Not Your Issue…?

Maybe you are beyond your childbearing years. Perhaps you made the decision to not have children, and the birth control method you used worked for you. Maybe you are a man. There are a hundred reasons to make the demise of Roe v. Wade not your issue.

And you are wrong. It is your issue.

It is your issue because:

• What happens when your fifteen year old daughter comes home pregnant?
• What happens when your wife is sexually assaulted by a stranger and becomes pregnant?
• What happens if prenatal care shows that your baby has multiple birth defects and is destined to live a very short life filled with pain?
• What happens when it touches your life? Oh, that’s right it isn’t your issue, at least until it is.

And lest you think these are hypotheticals only, last week a ten year old girl was raped and became pregnant. She had to go to another state to obtain an abortion. This is seriously messed up (for so many reasons).

This is everyone’s issue because this decision is the top of a very slippery slope. Some have called the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade a judicial coup. The Court has exposed itself as willing to pander to the right, a tendency toward which they have been leaning for some time. They have lost their objectivity and a whole lot of their credibility. Their decisions are eroding the barrier between church and state that are spelled out in the Constitution.  

While everyone was agog over Roe v. Wade, the Court also ruled that public monies can be used for private religious schools. The case from the state of Maine had to do with a rural town that had no public school, but had a religious school.  Most of the “religious” schools are conservative Christian schools.  Will this school allow children to NOT participate in the religious education that is part and parcel to these schools? What happens to the Jewish or Muslim student who lives in the town? Will they pay for him/her to attend another school that will not inculcate its religious beliefs? Would the same ruling have been made if it were a Jewish school? I think not.  

In another troubling decision, the Court also ruled that a coach can pray with his team at the fifty yard line following a football game. First, it assumes that God gives a rat’s patoot about who wins a high school football game. It is quite suspect in my opinion. Second, the larger issue with this case is that the student/coach relationship is a “power over” relationship. Coaches are powerful and influential figures in the lives of teenagers. Does a student athlete REALLY feel free to not participate? There is the very real possibility of subtle coercion to gain the approval of the coach and his/her teammates. Or student athletes may feel subtly pressured to participate in order to curry the coach’s favor for increased playing time or better recommendation letters for college.

We are in a dangerous time. The United States was never meant to be a theocracy. It was crafted as a republic and a democracy. If the fundamental christians can influence public policies that affect all people, we are a lot further down that slippery slope than we might imagine.

These three decisions in the aggregate further blur the line between the separation of church and state. The problem is that the religious freedom protected here is only the “christian” church, and I use the word very loosely. I sincerely doubt the same freedoms would be so readily extended to different religious expressions. And I can only imagine people would be up in arms.

Make no mistake, these are precedent setting cases. We will see more cases coming before the Supreme Court. We likely will see rulings in favor of religious institutions. These cases, taken together, open the door for coercive religious practices to be foisted on all people, regardless of their religious affiliation.  

Another troubling aspect of these decisions is that it opens the door to look at other civil rights issues. Clarence Thomas has suggested revisiting other landmark cases. Using the same logic regarding it not being in the Constitution, Thomas sees a loophole to roll back civil rights cases, including (ironically) his right to marry his wife. Same sex marriage may well be on the chopping block as well as civil rights protections for LGBTQ persons. There will be devastating consequences.

As one of the three main branches of government, the Supreme Court is the keeper of the Constitution. The subtext of that truth for our time is that the conservative Federalist Society poured millions of dollars into the nominations of the three conservative justices rammed through by the occupant. To be an “originalist” in regard to the constitution means that a bunch of old white men decided what was going to be law over two hundred years ago in a very different time and a very different world. I would like to think that human society evolves and uses the basic premise of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for all people. Instead they are cherry picking parts of the constitution to pander to the religious right. Religious conservatives and the originalists are conspiring to roll back civil rights at least fifty years. What they fail to see is that there are overarching perspectives that should inform their actions. These are justice for all people, a concern for the whole of the human community and creation.

If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.