The GOP Has Become the Party of Theocrats, and Samuel Alito Is their High Priest.

Posted on | April 23, 2023 | 1 Comment

Mike Magee

In the realm of historical fiction, Justice Alito and his GOP supporters have proven themselves masterful. The 7 to 2 decision (with Alito and Thomas in opposition) to leave the FDA alone for now with jurisdiction over the safety and efficacy of Mifepristone, does little to reassure that these Theocrats are men of their word.

Justice Alito’s reliability should be viewed through the lens of the testimony provided by Justices Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Gorsuch, under oath, on the topic during their confirmation hearings. Alito and Clarence Thomas and these co-signers on his leaked Dobbs draft assured us that the dismantling of Roe v. Wade would be self-limiting since “none of the other decisions cited by Roe and Casey “involve the critical moral question posed by abortion.”

But the history and performance of these five Justices, their original and current supporters, their documented religious orthodoxy, and the web of conservative schools and think tanks that nurtured their well-entrenched biases, all suggest a conspiracy that could threaten our democracy.

Elizabeth Fresse PhD, research associate at Auburn Seminary, sounded the alarm a year ago with this warning, “Morality has thus become the reigning justification for the state to infringe upon the liberty of female Americans and to subjugate their reproductive labor to its power. An interrogation of this morality, however, reveals that it is underpinned by a theology that both erases and assumes the subjugation of female gestational labor in procreation to patriarchy. We must shatter this male-dominant moral logic and foreground female personhood and agency in order for every American to be equally free.”

Dr. Linda Rosenstock, Dean Emeritus and Professor of Health Policy and Management at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health, has laid it out clearly that the loss of women’s autonomy over birth decisions, most especially unintended pregnancy, would be catastrophic.

“The broader the access to proven family planning methods, the lower the unintended pregnancy rate and the lower the abortion rate. We can’t underestimate the role of educating and empowering women – and men – about these issues.”

These are not simply the opinions or insights of a single health expert. They are backed up by the following facts:

1. Since 1981, abortion rates in U.S. women, age 15 to 44, have declined by nearly two thirds from 29.3 per 1000 to 11.4 per 1000.

2. Approximately half of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended. Of those unintended, approximately 40% of the women chose to terminate the pregnancy by abortion – either procedural or chemically induced.

3. The decline in the number of abortions has coincided with increased access to long-acting reversible contraception, including IUD’s and contraceptive implants. These options are now safe, increasingly covered by insurers, and more accessible to at-risk populations. Contraceptive reversible implants are now chosen by 16%, IUDs by 21%, and operative tubal ligation by 28%.

4. The increasing inclusion of sex education in middle school and high school curricula (DeSantis antics aside) has been accompanied by a decline in high school sexual activity by 17% between 2009 and 2019.

5. There were 629,898 abortions recorded by the CDC in 2019. For every 1000 live births that year, there were 195 other women who chose to terminate their pregnancies. More than half of the 1st trimester abortions are now chemically induced through Plan B-type pills.

The GOP, bolstered by minority-rule Right to Life advocates, bred and nurtured by ultra-conservative Catholics and Evangelical Christians, have (by their actions) revealed that a broader agenda than simply eliminating abortions is at work here. That broader agenda includes patriarchal control over women’s sexuality and enhancing congregant birth rates in America.

State GOP “dignitaries” want to play doctor and manage miscarriages one the one hand, while limiting contraception to promote handmaiden status on young women on the other. Using one crazy judge in Texas , they seek to dismantle the FDA and PhRMA science. Book sanctions, pedophilia fantasia, insistence that failed “abstinence-only” sex education works, highly organized assaults on women’s services provided by Planned Parenthood? In a climate like this, is it reasonable to assume that Justice Alito is trustworthy?

Other recently granted rights under these privacy precedents include:

The right to interracial marriage (Loving v. Virginia),
The right to obtain contraceptives (Griswold v. Connecticut)
The right to engage in private, consensual sexual acts (Lawrence v. Texas)
The right to same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges).

Paraphrasing the proverb from a book called The Court and Character of King James by Anthony Weldon, 1651,: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”