According to New York Times columnist Charles Blow, the narrow 5-4 Supreme Court decision last week to allow a controversial Texas abortion law to remain in effect has historical echoes in a call to action that helped plunge the country into the bloody Civil War.
At issue, the columnist wrote, is the position the government took on slaves prior to the war between the states and a growing movement in conservative states to restrict the freedom of women to make decisions for themselves.
Writing "A key component of women’s rights and body autonomy is being snatched away as we watch," Blow quoted from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's powerful dissent where she wrote, "This is a brazen challenge to our federal structure. It echoes the philosophy of John C. Calhoun, a virulent defender of the slaveholding South who insisted that States had the right to ‘veto’ or ‘nullif[y]’ any federal law with which they disagreed.”
In his column, Blow stated that Sotomayor hit the nail on the head.
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Pointing out that Calhoun once claimed slavery was, “instead of an evil, a good — a positive good,” Blow explained that "In fact, Calhoun’s stance on slavery and states’ rights was so severe that he has been called the father of secession and the man who started the Civil War, even though he died 11 years before the war commenced."
"In Calhoun’s view, the states had the right to control and oppress Black bodies as they saw fit, regardless of any actions to the contrary on the federal level," the columnist explained before stating the parallels with the Texas law -- with the approval of the Supreme Court -- exhibits the same mindset as Calhoun.
That, in turn, he claimed could lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and tearing the country apart once again -- including incidents of violence.
"The civil war I see is not the kind that would leave hundreds of thousands of young men dead in combat. That is not to say that we aren’t seeing spates of violence but rather that this new war will be fought in courts, statehouses and ballot boxes, rather than in the fields," he wrote before asking, "In some ways, the abortion battle now being waged in the courts is a test case. Can the states make an argument that a civil right can be reversed on the state level? Can they make the case that all that the Constitution has not explicitly spelled out should be reserved for the states?"
"All of us should be very worried about what we see happening with these abortion cases — not just women who might need abortions or relatives and friends of women who might need them," he proposed before adding, "We should worry about whether or not we are at an inflection point for an age of regression."
You can read his whole column here.
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