New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow didn’t mince any words when he wrote about the Supreme Court’s decision allowing Texas’ six-week abortion ban to remain on the books while giving abortion providers a limited opportunity to challenge the vigilante-enforced law.
The Supreme Court’s decision on Friday means that anyone who assists in providing an illegal abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy can still be sued.
Blow wrote in an op-ed piece on Sunday:
Roe v. Wade has essentially been overturned in the state, and soon that astonishing reality may not only become permanent there but may also spread to other states.
A key component of women’s rights and body autonomy is being snatched away as we watch.
He then quoted from Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s strongly worded dissent in which the liberal justice went all the way back to the tumultuous pre-Civil War era.
Sotomayor wrote:
“This is a brazen challenge to our federal structure. It echoes the philosophy of John C. Calhoun, a virulent defender of the slaveholding South who insisted that States had the right to ‘veto’ or ‘nullif[y]’ any federal law with which they disagreed.”
Blow noted that Calhoun was a strong believer in nullification, but was also a “raging racist” who went further than the slave owners who viewed slavery as a “necessary evil.”
In 1837 , the South Carolina senator railed in an anti-abolitionist speech on the Senate floor that he saw slavery to be “a positive good.”
But let me not be understood as admitting, even by implication, that the existing relations between the two races in the slave-holding states is an evil: Far otherwise; I hold it to be a good, as it has thus far proved itself to be to both and will continue to prove so if not disturbed by the fell spirit of abolition. I appeal to facts. Never before has the Black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically but morally and intellectually.”
In an article on the HistoryNet website, Calhoun, who died in 1850, was described as “the moral, political, and spiritual voice of Southern separatism.”
“Despite the fact that he never wanted the South to break away from the United States as it would a decade after his death, his words and life’s work made him the father of secession. In a very real way, he started the American Civil War.”
So in Calhoun’s opinion, states had the right to choose whether or not they wanted slavery regardless of any actions on the federal level.
At its Dec. 1 hearing on whether to uphold Mississippi’s 15-week abortion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh indicated that he felt states had the right to choose what restrictions they wanted to place on abortion rights.
Blow then wrote that it’s not just women who might need abortions, and their relatives and friends, who should be worried about what’s happening with these abortion cases before the Supreme Court. He said we should worry about whether or not “we are at an inflection point for an age of regression.”
He wrote:
“I see too many uneasy parallels between what was happening nearly 200 years ago and what is happening now. I see this country on the verge of another civil war, as the Calhounian impulse is reborn.
“There are enormous, obvious differences, of course. The civil war I see is not the kind that would leave hundreds of thousands of young men dead in combat. That is not to say that we aren’t seeing spates of violence but rather that this new war will be fought in courts, statehouses and ballot boxes, rather than in the fields.
:And this war won’t be only about the subjugation of Black people but also about the subjugation of all who challenge the white racist patriarchy.”