A car passes on the highway somewhere in South Carolina. †Make Liberals Cry Again”, reads on the bumper sticker, a nod to the Trump motto Make America Great Again†
Make the left howl again – the venom is reminiscent of all those gatherings of right-wing America over the years and the texts on flags and T-shirts there. “White, straight, Republican and male, anything else I can piss you off with?” Or simply: „Fuck your feelings†
As unlikely as it may sound, the venom is also reminiscent of this week’s leaked draft statement that the Supreme Court is likely to end protection of the right to abortion in the US. The conclusion is that the ruling in the Roe v. Wade case, in which the Supreme Court upheld the right to abortion in 1973, must be quashed. Judge Samuel Alito, who wrote this first draft of the ruling, is, of course, far too civilized for a fuck or a piss† But the resentment – or rather: the satisfaction of the desire for revenge – resounded in many of his sentences. Italics for clarity:
„Roe was seated from the start colossally wrong† The reasoning was exceptionally weak and the decision has had damaging consequences.”
†[Roe’s] exposition of history ranges from the constitutionally irrelevant to the clearly erroneous one†
“Abortion is not in the constitution. It doesn’t say anything about women at all.”
The pleasure with which Salito is canceling the right to abortion also fell on historian Jill Lepore (These Truths) on. She wrote in The New Yorker a piece in which she dismantles one of his core arguments. Abortion is not in the constitution, Alito writes, so you cannot derive any rights from it. Lepore: “There is absolutely nothing in that document about pregnancy, wombs, vaginas, fetuses, placentas, menstrual blood, breasts or breast milk. It doesn’t say anything about women at all.” And the explanation is simple: there were no women at the constitutional meeting, no female judges or legislators. “That’s a problem to be fixed, not a precedent to be celebrated.”
The tail between the legs
Comments on the leaked concept have rightly noted that conservative America has been working for decades to criminalize abortion. First by force: 110 cases of arson around abortion clinics in the decade after the ruling, later more than 15 assassination attempts against doctors and other clinic staff. Seven people were killed. Meanwhile, the Federalist Society, founded in 1982, began training conservative lawyers. With astonishing success: All six conservative justices of today’s Supreme Court were once members of the Federalist Society.
Nixon’s victory, a year after the Summer of Love of the hippies, had felt like the victory of the “silent majority” he extolled over the revolution of the 1960s. That was not just a political defeat, it was a social defeat. The counter-revolution had failed.
In the blissful series mrs. America (2020) the revolution and counter-revolution from those years are put side by side. Opposite Gloria Steinem and her feminist magazine ms. (featuring 53 American women who have declared abortions in the first issue) is Phyllis Schlafly, the self-proclaimed anti-feminist who turned millions of housewives into a political pressure group. In the series, Schlafly raises objections to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and the feminists on TV. “They want to legally bulldoze all differences between men and women. Say goodbye to girl scouting and hello to the unisex bathroom.”
The interview actually took place, in 1974, but it was yesterday live broadcast, including the gender neutral toilet. After the recording, interviewer Phil Donahue asks if everything Schlafly said is correct. “That abolition of separate toilets, that is really not going to happen.” Schlafly jabs her finger at Donahue. “When Lenin started the 1917 revolution, do you think he said to the Russians: ‘Fight with us and we’ll give you food shortages, censorship and terror? Of course not! He promised peace, land and bread. It starts with simple things like the ERA,” she warns. “And before you know it, we’re living in a totalitarian feminist nightmare.”
Every night on American TV the same conservative alarm bell is still sounded. It’s Fox News’ business model: what stupid things have leftists come up with? And in doing so, similar lies are told to demonstrate a higher truth: that the left is destroying America—our America. The examples given are ad absurdum. That’s not to say they’re made up, they’re true, or at least true. There is a mother in Texas who wants to change her nine-year-old son’s gender. There are teachers who divide children into two groups to let them experience how racism works. But the examples are repeated night after night, until it seems like it happens everywhere and all the time.
honorary member
A straight line runs from Phyllis Schlafly to Fox host Tucker Carlson, who sees “feminization” as a plot to replace white Americans with non-whites. The difference: Today’s counter-revolutionaries feel time pressure. They are politically and socially outnumbered and their numbers are dwindling. They have won only one of the six presidential elections this century by a majority vote.
Over the decades, the struggle has acquired an existential charge. God has taken sides. Or rather: one party has claimed God as an honorary member. While American society as a whole is secularizing – much more slowly than the Dutch, but still: just under 30 percent now call themselves non-believers – the faithful are rearranging themselves in the ranks of the Republican Party. In his book The Great Alignment (2018) political scientist Alan Abramowitz shows that over the past fifty years, the faithful voters of the Republican Party have become increasingly strict and therefore also hold increasingly traditional views. In the Nixon years, 45 percent of Republicans were practicing believers. In the Obama years, that number had risen to 70 percent.
Moreover, the group of white practicing believers has since the late 1980s in the overwhelming majority voted Republican and has become conservative. In the meantime, secularisation went hand in hand with changed views on marriage, birth control, sexual orientation and gender roles.
Thus the social gunpowder was put in its place. The traditional Christian values are considered important by fewer people, and the people who still find them important feel powerless. They knock exclusively on the door of one of the two parties for the rescue, which has become increasingly dependent on this group over the years. The Evangelical Christian vote, about a quarter of the population, accounted for half of Donald Trump’s voters in 2016. Less than 10 percent voted for Hillary Clinton.
Between the pissed off flags you always see copies that show Donald Trump as a Rambo with a machine gun. Sometimes he sits on the back of a tyrannosaurus. It’s a joke and it’s serious. Conservative strategist Paul Weyrich wrote in the late 1990s that there was a war going on “over our way of life. And I think it should be fought with the same intensity and dedication as a war with firearms.”
Radical-left Americans do have outrageous ideas too (abolish the police!), but they are on the fringe of the Democratic Party. Militant conservatives (ban classes that address the racist element in American history!) dominate the entire Republican Party. They chase the last moderates the party out. The abortion issue has become a litmus test for this new Republican Party.
In the 1960s, as the medical community began lobbying for abortion legalization, two former presidents served on the board of Planned Parenthood, a birth control organization: Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Dwight Eisenhower. That is now unthinkable. Planned Parenthood, which operates some 600 abortion clinics in the US, is the great Satan for conservative America.
Also read: American right to abortion is not inviolable
Majority ‘pro-choice’
The fact that a very large majority of Americans (80 percent) believe that abortion should remain legal (subject to conditions) and that a narrow majority (49 to 47 percent) call themselves “pro-choice” only raises the stakes for conservatives. but higher. From a disagreement, the abortion issue has turned into a -case belli† A war that cannot be won and must not be lost. Can it end otherwise than with violence?
Behind the same Washington Capitol that was stormed by conservatives on January 6, 2021, now stand their mortal enemies: a group of young women and men protesting before the Supreme Court. “Keep your laws off my body,” reads a protest sign.
Sarah Parker and Kate Danehy-Samitz flew in from their home state of Florida, where they had already started protesting. Parker has lost her voice. They have filed a lawsuit against their district council, which has wanted to enact a law banning abortion from the moment the first heartbeat is heard. “The first time something like this would be arranged in a district,” says Danehy-Samitz. The Florida court rejected it. “Of course it makes no sense to ban abortion on such a small scale. Those people are not really driven by their faith. They want to win voters.”
Occasionally she is drowned out by a young man who stands between the protesters with a megaphone and calmly says that abortion is murder and Christ is love. Catholic counter-protesters hand out rosaries. It almost looks timid. But they have the bible in their pocket. And it is loaded.
- 1973
- The US Supreme Court finds in a landmark ruling that laws prohibiting abortion are unconstitutional, establishing the national right to abortion.
- 1976
- Congress passes the Hyde Amendment, which bans state funding for abortion—unless rape, incest, or otherwise the mother dies.
- 1977 – 1988
- Anti-abortion violence in nearly 30 US states: abortion clinics are set on fire or incendiary. At its peak, in 1984, there are 29 such attacks.
- 1982
- The Federalist Society, an organization that prepares conservative judges for high positions as a counterweight to the left-liberal ideology, is founded. †
- 1993
- Abortion doctor David Gunn is shot dead by an anti-abortion activist outside his Florida clinic. Also in 1994, 1998 and 2009 an abortion doctor was murdered for his work.
- 2016
- The Supreme Court has rejected laws in which states impose restrictions on abortion clinics after Texas introduced such restrictions in 2013.
- 2020
- Amy Comey Barrett, the third conservative judge to appoint Trump, is appointed. The ratio in the court is now 6-3 in favor of the Conservatives.
Timeline
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 7, 2022
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