None of Us Are Free If One of Us In Chains

Anyone who’s lived long enough has seen the Supreme Court issue a ruling they didn’t like. This is not that. No, what made the ruling that felled Roe v. Wade and its companion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, more than just another disappointment, what made it the judicial equivalent of a kick in the teeth, is, as Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Breyer noted in a peppery dissent, the fact that this is the first time in history rights granted by the court have been rescinded.

Meantime, Republican architects of theocracy are openly speculating about imposing further restrictions. Indeed, in his concurrence, Justice Thomas pushes the court to next curtail contraceptive and LGBTQ rights. The fact that conservatives seem to feel it’s time now to unfurl their bucket list offers superfluous evidence that this ruling is not logical, but ideological. As the dissenters put it, “The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them and now it has the votes to discard them.”

via CommonDreams.org

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Abortion, guns and religion — a major change in the law in any one of these areas would have made for a fateful Supreme Court term. In its first full term together, the court’s conservative majority ruled in all three and issued other significant decisions limiting the government’s regulatory powers.

And it has signaled no plans to slow down.

via Huffington Post

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None of Us Are Free    /    Solomon Burke