A Bright Day
Atlanta, GA
June 26, 2022
Markets, they say, are forward-looking.
The one for lumber is no exception. It realized the last couple years that shops and businesses would need abundant wood to board their windows. Supplies shrank, prices rose.
Proprietors shielded their storefronts from lockdown looters, BLM rioters, and the expected mêlée from admirers of “Democracy” if the last election hadn’t gone their way.
The persistent crime, destitution, and decay that proliferated as a predictable result of covid “mitigation measures” are an enduring impetus to protect property while keeping the fire extinguisher handy.
Last week, a new reason arose to keep the planks up. More “mostly peaceful” protests may well be on the way.
Friday, the usual cadre of moral pygmies, judicial ignoramuses, and political opportunists pulled the pin from their cranial grenade when the Supreme Court had the audacity to acknowledge that the US Constitution does not, in fact, protect a “right” of expectant mothers to kill their unborn kids.
But the Court didn’t prohibit them from doing so. It merely recognized that the power to prohibit…or to permit…lies with the states.
Constitutionally, this is clearly the right ruling. If anything, it didn’t go far enough. The Court could’ve appealed to the Fifth Amendment assertion that no “person” shall be “deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law” to prohibit abortion in every state.
But we’ll take what we can get. And I never thought I’d live to see the glorious thing we got.
Like an adult books section in a public library, Roe was an egregious affront that needed to go. That it was there for fifty years is irrelevant, and beside the point.
Supreme Court decisions aren’t tenured professors. They shouldn’t be allowed to stay simply by virtue of sticking around. Precedence is important, but it’s not paramount; constitutionality is.
If a ruling was erroneously decided, it should be discarded. Would Roe’s advocates have made an appeal to “precedence” to retain Plessy v Ferguson, which stood almost a decade longer?
Roe was overturned because it was as much a legal travesty as a moral outrage. That some judicial ouija board could conjure an arbitrary “right” to dismember unborn babies doesn’t mean there is one. And it certainly doesn’t make central government enforcement of such a prerogative constitutional.
Notwithstanding that the Fifth Amendment could be interpreted to ban abortion, the Constitution grants the US government no authority to interfere in such matters. These are issues to be decided by or within the states. Laws will vary, which is fine. That’s how it should be in a federal republic of fifty sovereign societies.
Supreme Court decisions on school prayer, contraception, sodomy, and homosexual “marriage” should be repealed for similar reasons. They were unconstitutional over-reaches by activist Courts imposing revolutionary schemes on reluctant states. It’s high time courts reversed this relentless usurpation of undelegated power, and returned it where it belongs.
In many states, the abortion industry will doubtless be curtailed or eliminated. In others, like the disintegrating hellholes where forced lockdowns and compulsory vaccines were most prominent, this particular “right to choose” will likely persist. If anything, to the extent possible, it will probably expand.
But to the cult of child sacrifice in which abortion is the sacrament, that’s not good enough.
States inclined to restrict abortion may not like the fact that others permit it. But they also tend to mind their own business and not meddle in others’ affairs. South Carolina or Mississippi may not care for California or Connecticut, but they don’t grab bullhorns, take to the streets, and tell them what to do.
It is in states where abortion is secure where tantrums always erupt. It is in bastions of “tolerance” that seismographs reverberate to the sinister shaking of sanctimonious lecturing and self-righteous rage.
Tho’ their legal ability to get an abortion remains unperturbed, its advocates can’t abide another community deciding to live by different rules. It’s always the proponents of “diversity” that demand every place be the same. It must always be their way, everywhere.
This power-hungry petulance derives from endemic narcissism in a disposable culture. It thrives on phony money, instant gratification, and no consequences (at least not for themselves).
People come to believe that reckless actions should be unencumbered by opportunity cost. They live for the day, and give no thought to tomorrow. This is the rotten fruit of high time preference, of which there can be no more dire symptom than official sanction to snuff out one’s own offspring.
In such a society, easy abortion is as much a boon to irresponsible men as it is an escape hatch for selfish women, which is why so many of them support it. They’ll summarily dispose of their baby or abandon the mother to get on with their lives.
But now, as when a toxic spill is removed from a tropical beach, the sand is shifting. As the red tide of Roe recedes, perhaps it can carry with it the foul stench of flawed reasoning and Orwellian euphemism.
Persistent propaganda portrays an inability to abort a child as inhibiting “healthcare”, and an unconscionable assault on “reproductive rights.” But that’s patently preposterous. Using metal forceps to crush a pre-born skull is not only not “healthcare”; it’s a vile inversion of both “health” and “care”.
Nor does prohibiting abortion diminish “reproductive rights.” Every woman remains as free to reproduce (or not to) as she was on Thursday. And she would retain that freedom even if abortion were completely banned.
Abortion doesn’t thwart reproduction, which happens at conception. Abortion ends a life to prevent birth. Had reproduction not already occurred, there’d be nothing to extinguish from the sanctity of the womb.
But by the grace of God, those children are there. Since Roe, almost 70 million of them were legally eliminated. Many would have perished regardless, as they did before Roe and, regrettably, will afterward.
Yet when a society sanctions monstrosities, it becomes monstrous. The hyperbolic hyperventilation after Friday’s ruling is an instructive symptom of how far this one has devolved.
For two years we were assured that the most anti-scientific lunacy was worth it “even if it saved just one life.” Discarding Roe may save millions, which is reason to rejoice.
Last week featured the longest day of the year. It also gave us the brightest one in decades. On Friday…the Solemn Feast of the Sacred Heart…the Holy Innocents received a reprieve.
Eternal rest to those who didn’t.
JD
