Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, eliminating constitutional right to abortion

I have no idea whether there's an "inalienable" right to an abortion, just that there is not one in the constitution. whether abortion should be legal the people can decide for themselves.

we probably need to clarify "rights" and "law."

 

"Marriage" is also not in the Constitution so under the same reasoning in Dobbs not only gay marriage could be called into question but marriage for all could be.

 

these two posts are related. Bentham is of course open to interpretation, but the standard account of "nonsense on stilts" is the idea that human-created rights (as opposed to God-given rights or rights somehow "discovered" in the "natural law") are arbitrary: if they can be granted or created by humans, they can also simultaneously be revoked or eliminated by humans.

This is one reason why some of the Founders were so adamant about a bill of rights: bills of rights stipulate rights that cannot without EXTREME effort be revoked or eliminated. And if you couple those enumerated rights found in bills of rights with correlative assumptions about where they come from (e.g., "natural rights" or "inalienable rights"), then they are for all intents and purposes nearly fool-proof as guarantees of freedoms.

To pin a "right to choose" or a "right to an abortion" on so flimsy a foundation as the infamous "penumbras" language Justice Douglas first promulgated is to invite the very possibility or even likelihood of revocation somewhere down the line. While Bentham was all for legal rights, he had a hard time with metaphysically-questionable philosophical and legal doctrines that were more fiction than fact.

To the last line of Lou's post ("the decision made here is treasonous to those ideals"), I will simply say that this is rather overblown as rhetoric. I know a lot of people are disappointed right now and have a very real need to blow off steam, but there's absolutely NOTHING at all "treasonous" about a Supreme Court decision of this type.

 

That is a good example. That was rightly overturned to GIVE more rights. What this decision has done is, for the first time in US history, explicitly taken a Constitutional Right away from Americans. It is going backward, heading toward wrongful decision such as Dred Scott.

EDIT - Another similarity of that Court to today's Court is Dred Scott decision was based on Originalism (the US Constitution didn't include people of African descent and thus the right and privilege of US citizens shouldn't apply to them). The same morally bankrupt logic is used today to strip Right away from Americans.

 

I see the the right to an abortion as a religious freedom right, and the state in anyway restricting them especially when the restrictions come from primarily a religious belief, as establishing a religion. For the Supreme Court to allow states to establish religions (a sort of sharia law banning abortions) is indeed a betrayal.

 

Bentham was an atheist so he doesn't subscribe to the idea of "God Given Rights" that Locke or Jefferson did.

Practical purposes yes rights exist because there is a government to enforce them and as such a government could choose not to enforce rights, effectively taking them away. For Bentham and many of these other philosophers, including the Founders, though the point of government was to provide a framework for the existence and exercise of rigths. That is why the language of the Bill of Rights is written as a not the granting of rights but restrictions on how government could infringe on rights.

The very langauge of the 9th Amendment shows that the Founders believed in an expansion of rights beyond what was enumerated.

 

well, that's a pretty torturous objection, which then is open to the same complaint: the so-called "secular" right to abortion could be argued to be rooted in a type of militant atheism, which is itself for constitutional and legal purposes a "religious worldview" as well. So your argument would apply to the right to abortion being inflicted on others as a result of religious belief--as you say, "as establishing a religion."

another way of saying this is that your line of reasoning may be self-refuting.

for the atheism question, you might take a look at:

Is Atheism a Religion? Recent Judicial Perspectives on the Constitutional Meaning of “Religion”

https://watermark.silverchair.com/47-4-707.pdf

 

So your hot take here is that the ONLY reason Roe was overturned was because of California’s stance on infringing the right? What a bizarre take.

I will say though that the reason it’s being overturned is because of the propaganda and activist movement which didn’t exist until the 90’s. They used shock tactics such as making posters of dead babies and stalking people at clinics. If you listen to people like my mom who is an anti abortion activist you’d think that every abortion ever is in the 3rd trimester and the doctor and the mom high five and put out their cigarettes on the dead body.

What this propaganda campaign lies about and generalizes is that every single time there is an abortion there is a very emotion and intense situation happen. And women have almost no reason to wait till their 3rd trimester… I guess out of laziness… if that’s the theory… to abort which is why you never actually can cite those stories and the ones the right wing activists are showing pictures of fetuses for could very well be a situation where the mothers life is on the line with a stroke which is more common than you think with pregnant women going into their 3rd trimester where your body is preparing to build up more blood and a blood vessel bursts in your brain. This happens and often a choice has to be made about which life to save which is why California has people on the other side saying let’s not infringe on that extremely delicate situation and let the mother, her family, and their doctors make the best decision they can given the moral complexities.

So your talking point and blame going to California is only accurate to the point that it’s given activists for years propaganda that is used to judge all women who might have an abortion to say “See!!! It’s ALL late term murder of babies”… but that’s based on lies and overgeneralization and if you actually heard the stories of women that did have to get an abortion, there’s a lot more nuance and moral complexities with every single case.

So respectfully your talking points on this and your attempt to blame California is just an admit that the right wing Christian Taliban propaganda campaign of 30 years is really what’s to blame and that’s actually the right answer here. If the problem is California only, there’s no reason for red states to pass draconian laws in their states.

 

as an Englishman Bentham didn't have a whole lot of enthusiasm for anything having to do with the American experiment in government

Of Rights and Witches: Bentham’s Critique of the Declaration of Independence

https://persistentenlightenment.com...-critique-of-the-declaration-of-independence/

 

while relevant, I don't think the "propaganda and activist movement" is "the reason it's being overturned." This focus pretty much misses the point that since 1973, the ill-conceived and poorly-reasoned decision in Roe galvanized and motivated several generations of legal thinkers in ways that historians are just now beginning to understand.

paywalled at the WSJ, but this is a nice article-length overview that really hits the nail on the head:

The Conservative Legal Push to Overturn Roe v. Wade Was 50 Years in the Making
An increasingly influential movement questioned the view of constitutional rights underpinning the decision

https://www.wsj.com/articles/roe-v-wade-overturned-supreme-court-11656110804

This legal movement had little or nothing to do with "posters of dead babies and stalking people at clinics."

If folks can't access WSJ, here's a book that covers much of the same ground, by a very fair and even-handed author:

 

The Founders were humble enough to realize they aren't God and can't foresee every future, every possibility to explicitly limits rights to only those that are directly written down in stones. What a concept!

 

More than likely I think banning p*rn is next since they’ll likely steal the language in legislation and propaganda campaigns of that other countries like Russia who have put in place p*rn bans based on a similar premise. With right to privacy going out the window it’s logically the next step. What you see with Russia too is the law being used the way weed has been here in the past and it’s way easier to sprinkle on victims. Russia uses p*rn as a way to easily attack political enemies. Someone like Trump would salivate at those laws being put in place so he could have something to hold against Republicans to bend them to his will and attack Democrats.

Given what the Ginny Thomas court wrote about their reasoning, I think gay marriage and states banning p*rn will be next. Tech companies are going to start freaking out and wish they never got in bed with Republicans.

 

Atheism is a belief system and not what I am talking about here.

A woman's right to have an abortion doesn't inflict that upon others. The pro-lifers aren't taking any damage, they are just upset that they can't have god's way. But this isn't a religious state and banning abortions all the way through is tantamount to Sharia Christian law.


Some people believe that Cows are conscious and killing one is an act of murder. Yet in this country it is still legal because it's ambiguous whether that is true or not, and historically we have eaten meat for sustenance. It would be clearly unconstitutional for a state to ban the consumption of meat because a bunch of vegans got into power at the state level. There would be no issue with the Supreme Court striking down a ban on meat under the grounds that animals should have the same rights as humans.

Obviously I am not saying humans are animals, but making an analogy to demonstrate the problem with the arguments being made here. It's at best ambiguous whether or not a zygote is a human life. It comes down to a belief system. And that's a religion and therefore the state has no right to impose that upon people. It should be left to the individual to make that decision.

 

if you look at the piece by Davis you'll realize that since the 1940s U.S. courts have increasingly moved toward a "functional" definition of "religion" that sees "belief systems" as religion. The theologian Paul Tillich used the phrase "realm of man's ultimate concern" to capture what he believed to be the essence of the religious impulse, and courts in the U.S. have been greatly influenced by that view

 

Haha… okay Mr. “Not a Republican”… shilling for overturning of Roe with your Prager U talking points really has me convinced.

Why do you think virtually every SCOTUS ruling has something written called “the Dissent”??

Maybe it’s because you can argue virtually anything is wrongfully decided which is why it got to the Supreme Court in the first place. But even Beerbong Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Handmaiden Barrett had to admit that Roe was established precedent and even if you disagree with the decision the court cannot step in to take away rights established by that precedent.

Of course they did it anyways because they just don’t care and think they are untouchable but they said it themselves why the point you are trying to make by dissenting the original case is still moot in the end. You’d say the same thing is a future court decided all the gun rulings in the past based on the 2nd amendment were wrongfully decided and stripped away your ability to own a gun. While abortion is not in the constitution the right to privacy is and that’s the right the court stood behind and established that abortion is a constitutional right.

But like with everything Congress has the ability to regulate and it has failed to do that on virtually everything after citizens United and previous SCOTUS rulings gave the power to billionaires to buy off politicians to do nothing which then gave SCOTUS god like powers and here we are…. With a self described independent making a case against Roe vs Wade to try and troll Democrats.

Enjoy your weekend of nothing but trolling on the internet. I’ll get on with my life from here and find something to enjoy today because the GOP bans it.

 

Conservatives will lose big on this and they deserve to, they just can’t let it go the dems can’t with the trans/over the top ****.

you can’t argue that Uvalde shooter has more of a constitutional right to obtain a gun than a woman does to terminate a single cell after she gets raped.

And it was the best thing they could have done for the dems because it’ll be a single issue vote

and we will have to suffer with more bidens because of it.

extremelely short sighted thinking

 

it was my mistake to reply to your post

 

I'm not disagreeing with you here. If you want to call Atheism a religion that's fine, but I am not arguing that the Courts should abide by atheism but rather that no belief system should be imposed on others.

 

I'll admit I'm having more trouble following what it is you're trying to say here