Legislating in the Name of God by Linda Greenhouse
'One hundred fifty years ago, a woman named Myra Bradwell brought a Supreme Court case claiming a constitutional right to be admitted to the Illinois bar. She had passed the states bar exam with high honors, but the Illinois Supreme Court refused her application, saying that when the State Legislature gave the court the power to grant law licenses, it was with not the slightest expectation that this privilege would be extended to women.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the state court, with Justice Joseph Bradley writing in a concurring opinion that the paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.
This, Justice Bradley explained, is the law of the Creator.
The case of Bradwell v. Illinois is regarded today as a low point in Supreme Court history, at least by those of us who reject the notion of God as the ultimate personnel administrator. But it turns out that God has a role in the countrys civic life after all: that of supreme legislator.
Republican politicians used to offer secular rationales for their anti-abortion zealotry: They claimed that abortion hurt women or that abortion procedures demeaned the medical profession. In the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, some opportunistic states imposed temporary bans on abortion, making the demonstrably false assertion that abortion patients would take up scarce hospital beds.
But now, sensing the wind at their backs and the Supreme Court on their side, Republican officeholders are no longer coy about their religion-driven mission to stop abortion. In May, when Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signed S.B. 8, the vigilante bill that bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, he claimed that our creator endowed us with the right to life, and yet millions of children lose their right to life every year because of abortion. In Texas we work to save those lives. (There are actually fewer than one million abortions a year in the United States, but lets not get picky with the facts.)'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/09/opinion/abortion-supreme-court-religion.html
Diamond_Dog
(31,956 posts)Her no-nonsense explanations of legal matters make these things easy for even me to understand.
OldBaldy1701E
(5,112 posts)the thousands that die from easily treated things and negligence because of poverty and oppression don't matter to 'Gawd'. Oh, these are rethugs we are dealing with... of course they don't count! Hell, they were probably little tiny sinners anyway!