Why would pro-abortion radicals in deep blue states be so very angry about Dobbs?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Kate” writes:

Why pro-abortion radicals are rioting in left-wing jurisdictions is hard to understand. California and New York have virtually no restrictions on abortion up to the point of delivery, and California’s legislature is proposing to effectively extend that to seven days postpartum.

Let me tackle that last part first: no, the California legislature is not proposing to extend that to seven days postpartum. That’s one of those misinterpretations that’s become a rumor that’s been spread around. I read the wording of the law myself and it applies to things that a woman might due during pregnancy – not an abortion – that might end up causing harm or death to the baby. For an example of the sort of situation it’s meant to deal with, see the Chelsea Becker case:

A California judge has dismissed a murder case against a woman who delivered a stillbirth after consuming methamphetamine, saying prosecutors failed to provide evidence that she took drugs knowing that it could kill her baby.

Kings County Superior Court Judge Robert Shane Burns delivered his decision in court Thursday, said Dana Sussman, deputy executive director for the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which is providing legal counsel for the woman, Chelsea Becker.

The legislature has been revising the wording of the bill to remove any ambiguity and make sure it does not apply to infanticide or even to purposeful neglect after birth:

University College London Hospital clinical lecturer in infertility and a leading voice on medical ethics, Dr Francoise Shenfield, told Reuters: “Definition of perinatal death is stillbirth, plus early neonatal deaths under seven days.”

Rather, the bill seeks to protect parents from legal prosecution if that perinatal death is the result of accidental causes, she said.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I’ll try to answer the implicit question in the first part of Kate’s comment: why would pro-abortion radicals riot in left-wing jurisdictions where abortion is not going to be outlawed and probably is going to become even more unlimited?

A lot of reasons – and let me add that the majority of these people are women, although it’s not limited to women:

(1) They’re being encouraged to do so.

(2) They’re being lied to by leftist leaders and legislators and led to believe that this ruling does constitute some sort of abortion ban, and since a lot of people neither understand law nor follow its ins and outs, that lie gains some traction.

(3) Even if they do understand that their own states will not be restricting abortion, they are used to it being available to all women. Some are old enough to remember the horrors of illegal abortions (some even had them), and many of the younger ones have been told stories about the olden days.

(4) Many women on the left have bought the “Handmaid’s Tale” sort of scenario which goes like this: rigid fundamentalist Christian men are trying to control the reproductive organs of women and will stop at nothing till they get total control. This fear has been drummed up incessantly for many years.

(5) Many also believe that the Catholics on the Supreme Court are intent on imposing Catholicism on everyone and the ruling in Dobbs originates in their Catholicism. There is no separation of church and state here (#5 relies on their not understanding that the ruling actually takes the Court out of the business of ruling on abortion at the federal level, but there are plenty of people who not only don’t understand that but who are not interested in even listening to that sort of assertion, much less crediting it).

(6) A leftist doesn’t want states to be able to make their own decisions – as opposed to the federal government dictating what states can do – unless the issue involves something the federal government is trying to do that the left is against and the right is for. Then states’ rights become good and the left will support them. When Trump tried to enforce immigration laws, for example, the left was in favor of states’ defiance against the feds. But when SCOTUS allows abortion to revert to the states to make their own varied rules as the states see fit, that is an abomination because abortion is a right – after all, Roe said so, and that’s been the law of the land for well-nigh fifty years. The fact that the Court has longer and consistently held that immigration is a federal power and never said that regulating abortion was a federal power until Roe, thus generating a large distinction between the two issues, is irrelevant to the left.

(7) They’re not used to ceding ground. Usually there’s no reversal after they’ve won a battle. There might be a pause, but it should only be temporary.

(8) They’re being told this is just the beginning of what the right is planning. Next there will be a federal abortion ban. Then the Court will reverse previous decisions on gay marriage, contraception, and even interracial marriage, and some states will ban those things and perhaps the Republicans will ban them nationwide through federal legislation if they ever get control of Congress. The fact that Dobbs explicitly stated that reversal of those cases won’t be happening, because different principles apply, is ignored. The left is also using Clarence Thomas’ concurrence – the one about the overuse of the due process clause, a position which none of the others joined – to mount its argument that these bans are on the right’s agenda. But even if Thomas hadn’t written that, the left would have said the right is planning to attack these things next anyway.

(9) It’s all Trump’s fault, and he is evil.

[NOTE: I think the current rage centers on Dobbs, but the concealed carry SCOTUS case Bruen has intensified the anger and even if Dobbs hadn’t been decided as it was, the left would still be mad at Bruen – although not as mad. All gun control cases are considered to be about the exceedingly rare phenomenon of non-gang-related mass shootings. The fact that very few gun-control measures have anything to do with such events nor would the proposals have prevented the events in question is not even part of the arguments the left deigns to deal with.]

Tomorrow is the 13th anniversary of commenter FredHJr’s death

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: The following is a somewhat revised version of a post that has appeared previously on this blog.]

Unbelievable that it’s been thirteen years since commenter FredHJr died suddenly and tragically. As time passes, the number of readers here who don’t remember Fred must necessarily increase, so for those of you who don’t know who FredHJr was, please see this and this, as well as these.

Fred’s death was extremely tragic for his family. But it was tragic for this blog, too, because he was an invaluable and irreplaceable member of our community, a “changer” who knew a lot about the Left, and a keen observer of politics, history, religion, culture—of life itself. I still think about him often, wondering what he’d have to say about everything that’s happened in these last thirteen years.

Every year on the anniversary, I offer some excerpts from his many comments here.

This comment is from October 18, 2008, just a few weeks before Obama was elected president for the first time:

It’s the Marxist/Leninist ethics of expediency. No regrets. Whatever it takes to discredit anything the other side does and excuse the sins of your own side.

…this reveals a lot about who is about to take power and how they will wield it against the rest of us. They get away with it and many will not at all be troubled by it because they are shaped by the post-modernism, cultural Marxism that they imbibed during their formative and educational experience. If we as a people cannot name this accurately and expunge its corrosive influence over our lives, then down into the wages of perdition and disaster we go.

The comment is from October 28, 2008. The election was getting close:

Obama is part of a nexus of interests. What the American dopes who will put him in office are getting is a NETWORK of alliances and interests, running the gamut from Finance (Soros) to academia to media to law. Thus far, in order to appeal to the Middle Muddle he has been packaged as a moderate or centrist. But once in office the venomous swarm of this network will burst out of the nest and devour the host. You wait and see. And I’m not eager for the moment to say “I told you so.” I really would it be the case that it never happens at all.

This was a comment of Fred’s from the very beginning of the Obama presidency, but I think it’s worth mulling over today:

For me, Western Civilization is an incredibly complex work that has eclectically and also seamlessly borrowed the excellence and the virtues of Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, and the Enlightenment. The High Middle Ages and the Renaissance also made important contributions. In its totality it is a meritocracy and a liberation of humanity that has resulted in ever greater learning and material prosperity and health for most of the people who live under it. It is not an unblemished history. Yet in its totality it gleams with advancement when juxtaposed against civilizations which enslave humanity.

I think the beginning of the end of our civilization began with the French Revolution and The Terror. It was the beginning of the elaboration of totalitarian thought and throughout the 19th century this kept on finding newer permutations of elegant, intellectual terror. The 20th century was the culmination of the barbarity of totalitarianism.

These are chosen somewhat randomly, but so very much of what I looked at that Fred had written was on target.

RIP Fred, and may your family be comforted in their grief. We miss you.

Over the years there have been other commenters here who probably have died, and I would like to mention them too, but for no one else did I actually get official word of that person’s death. So it’s hard to be specific. One commenter who comes to mind is “strcpy,” who announced that he was very ill and then disappeared shortly thereafter, about twelve years ago. I wrote him an email but never heard back, and I fear he’s gone. But I don’t know for sure. Another prolific commenter who disappeared many years ago was Occam’s Beard. I was never able to contact him after that, and so I fear something tragic may have happened. Same for parker.

There may be others, as well. I wouldn’t necessarily find out. Sometimes people just stop commenting here because they get busy or they get tired or they get turned off. But it stands to reason some of them will have died. So I’ll take this opportunity to say RIP for all of them.

So, what about my series of posts on the McCraw hearing? Let’s call this Part I

The New Neo Posted on by

I thought I’d get the first piece out today, but it may not be till next week – Monday, I hope. I was busy earlier today and got a very late start, and it’s one of the more complex issues I’ve tried to tackle. But I hope it will help readers here sort out an enormous tangle of information, and it will present some theories I’ve generated. The point is not just to evaluate what went so very wrong in the Uvalde response – and there’s plenty of that – but analyzing some of this may help somebody or other to come up with prevention and/or reaction strategies for the future.

But for today, I thought I’d just list a few somewhat random facts that McCraw mentioned in his lengthy lengthy testimony, things that have come up in discussions in the past on this blog and were considered somewhat mysterious. In no particular order:

(1) The perp had no trouble getting the money. It came from his fast-food job, and he had no rent or other expenses of the usual sort. He had stopped attending high school in his senior year and worked enough hours to save enough in a bank account (held jointly with his grandmother). He made many purchases online when he was seventeen – not of weapons but of accessories for the weapons he was planning to buy – and then after his 18th birthday he made the purchase of the items (including the firearms) that he was only able to buy after turning eighteen.

(2) He does not seem to have had any juvenile record. Apparently he kept a pretty low profile in the regard. Some acquaintances have reported animal abuse (carrying around dead cats in a bag and talking about it), but no one ever reported it to authorities. Also, despite quite a few apprehensive feelings about him on the part of online acquaintances alarmed by certain things he’d said, he was never reported to local or state or federal authorities for any of this.

(3) As I had guessed, there is no toxicology report yet on the perp because although it’s been done it takes a long time to issue results. He said the results will be made available after that.

(4) The questions of how the classroom door locks operated, whether or not the doors of those two classrooms were in fact locked, whether the officers knew whether they were or weren’t (or whether they even checked to see), and what should or could have been done by the officers to enter those classrooms, is such a big topic it will probably have its own post. But apropos of earlier discussions we had on this blog, a shotgun breach or an explosive breach of a locked door generally would never be used in a classroom situation. That wasn’t the issue here, however.

(5) Quite early on, there were at least two rifles, a Halligan, and several ballistic shields in the hallway of the school. Unfortunately – and this is one of my big criticisms of McCraw’s testimony – he doesn’t say where they were (the hallway had a bend in it), who had them exactly, to whom their presence was communicated, or whether it was in fact communicated to Arredondo or others in any possible coordinating position. McCraw did not even make it clear whether or not there was coordinated communication, and if so what its nature was (that is, how messages were conveyed), nor did he compare the communication that occurred within that hallway that day with what the officers would have been told to do in training in order to communicate under such circumstances. Perhaps there was someone else at the hearing who went into all of that; I only listened to McCraw, who spoke for about four and a half hours. If anyone has watched more of it and those things were touched on in any comprehensive way, please let me know.

(6) Police radios didn’t work in the school – not just the Uvalde police, but even the state police and the federal officers except for BorTac. And even the BorTac radios could not be reliably connected to each other while in the building, for a group call. What’s more, this is not an unusual problem in schools, and it’s somewhat expensive to solve (I’ve read that, anyway; there may be more creative cheaper solutions that haven’t been tried). McCraw also said that police radios are very chaotic in a crisis, with lots of communications coming in, and that can be a problem even if they are working. Quite a few of the officers in the hall had their radios with them, but they did not function and so were useless.

(7) Arredondo and others at the scene were in communication with headquarters by cell phone. But for some unknown reason, none of the content of the 911 calls from the classrooms where the perp was and where the massacre had occurred was ever relayed to Arredondo, so he was unaware of that or even their existence. Apparently there was only one person there (and I believe that person was outside the hallway and not in the building, although I didn’t hear McCraw directly addressing that question) who heard anything about those later 911 calls, and there is no indication that he or she ever relayed the information to anyone. My own thought is that the person may have assumed – and it would seem reasonable to have assumed – that the chief and others already had the same information and thus there was no need to try to repeat it. The lack of awareness of the 911 calls is a small but important point, and it is emblematic of the enormous and really shocking breakdown of communication that occurred on so many levels.

I’ll stop there for today. This is just the very tippy tip of the big iceberg. Unfortunately, McCraw left out a great deal of information that would be extremely pertinent – I don’t know whether he already knows the answers to those things and just isn’t saying, or whether he doesn’t know yet. I plan to get into more of those issues later. His presentation was only based on video and audio evidence, however – not on any interviews with participants or survivors or anyone else, although he said that about 700 such interviews have been conducted so far. I am assuming those will be sorted out and incorporated into a final investigative report, but that will take quite a while.

Trashing the Constitution

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the problems with discussing Dobbs with anyone on the left is that it was decided on the grounds of what’s in the Constitution and what is not. Why would that be a problem? Simply because the left is not interested in assigning any value to the Constitution except when it serves their purposes. So any argument defending Dobbs on constitutional grounds is akin to defending it with reference to something outdated and outworn, like phlogiston.

Commenter “TommyJay” quotes sports guy David Portnoy as saying something similar. But Portnoy himself actually isn’t on the left; he’s more of a libertarian iconoclast. However, what he says here about the Constitution is something the left has been pushing and embracing for years:

“At what point do you look at the Constitution and say, hey this was written by people who had slaves, and maybe not everything is exactly to a tee in the Constitution,” Portnoy bloviated. “Like a million years from now you’re going to use the Constitution as a document written in… it’s just nuts, in what world. The world evolves, people evolve, technology evolves. You gotta evolve.”…

“The left f*cking hates me. The woke left, the liberals, they’re crazy. They’re insane people. Yet, I end up having to vote for a moron like Biden because the right is going to put Supreme Court people in who are just ruining this country, taking basic rights away,” he insisted.

That’s how someone who seems to hate the left becomes a useful idiot himself in service of it.

When I say that views like that have been pushed by the left for many years, I mean it. I probably could find something similar even earlier if I looked carefully, but the most prominent statement of the sort is something I remember writing about almost ten years ago on this blog. Here’s an excerpt from the post:

Yesterday there was a big brouhaha over an op-ed of Louis Michael Seidman’s that appeared in the New York Times.

It was the type of piece that, on first reading, appears to be some sort of ironic Onion-esque parody—but sadly, it’s not. It’s also the sort of thing you’d expect from a leftist college student with no knowledge of history and no understanding of the Constitution.

But author Seidman is a well-known professor of constitutional law at Georgetown, one of the most elite law schools in the nation…

Read the whole thing if you can stomach it, just for the flavor, and the exposure to the strangely tortured logic (and lack of historical accuracy) of this particular law professor. Seidman not only shows a lack of knowledge (actual? or strategic?) of the true position of most of the Founders regarding slavery, he also expresses the typical leftist position that we should throw away the wisdom of the past (wisdom? how can that be; they’re just a bunch of propertied white guys—just like Seidman, by the way) because we want to do something, and that pesky old white-guy document stands in our way.

At the time Seidman’s piece was written in late 2012, it seemed at least somewhat shocking that it had been published in the Times, because it seemed to be advocating somewhat of an outlier position – at least in terms of public statements as opposed to things only discussed in the bosom of inner leftist circles. Now it’s positively a mainstream view, because the left has managed to shift that Overton window considerably in the decade since.

The last paragraph of my post about Seidman’s op-ed was this:

As for why the Times decided to publish this piece right now, one can only conclude they see the time as ripe for delegitimizing the Constitution in order to further the leftist agenda, and seek to use Seidman’s credentials to make the argument from authority. The ground has been well prepared for this by our president, the MSM, and our educational system, so their calculations may indeed be correct.

[NOTE: That post of mine on Seidman’s article got me a ten-minute-ish gig on The Michael Savage Show, of all places. I managed to save the audio and you can listen to it here:

The interview was done is an interesting way. An assistant of his called me and read me the questions, and I answered while he recorded me. Then later they must have patched in Savage’s reading the questions. I never spoke to Savage himself.]

This is one of The Babylon Bee’s best

The New Neo Posted on by

Satire is best when it’s closest to the absurd truth.

“Dems Pause January 6 Hearings To Call For Insurrection”:

Democrats have temporarily pushed pause on the January 6th hearings in order to lead an insurrection against the federal government.

“On January 6th, a branch of our federal government was almost overthrown because politicians used dangerous rhetoric that caused—wait, hold on everyone, I just got the update. Roe’s been overturned!” said Representative Adam Schiff. “Okay, well if all the Republicans could please sit tight, there will be a brief recess while our Democratic caucus takes to the streets demanding we overthrow a branch of the federal government.”

After closing down their presentation entitled “How Trump Undermined Institutional Authority”, Democrats raced to join the crowd surrounding the Supreme Court building. “Rigged! Rigged decision!” shouted Senator Elizabeth Warren. “Judges must no longer be allowed to hold power! We will never abide by an illegitimate decision by an illegitimate court. Fight, fight!” she screamed as beleaguered police arrived in riot gear.

Warren didn’t really say that. This is what she actually said, a mendacious and demagogic misstatement of many of the issues decided in Dobbs and likely to result from it, a speech designed to mislead and prey on fears. Warren is a lawyer and former law professor and she knows better. But she thinks Americans are stupid and can’t understand either Roe or Casey or Dobbs.

That is the Democrats’ approach to this, and perhaps it will work with some people. If so, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time.

More Dobbs reflections

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I was originally planning to write today about the McCraw testimony on Uvalde. But other news intervened, and I’m postponing that, probably for tomorrow instead.]

I agree with Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection that the leak of the Dobbs ruling has at least somewhat diffused the reaction. That doesn’t mean the response on the part of the left won’t still be very very intense and rageful, perhaps even violent. But that was always a given, and other people have had two months to think about it.

The left – for example, AOC – will try to stir up the pro-abortion crowds. But how big will those crowds be, and what will they actually be doing? Will they become violent, and if so how violent, and will the local police restrain them and will the DOJ try them? We already had a person trying to assassinate Kavanaugh over the prospect of Roe’s being overturned, and that person is being prosecuted. But the people who protested at Kavanaugh’s house have not been arrested as far as I know, and that was a crime as well.

Then there are the political repercussions. The left, which loves to tell us how much they adore democracy, cannot abide the idea of people in each state having the right to decide about abortion for their own state. No, the left wants to dictate to others what to do – after all, as AOC says, “elections are not enough” for the left to get exactly what it wants, at least elections haven’t gotten them that so far. But aside from leftists – who weren’t going to vote Republican anyway, what votes have been changed by the Dobbs ruling?

I don’t know, but previous polls haven’t indicated it will be many. It seems to me the effect will be to intensity the left’s rage, but it was already very intense. Plus, on the right, there might be quite a few people who don’t usually vote because they think that Republicans and Democrats form a big “uniparty,” and the Dobbs ruling could in fact energize some of them who would not otherwise have voted to vote in 2022, enough of them to counterbalance some votes on the other side. It’s possible, anyway.

And then there’s Biden. Here’s some of what the Great Unifier had to say:

“It’s a realization of an extreme ideology and a tragic error by the Supreme Court, in my view,” he stated. “With this decision, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court shows how extreme it is, how far removed they are from the majority of this country.”

But though Biden urged protesters to be “peaceful, peaceful, peaceful” and proclaimed that “threats and intimidation are not speech,” what he still did not do is expressly condemn the actions of 26-year-old Nicholas John Roske, who was arrested in the early morning hours of June 8th after an admitted attempt at assassinating Justice Brett Kavanaugh ahead of today’s ruling. Nor did he expressly condemn the acts of intimidation and violence by pro-abortion radicals that have taken place in churches and at pro-life centers across the country over the last couple of months.

On the new gun control legislation

The New Neo Posted on by

In other news (besides Dobbs, which is the huge news of the day), Congress seems to be passing a new gun control law, with the cooperation of some Republicans.

This is the legislation I already discussed in #2 of this roundup. Concern centers around the fact that so-called “red flag” gun control provisions are ripe for possible abuse by angry and vengeful relatives (or others, depending on the details) or even by police. Thing is – and I don’t know if most people understand this – the bill apparently does not require states to adopt red flag laws, it merely provides funding for them:

The bipartisan gun bill that is on a fast track through Congress and backed by U.S. Sen. John Cornyn includes new state grants to incentivize red flag laws, which allow judges to temporarily seize firearms from people who are deemed dangerous.

That means it’ll be up to states as to whether they want to take advantage of one of the key provisions of the landmark gun legislation…

It includes $750 million that states can use to implement and maintain red flag programs. Generally, red flag laws allow the authorities to ask a court to take guns away from someone they believe is an imminent danger. In some cases, people beside the police — family members, for example, can petition a court.

But the funding could also be used for other crisis-intervention programs in states that do not currently have red flag laws or are unlikely to enact them anytime soon — like Texas.

So each state should be free to accept or decline, and if they accept, it seems they can enact as many protections against abuse that they can come up with. And SCOTUS can decide whether red flag laws for gun control violate the 2nd Amendment or due process, on a state-by-state basis depending on the details of each law.

Dobbs is issued, and Roe and Casey are overturned

The New Neo Posted on by

In a vote that was telegraphed in advance by the unusual leak, SCOTUS has overruled Roe and Casey, thus ending federal control over the states’ ability to set their own abortion laws.

My original prediction for Dobbs prior to the leak (and I don’t have time to locate it right now) was that Roberts would opt for a narrow ruling that upheld the Mississippi state law involved but left Roe and Casey for another day, and that one or two of the other conservative justices might agree with him and thus the can would be kicked down the road. That didn’t happen. The other conservative justices held firm against the precedents of Roe and Casey, and Roberts himself did exactly as predicted (although he reluctantly concurred with the majority), and therefore the Mississippi law was upheld 6-3 and Roe and Casey have been overturned.

As for the liberal justices, they voted exactly as expected.

There is little doubt in my mind that Roe and Casey were terrible decisions in the legal sense. It used to be that even many legal scholars on the left acknowledged that even if they approved of the result. But after Roe’s having been in place for nearly fifty years, several generations have grown up assuming it will continue to be the law. To me, the legal arguments against Roe and Casey are exceptionally strong, but the political repercussions are potentially as bad as the ruling itself was. It really depends on the reaction of the left – which at the moment is of course fury – and what that might lead to.

AOC has predictably said this:

Speaking outside the Supreme Court, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told protesters that “right now, elections are not enough” to reclaim abortion rights in America “we have to fill the streets.”

Insurrection, anyone? Will AOC be impeached for this? No, of course not. It’s particularly horrendous that she’s saying those words in light of the recent arrest of a man planning to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh, but hey, rabble-rousers gotta rabble-rouse. The real question is whether the protests will amount to anything, and what effect the Dobbs ruling will have on the vote in November.

What will different states end up doing about abortion, now that they are able to enact whatever abortion laws they wish, from strict to permissive? Blue states can continue to have abortion on demand, so most Democratic voters won’t find that this limits abortion in their states at all. Red states can do what they want, which will be varying degrees of prohibition that remain to be seen. More moderate states will almost certainly be in the middle. This is where we would have been, I think, without the fifty years of turmoil that Roe engendered. But now turmoil seems to be rampant in the US, and not just about abortion.

One fear I have, as an older person, is that illegal abortion will take the place of legal abortion and the results will be quite a few deaths of pregnant women. Those who believe that every abortion is murder probably will say it’s a tradeoff they’re willing to make to preserve the lives of so many unborn. I’ve written a great deal on abortion, and I refer you to this list if you want to learn them, with a more personal story here.

My hope – although I think it’s a vain one – is that this ruling will cause a lot more people to use birth control more assiduously. That wouldn’t eliminate unwanted pregnancies, but it would help reduce them. If abortion isn’t such an easily available backup, logic would dictate that might happen – but sex is an area where logic so often falters.

As for the decision itself, I haven’t read the whole thing, just short parts of it. Here are some excerpts:

…[I]n 1973, this Court decided Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113. Even though the Constitution makes no mention of abortion, the Court held that it confers a broad right to obtain one. It did not claim that American law or the common law had ever recognized such a right, and its survey of history ranged from the constitutionally irrelevant (e.g., its discussion of abortion in antiquity) to the plainly incorrect (e.g., its assertion that abortion was probably never a crime under the common law). After cataloging a wealth of other information having no bearing on the meaning of the Constitution, the opinion concluded with a numbered set of rules much like those that might be found in a statute enacted by a legislature…

…Roe…It imposed the same highly restrictive regime on the entire Nation, and it effectively struck down the abortion laws of every single State.

Justice Byron White aptly put it in his dissent, the decision represented the “exercise of raw judicial power,” and it sparked a national controversy that has embittered our political culture for a half century.

Eventually, in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833 (1992), the Court revisited Roe, but the Members of the Court split three ways…

Paradoxically, the judgment in Casey did a fair amount of overruling. Several important abortion decisions were overruled in toto, and Roe itself was overruled in part. Casey threw out Roe’s trimester scheme and substituted a new rule of uncertain origin under which States were forbidden to adopt any regulation that imposed an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to have an abortion. The decision provided no clear guidance about the difference between a “due” and an “undue” burden. But the three Justices who authored the controlling opinion “call[ed] the contending sides of a national controversy to end their national division” by treating the Court’s decision as the final settlement of the question of the constitutional right to abortion.

As has become increasingly apparent in the intervening years, Casey did not achieve that goal. Americans continue to hold passionate and widely divergent views on abortion, and state legislatures have acted accordingly…

We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely–the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but
any such right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.”

The right to abortion does not fall within this category.

Until the latter part of the 20th century, such a right was entirely unknown in American law…

Stare decisis, the doctrine on which Casey’s controlling opinion was based, does not compel unending adherence to Roe’s abuse of judicial authority. Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.

And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.

How many people even understand that’s what Dobbs now does – “returns the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives”? I would guess a lot of people think that Dobbs bans abortion, which it does not. The important issue of who decides – the federal judiciary or the state legislatures – which is the heart of Dobbs, is probably of little importance to a great many people, who want what they want.

[NOTE: Trump’s SCOTUS appointments led directly to Dobbs, as many have pointed out. But another important player was McConnell – whom many conservatives nevertheless detest – because he agreed to block Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to SCOTUS.]

Open thread 6/24/22

The New Neo Posted on by

This is Violette Verdy, in a short excerpt from her role as the girl in green in Jerome Robbins’ brilliant 1969 “Dances At a Gathering.” She was the role’s originator and the most musical dancer I’ve ever seen, with exquisite timing and expression. I saw her dance this role many times and it was always a wondrous experience. Video can’t capture it, but nothing could and I’m glad we have this to give at least a faint suggestion of her unique artistry:

That was Violette Verdy. This is not – although it’s a valiant effort by Aurelie Dupont. In the manner of later dancers, she is slower and much more tense than the joyous and relaxed Verdy, too:

Looking at Uvalde from another perspective

The New Neo Posted on by

At first the Uvalde school shooting riveted everyone’s attention because of its horror and tragedy. The murder of innocent and beloved children and their teachers is a nightmare that engenders deep feelings of rage and grief. At first, the stories focused on the victims and the perpetrator, and also some descriptions by survivors.

But after a while people realized that the perpetrator will always remain opaque, as psychopaths so often do. What drove an 18-year-old to end his life through an act of obscene cruelty? We’ll never know. The grandmother he shot in the face and left for dead has surprisingly survived, minus her jaw. His family will live with the mystery and the horror forever, but they have faded into obscurity once more. The children he killed will always be mourned by their families and friends, and the survivors will bear the physical and emotional scars.

But the world has moved on, as the world does. Now we’re confronting what might be done to improve school security, and the hearing in Texas this past Tuesday that featured Texas Department of Public Safety head Steve McCraw had lengthy discussions on that issue. But the focus for most people listening to the hearing was when he finally gave an updated timeline and facts.

In particular, people wanted to know about the police response. Ever since just a few days after the shooting, when it began to emerge that the police got to the school quickly but acted with agonizing slowness and delay, a great deal of rage has been directed in their direction and in particular towards the person who was ostensibly in charge but seemed to not have a clue what should be done, school police chief Arredondo.

I set out to watch McCraw’s entire testimony, which lasted about four and a half hours. I took notes the entire time and listened very carefully, sometimes playing certain sections several times. About a third of the way into it, I was struck with the thought that I was watching something that was teaching me much more than facts about the shooting. That “something” concerned the ways in which people take in information, communicate that information, understand or don’t understand each other, and act on their perceptions in terms of behavior and also in terms of their judgments of the behavior of others.

It’s something we do every day and every time we interact with another person. We’ve done it all our lives. Sometimes, when people make errors in perception or judgment or behavior, it doesn’t matter much. Sometimes it causes small misunderstandings and mistakes; sometimes it causes large ones. Sometimes it even causes fatal ones.

People whose job it is to investigate accidents are well aware of that. Sometimes they discover that an instrument was read wrong. Sometimes a word was misheard. Sometimes a person is tired and loses alertness (I once fell asleep for a split second while driving on three hours of sleep, and almost veered into oncoming traffic when something – I don’t know what – jerked me awake).

Fortunately, though, most of the time our errors have few or no important consequences – although some misunderstandings and miscommunications can end a friendship, or a marriage, or estrange a relative. But that’s part of being human.

Here’s a story. When I was about five years old, my older brother and I used to attend Sunday School classes from 9 AM to noon. My mother would pick us up then and take us home, about a three- or four-mile drive. But one Sunday she didn’t come.

I couldn’t figure out why. I watched all the other kids leave, and I think even a teacher or two asked me if I was all right and I said I was fine (I hated asking for help). But at a certain point I was left alone, standing there.

Fortunately it was a beautiful day, sunny and just a little warm. Although I was only five, I knew the way home – after all, we drove it Sunday after Sunday.

And so I started out for my house on foot. I had a choice of one of two ways to go. The shorter way was through the park and the longer way would take me around it (in those days each route was fairly safe). I chose the longer way because I would be passing the apartment building where my aunt, uncle, and cousin lived, and I decided to stop there and see if they were home, because I figured if they were then they could drive me to my house. I was starting to get a bit tired.

It was a good idea in theory. But they weren’t in their apartment; I rang and rang the bell but no answer. At that point it would have made my trip even longer to have backtracked and gone through the park, so I continued onward. It was a long walk, and as it got hotter I took off my outer sweater and carried it; for some reason I remember that in particular. The last stretch was uphill and I was dragging a bit more. But then I got to my block, and then my house.

The front door was open, and I stepped in. I saw my mother in the living room, sitting on a couch and chatting on the phone. She looked at me, open-mouthed with surprise, and I said something nasty to her and then turned on my heel and went upstairs to my room. I was really, really angry, because the only explanation in my head the entire time had been that she had simply forgotten me.

But then she told me her story. At about ten o’clock, my brother had called her from the school phone and said something like “We’re being let out early and I’m going to Jimmy’s house.” Jimmy was his friend. My mother thought that the “we” was my brother and me, but he actually meant that the other person in the “we” was Jimmy. My brother never for a moment thought my mother would misunderstand and think that he and I were the ones going over to Jimmy’s house. And my mother never thought that he didn’t mean me, so she never thought to ask him what he meant.

They both thought everything they said was clear. But when my brother phoned her to be picked up later on at Jimmy’s house, which happened at about 12:30, and she arrived there, she was stunned to learn I wasn’t at Jimmy’s, too. Stunned and very very upset.

Meanwhile, I was oblivious to all that, and plodding home, with my short cotton socks sinking down at the heels and forcing me to tug them up every block or so.

My mother took my brother in the car and they went to look for me. I wasn’t at the school anymore when they got there, of course; no one was. Again, my mother – and my brother – made an assumption at that point. Their assumption was that I would of course take the route we always took, the short one through the pretty park with the water feature and the birds. It never occurred to them that I wouldn’t do that, because they simply didn’t think that I’d stop at my uncle’s instead. I guess they thought of me as a creature of habit, unable to come up with a more creative solution to my problem; after all, I was only five. But when they drove the park route (several times, I think) I was nowhere to be found.

And so they went back to our house. My mother was extremely upset. My father wasn’t home. Did she call the police at that point? I can’t remember. But when I entered the house she was certainly calling someone (no cell phones back then, of course). She was flabbergasted and delighted to see me trudge in, my sweater dragging too. And I was absolutely enraged at her, till she told me the story of what had really happened. Even then, I couldn’t understand for a long time how my brother and mother had misunderstood each other so badly, and it bugged me that it ended up affecting me. It also seemed strange to me that all this drama had occurred completely outside my awareness. For me, the drama was at the beginning; the rest had just been tedious.

That’s a story with a completely happy ending. No one was hurt. My mother wasn’t guilty of neglect. I was forgiven for being angry. My brother was – my brother. But it planted seeds of knowledge within me about how easily communications can go astray, and it certainly wasn’t the only time that happened in my life.

On Tuesday, when I watched McCraw’s presentation, and then listened to the question-and-answer period as well, I was struck over and over with the ways in which people misunderstand each other despite making enormous efforts at being clear. It was a demonstration of one of my favorite quotes, from Karl Popper:

Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you.

And combine that with Donald Rumsfeld’s:

…[A]s we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

It’s usually those last ones that get you.

But police responding to a school shooter call don’t have the luxury of misunderstanding, or of having a lot of unknown unknowns. We demand perfection or near-perfection of them – or at least competence in often-chaotic situations – for a reason, which is that the stakes are extremely high. They are required to understand others clearly and to be understood clearly by others as well, and it is necessary for them not to assume that they know things they don’t know and to ask the right questions of dispatch, and all this must happen very rapidly in tense situations.

We also require courage of police – courage of a degree we don’t all have. I certainly don’t think I have the requisite courage; but then, I’m not a police officer. “It’s what they signed on for,” we say. So it probably is the case that even though we have almost no tolerance in police for error and/or stupidity or misunderstandings that can prove dangerous or fatal, we probably have even less patience for demonstrations of cowardice.

All of those are issues relevant to the perceptions and behavior of the police in Uvalde that day, and to our own perceptions of the meaning of the information we read and hear about that behavior. This was on full display in McCraw’s testimony as well as in the questions of the Texas senators. There were a number of communication breakdowns, as well as unknown-unknowns, even in the interactions between McCraw and the senators there, and I’m virtually certain that a lot of viewers will have trouble agreeing on what was said and in particular what it means.

So here I am again, writing a post with general reflections rather than going into the nitty-gritty of McCraw’s testimony. But for me this is a very big topic with many parts, so I felt the need to write this first. I definitely plan to go into much detail on specifics in subsequent posts – probably exhaustive detail.