Why we in the trans community should be worried over the leaked rough draft of the Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade. It could lead the way in striking down all non-discrimination laws!
It looks like the court has blinders and is focused on the 'Originalism' and not on the whole of all the amendments.
CNN reported that (The highlighted text is my emphasis)…
In the draft opinion, Alito writes that Roe “must be overruled.”
“The Constitution makes no reference to abortion and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” Alito wrote. He said that Roe was “egregiously wrong from the start” and that its reasoning was “exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.”
He added, “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s representatives.”
“That is what the Constitution and the rule of law demand,” he said, according to the draft.
Their argument doesn’t hold water, the Ninth Amendment states,
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Now I am not a lawyer but it seems to me that the 9th that our rights are not limited to those spelled out in the Constitution, that it seems like the justices conveniently forgot about the amendment.
NBC News looked at the legal arguments that the leaked draft stated…
1. The opinion claims that the right to abortion is not deeply rooted in our nation’s history and tradition.
“Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for the right to obtain an abortion. Zero. None.” Alito thereby claims that there is no historical basis for a right to abortion. Even assuming Alito did not distort the historical record with some cherry-picked law office history — the pejorative term historians give to the error-prone historical analyses of lawyers and judges in cases — his claim is rubbish.
Rights can be stated at different levels of generality. The right to homosexual sodomy is a narrow formulation; the right to choose your intimate partner is a broader formulation. Stated narrowly, as Alito did with the right to abortion, the historical record may not support the right. Stated slightly more broadly, it becomes more obvious that the right is deeply rooted in our nation’s history and tradition. The right to make medical decisions is deeply rooted in our nation’s history and tradition. So, as previous Supreme Courts have noted, is the right to bodily autonomy, as well as decisional autonomy — such as the right to make major life decisions like whom to marry and whether to have children. These are not listed in the Constitution, but as the Ninth Amendment states: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
The article goes on to to debunk justice Alito stated...
2. The opinion relies on history and tradition alone to determine our rights.
3. The opinion reaffirms that pregnancy discrimination is not sex discrimination.
4. The court casually dismisses the equal protection clause.
“[W]e briefly address one additional constitutional provision that some … have now offered as yet another home for the abortion right: The Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.” Although it is obvious to millions of women, Alito rejected out of hand the idea that abortion rights have much to do with equality. Yet as Planned Parenthood v. Casey recognized, without the right to control their reproduction, women cannot participate as equals in the social, economic and political life of the country. Alito devotes only a brief paragraph to this crucial aspect of why the right to abortion should be constitutionally guaranteed, and his main argument for dismissing it is that Geduldig and its progeny preclude it — despite the clearly flawed reasoning of Geduldig.
They also glanced over the Ninth Amendment.
5. The opinion claims there is nothing wrong with letting legislatures determine abortion access.
6. The opinion puts many other rights at risk.
7. The opinion violates the principle of separation of church and state.
“There is ample evidence that the passage of [anti-abortion] laws was … spurred by a sincere belief that abortion kills a human being.” But the view that an embryo or a fetus is a human being and that abortion is murder is ultimately a religious view, and not a universal one at that. Rather, it is the deeply held belief of a vocal and powerful subset of Christians; in Reform Judaism, for instance, an abortion may be religiously mandated.
8. The opinion engages in shameless hypocrisy.
“In interpreting what is meant by the Fourteenth Amendment’s reference to ‘liberty,’ we must guard against the natural human tendency to confuse what that Amendment protects with our own ardent views about the liberty that Americans should enjoy.” Yet that is exactly what Alito’s opinion does: It overrules decades-old precedent to impose conservative justices’ anti-abortion views because they finally have the votes to do so.
Then we have this did the justices perjure themselves at the Congressional hearings on their appointments?
Did Trump’s Supreme Court nominees hide their abortion views? Here’s what Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said about Roe during their hearings
Boston Globe
By Pranav Baskar
May 4, 2022
Four years ago, at the Senate confirmation hearing that would send Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, asked the judge, point-blank, how he’d rule on a woman’s right to an abortion.“Can you commit, sitting here today, that you would never overturn Roe v. Wade?”
Kavanaugh’s expression didn’t change as he quickly replied, “Senator, each of the eight Justices currently on the Supreme Court, when they were in this seat, declined to answer that question.”
It was a practiced non-answer Kavanaugh deployed repeatedly as he dodged questions on Roe during his 2018 confirmation hearing, according to a Globe analysis of all 300 references to the landmark ruling he faced over dozens of hours of questioning.
But Senator Collins said,
Senator Susan Collins, a moderate, pro-abortion rights Republican from Maine, suggested to the Globe that she felt the justices, who Politico reported are among the five justices poised to overturn Roe, misrepresented their views in private discussions she had prior to voting to confirm them if they do vote to gut the precedent. She told reporters at the time that she believed Kavanaugh agreed with her that Roe was “settled law.”
[…]
“I will tell you what my view right now is, which is, it is an important precedent of the Supreme Court that has been reaffirmed many times,” Kavanaugh said of Roe during the trial. " Planned Parenthood v. Casey reaffirmed Roe. So Casey now becomes a precedent-on-precedent. It is not as if it is just a run of the mill case that was decided and never been reconsidered, but Casey specifically reconsidered it, applied the stare decisis factors, and decided to reaffirm it.”
[…]
Both recognized Roe as Supreme Court precedent, and that future cases, including Planned Parenthood v. Casey, reaffirmed a woman’s right to an abortion. In these answers, the judges did not seem overtly hostile to those precedents.
“I will tell you what my view right now is, which is, it is an important precedent of the Supreme Court that has been reaffirmed many times,” Kavanaugh said of Roe during the trial. " Planned Parenthood v. Casey reaffirmed Roe. So Casey now becomes a precedent-on-precedent. It is not as if it is just a run of the mill case that was decided and never been reconsidered, but Casey specifically reconsidered it, applied the stare decisis factors, and decided to reaffirm it.”
As for Gorsuch…
“Senator, again, I would tell you that Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed,” Gorsuch said.
He would later say in the trial: “All precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court deserves the respect of precedent, which is quite a lot. It is the anchor of law. It is the starting place for a judge.”
So what do you think did they perjure themselves?
For the conservatives any court cases that do not got their way is an “activist court” so that means that they can ignore precedents because in their views.
So, what’s next?
- Marriage equality?
- Gay sex?
- Us?
- Interracial marriage?
- Title VII?
- Title IX?
- The Civil Rights Act of 1964?
You do know that the evangelical Christians and the Republicans have us in their sights. They want to control ever aspect your life including who you love and how you identify.
HRHRHR
Here in Connecticut the governor signed the bill to prevent cooperating in investigations and prosecutions of reproductive healthcare providers in the state from other states that have banned reproductive healthcare.
NBC Connecticut wrote,
Under the bill, state and local agencies in the state of Connecticut, which codified the Roe v. Wade decision in state law in 1990, would be prevented from cooperating in investigations and prosecutions of abortion providers in the state. The bill also modifies the state’s extradition statutes and prevents an out-of-state patient’s medical records from being disclosed.
Even through the talk is about abortion this bill also covers us, the bill has a board definition of reproductive healthcare (I wrote about it here.).
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Where do I stand on the issue.
I believe that the government should have no say in what you do to your body, that government has no in your personal religious beliefs. I believe that life begins when the fetus can live on its own.
I personally am against abortion except to prevent the mother's death because there are so many ways to prevent pregnancy. But I will not block a persons right to chose.
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