A former anti-abortion activist reflects
Readers will have been unimpressed with Justice Samuel Alito’s decision in Dobbs to overturn Roe v. Wade after half a century. Prompted by news that evangelical activists were praying with some Supreme Court Justices, religious freedom activist Rabbi Jack Moline of the Interfaith Alliance spoke with anti-abortion activist Rev. Rob Schenck about the Dobbs ruling. Schenck is one of those praying with the justices after a decade of cultivating relationships that gained him that access.
Schenck was less than enthusiastic about Dobbs after events and studying Dietrich Bonhoeffer changed his thinking. The interview aired on State of Belief” on July 16. The following excerpt is at Mother Jones.
“I had set myself up to rejoice over this moment,” Schenck said when he realized the leaked draft ruling was authentic, “when in fact I was seeing it now as a catastrophe.”
I can only imagine. Is it your impression, knowing Justice Scalia as you did, that he would have encouraged this decision? Or would he have resisted it?
I can’t say for sure. I won’t say he most certainly would have voted with the majority on this, particularly in the way that justice Alito wrote it. I think he would have taken some issue with the way it was done; and as you said, how thin its jurisprudence was. It was filled with popular religious sentiment. You know, I’m not a lawyer; I’m most certainly not a Supreme Court litigator. But I was around enough of them and submitted briefs in enough cases I was interested in that I know what a good legal argument is, and this didn’t seem to be one. It seemed to be more of a polemic from our side of the movement! Which startled me, it took my breath away. Alito was using phrases we had invented as bumper sticker slogans in a Supreme Court decision! I don’t think Scalia would have ever signed onto that.
This fight is not over, Schenck believes:
And the talk now among my old interlocutors is, at the very least, for Congress to work for a national ban on abortion, period. Never mind that that’s contradictory to conservative sensibilities about state autonomy; because we’re not really in a conservative time anymore. I don’t think what happened at the Court in Dobbs or what is happening among the Republicans now in Congress or especially on state levels, is conservative. It’s radical, it’s fascist. And we should start saying that.
Pretty soon they may own it.
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