‘It’s the Establishment Clause, Stupid!’

 

By Steven Jonas

There have been some very succinct slogans in U.S. political history. The one above (which I immodestly made up) is drawn from Jim Carville’s famous slogan which in 1992 helped Bill Clinton defeat G.H. W. Bush: “It’s the economy, stupid!” I view Jim’s original in the context of other short, but sweet, U.S. Presidential election slogans, like: “Tippecanoe and Tyler too (1840); “54-40 or Fight” used by James K. Polk in the election of 1844; and “He kept us out of war,” (Woodrow Wilson, 1916).

The battle over abortion rights and freedom of choice in the outcome of pregnancy has been with us since the adoption of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court in 1972. As the religious right closed in on getting a reversal of that classic decision, I wrote periodically on the battle. Most often my argument centered on the Constitution’s Establishment Clause, found in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”.

Since the anti-abortion rights advocates often (actually, almost always) invoked “the Will of God” in support of their position, for reasons which I still do not understand the Establishment Clause simply was very infrequently used by the Abortion Rights advocates (and if used, was not used very prominently). In his opinion on Dobbs, at the end, Justice Alito said: “Abortion presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion.”

Well, yes it does. As it happens, the arguments against abortion rights have always been made on religious grounds. E.g. “life begins at the moment of conception,” a totally religious concept (as discussed in detail further below), and this statement from a member of the Alabama Supreme Court declaring that destruction of a (non-implanted) IVF embryo is a human life: “Human life,” Parker wrote, “cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.” And then there is: “U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson saying the notion [emphasis added] of church-state separation in the U.S. was a ‘misnomer.’ “

Well, I guess that neither a Supreme Court Justice in Alabama nor the present Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives ever took Civics (and must have also skipped the course on Constitutional Law when they were in law school). For here, again, is that Clause, which happens to be the very first one in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

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Source: OpEdNews.com