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Moment of Truth: Scalia Plus Alito Equals Meh, Scalito

 

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is an arrogant liar. In this he takes after his dead mentor on the SCOTUS bench, Antonin Scalia, a man with neither a conscience nor an optimally-working pancreas. Now, there is no shortage of flatulent losers on the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett are the two most recently-added passengers in that clown car, and they seem like token placeholders in a battle to turn the court into a stamp mold for decisions based on radical rightwing Catholicism. The court represents radical rightwing Catholicism more than any other faith, and it rules according to radical rightwing Catholic dictates, a fact that calls into question the court’s integrity as a body reflecting the aims of the secular or deist framers of the Constitution to which it gives poorly-informed lip service in its many partisan opinions.

Let us remember what Bill Donohue, the president of The Catholic League, said about secular Jews, lest we misunderstand how much Catholic radical fascism owes to the Nazis. “Secular Jews hate Christianity,” he contended. “They like anal sex and abortions.”

Alito, in his leaked and leaky draft (and drafty) opinion, spends his time debunking the notion that there is anything in the Constitution supporting a woman’s right to end her pregnancy. He glibly elides, or glides over, the Ninth Amendment, in which rights not enumerated in the Constitution are reserved to the people. Sounds like Alito just didn’t want to hear what the Constitution was saying. In any case, his real project is overturning Roe vs Wade, which doesn’t rely on the Ninth Amendment to guarantee said right. So, despite what the Ninth says, Alito, according to his masturbatory logic, needn’t address it.

Alito wants abortion made illegal. He contends the nation is split on abortion. It’s not, and he knows it. The vast majority of us supports free, safe, legal access to abortion, particularly in the first and second trimesters. Alito, throughout his opinion, uses the phrase “unborn human being,” signaling where his allegiance lies: with the misogynistic rightwing minority in the nation.

Because he is an abortion choice antagonist, and an overall antagonist of whatever he thinks the “left” is (n.b. Donohue, above), Alito briefly feigns concern for the experience of the mother (but

only out of vague obligation), and speaks mainly out of concern for the “unborn human being,” presumably the one party in this argument of which he feels himself the intellectual equal. I’m sure the little bean-sized fetuses agree with him heartily. Have you ever seen one of these things? I’m pretty sure I was once given a dish of them as crispy banchan to eat before a Korean meal.

An appendix to the opinion lists anti-abortion statutes beginning in 1825 and ending in 1952 in various states. It’s there to support Alito’s contention that there was no tradition of condoning a woman’s right to end her pregnancy around the time of the framing of the Constitution. Of course, there was a tradition of keeping black people as property around then, too, but that’s not at issue.

Incidentally, not a single statute mentions the intentions of the pregnant woman until the second to last example, in Kentucky in 1910, and therein to state that consent of the woman to an abortion is no defense for the provider. All the statutes punish the person who provides the abortion. The desires, motives, social conditions, relationship with the father, or needs of the mother, aside from mention of an exception in cases where continued pregnancy threatens the life of the mother, are completely ignored. Cases of rape and incestuous rape are not mentioned in a single instance.

That is because the rights of women have expanded since the Constitution was first written. It’s pretty clear that Alito doesn’t find the expansion of rights to non-land-owning non-white males a tradition worth acknowledging. It’s even possible that the political interests Alito and his opinion are meant to placate find that tradition abhorrent. Whatever the case, it is Alito’s obvious goal to wish it away by pretending it doesn’t exist.

Alito quotes dead Scalia denigrating Roe vs Wade. He goes out of his way to chip away at the supporting laws and precedents supporting Roe. He does so in order to undermine Roe’s status as settled precedent, or “stare decisis,” to which he claims adherence – if only Roe weren’t such a poorly-supported precedent!

Alito patently argues in bad faith when he denigrates Roe’s “unworkability,” and points to the imprecision of the words “undue burden” regarding the obtaining of a procedure to end a pregnancy. Would he apply the same derogatory judgment to the words “unreasonable search and seizure” or “cruel and unusual punishment?”

Taking current trends as evidence, the difficulty in even finding an operating abortion clinic in certain states, Texas for example, argues for a quite uncomplicated understanding of the phrase “undue burden.” But that would require Alito to look outside of the document under consideration, the Constitution – and more precisely, the pre-Civil War Constitution – within which boundaries his vision is limited, like a mule wearing blinders. Can any judgment be made on any value-laden words or phrases without looking at the situations in the real world they may refer to? Who is this self-blindering jackass? No, the trend in abortion rights limitations is perfectly justified to Alito, because the decision which allowed women to have the right to control their pregnancies’ durations is so easy for him to mock and lambaste. And, hey, he’s got a critical mass of fellow fascist Catholic fundamentalists on the court to bolster his bilious adjudication.

He is correct in writing that Roe relied too much on appealing to the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause and privacy issues instead of the right of a human being to make their medical choices without the state having any say in the matter. As he points out, this was also a critique made by feminists at the decision’s advent, and has continued to be the critique the closer and closer the Federalist Society has moved to its goal of packing the SCOTUS with anti-choice radical Catholic fascists.

We can call them Catholic Nazis. There’s no reason not to. Pope Pius XII clearly saw no substantial disagreement between the Vatican and Berlin during the ethnic, sexually normative, racial, national, and ablist purges at the height of the Holocaust. Pius XII was a staunch anti- reproductive-freedom authoritarian, as was Hitler, to whose projects of genocide the Vatican remained thoroughly agnostic and disinterested. And as Bill Donohue reminds us, radical rightwing Catholicism has not progressed much in the intervening eight decades.

I guess that’s just women’s bad luck! Because now, evil, grasping theocrats with no respect for the Constitution’s tradition of broadening rights rather than curtailing them are in the majority – not in the nation, not in Congress, but simply on the heavy-handedly manipulated court. Dictatorial Catholic fascists are wielding the magnifying glass now, finding only what they want to find in the document they claim to be examining fairly and to the strict construction of which they purport to be adhering.

Alito, assuming himself to be the sole intellectual on a court now crammed with a frat boy and a Stepford wife over the legitimate but usurped Constitutional right of a Democratic president, spends his time rooting around in old British law, neglecting and in fact flat out falsely denying the common law acceptance of a woman bringing on her period through medical means. So common was the practice that none other than Constitutional framer and colonial nation founder Benjamin Franklin published a recipe for an abortion formula for women to make free use of. So much for “no evidence.” But I guess if one refuses to see it, it isn’t there. And if you want to distort the history of common abortion acceptance in the colonial era because you have a different, more fascist agenda in mind, why not? Who can stop you now that democracy is fair game for destruction by gerrymanderers, wealthy ideological donors, court-perverting think tanks, and conspiracy-drunk yahoos?

In a way, this decision could be a deceptively good thing, because now the fight can move to destroying by any means necessary bad-faith Jesus-peddlers who dismiss the bodily autonomy of women. The people want abortion to be considered a medical procedure out of the bounds of government regulation or prohibition. On the way to completing our revolution of the people against the corporate profiteers; of the Earth against the polluters and destroyers; of abundant distribution versus false shortages, hoarding, and resource theft; let us make this landmark in the history of fascist jurisprudence be for us, the people, the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

abortion Roe Casey

 

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