated law proclaim that something “undemocratic” has transpired, that it is a form of “judicial tyranny” for “five unelected judges” to overturn the will of the majority. Conversely, when the Court refuses to invalidate a democratically elected law, those who regard that law as pernicious, as an attack on fundamental rights, accuse the Court of failing to protect vulnerable individuals.
This by-now-reflexive discourse about the Supreme Court ignores its core function. Like the U.S. Constitution itself, the Court is designed to be an anti-majoritarian check against the excesses of majoritarian sentiment. The Founders wanted to establish a democracy that empowered majorities of citizens to choose their leaders, but also feared that majorities would be inclined to coalesce around unjust laws that would deprive basic rights, and thus sought to impose limits on the power of majorities as well….
Thus, the purpose of the Bill of Rights is fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-majoritarian. It bars majorities from enacting laws that infringe on the fundamental rights of minorities. Thus, in the U.S., it does not matter if 80% or 90% of Americans support a law to restrict free speech, or ban the free exercise of a particular religion, or imprison someone without due process, or subject a particularly despised criminal to cruel and unusual punishment. Such laws can never be validly enacted. The Constitution deprives the majority of the power to engage in such acts regardless of how popular they might be. — the Supreme Court itself is intended to uphold similarly anti-majoritarian and anti-democratic values.
4. Greenwald also nicely roasts the typical misinformation used by the news media to make the public dumber:
It was bizarre to watch liberals accuse the Court of acting “undemocratically” as they denounced the ability of “five unelected aristocrats” — in the words of Vox‘s Ian Millhiser — to decide the question of abortion rights. Who do they think decided Roe in the first place? Indeed, Millhiser’s argument here — unelected Supreme Court Justices have no business mucking around in abortion rights — is supremely ironic given that it was unelected judges who issued Roe back in 1973, in the process striking down numerous democratically elected laws. Worse, this rhetoric perfectly echoes the arguments which opponents of Roe have made for decades: namely, it is the democratic process, not unelected judges, which should determine what, if any, limits will be placed on the legal ability to provide or obtain an abortion. Indeed, Roe was the classic expression of the above-described anti-majoritarian and anti-democratic values: seven unelected men (for those who believe such demographic attributes matter) struck down laws that had been supported by majorities and enacted by many states which heavily restricted or outright banned abortion procedures. The sole purpose of Roe was to deny citizens the right to enact the anti-abortion laws, no matter how much popular support they commanded.
5. Media hack freakout watch…Consider these hysterical rants by progressive shills from the law, punditry and academia:
-
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, who lowers the civic literacy of anyone listening to him, exclaimed, “Minority government! Minority-ruled government, and the Supreme Court is the most incredible exemplar of that. You have these judges, appointed to the Supreme Court by two presidents who did not win the most votes in that presidential election!”
They were, however, elected by the formula that has served the nation well for 230 years.
- Historian Jon Meacham actually said, on MSNBC, naturally, where the hysterics and demagogues roam, “Everything is at risk! That the Constitution is a fragile thing. Well, if you ever thought that was hyperbolic or a cliché or some sort of casual thing, read this draft opinion. Elections matter. The Court matters. The composition of the Senate matters. The presidency matters. Because in a republic, all—all– rights are supposed to be eternal, right? They are supposed to be grounded in the, both in reason and in—and in– theocentric view, they’re supposed to be eternal, but in practice, they’re temporal and what we’re seeing today in vivid terms, right where you’re seeing, is that the rights that many people have taken for granted for 50 years and more are fragile and at risk.”
That’s disinformation.. The “right” to abortion on demand has never been taken for granted, and Roe was recognized as vulnerable to a challenge from the moment it came down precisely because it concocted a right out of thin air.
- Maybe Jeffrey Toobin had to promise to spew total nonsense to keep his CNN legal analyst job after, well, you know. Toobin made a fool of himself insisting that Justice Alito’s draft opinion striking down Roe would affect “the right to privacy, which is implicit”and that “same right” is “recognized in saying states can’t ban married couples from buying birth control” and “can’t ban consensual sodomy between people of the same sex, or different sexes.” [It won’t and it’s not, because Roe mistakenly relied on a privacy holding that wasn’t relevant] Then he really freaked out:
That there are certain regions of people’s lives that the legislatures may not legislate in. This is a constitutional right. What Justice Alito’s opinion — draft opinion says is that there is no such thing as a right to privacy. So, abortion is not protected. Private sexual matters are not protected. Purchase of birth control is not protected by the Constitution. So, that opinion is an invitation, not just for states to ban abortion, but for states to regulate in entire new areas that previously had been off-limits.
Legislatures can’t protect the lives of viable fetuses? Killing an unborn child is a “private sexual matter”? This hack is a lawyer?
But he’s better than Jennifer Rodgers, another CNN legal analyst, who insisted gay marriage is in danger, saying, “[T]his notion that the difference between all these privacy rights is that one involves an unborn being, whether you call it a child, a fetus, whatever, that’s nowhere either, so this is just semantics.”
Hey, man, it’s nowhere! That “notion” is known in law school as a material distinction, but to be fair, abortion advocates never acknowledged that the human life lost in an abortion was anything to pay attention to.
Ethics Alarms 
My reaction on the leak, which is probably far less wise than anything Roberts would do, is threaten to fire and black-ball EVERY clerk on the Court, unless the leaker is identified. Anyone who knows anything would likely speak up. Then, you deal with the leaker.
His decision to have the Marshal (not you, Jack?) investigate is a good idea.
But, he should, at least, have each Justice put the fear of God (?) into their clerks.
I can’t imagine that any of the Justices (even Sotomayor) would approve of what was done. I, myself, was a lowly extern and clerk in the 4th Judicial District of the State [that Mondale Won] and I had enough sense not to disclose confidential deliberations of the Court.
Of course, no one would have cared. Regardless, the ability to keep your big fat mouth shut is essential to the practice of law (a skill they don’t encourage in Law School, where the chattering masses are encouraged).
I think I am above average in the secret-keeping category. Not Michael Corleone level, but still pretty good.
-Jut
Re: Your first paragraph. I had a similar idea.
I saw an idiotic tweet (not worth looking it up) that claimed Thomas was now going to make interracial marriages illegal. I dare you guys to find a worse take on this.
Do you mean the tweet from this idiot?
Does Swalwell know that Thomas has a white wife? Why are we not telling the world that this is a “BASELESS CLAIM” which is their favorite rebuttal to any claims made by their opposition.
This is why it is called the Disinformation Governance Board and not the Ministry of Truth. They have no interest in spreading the truth. They are regulating the spreading of disinformation.
In Left-Speak, Thomas isn’t really black so the skin color of his wife is irrelevant.
I am reading the draft and Alito specifically takes on the above fears by drawing the distinction between abortion and those other “privacy” issues. He states unequivocally that abortion involves killing a potential human life while the others do not. I will find the page number and post it.
The text that states that this decision does not affect issues on contraception, gay marriage etc. begins on page number 31 of the text and concludes on page 32. Here Alito was addressing “ordered liberty”.
There might be a legal fiction involved to keep hormonal contraception involved. Based on the warning label alone, the pill can cause the earliest form of abortion: preventing a fertilized embryo from implanting in the uterus.
Doctors have played word games to avoid saying this was an “abortion”. They changed the start of a pregnancy from fertilization to implantation after the pill was invented. This means the pill does NOT “terminate” a pregnancy but prevents it from starting if it blocks implantation. The warning is deliberately vague, as science cannot directly obverse the interior of the uterus each and every cycle to see if it blocks implantations. Indirect hormonal observations show it primarily blocks ovulation, thus hindering fertilization. But blocking implantation cannot be ruled out.
Thus a law banning hormonal contraceptives could survive judicial review if the courts find the possibility of blocking implantation to be equivalent to abortion, giving the state a legitimate interest in its prohibition. The court might also find the defined right to privacy outweighs the undefined risk of blocking implantation. Or the court could defer to the medical definition and say no pregnancy existed prior to implantation, thus nothing was terminated.
Rich,
Personally, I think the Dobbs decision will have very little impact on the women’s health prerogatives. Sure, it is possible that as many as three states might outright ban any and all abortions but the legislators will do so at their peril. The likelihood that hormonal contraceptives would be banned because it constitutes an abortion is very far fetched. Roe v Wade as well as Casey have been around long enough for federal legislators to craft a protective bill that would pass Constitutional muster but they have not. The reason they have not is because they fear the political backlash.
Well, yes, in case pregnant girls and women decide to take pills on a whim.
You should read about other warning labels.
Where has he during the 20th century, when the Supreme court repeatedly denied cert to 2nd Amendment challenges, even refusing to review appellate court rulings that upheld handgun bans on the merits.
A cursory review of history would reveal that the judiciary is far more protective of Roe v Wade than District of Columbia v Heller.
By the logic Toobin and Rodgers are using, Child Protective Services is a violation of parents’ privacy. I get the feeling that most of these progressives only have access to stupid arguments in defense of abortion because all the smart ones involve the philosophical skills to discuss the nature of consciousness, which is something humans have yet to catch up on.
Also, did Meacham seriously invoke theology, of all things, to defend abortion? As in, he thinks there’s a god-given right to have an abortion? That’s my daily dose of irony right there. I suppose he might perhaps be referring to Dionysus? Dionysus seems like a god who’d have abortion in his portfolio. I get the sense that most other gods would approve of abortion if it’s forcibly imposed upon a conquered enemy population. Or, you know, caused by a natural disaster in the course of generalized death and what not.
Baal and Molech required child sacrifices. In Rome, the child was considered the possession of the father and the father could kill the child at any time, the patria potestas. The new liberal theology considers children the property of the mother. A matria potestas is assumed, giving the mother the power of life and death over her children. That is why the new bills in Maryland and California would allow mothers to kill their children after birth, matria potestas. This latest move is logical after more than half-a-dozen states legalized abortion till birth and legalized allowing children born alive from abortions to be killed.
“This latest move is logical after more than half-a-dozen states legalized abortion till birth and legalized allowing children born alive from abortions to be killed.”
This surprises me. Do you have a link where I can read more about that?
I know of an example along those lines. Years ago I had a coworker who lost an infant to SIDS. Something set off the police to grill them. He and his wife were separated and the police hounded them for quite a while. No charges were forthcoming but they had to hire a lawyer and go through the grief concurrent with the investigation hanging over them.
When this happened to them, it occurred to me how disingenuous one of the argument in support of Roe v. Wade was. The argument to “privacy” for abortion should apply here, too, right? To make the parallel, it would be to argue that infacide should not be investigated because it violated the rights of privacy of the parents who lost a child to SIDS.
Who could ever have imagined back in 2007 that we would’ve descended into some kind of bizarro world where Glenn Greenwald, a leftist demagogue who engaged in rampant sockpuppetry on many blogs and was a massive joke to every sane person, would become the voice of reason?
It just goes to show you that second chances are worth giving if only to increase your chances of amazement and awe at how a person can change.
Thanks again, Jack. This whole story is upsetting on several levels. First: the leak was unconscionable. My small ethics agency suffered two leaks in the past 25 years–luckily I survived them both–but it damaged our reputation and the entire system of ethics administration in Chicago. The first was likely from another attorney in the office [and the Tribune printed the leaked draft opinion above the fold–admirable journalistic ethics there]; the second was likely from a former board member to a Sun-Times reporter, who printed the leaked emails between me and my Chair wholesale [ditto on admirable journalistic ethics]. It took me years to get that board member removed. In a democracy, no conceivable motivation justifies leaking confidential, pre-final deliberative drafts, and those responsible break the law and should be held accountable.
Second, the ethics or morality of abortion mostly aside, I wish my old, beloved Con Law and Torts Professor, Victor G. Rosenblum, were still with us. He died in 2006. He was in every way but one a classic NYC liberal-Columbia-educated Jew–he was passionately anti-abortion and the architect of the National Right to Life Committee’s legal strategy of changing abortion laws through state legislatures. He was a gentle, kindly Mensch, who adopted several kids from Vietnam. How I would love to have a coffee with him today. As I explained to him back in 1984, I ultimately cannot justify abortion, but now I have 2 adult daughters, and the thought of them getting raped and being forced to carry the children to term is repulsive. I have to believe that state legislators in OK, MS, etc. feel the same way. It’s a moral conundrum, and, probably, as Alito seems to be arguing in the leaded draft, one for the states to decide. But reasonable people can and do disagree about it, although much of that disagreement is, like most disagreements in this world, disrespectful.
Which leads me to my third upsetting point: I believe the USA cannot survive as a 50-state republic/polity for another 100 years. The cultural divides and mutual antipathy are simply too great. The SCOTUS did not cause this, of course, and it is not up to the SCOTUS to save the Union, even if a Democrat wins the White House again and replaces 3 “conservative” justices to bring about a “liberal” majority that reinstates Roe. But the trend seems inevitable. In 100 years, we will be 2-5 countries, each with its own abortion, prayer, and marriage laws. If and when that is about to happen, I hope people are given a decade or so to relocate to places that better suit them, and that the break-up is not violent. It has been a grand experiment, this American democracy, but it is too diverse today to be sustainable. We are seeing it happen, unmistakably and surely.
Unfortunately, I have been agreeing with the last point for quite a while now. Usually the splitting up of the US is something that only happens in dystopian novels, but I think it may be a reality sooner rather than later. It’s not that it’s too diverse to be sustainable, it’s that our differences have become much more important to us than the things that unite us, and no one wants to talk about uniting except on their own terms now.
Being diverse wouldn’t be a problem if we accepted federalism and let states be the decider of much of public policy. The problem is that progressives are not tolerant at all. They want their way to be imposed on the entire country. Roe v. Wade being overturned is a perfect examples of this. The progressives of the NE and West coast are all hot and bothered by Roe v. Wade, in spite of the fact that there will be zero, absolutely zero impact on them. They have this vicarious, paternalistic, concern over a bunch of women who live thousands of miles away and those women’s access to abortion. It never enters their mind to butt out of the business of people that far away.
Well-put.
This is why we have to examine our moral and ethical values in advance. Come crunch time, our lizard brains take over and we may make rash decisions we regret. In my high school biology class, we had white mice we would do simple behavior experiments with. Basically run them through mazes and what not. We tried to keep them stress free as possible, but the poor things would get stressed, and mothers would eat their babies.
i am not a father yet, but the thought of letting my daughter get so stressed and desperate that she would destroy her own baby like a rat is utterly repulsive. I recognize that I have to structure my life now such that an unplanned pregnancy, even under horrific circumstances such as rape, wouldn’t be a devastating blow. She needs to know the unconditional love of a family that would support her through anything, and we need to plan ahead and commit ourselves to values to forestall our most desperate instincts.
In all fairness, even most of the rightiest of right wingers are ok with abortions in the case of rape, incest, or danger to the life of the mother. Of course, the last is open to abuse, as a woman of means could get one of her wealthy doctor friends to certify to danger to the mother’s life, while someone of lesser means could not.
One of the great examples of the very distorted reporting on abortion by the main stream media can be said about how they define “extremist.”
They are quick to tar the right as “abortion extremists”, painting a broad brush about most of the right by citing the opinions of the few. The converse is that they will not point out how extremist most of the leadership of the democrat party is about abortion. Very, very few across the entire spectrum of the population support abortion to the level that the democrat leadership espouses. Across the board, democrat leaders are advocating for abortion up to the moment the baby is crowning.
I remember when the case of Kermit Gosnell was active. I was at my in-laws and it was on the news. I made the comment that “You know, if this was here, what he did is completely legal. He would be protected from both legal and professional sanction.” My father in law got pretty pissed at me saying that I was trying to spread lies…. but to their credit I got a later apology.
I don’t know the count, but I do believe it is around 6 states that have no restrictions.
I’ll have another comment on bias to open with. Searching the specific statement “states with no abortion laws” in google just gives me result after result of the states expected to pass laws to restrict abortions.
But to my point: it is indeed 6 states, plus DC. In DC, VT, NH, NJ, CO, NM and OR you can kill the baby right up to the moment of birth.
“Which leads me to my third upsetting point: I believe the USA cannot survive as a 50-state republic/polity for another 100 years…In 100 years, we will be 2-5 countries, each with its own abortion, prayer, and marriage laws.”
Not that I disagree but if what you predict comes true; does it follow that our brutal bloody civil war was unnecessary?
As an aside or observation; I doubt another blog site exists that can discuss this topic as thoughtfully, well considered, and civil, as this one. Jack’s players are well coached and the obstinate ones are benched.
Thought of the morning:
I’ve seen a recent trend among Republicans in regards to the abortion issue; They’re like dogs who actually managed to catch the car and now don’t know what to do with it. This is almost certainly because they don’t actually agree with the party on the issue, but never thought anything would ever happen. In reality, they’re scared because they think that abortion is a losing issue both for them and for the party.
And in normal circumstances, I think they’d be right. Historically, when the right makes inroads on issues like abortion, the left galvanizes and rustles up the vote. I think that was probably part of the calculation of the leaker.
Thing is… Democrats are still working off Obama’s original playbook of intersectional issues banding together disparate minorities. That worked, barely, only so long as other things also worked. And as no Democrat since Clinton seems to really understand: “It’s about the economy, stupid”. My theory is that while there is obviously a class of voter that will single-issue vote on a social cause, most voters will vote with their pocketbook. That doesn’t mean that most voters will vote republican, some voters will think Democrats are better for their pocketbook, regardless the reason, whether they agree with the Keynes model of an economy or want to use more government benefits, my point is that usually the economy is pretty close to a wash, and you have to seriously fuck up to move your base economically. There are other touchpoints like the economy, but it is *by far* the most important.
But if you manage to do that, nothing else matters. My theory is that we’re at that point. That historically Democrat voters are going to look at the geriatric dumpster fire of Joe’s fading cognition, the economy, the SNAFU of foreign relations, the economy, the handling of Covid, and the economy and so long as Republicans can manage to scrape together a candidate who can enunciate the issues and offer some kind of hope of an off ramp, nothing else matters. I don’t think the abortion issue is enough to move the needle for independent voters. I wouldn’t say that about other election cycles, but the Democrats have pooched this enough that I think the Republicans could field a genuine Lovecraftian Horror and so long as Chaugnar Faugn could spin a narrative of economic recovery, it’d still win.
“They’re like dogs who actually managed to catch the car and now don’t know what to do with it. This is almost certainly because they don’t actually agree with the party on the issue, but never thought anything would ever happen. In reality, they’re scared because they think that abortion is a losing issue both for them and for the party.”
I think your general observation is correct – but not for the reason given in your second sentence. I think they thought it would never happen and so didn’t plan on crafting reasonable responses to the secondary and tertiary effects. Now they’ll be stuck there looking ill prepared.
The law at issue only forbids abortions after fifteen weeks, so many pro-lifers were expecting the Supreme Court to uphold the law without having to overturn Roe.
This post would already be at 250-300 comments if even 3 of the previously dedicated leftists hadn’t self-exiled.
I don’t know…. I am so exhausted on the topic. I’ll talk about the secondary issues around Dobbs, like the leak, and the unhinged responses to it, but we have spilled so much digital ink on the topic that I don’t think I could possibly come up with a new thing to say.
Oh, I’d think about a third of the comments would be rehashing the same arguments regarding abortion – given the commentariat of yesteryear, I think another third of the arguments would indeed be about what is more important – the leak or the content of the leak, and the final third would be about the ethics of the leak itself.
I think about one third of everything would be insulting the other side as well.
The leak is the *primary* issue right now.
The ruling was going to happen regardless – meaning that the screeching about abortion was going to happen regardless. Leak or not.
The leak, therefore, having happened, is the primary subject in this, not secondary.
And any way – you know you miss the fact that there’s always someone who *just* discovered the burning fertility clinic hypothetical and they trot it out with the enthusiasm of a newly promoted general in 1918 who suggests “why don’t we try a frontal assault?”
Only newly promoted AMERICAN generals would have said that in 1918.
Heh, fair. I do miss the low hanging fruit.
To the guys using the “bodily autonomy” memetic argument going around about how the left raging about masks and vaccine mandates undermine themselves by then claiming bodily autonomy for abortions – while their inconsistency is true – the fact that bodily autonomy is even more weakly connected to abortion because there’s a 2nd body involved than to the vaccine mandates – by joining into the argument, you are then conceding that to be anti-abortion, you must be pro-mandate.
It’s fallacious.
You can be anti-abortion and anti-mandate because the two are not analogous. And because they aren’t analogous, you shouldn’t use the “bodily autonomy” rant to make them analogous.
Abortion involves two bodies. How is it not analogous?
Further, abortion guarantees the death of one of the two bodies. Now that vaccines and masks both have been proven to be very limited in the ability to spread to others, the ‘protecting others’ argument is far more tenuous at preventing deaths of others.
Those using “bodily autonomy” are trying to show that the pro-abortion crowd is not consistent with its own “principle”.
The pro-abortion crowd claims that a mother can kill the child inside her because it’s “her body”.
Some on the anti-abortion crowd are using *that* argument to show “my body, my choice, no vaccine”.
This then goes on by analogy to demonstrate an inconsistency in the pro-abortion conclusion based on “bodily autonomy”.
HOWEVER, if the two are analogous, a pro-abortionist need merely say “ok, deal, I won’t mandate vaccines and you won’t oppose abortion, because of bodily autonomy”.
My comment is that the pro-abortion argument doesn’t rely on bodily autonomy at all because there is a 2nd body involved that was invited into the equation by the 1st body involved – that is given no consideration by their stance.
Therefore, meeting them in argument based on conceding their false premise to score a funny anti-mandate jab, undermines the argument altogether.
They are not analogous. So stop making the silly connection.
The pro-abortionists only fallaciously attach “autonomy” to their argument to make it more palatable.
Correct.
Proving yet again that the Democratic establishment only cares about a woman’s right to choose when it comes to her reproductive system.
Glenn Greenwald is wrong. He is promoting the unfounded assertion that the majority of Americans agree with abortion. The slanted surveys suggest majority support for abortion, but this is only for early-term abortions and for special cases. Only ~15% of Americans support abortions beyond the first trimester. Today, abortions are performed up to birth, babies born alive from abortion are killed, and bills are pending that propose to allow abortions after birth. perhaps up to the first birthday. The majority of Americans do NOT support the abortion industry as it is practiced today and it is doubtful if a majority would be against a Supreme Court ruling that returned the abortion question to the states. Such a decision would still allow Maryland and California to kill infants, but it would allow other states to forbid such practices.
This isn’t the majority trying to take rights away from the people through an undemocratic process, as Greenwald is suggesting. A minority has imposed restrictions on people through an undemocratic process and the court is trying to undo it. What is the argument against THAT?
This reminds me.
https://www.healthing.ca/wellness/opinion/abortion-rights-language-vaccines
I do wonder why the leftist leadership went gung-ho over vaccine mandates, including creating unprecedented mandates to visit public establishment or generally to work in a business with more than fifty employees.
As a matter of fact, in enacting one of these unprecedented mandates, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot tweeted that it was “inconvenient by design”.
This is far beyond previous vaccination efforts. Back in 2009m, when the state of New York mandated the swine flu vaccine for health care nurses, both the NY nurses’ union and the NYCLU objected to the mandate.
by sharp contrast, the ACLU actually endorsed the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for patronizing bars and restaurants 9something that was never done with any vaccine before)
There have been calls by people for hospitals to deny health care to people who did not receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Again, hospitals do not have a history of doing this with respect to other vaccines. I saw a tweet where one person argued that sex offenders are more worthy of getting hospital care than people who are not vaccinated against COVID-19.
Others have demanded that health insurance companies either charge higher premiums for those unvaccinated from COVID-19, or deny coverage altogether. Again, health insurance companies do not do this with respect to the swine flu vaccine nor any other vaccine.
If the leftist establishment could have been credibly called pro-choice before 2020, it can no longer credibly be called so today.