Controlling Our Bodies Requires Saving American Democracy

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Most people don’t realize that Roe v. Wade was the brainchild of two Nixon appointees, Justice Harry Blackmun and Chief Justice Warren Burger – the so-called Minnesota twins because they had grown up together in Minnesota. Blackmun had been counsel to the Mayo Clinic and he and Burger had corresponded about abortion rights well before Roe v. Wade came to the Court. So they were ready and waiting for it.

As a moral issue Roe was about people’s rights to control their own bodies. It has never seemed a close moral case to me. But the legal implications of litigation are often much more complex than the moral issues. Roe was controversial from the beginning even among liberal law professors. I particularly remember an article by John Hart Ely criticizing the legal foundations of Roe. And Gerald Rosenberg famously argued in The Hollow Hope that women would have had a more secure right to abort without Roe. I’m in print, in an article with my friend David Schultz, disagreeing with Rosenberg.

But I want to make a different point than the ones that Ely, Rosenberg, or David and I made, that it is important to understand the price we have paid for the freedom we believe in and what that means for the future.

When Roe was decided, the Court was mopping up some of the civil rights cases in the midst of a backlash. Many of us remember the White Citizens Councils and racist violence. But most of the country was appalled. The racists had no chance of taking over the country. They had no claim to the moral high ground, and even its opponents understood that. Segregation, lynching, denials of voting rights were basically indefensible.

But Roe was a bugle call to many religious groups. The racist and religious groups reached different people despite some overlap. Church groups had a religious fervor and an organizational engine that the racists could not achieve by themselves. Karl Rove and others put many of them together. In doing so, they created a movement that threatens the core of American self-government.

Racism clearly underlies a great deal of what is happening now in the country and a large part of support for Mr. Trump. But the religious fervor of church groups built a separate movement around gender and sexual issues before some of the religious groups merged with the racists. The combination is lethal.

By nationalizing the social, gender and sexual issues on top of the Civil Rights revolution, the Court made a large group of Americans willing to attack American democracy. It was once possible, though unfair and expensive, for people who believed in the freedom to control their own bodies to rely on the law in states like New York and Massachusetts even though they’d be wise to stay out of Mississippi, Alabama, Texas and other states that had tried to destroy the country in the Civil War. But now, freedom-loving people cannot be sure of freedom anywhere in the country when American popular government is under attack by racists who recognize no rights but their own. What was a religious movement aimed at a moral issue is now fueling an attack on democracy itself.

Let’s be clear – no dictatorship, no government based on aiming weapons at its own people, supports women’s rights, privacy rights or sexual rights. In other words, with their sights trained on popular government, everything is at risk, all the freedoms we care about. The price of protecting everyone’s control of their own bodies is that we all have to fight for democracy with everything at our disposal.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on April 26, 2022.

Bless Those Air Bags

Two yellow punctured-balloon-shaped cloths. Slowly I understood they were air bags and had saved our lives. On the phone, an engineer told us air bags are designed to deflate as quickly as they inflate. I’m amazed. Car’s gone but we’re going about most of our business as if nothing happened. I’m in a combination of shock and amazement about how beautiful the world looks.

I realize I have a few more to thank.

It was the kind of accident that could easily have killed four of us, two in each car, before Ralph Nader wrote Unsafe At Any Speed and the feds imposed regulations so that cars would be safer for the people in them. Bless Ralph and bless all the people responsible for the regulations.

Bless also the kind and thoughtful people at the scene of the accident. The four of us emerged from our cars – theirs had spun around and rolled over into a ditch – checking to make sure the others were OK. No recriminations, just concern. We all said we were OK and were on our feet looking around to see what had happened. Another couple saw the accident and ran to the intersection to direct traffic until the police came. The police who came – guys and gals – were also kind and thoughtful. I hope they are like that to everyone of all backgrounds and colors. We were treated well. Thank you to all.

Teamwork

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I want to raise an important issue that’s been crowded out by the headlines.

Many people are upset about the whole idea of affirmative action or otherwise taking specific note of the needs of Black folk. For many, that seems completely new, like we never did that for anybody before. When I was a kid, the two parties in New York carefully balanced their tickets with Protestants, Catholics and Jews for statewide offices. To many, that seemed OK because everybody involved was “White” and only Blacks noticed their absence.  Few remember now that people had been referring to Jews, Italians and Irish as races, and Southern Europeans and semitic peoples were not the least shamed by their swarthy skin. The world changes – now everybody but Blacks are white and the Blacks are the new kids on the block.

Norman Rockwell did the famous Four Freedoms posters for American war bonds in World War II, and the iconic covers for the Saturday Evening Post, a national magazine, including the sweet picture of the doctor putting his stethoscope on a little girl’s doll. Rockwell also painted Moving Day, depicting the arrival of a moving truck with Black children and their baseball equipment opposite a group of similarly equipped white children, the two groups standing there not knowing what to say. “Play Ball” was the obvious answer.

Sports used to be about learning teamwork. We learned to cooperate, help each other for the sake of the team, and we did it together with kids of all backgrounds. I’ll never forget taking a cab with some friends to a demonstration in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City against the war in Vietnam. The cab driver was pretty obviously unhappy with us – he realized the four of us were carrying candles to light at a well-publicized demonstration. I remember turning the conversation to the Mets. The Mets had never made it out of last place, but this year, 1969, they were fighting for the championship. Mayor John Lindsay, was literally campaigning for re-election from the Met dugout. It seemed like the whole world was for the Mets – at least in New York City. The change on our taxi driver’s face was obvious – how could such nice Mets fans be against the war!

Some of you may remember Pee Wee Reese, the long time Brooklyn Dodger shortstop and captain. In 1947, when the Dodgers brought Jackie Robinson up as the first Black major league ballplayer of the twentieth Century, some Dodgers groused about having to play with a Black man. Reese got up at a team meeting and told his teammates they weren’t going to win in spite of Jackie – they were going to win because of Jackie. In fact, the Dodgers became the dominant team in the National League for the rest of Jackie’s career. As Jackie aged and skills declined, a Dodger manager benched him, but the team played poorly. It fell to Reese to tell their manager his teammates wanted Jackie on the field. Jackie was restored to the lineup and the Dodgers won the pennant again.

Sports matters and teamwork matters, and it matters to America. We cannot make a greater America by fighting and killing each other, by wasting our energies kicking each other off the team of America the way that white supremacists want us to do. We can only destroy the country we love.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on April 19, 2022.

Understanding economic news

Paul Krugman explains economic news with the clarity of a reporter and the authority of a Nobel Prize winner. I’ve been following Paul Krugman’s newsletter for a long time and I’d like to recommend it to you to understand what is going on, what government can and cannot do about inflation, etc.