Following up on the post below here’s a pro-choice tactic that should tie the other side up in knots:
Revs. Jan Barnes and Krista Taves have logged hundreds of hours standing outside abortion clinics across Missouri and Illinois, going back to the mid-1980s. But unlike other clergy members around the country, they never pleaded with patients to turn back.
The sight of the two women in clerical collars holding up messages of love and support for people terminating a pregnancy “so infuriated the anti-abortion protesters that they would heap abuse on us and it drew the abuse away from the women,” recalled Taves, a minister at Eliot Unitarian Chapel in Kirkwood, Missouri, as she sat on a couch at Barnes’ stately church in this quiet suburb of St. Louis.
“I thought: ‘Whoa, these people really are not messing around.’ But then I thought, ‘Well, I’m not messing around either.’”
So when Missouri’s abortion ban took effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, Barnes and Taves decided to fight back. Along with rabbis and ministers across several denominations, they joined a first-of-its-kind lawsuit arguing Missouri blurred the line between church and state, imposed a particular Christian idea of when life begins over the beliefs of other denominations, and threatened their ability to practice their religions.
As the nation nears the one year anniversary of the fall of Roe, the Missouri case is one of nearly a dozen challenges to abortion restrictions filed by clergy members and practitioners of everything from Judaism to Satanism that are now making their way through state and federal courts — a strategy that aims to restore access to the procedure and chip away at the assumption that all religious people oppose abortion.
In fact, many of the lawsuits are wielding religious protection laws enacted by anti-abortion state officials to target those officials’ own restrictions on the procedure.
In Indiana, a group of Jewish, Muslim and other religious plaintiffs sued over the state’s near-total abortion ban. Their argument: that it violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act signed into law in 2015 by then-Gov. Mike Pence. A lower court judge sided with them in December and blocked the state’s ban from taking effect — the most significant win the religious challengers have notched so far.
Then, earlier this month, the Indiana judge granted the challengers class action status, meaning a win for them could apply to anyone in the state whose religion supports abortion access in cases prohibited by state law.
Even if the Religious Freedom law was intended by Mike Pence to discriminate against people, we thought: ‘Let’s use this for good instead,’” said Amalia Shifriss, a leader of Hoosier Jews for Choice, one of the Indiana plaintiffs. “It brings me joy to think how much this must upset him.”
Coincidentally I wrote a piece a couple of days ago about the court’s relaxing of the so-called “sincerity requirement” which required that any freedom of religion case be based upon sincerely held religious beliefs. They haven’t really questioned it in any of their recent cases even though there’s ample reason to believe that some of the cases were purely political. I wrote this:
I do have a sneaking suspicion that the courts will once again discover the “sincerity requirement” when an offbeat religion decides to test it …
Here’s the best Mike Pence’s campaign could come up with:
A Pence spokesperson characterized the lawsuit as a “pursuit to legalize abortion up to and even after birth. They added: “It will probably strike Americans as pretty tasteless to call the latest iteration of their abortion crusade as a cause ‘for good’ and a source of ‘joy.’”
The original article concludes:
Judges have historically avoided questioning the sincerity of someone’s religious beliefs, but Becket and other groups have filed amicus briefs that do so.
To combat these accusations, the challengers point to scripture that lays out a case for abortion rights as well as support from religious leaders for their claims.
The Jewish challengers in Kentucky cite religious texts including the Mishnah that say life begins when a baby takes its first breath, not when it is conceived, and if medical issues arise during pregnancy, the pregnant person’s life “comes before the life of [the child].” They also submitted to the court letters from rabbis arguing that current state exemptions for life-threatening medical emergencies aren’t enough, saying Jewish law permits, and in some cases requires, an abortion when there is “a risk of poverty, abuse, addiction, or mental illness.”
The case challenging Missouri’s ban cites the United Church of Christ’s vote in 1971 to acknowledge the right to abortion and members’ “autonomy to determine what happens to their own bodies,” as well as the Episcopal Church’s “long-standing opposition” to any government attempt to infringe on reproductive choices.
“There’s a tendency to see these cases as kind of a clever, legal switcheroo. Like, here’s a way to take these laws that are often thought of as very conservative and use them to protect abortion rights,” Platt said. “But the idea of reproductive rights as a religious liberty issue is absolutely not something that came from lawyers. It’s how faith communities themselves have been talking about their approach to reproductive rights for literally decades.”
Centuries actually.
I’m sure this very orthodox Catholic Supreme Court majority will find a way to dismiss those beliefs. They have no trouble being intellectually inconsistent if it suits their purpose. They just don’t care.about that. But it will prove once again just what rank partisans they really are.