This commentary is by Walt Amses, a writer who lives in North Calais.
The first full weekend of summer finds temperatures a little too warm and the water a little too cold but I chalk it up as an impasse, like flipping a coin that lands on its edge, and go in anyway.
While my no-hesitation entry is impressive to the couple of people on shore, they have no idea I actually tripped over an unseen rock and my first couple of strokes aim to keep it that way. As the sweat from an earlier walk dissolves and the gardening grit succumbs to the crystal water of the isolated pond, I’m in a familiar zone, one that for decades has allowed me to transcend most everything the world has to offer.
Not this day.
Like most everyone else in the country, I’m ruminating over a series of small “What ifs” that coalesced into last week’s thunderbolt, setting back a century of American intellectual and scientific progress, empowering a Christian theocracy bent on its superstitions dictating the rule of law.
What if Merrick Garland? … What if Hillary? … What if RBG? … What if Bernie Bros? The chilling message in this decision is that what voters want is fast becoming immaterial to the court, and why not? Five of the justices in the majority were appointed by presidents who entered the White House after losing the popular vote.
Patiently waiting three decades for his day to come, Clarence Thomas made clear immediately that he wasn’t yet satisfied. He wanted more. In a concurring opinion, stunning in its implications, Thomas took aim at the heart of a nation already riven by the court’s overturning Roe v. Wade, intimating that the rights to marriage equality, intimate LGBTQIA + relationships and even contraception could eventually be heading for the SCOTUS chopping block.
Joined by one credibly accused of sexual misconduct (as was Thomas) and three who perjured themselves onto the court, the justices capped off an extraordinary week of far-right fever dreams, elevating fetuses over women, concealed weapons over public safety, rogue cops over Miranda Rights and religious schooling at public expense over church-state separation.
As all this was being imposed on a public overwhelmingly wanting no part of it, Thomas rubbed salt in the wound, all but inviting challenges to a wide spectrum of gay rights, contraception and the right to privacy itself.
Turning back after a couple of hundred yards, I begin to forget how cold the water is but can’t tear my focus from the self-mythologizing of the Christian right, and its sanctimonious recall of how Roe galvanized the movement in 1973, jumpstarting a half-century of activism leading to last week’s big SCOTUS victory.
Unfortunately, as William Barr might say, their recollection is total bullshit. Randall Balmer, the Mandel family professor of arts and sciences at Dartmouth, eviscerated what he termed a “durable myth” several years ago in Politico magazine. “It wasn’t until a full six years after Roe that evangelical leaders seized on abortion not for moral reasons but as a rallying cry to deny Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools.”
Largely conceived by the late Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, the new coalition’s long-term objective was political power, which, according to Weyrich, once achieved would “give the Moral Majority the opportunity to re-create this great nation.”
But Balmer reports a catalyst around which to rally was elusive: “Weyrich by his own account had tried out different issues to pique evangelical interest, including pornography, school prayer, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment and even abortion,” but couldn’t get “those people” interested, admitting at a 1990 conference that he had “failed utterly.”
Contradicting the carefully manufactured mythology, we find the Christian response to Roe v. Wade was hardly a response at all, certainly not angry. It was mostly silence or even outright approval. Baptists thought the decision was “an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior.” W. Barry Garrett, writing in the Baptist Press at that time, suggested “religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.”
But issues around money, power and racism proved too difficult to ignore and losing the federal tax exemption of their racially discriminatory private schools was a bridge too far and the religious right was born through no connection whatever to abortion.
Another concern for evangelicals was that if their “segregation academies” lost their status; gifts and donations to such institutions would no longer provide charitable tax deductions. Although abortion, writes Balmer, “emerged as a rallying cry by 1980, the real roots of the religious right lie not in the defense of a fetus but in the defense of racial segregation.”
The next afternoon, after a longer swim on a bigger, even colder lake, I’m lying on a dock in bright, warm sunshine, staring at a string of cumulus clouds vaguely reminiscent of Hubble telescope photographs: towering columns of dust and gas purported to show the birth of stars from interstellar gasses, nicknamed “the pillars of creation.”
As the magnificence of those amazing images — 6,500 light years from earth and 7,000 years into the past — come back to me, I find it inconceivable that the nation capable of such wonder would imply threats to women’s access to contraception, subsequently forcing them to give birth against their will.
Misogynistic to the extreme; Draconian beyond measure; and so primitive Samuel Alito justifies the decision by citing (several times) Sir Matthew Hale, a 17th-century English legal authority who thought there was no such thing as marital rape, believing “I do” was retroactive consent, and presided over witch trials.
The very idea this character would convey even a shred of credibility in the victimization of women is simply loathsome.
Welcome to Christian America.
