The Reaction To The Leak Was Swift!

Today is Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022. 

Yesterday, in anticipation of primary elections all across the country, a Supreme Court staffer leaked the draft opinion of the majority that Roe v Wade is not Constitutional, and should be stricken down, and that they issue should rightfully be decided by the legislatures, in each state, if necessary.

My initial response is that this seems very expected and not a big deal: you've had 50 years to plead your case to the voters and lawmakers (which doesn't include the Supreme Court) and get all the states, etc, to pass laws legalizing abortion. Colorado just passed a law, apparently (that I don't know the details of). 

That's how the process is supposed to work, right? The Constitution enumerates the responsibilities of the Federal Government. Anything not in it is left to the States to legislate. Over the course of our country's history, the legislatures have enacted laws that are in contradiction to the Constitution, and sometimes those laws have gotten struck down, and sometimes they haven't. Some weren't until years later when the Supreme Court has revisited prior decisions. It's been a messy process quite a few times.

Opponents to Roe v Wade come from different stances, for sure. Some believe that all abortion is wrong, evil, even. Some believe that it was an incorrect decision based on the law, believe it or not. I don't think anyone is in a room saying "I want to control what women do with their bodies."

Here's the conclusion paragraph of the opinion:

"Abortion presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each state from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives."

Here's the link to the leaked document. 

If your read it, you may learn several things, which may or may not change your stance, but should educate you that this is, as mentioned above, a messy bit of legislative history..

Gallup Does Mention One Thing....

This is an interesting bit of data, certainly, and I'm not here to minimize the effect of the HodgesObergefell decision (I've (jokingly) mentioned that I've known Jim was gay longer than he has, right? College friends from back in the day), or even really comment on that. As usual, I have this odd take on this bit of data (and one point that isn't mine at all)

LGBT marriage rates have increased, but not as much as you might think. Indeed, as the text of the article points out, it may have actually slowed a little after the big push last year when it all became legal.

On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court issued the Obergefell decision. As would be expected, the number of same-sex marriages has increased, though the rate of increase has slowed.

One thing I can't figure out is the two different numbers cited:

Two years after the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that states could not prohibit same-sex marriages, 10.2% of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) adults in the U.S. are married to a same-sex spouse. That is up from 7.9% in the months prior to the Supreme Court decision in 2015, but only marginally higher than the 9.6% measured in the first year after the ruling.

But then says:

As a result of these shifts, Gallup estimates that 61% of same-sex, cohabiting couples in the U.S. are now married, up from 38% before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in June 2015, and 49% one year ago. 

 

Huh?

Anyway, here's someone else's point (Rush Limbaugh): not as many gay people want to get married as everyone seemed to think, so the issue was overblown in many ways. Yes, there were plenty of folks that wanted to get legally married, don't mistake the point, it's just that the storyline overstated that number, and therefore the reach of the "historic" decision was far smaller than the average ally thought. There is data to support that idea in this story:

An increasing percentage of LGBT adults now identify their marital status as single or never married. That has always been the dominant status among LGBT individuals, but has increased from 47.4% to 55.7% over the last two years.

Now, I immediately noticed a line in the data (my emphasis below) that I am impressed that Gallup chose to include:

 LGBT Americans are still more likely to be married to an opposite-sex spouse (13.1%) than a same-sex spouse (10.2%), but the gap is narrowing. According to prior research on LGBT identification, roughly half of those who self-identify as LGBT are bisexual, helping explaining the high proportion of LGBT individuals who are married to opposite-sex partners. Gallup's question does not probe specifically for whether LGBT individuals are lesbian or gay or bisexual or transgender.

Interesting, eh?

With Gallup reporting that according to their research

Overall, 4.3% of U.S. adults identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, according to Gallup's latest estimate from its June 2016-June 2017 tracking data. That is up from 3.9% a year ago and 3.4% in Gallup's initial estimate in 2012. 

I find it interesting that it's still a tiny percentage of the population that was affected by this massive media story (although it's still a largish actual number: 2015 census says 247,773,709 adults, so that's like 10.6 million people), and the subset of that number that got married in light of the Supreme Court decision is pretty small. Let's do some math.

Using the 2015 number above, and that 4.3% percentage according to Gallup, there are approximately

• 10,654,269 adult LGBT people in the US.
• 841,687 married prior to HodgesObergefell (7.9%)
• 1,086,735 married after two years (10.2%)
• so 245,048 adults got married as a result, so far. (this is off by a little, as we are using 2015 numbers, I get that.)

That's .000989% of the adults in the US. 

That's a lot of hubbub for a very very small group. I have said that the US Constitution has been described as a document to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority (not my line, obviously), so this fits into that mold, I guess, but wow, what a lot of attention given to an issue that has a ridiculously tiny reach. Perspective, people. 

Ah, The Supremes.... 5-4 is not good enough for some people!

I really just wanted to publish the link to the opinion in the BURWELL, SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, ET AL. v. HOBBY LOBBY STORES, INC., ET AL.  case.

Here's the dissent as well.

My thoughts are simple, really. The majority opinion holds that as the current laws are written, it's reasonable that Hobby Lobby, et al, should be able to not pay for 4 after-conception birth control methods based on religious beliefs of the 3 named closely-held (5 or fewer voting shareholders?) incorporated companies' owners. The minority dissent disagrees with that opinion, of course. The laws are not plain enough to remove doubt, so the Supremes have to interpret what is in the applicable laws and decide who is more right, and this time the government's position was held to be less credible. That's how it works.

The decision does not take away access, it does not deny coverage, and it doesn't change anything, really, as the HHS has already, by fiat, said that even religious non-profits' insurance companies must provide contraception coverage regardless of what they religious non-profits' policy says or pays for (essentially sticking the insurance company with the bill, although HHS says there is "no net economic burden on the insurance companies that are required to provide or secure the coverage"). No reason (as Scalia notes in the majority opinion) that they can't make for-profits do the same thing, whether we agree with that or not!

Lastly, the stupid comparisons. Viagra treats a medical condition, a medical problem. It's not the same as covering contraception (and I know that birth control treatments are also used for other medical problems, but those uses are almost universally included already, and not a part of the discussion at all). It's also not covered at no cost to the patient, nor are vasectomies: female birth control explicitly is (if covered under ACA, etc.) at no cost.

Only semi-related, I love it when folks that have pooh-poohed the notion of the "slippery slope" regarding things like property rights and the Second Amendment invoke it over whose responsibility it is to pay for birth control.

Millard F. Caldwell?

I was reading today about the CBS Political Director's blatant partisanship when in the comments appeared this quote:

"Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and given him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the new wonderful good society which shall now be Rome's, interpreted to mean more money, more ease, more security, and more living fatly at the expense of the industrious."
Marcus Tullius Cicero


This is excellent, it's historically accurate, and I fully support it's use in modern times, but I had to investigate, of course. In the web search results I came upon this writing from 1965 (my birth year) that the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, Inc. published in 1996 and has made available at the link already given.  There are so many gems that I would end up pasting the whole thing into this blog if I tried to discuss the thing, but what I first want to say is that the author, Millard F. Caldwell was a Democrat.  Now, times have changed and I know some modern Libs and progs will say "well, the segregationists were D, but now they're R" but what is much more interesting to me is that what was true in Rome and discussed by our Founders was observed by a Democrat in 1965 whose words resonate today.

And if I were a left-wing newspaperman wedded to socialism, hating wealth and the wealthy, I would do my writing behind America's constitutional guaranty of free speech. I would emulate the feist dog and bark mightily, but from behind the strong fence of constitutional protection. I would remember only too well how freedom of the press and freedom of those who write for the press have been curtailed in those countries where man has risen above the law. Each morning I would remind myself to remind all my left-wing doctor, preacher, teacher, and racist friends that only under a constitutional form of government, where the rights of the individuals are protected, can we live and breathe and preach and write our thoughts; that under centralized power our only free choice will be to write and preach and teach as Big Brother tells us or to go dig salt in the mines.

But what would you do if your aim is for a dictatorship or a communistic takeover? How would you go about weakening the fiber of the country? You would know that, given a fair choice between a representative Republic and a dictatorship, the vast majority of the people in this country would vote against centralization.

No, your road to successful takeover would involve beguiling the people with handouts, creating false sense of security and, step by step, the dishing out of benefits with one hand and the lifting of liberties with the other. You would encourage the issuance of invalid executive orders, all in the name of humanity to please large segments of the voters. You would persuade the judiciary to ignore constitutional restraint and, in the beginning at least, issue invalid decisions in favor of the so-called downtrodden of our population and, of course, contemporarily, you would have the do-gooders demonstrate and create strife and, in every way possible, debunk and belittle the principles upon which the country grew and prospered and became the first nation of the earth. This prescription, faithfully followed, is likely of success under all conditions and, absent intelligent opposition, can be guaranteed.

These are not just theoretical abstractions - that's the way it's been done throughout history, beginning with Greece and Rome, on down through Russia, Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and Peron's Argentina.

But there's a great difference in the composition of nationalities. Three or four hundred years ago the English, pushed to the wall by the power-spawned rule of the Star Chamber courts, pushed back and recaptured their rights. The Russian people, in sheep-like docility, have submitted. The melting pot of America seems content and complacent. Its sycophantic Congress, reflecting public acquiescence, is grovelling at the feet of the President. Its Democratic party has been captured, and its Republican party is without policy or guidance. We appear to be drunk on benefits and slogans, rushing lightheartedly along to self-destruction.

But perhaps all this is in keeping with natural law. The children of Hamlin followed the Pied Piper to ruin, the people of Germany and Italy followed Hitler and Mussolini, the lemmings of Norway rush to the sea to drown, and the grunions of the West Coast rush from the sea to flop on the beach and die. The Roman Republic was destroyed when the urban leaders pampered its populace with free handouts...Perhaps Benjamin Franklin knew what he was talking about when he told the young nation, after it had adopted its Constitution, in substance, that they had gained a free and independent nation but did not have the common sense to keep it.

Isn't history fascinating?