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Shop NowLiberals are rightly concerned about the broader implications of the Supreme Court’s leaked decision to dismantle Roe v. Wade and give states the right to ban abortion. The concern comes from the fact that Justice Samuel Alito didn’t merely decide to overturn Roe. Instead, Alito dismantled the flimsy legal basis of the decision and, by implication, a number of other canonized Supreme Court cases that have constructed essential liberal restrictions on the states.
Roe v. Wade just the beginning?
The essence of Alito’s argument is that the “right” to abortion and many of the other supposedly sacred rights established by the court are simply constructs forced on the nation by unelected justices.
As he points out in the leaked opinion, these rights have no basis in the Constitution or common law, and that there is no reason for them to be obligatory rather than subject to the wishes of the American people.
Rights not explicitly mentioned by the Constitution are still protected by it if they have strong and undeniable roots in history and the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition.
Rights to abortion, gay marriage, contraception, sodomy, and other recently created rights are new innovations that have no basis in America’s founding documents.
The Supreme Court would not be banning these things if Roe v. Wade and other relevant rulings are overturned, but it would be conceding that they are not inherently protected and that voters should be allowed to use the political process to make decisions about them.
Alito, of course, specified in his opinion that he was only discussing the idea of a Constitutional right to abortion, but there is no legal reason for the court to not give these other issues back to the states to decide on if Roe is overturned.
Alito opinion opens new doors
The fact that Alito has a legitimate argument is causing liberals to fear that abortion will be just the start of the conservative court’s efforts to deconstruct these flimsy rights and open the door to statewide bans.
Those fears reflect the fact that America no longer resembles the country created by the Founding Fathers or even the country that existed in the first half of the 20th century, and that the legal foundations of the country have not matched the pace of social change.
Hardly anyone actively campaigns against gay marriage in 2022, but only seven years ago Obergefell v. Hodges claimed to be the final word on what had previously been an extremely contentious issue.
Liberals rightly fear that the situation could change drastically if the issue suddenly ceased to be enshrined as one of the sacred rights decreed by the court.
As with abortion, these flimsy rights would become valid subjects for debate if voters were told that the decisions were theirs to make, rather than the Supreme Court’s.
All of these supposed rights constructed by liberal judges represent the use by liberals of the court as a weapon with which to force their agenda as inalienable rights on conservative states that might wish to vote against them. Overturning Roe v. Wade would take that weapon away from them in an instant.
