THIS TAKES THE CRAZY CAKE

By

William A. Gralnick

What in the Sam Hill is going on?!? Many believed that the anti-abortion crazies gunning for Roe V. Wade saw that group as an excellent puzzle piece to plug into their election strategy maps. Now we have a way for religious belief to bore into politics like a bull moose bores into anything that makes it angry. A conservative majority in the Supreme Court was hammered into place. That process proved that a lie here or there in pursuit of the black robe fell under the rubric of the ends justifying the means.

I wager most people don’t understand that the constitution was very protective of states’ rights. Only by interpretation and in some cases, dire needs of the country as a whole gave us a burgeoning Federal government. Once the Court put Roe v Wade behind bars, the states could now be the arbiters of what a woman could and could not do about her personal family-building feelings. In a perfect world, which by so many measures this one is not, this seems to be the way the framers wanted things. They did not see the lunacy that could overtake the system.

Lunacy, while applicable, is not really fair. What we are seeing is the cock-eyed result of the urban (progressive)-rural (conservative) in this country. Many state legislatures are tilted towards the right. One reason is that middle-class, liberal, well-educated voters tend to turn their noses up at state legislators, thinking only the Federal vote matters. The other is that motivated conservative voters knew what they were doing when they began taking state doings seriously. (Below is Tallahassee, Florida. Not quite urban America).

So, this is what you have. According to a March report in the New York Times, 13 states have either forbade abortions or allowed them with such restrictions, i.e. within six weeks of conception, that they might as well have made them illegal. Georgia is one such state. As of this writing, a legislative committee has voted to move the bill to the floor. The states in the illegal or near-illegal category are these:

Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. You can pretty much add Georgia and Florida. If I were a betting man, I’d bet there are more to come. Nor, of course, is that all. Now we are entering the battle of the abortion pill. This issue will end up with the Supremes. Surely there will be a challenge regarding whether a…