Outlawing abortion is a central goalpost in the unfolding of the far-right wing’s takeover strategy. The crusade to install a white minority theocratic tyranny in the United States begins by revoking the political rights and personal freedoms the people of this country have won over the last 60 years or so.
All this was signaled explicitly by Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito, the author of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson, the case that resulted in the overturning of Roe. Starting with his first sentence, Alito directly says he and his gang, all of whom perjured themselves before the United States Senate and the American people, are explicitly empowering the United States government and state governments to make laws “respecting an establishment of religion.”
Eliminating individual liberty in the realm of sexual relationships is a very important front for the right wing in this crusade since it is necessary to squash those freedoms in order to advance the subjugation of women, which is itself a fundamental and essential part of the drive to establish their vision of a theocratic “family values” tyranny.
Some of these right-wing fantasies include the erroneous belief that their “family values” agenda can solve the country’s economic woes by driving women from the public sphere, including the public workforce, and restoring the public labor market as a white male-dominated or male-only preserve, with some “worthy” exceptions among women, and maybe, in special cases, the racially oppressed, demeaned, and degraded minorities.
The MAGA dream includes turning the “respectable” parts of the workforce white again. Forcing all women to have children regardless of their will is essential, in the MAGA-theocratic mind, to achieving this goal. They also believe these restrictions will raise white birth rates, which is another key feature of their program.
These are among the economic and social aspects behind outlawing a woman’s right to plan her reproductive choices and the size of her family.
However, true to the time-honored “bread and circuses” tradition of tyrants, most voters that back these politics are consciously enamored primarily by what they take to be the benefits of liquidating the establishment clause of the First Amendment (i.e. separation of church and state), as well as by the revocation of the 14th Amendment (which said everyone born in the U.S. is a citizen and entitled to equality before law) and 15th Amendments (gave the right to vote to all men regardless of race), and by the anti-abortionist’s mystical, anti-reality, anti-scientific, fictional, and fanciful arguments.
The Supreme Court’s would-be theocratic tyrant majority has already announced their movement’s agenda. Outlawing the right of a woman to control her fertility choices is just the beginning.
Restricting voting rights, dissolving, in substance, the public school as such, and finally and decisively wiping out the “well-regulated militia” qualification for gun ownership, are all just as important, in this vision, as outlawing contraception for the unmarried, using the state to govern the private behavior of consenting adults regarding which sex acts, sexual relationships, love relationships, and marriages are legal and illegal, and the reinstatement of government-enforced censorship over artistic representations of sexual and family matters.
This is serious stuff. The fascist-far right-GOP coalition’s program for establishing a white minority authoritarian state in the United States is well thought-out and complex. Its strategy of attacking sexual and relationship rights as a first front is explicitly copied from Nazism; the parallels are chilling.
We must not buy into or give credit or comfort to the fictions that fuel the theocratic and tyrannical fantasies of the far right, nor should we credit the claims that striving for the legal monopoly of a single establishment of religion, as these right-wingers favor, is just. (They like to peddle the fiction that the United States is, or once was, “a Christian country.” This is not only demonstrably untrue, it is poison.)
We need to take seriously the right wing’s very real desire for religious and cultural civil war, a war they believe they will win because their god is on their side. They’re counting on the notion that the people of the United States haven’t read and don’t care to read the Constitution, and don’t really care what it says or why it says what it says.
The pro-fascist MAGA current leaders, including the perjuring majority on the Supreme Court, are also counting on the idea that a large enough portion of the population holds the Constitution in such contempt that they will consent to its revocation, a process in which Dobbs v. Jackson is an important first step.
There is so much that is socially corrosive and corrupt about right-wing political uses of fundamentalist religion; however, the most hypocritical part of the U.S. right-wing version of religion is its practical rejection of Christian history and ethics, and of monotheism.
But it’ll do us no good to deny the plain fact that these fascists are actually hypocritical, cold-blooded believers in no ethics derived from any religious or spiritual source whatsoever; or to deny that are telling us what they’re planning to do to us, and to our country.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the opinions of its author.
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