It’s Free States and Slave States again
“If you don’t think this country is sliding toward theocracy, you’re not paying attention,” writes Charles Blow, reacting to the Alabama Supreme Court’s Tuesday ruling that frozen embryos are children. Destruction of those embryos, even by accident, the court ruled, falls under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.
From the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe to plans by Trump-aligned think tanks to restructure the United States to suit Christian nationalists to Alabama’s Tuesday ruling, Tali-bans will pop up all over in a second Trump term. A national abortion ban is clearly on the agenda.
“Control of women’s bodies is the endgame,” Blow continues.
But is it? Reducing women to birthing vessels and daycare attendants is only one part of the plan. Theists who have long argued that the founders intended to create a Christian nation publish textbooks, build theme parks, ban books, and rail against public education on that basis in a bid to force the rest of us to live according to their worldview. And not just women. Women in their minds are simply easier targets.
Will Bunch this week posted a Heritage Foundation clip from last year advocating the elimination of birth control. Bunch comments, “If Democrats can’t defeat a party that wants to end recreational sex then I give up.” Women are not their only targets, boys. They’ll be coming for IUDs and condoms in short order. The most radical among them believe even barrier methods are murder.
Their Mandate for Leadership (over 900 pages) and its supporting organizations toss around the word freedom liberally, but neither liberality nor freedom is their goal. Not, at least, as the majority of Americans living outside their looking-glass world would recognize it.
Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi reminds people that the IVF ban impacts men as well as women, mothers and fathers, families, couples, everyone. The Christian nationalist vision is fueled not simply by isolationism and xenophobia. Their vision is totalizing, and they’ve written it down.
It is ironic how, especially post-September 11, whenever a Muslim ran for office, the right screamed that she/he meant to introduce Sharia law to the United States. Some other faith’s religious law: bad. Christian theist’s law: good.
The extremist right threatens civil war whenever it does not get its way in a democratic process it has already abandoned. And they have not gone to guns yet. But already in the post-Roe era we are devolving into free states and slave states where it is not only women’s rights to control their bodies being restricted, but the rights of anyone who wants to become a parent and start a family. Our most intimate decisions are at stake. Christian nationalists’ targets are all of us.
Update: Too good not to add.
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