What is “Pro-Wife Extremism”?
After Republican take-over in 94/95, I thought conservatives couldn’t get much crazier. One of the things I remember from those days is the mixture of astonishment and revulsion I felt as I the Republican majority reveal its agenda. At times I was absolutely stupefied by the things they said and did. I thought they’d outdone themselves.
Boy was I wrong. I didn’t believe it when Joshua Holland posted that an editor over at the Wall Stree Journal’s Opinion Journal had taken conservative framing to dizzying new heights. That is, I didn’t want to believe it. I guess I’ve been clinging to the idea that there was a limit to the madness. Now that I’ve seen the column, I know I was wrong. It must be read to be believed.
When President Bush nominated Judge Sam Alito to the Supreme Court, it didn’t take long for extremist groups to alight on his partial dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, decided by the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1991, as a pretext to oppose him. Planned Parenthood’s Karen Pearl called the opinion “outrageous” and said it proved Judge Alito is “far, far out of the mainstream.”
… Roe was the offspring of Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that established a “right to privacy”–and specifically, a right of married couples to obtain contraceptives. This right had no basis in the text of the Constitution, but it was grounded, as Justice William O. Douglas wrote for the majority, in “the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship.”
By 1992, when the high court decided Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the right to marital privacy had somehow morphed into a woman’s right to abort her husband’s child without telling him. The court’s privacy jurisprudence has become simply a matter of five justices’ policy preferences, unmoored from any limiting principle. You don’t have to be a pro-life absolutist to object to this exercise in pro-wife extremism.
I’ll let someone else hash out the legal arguments here, as I’d quickly be in water over my head. (Though, as Deanna Zandt, pointed out, it seems to me that a guy makes his reproductive choice when he chooses to have unprotected vaginal intercourse with a woman who may be in the prime of her fertility.)
But what the hell is “pro-wife extremism”? There was a time when limiting a man to beating his wife with “a stick no bigger than a thumb” (and, yes, I know that the story behind that is mostly — but not all — myth), but what kind of fevered brain comes up with that term in 2005?
Technorati Tags: bush, courts, current events, feminism, supreme court
November 8th, 2005 at 1:30 pm
One thing I was wondering about this law. Was she to be required to notify her husband or the father of the fetus? They might not be the same person….
November 8th, 2005 at 3:01 pm
more stuff that should have been in The Onion
The idea that a woman should not be legally required to (that is, liable to criminal prosecution if she doesn’t) tell her husband if she has an abortion is being spun as “pro-wife extremism”. I shit you not. Lemme tell ya, these pro-wife extremists …