The hypocrisy of the righteous
24th May 2021 · 0 Comments
Anti-abortionists will get another day in Court this year. The Supreme Court of the United States will hear a challenge to a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks of gestation.
The U.S. Supreme Court last year rejected Louisiana’s heartbeat law and others and upheld Roe v. Wade.
Still, it’s totally feasible that the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade this time. Trump’s stacked the Court with three extremely conservative Republican judges who kissed his ass to get their seats.
With a Republican 6-3 majority, Republicans can rule as they please. They can overturn Roe v Wade and other cases of historical importance. If they wanted to, they could overturn Brown v. Board of Education and make legal segregation the law of the land again.
White Evangelical Christians continue to be at the forefront of the Anti-Abortion Movement. They consider fetuses “persons” who have a right to live and abortion a sin before God. Republicans jumped on the anti-abortion bandwagon during the Reagan era.
Anti-abortionists have the right to feel some kind of way about abortion, but they don’t have the right to impose their beliefs on others, nor does the U.S. Supreme Court.
The problem with the abortion debate is just that. Why is there any debate, much less a legal one, about what a woman should do with her body? Who gave the federal government the right to regulate what goes on in a woman’s uterus?
The arrogance and hypocrisy of pro-lifers, evangelical Christians, and conservative Republicans are stunning. From their perspective, a woman has no rights over her body.
They do support the rights of people who deny services to gay and transgender people. But gay and transgender people don’t have the right to be who they are.
They also take issue with the rights of folk who deny entry to people not wearing masks into their establishments. Maskless people’s constitutional rights must be upheld. And they support anti-vaxxers’ claim that they have the right to not be vaccinated but don’t support people’s right not to be infected with a deadly virus and its variants by maskless people.
They claim to believe in the sanctity of life. But these are the same people who oppose funding to cut child poverty in half. These are the same people who refuse to vote for a living wage, who want to scrap the Affordable Care Act, who, like Senator Ron Johnson, aren’t concerned about racially motivated domestic extremists.
Johnson, a Republican and Trump loyalist, dared to say that Congress shouldn’t be focusing on domestic terrorism that “might kill a couple hundred people a year.” Johnson is the same hypocrite that tried to downplay the Jan. 6 insurrection, claiming the violent Trump mob were patriots. Those “patriots” put 140 Capitol Hill police in the hospital and caused the deaths of five people who died due to their “patriotism.”
Johnson and his fellow Republicans won’t vote for the George Floyd Justice in Policing bill because the legislation ends qualified immunity for police and sets up a national database of police misconduct. Officers with a history of killing or abusing citizens can’t simply get hired by another police department.
What happens to the sanctity of life when cops kill innocent, unarmed people who they swear to protect and serve? Are their lives not as precious as unborn fetuses? Anti-abortionists say abortion is murder, but these are the same people who support the death penalty – state-sanctioned murder – via lethal injection, the electric chair, and even firing squads.
Do these hypocrites understand that once a child is born, he or she still needs protection, childcare, education, and good quality of life? Do they know that even when children grow up, they need help?
These are the same people who want to slash food benefits for families with children, support Biden’s supplement childcare funding, cut child poverty in half, and refuse to provide supplemental unemployment benefits to people who lost their jobs during the pandemic.
What happens to the sanctity of life in those cases?
This article originally published in the May 24, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
