States’ rights are the boogeyman!
3rd June 2024 · 0 Comments
During the last century, it was common for parents to tell children that if they misbehaved, “the boogeyman is going to get you.” Britannica.com says the word boogeyman originated in the 15th century and was used to describe a monster or “a frightening specter.”
Contrary to conventional wisdom, States’ rights are not mythical creatures but “frightening specters” that we must confront in society. Whenever states want to override federal protections and constitutional law, they scream for states’ rights.
The doctrine of states’ rights generally favors local and state control over federal control.
The 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives certain powers to the states:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively or to the people. Ratified by Required Number of States, December 15, 1791.”
For Black people, states’ rights are codes for “Let’s use state power to take away constitutional rights, voting rights, due process rights, and any other rights we can think of from Black Americans.”
Southern states have a long history of wanting to circumvent federal laws they didn’t support, especially laws that interfered with their right to own slaves and take them wherever they wanted, PBS History Detectives assert.
In the 1850s, Southern states argued that federal laws that banned the expansion of slavery into territories discriminated against states that allowed slavery.
Not surprisingly, in 1857, in America, when racism and discrimination loomed large as a by-product of enslavement, racist white men sat on the U.S. Supreme Court; that year, the high court sided with states’ rights supporters in Dred Scott v. Sandford ruling that Congress had no authority to regulate slavery in the territories.
States’ rights were also vital in the Secession Crisis of 1860-1861 when South Carolina and other Southern states seceded from the Union in protest of Abraham Lincoln’s presidential election. Obviously, the desire for unfettered states’ rights and the overriding of the federal government’s constitutional supremacy led to the American Civil War.
The states’ rights boogeyman continued to buck the federal government’s powers during the civil rights era when avowed segregationists like Alabama Governor George Wallace used states’ rights to enforce racial integration.
New Orleans Attorney Kenneth Jones Jr. defines states’ rights as “Any field that is not regulated by the federal government, state laws control.”
“It’s like when the dog catches the car. The states don’t know what to do. Each state has different thoughts based on what its population believes in. More religious states have draconian rules because they go hand in hand with what they believe in,” the attorney explains.
Today, the boogeyman, aka states’ rights, is being used by religious zealots in states, especially Southern states, again, to control women’s bodies.
Abortion bans in 21 states have brought many women to death’s door for lack of maternal health care, abortions, and D&Cs that could save their lives when their fetuses are not viable.
“In the Bible Belt, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Florida, no abortion. More liberal states, like California and Wisconsin, have different mindsets,” Jones explained.
Louisiana legislators, religious extremists who voted and passed the so-called “Heartbeat Bill,” a near-total abortion ban, and, more recently, a bill outlawing medical abortions through two medications, have disgraced the state and may ultimately be to blame should women who can’t get maternal health care die.
Kaitlyn Joshua, a Louisiana resident and married mother of two, was denied health care at two Louisiana hospitals while miscarrying her and her husband’s third child. She nearly died. Joshua is now on the campaign trail for President Joe Biden and telling her story in national media interviews.
The boogeyman of states’ rights is without question demonic. How else can we view people who are blurring the lines of the separation of church and state and taking away women’s bodily autonomy and families’ right to choose whether to have children or not? How else can so-called Christian nationalists be viewed?
This country was founded on religious freedom, not religious fervor or domination.
But Louisiana and other state legislators aren’t the only ones with blood on their hands.
Former President Donald J. Trump Sr. and Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court do as well. In overturning Roe v Wade, which Trump brags about doing, they stripped away women’s rights to choose and ceded the high court’s power to states’ rights.
When they overturned Roe with Dobbs, there was no federal right to an abortion. That is now the law of the land. Each state can now exercise its police powers (health, safety, welfare). Under its health and police powers, it can now regulate abortion.
Since there’s no federal government statute to dominate the field (maternal health care), the law is only what the state legislature provides for.
But then there is karma. When women die in large numbers, hospitals and states will be sued. And there’s a high possibility that they will lose in the courts.
The only remedy for restoring women’s rights to choose nationwide is if there is a new federal court decision or a national federal abortion statute passed by Congress.
The fight for women’s rights and bodily autonomy is not over. The battle will be waged at the ballot box. Indeed, women in several states have voted to retain a woman’s right to choose and ensured that the right is codified in their state constitutions.
For women in states with abortion bans, “Rovember is Coming,” as one protest sign announced, and with it, the chance to slay the boogeyman. Your vote is your sword.
This article originally published in the June 3, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
