Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights per draft opinion (Update: Dobbs opinion official) (1 Viewer)

[Brennan77]

Forgive me for posting this given that I'm not a regular participant.

Exclusive: Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Justice Alito writes in an initial majority draft circulated inside the court.

www.politico.com

Read Justice Alito's initial draft abortion opinion which would overturn Roe v. Wade

Read the full 98-page initial draft majority opinion.

www.politico.com

 

[BullSheetBuddha]

You might want to give it a rest. Chuck was trying to patiently explain to you the reality and legality of what you are going on about. He and Dave have been far more patient than your posts have warranted

IMO Chuck is wrong about "what I'm going on about". And Dave? Well, you know Dave.

 

[SystemShock]

Fair point. But I maintain that we're in this spot more because of the hyper-politicization of the nomination process for SCOTUS justices than because of religion. The anti-abortion stance as a political position has been around since well before the religious right in politics was a thing.

And religion has played a major role in the hyper-politization of the SCOTUS nomination process.

The religious right has been around for a long, long time; and before it became the religious right, it was just religious.

 

[BullSheetBuddha]

And religion has played a major role in the hyper-politization of the SCOTUS nomination process.

The religious right has been around for a long, long time; and before it became the religious right, it was just religious.

Before it became the religious right it was the religious wing of the Democratic party, the Bible Belt.

 

[MT15]

I don't disagree, but being what it is now, people in those states will have to make their own decisions about what their abortion laws are. Granted there probably will come a time when those limits are revisited at the federal level. I'm not sure how that would happen. The best way to resolve it imo is for Congress to codify something approaching what Roe was for 50 years.

I still contend that a lot of politicians are pro-life or pro-choice because it's their party's position and not so much a real personal or religious red line. It's politically driven, although there's no doubt some religious influence, particularly in the Republican Party. If not for the party's duplicity in all things Trump, I might still be a Republican today. As things sit now, I can't see myself returning.

Yes, for the politicians it’s sometimes political. For the people pushing the politicians to take up these restrictions it is overwhelmingly religious based. Like over 90%. So I don’t think it matters why the politicians have taken that viewpoint. It’s overwhelmingly a religious viewpoint.

 

[MT15]

Fair point. But I maintain that we're in this spot more because of the hyper-politicization of the nomination process for SCOTUS justices than because of religion. The anti-abortion stance as a political position has been around since well before the religious right in politics was a thing.

IMO, it has always been religious. It was mainly a catholic religious stance for decades. Protestants and Evangelicals welcomed Roe 50 years ago. Anti-abortion picked up political steam only when evangelicals reversed their support. I’ve never known anyone who truly had an anti-abortion stance that wasn’t based on religious belief.

 

[SaulGoodmanEsq]

Do I though? If it is so unimportant, why not require it, like we do when you choose to buy a six pack?

For the record, I'm in favor of requiring ID's. Just pointing out that when they are required, people will complain voters are using fake IDs to vote.

 

[MT15]

IMO Chuck is wrong about "what I'm going on about". And Dave? Well, you know Dave.

You need to check your language. Both of the posters you are attacking are extremely fair-minded and very knowledgeable about their fields. I’ve been able to disagree with both of them without using abrasive language many times in the past. This website requires us to discuss civilly.

 

[cuddlemonkey]

IMO Chuck is wrong about "what I'm going on about". And Dave? Well, you know Dave.

I know Dave from his post history. I've disagreed with him on more than one occasion. I still respect the hell out of him and his opinions.

As for Chuck, I don't necessarily agree with him on this. As Shock said in his post a few minutes ago, SCOTUS has become incredibly steeped in religion and it's showing. I'm hoping that some of the cases brought forth challenging these cases on religious grounds- i.e., Judaism not only doesn't ban abortions but actually requires them in some situations- start to push things back.

I'm also hoping that John Roberts retires and Clarence Thomas resigns in shame in the next 6 months and tips the court back toward something resembling objectivity.

 

[DaveXA]

I'm not insulting anyone. It's you who is drooling at the mouth and has been throughout the last few pages of this thread. I saw it coming dozens of posts ago.

Nonsense...

I didn't say it was, obviously. I'm just giving you a little peek into how others feel so perhaps you'll realize how far off you are in this case.

Nonsense again. No one is saying that religion can't play a part in a voter's mind or a law makers mind. What's being said by those of us who can think is that religion can't be THE reason behind a law or position...

So isn't Stewart Rhodes. So wasn't Richard Nixon. Neither one could think worth a damn.

 

[DaveXA]

Yes, for the politicians it’s sometimes political. For the people pushing the politicians to take up these restrictions it is overwhelmingly religious based. Like over 90%. So I don’t think it matters why the politicians have taken that viewpoint. It’s overwhelmingly a religious viewpoint.

Fair point.

 

[DaveXA]

IMO, it has always been religious. It was mainly a catholic religious stance for decades. Protestants and Evangelicals welcomed Roe 50 years ago. Anti-abortion picked up political steam only when evangelicals reversed their support. I’ve never known anyone who truly had an anti-abortion stance that wasn’t based on religious belief.

That makes sense. I do think that the religious right getting almost militiantly involved in politics in the 80s and 90s started that march to overt religious influence in politics. They didn't really have to try that hard before then, but their grip on power has ebbed and flowed since then. I do think the current cycle is the beginning of the end of that stranglehold on the conservative political landscape, thanks somewhat ironically in large part because of Trump.

 

[BullSheetBuddha]

I know Dave from his post history. I've disagreed with him on more than one occasion. I still respect the hell out of him and his opinions.

I realize how important the need to appear to get along is here.

I'll restate that. I realize how important the need to get along is here.

 

[cuddlemonkey]

I realize how important the need to appear to get along is here.

I'll restate that. I realize how important the need to get along is here.

It's not about getting along. It's about not being unnecessarily antagonistic. There's great conversation to be had here for those willing to participate (or at least not actively shout it down).

 

[MT15]

It’s also the one thing that the guy who owns this site asks of us. Who provides us this space.

 

[BullSheetBuddha]

Some of our religious history.

Did Religion Make the Civil War Worse?

Faith may have inflamed the conflict, but one lasting legacy of the war may be the toll it took upon American faith.

www.theatlantic.com

What kept the nation feeding an entire generation into the Civil War’s meat grinder, especially if the war’s endgame prospects were so unclear? The answer, in Stout’s version, was American religion. A war which began as a fairly colorless constitutional dispute over secession was transformed by a tidal wave of “millennial nationalism” into a crusade with no off switch. Faust flips the causal equation. If religion did not exactly drive Americans to war, then war drove Americans to religion as the justification for its lethally expensive costs. “The war’s staggering human cost demanded a new sense of national destiny,” wrote Faust, “one designed to ensure that lives had been sacrificed for appropriately lofty ends.” A nation guided by realpolitik knows when to cut its losses. A nation blinded by the moral gleam of a “fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel” and charmed by the eloquence of a president with an uncanny knack for making his assessment of political problems sound like the Sermon on the Mount, obeys no such limitations.

There is not much questioning the cultural power of religion in America in the Civil War years. Americans at the midpoint of the 19th century were probably as thoroughly Christianized a people as they have ever been. Landscapes were dominated by church spires, and the most common sound in public spaces was the ringing of church bells. American churches jumped to exponential levels of growth. Between 1780 and 1820, Americans built 10,000 new churches; by 1860, they quadrupled that number. Almost all of the 78 American colleges which were founded by 1840 were church-related, with clergymen serving on the boards and the faculties. Even a man of such modest religious visibility as Abraham Lincoln, who never belonged to a church and never professed more than a deistic concept of God, nevertheless felt compelled, during his run for Congress in 1846, to still the anxieties of a Christian electorate by protesting that “I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular … I do not think I could myself, be brought to support a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion.”

If, in Jefferson’s words, the Constitution had erected a “wall of separation” between the church and the federal government, there was no corresponding wall between church and culture. Closed off from making policy, churches organized independent societies for Bible distribution, for alcoholism reform, for observance of the Sabbath, and for suppressing vice and immorality. And, they grew. By the time the French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville took his celebrated tour of the United States in the 1830s, he was amazed to find that while “in the United States religion” has no “influence on the laws or on the details of political opinions,” nevertheless, “it directs the mores” and through that “it works to regulate the state.”

The question Tocqueville did not ask was whether American religion would always be content simply with cultural dominance, and might not seize an opportunity, if it presented itself, to assert a political role. And if ever there was a moment when it seemed possible that American religion might reassume a managing place in public politics, the Civil War was it. At the height of the war, delegations of concerned clergymen received high-profile audiences with the President; the National Reform Association moved an amendment to the Constitution to add formal recognition of Christianity to its preamble; the military chaplaincy was dramatically expanded as a major component of the U.S. armed forces; and “fully one-third of all soldiers in the field were praying men and members of some branch of the Christian Church,” and religious revivals in the armies converted between 5 and 10 percent of men in uniform.

“Southerners must be made to feel that this was a real war, and that they were to be swept away by the hand of God, like the Jews of old.”

Above all, it was a time when Christianity allied itself, in the most unambiguous and unconditional fashion, to the actual waging of a war. In 1775, American soldiers sang Yankee Doodle; in 1861, it was Glory, glory, hallelujah! As Stout argues, the Civil War “would require not only a war of troops and armaments … it would have to be augmented by moral and spiritual arguments that could steel millions of men to the bloody business of killing one another...” Stout concentrates on describing how Northerners, in particular, were bloated with this certainty. By “presenting the Union in absolutist moral terms,” Northerners gave themselves permission to wage a war of holy devastation. “Southerners must be made to feel that this was a real war,” explained Colonel James Montgomery, a one-time ally of John Brown, “and that they were to be swept away by the hand of God, like the Jews of old.” Or at least offered no alternative but unconditional surrender. “The Southern States,” declared Henry Ward Beecher shortly after Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency, “have organized society around a rotten core,—slavery,” while the “north has organized society about a vital heart, —liberty.” Across that divide, “God is calling to the nations.” And he is telling the American nation in particular that, “compromise is a most pernicious sham.”

 

[SystemShock]

Before it became the religious right it was the religious wing of the Democratic party, the Bible Belt.

You have to go back way further than that.

 

[BullSheetBuddha]

You have to go back way further than that.

Be my guest.

 

[BullSheetBuddha]

It's not about getting along. It's about not being unnecessarily antagonistic. There's great conversation to be had here fr those willing to participate (or at least not actively shout it down).

It's not about getting along. It's about not being unnecessarily antagonistic. There's great conversation to be had here fr those willing to participate (or at least not actively shout it down).

Of course it's about getting along, and it's also about good conversation.