REGARDING ROE V WADE

Regarding Roe v Wade Dr. Roger Ray May 22, 2022 CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO Taken from Justice Samuel Alito’s draft of a Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade, Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives. We were shocked but we were not surprised when the draft Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade was leaked. We were shocked because access to safe and legal abortions has been a protected constitutional right for nearly 50 years and this reversal is horrifying and unjust in so very many ways. But it is not surprising because this has been a part of almost every national election’s campaign conversation for decades. We can hardly be surprised, especially after the Trump administration’s appointments to the court that were clearly orchestrated in order to achieve this specific result. I was out of the country when news of the leak broke, but I immediately contacted David to say that we were going to have to juggle our preaching schedule to respond to this nightmare, sooner rather than later. My mind raced back to all the arguments we have made about this topic for decades, that every woman has a right to manage her own reproductive health in consultation with her physician and without the interference of the government. And all of the well rehearsed arguments about the hypocrisy of being concerned about bringing a child to term but not being concerned about the child’s housing, nutrition, education, and healthcare. There is so much to be said about the basic human right of a woman to make this decision on her own and yet, I don’t think that I am going to allow myself to be drawn into that fight. If you will indulge me an aside which I believe is relevant at this point: I spent the first twenty years that I was a pastor in Springfield fighting for the civil rights of the LGBT community. I was, in many ways, a lone voice in this religious wilderness in the early years. I lived through having protesters marching in front of the church, repeated threats to either fire me from my church, or more extreme anonymous physical threats. A retired minister was so outraged by what I was doing that he actually hired a private investigator to try to find enough dirt on me to end my career . . . I believe that he was charged with actually trying to find my gay lover because he was the kind of person who had no capacity for understanding compassion and he assumed, as any sociopath would, that I was only concerned about the civil rights of the gay community because I was secretly gay, myself. I believe that my engagement in that fight along with several other controversial ethical issues is what finally brought about the end of my relationship with my former denomination, which was a price I would gladly pay all over again if I had it to relive those years. But about a decade ago, before the 2015 Supreme Court decision that made same sex marriage legal, we were hosting the late Bishop John Shelby Spong here for our annual conference and he said something that was life changing and liberating for me. Spong said, in one of his lectures, that he was through trying to explain his biblical and moral defense of gay rights to those who continued to oppose same sex marriage. He said, that having thoroughly explained his beliefs repeatedly for decades that it was now time for the opponents of gay rights to make some plausible defense of their prejudice. He could not have been more on target. . . and I felt as if a weight had been taken off of my shoulders. I realized that it was not my job to convince the homophobic to overcome their prejudices. I am not, after all, the ass-hole whisperer. For decades we have paid the price, we’ve lost church members, church jobs, friends and even some family members, carrying the banner for gay rights. We have nothing new to add to the debate. Now it is time for those who seek to maintain this wretched prejudice to explain themselves… which they cannot credibly do. I believe that we are in the exact same place with the civil rights of women, especially as it regards their right to manage their own reproductive lives. It isn’t that Justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barret don’t understand the issues at hand, it is that they do not care. It is no longer our job to convince them to do the right thing, they have made it abundantly clear that they have no interest in doing the right thing. It is now our job to double down and change our government so that such an injustice cannot stand and people with such tortured moral retardation as Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barret are not appointed to powerful decision-making positions. In the United States, national elections are won in the margins. The largest margin that any president has won in the popular vote in the past 50 years was 23% and folks, that was the re-election of Richard Nixon who was later forced to resign in disgrace. No one in the last 30 years has even made it to a 10% margin. We elect presidents and most senators by very slim margins of 3 or 4% and some still call that narrow victory a “land slide” that gives them a “mandate.” Because of this almost even divide in American politics, both parties have to try to add up which constituencies they have to add to their voting base in order to win an election. Both parties try to use redistricting to maximize their reliable voting blocks and minimize their opponents. Granted, the Republican Party has elevated redistricting and voter suppression to the level of a racist sacrament, but they know that immigrants, minorities, and the poor tend to vote more heavily for Democrats and so, in a fit of anti-democratic manipulation, they are trying to suppress those votes so that Republicans can stay in power. There was a time when Catholics and Evangelicals tended to vote for Democrats because their constituency was largely among the working poor. But in the most recent generations, Republicans have used abortion as the issue they could exploit to lure Catholic and Evangelical support. Even though between 70 and 80% of Americans are in favor of a woman’s right to choose in most cases, the Republican Party has wrapped itself in several unpopular positions in order to garner the vote of these single issue voters… abortion is one, gun ownership is another, and when those fail, they trot out scare words like “socialism” or “the liberal media” to herd enough of the lunatic fringe into their pro-business, pro-military voting blocks to win many elections. You will note that in the wake of this horrible mass murder in Baltimore, that Republican elected officials have been almost entirely silent. It isn’t that more than three or four of them are dumb enough to have ever actually believed in this whole notion about how white people are being replaced by Jews, Blacks, Latinos, and Arabs, but, and here is the crux of the matter, no Republican can win an election without the votes of the racists who do believe in these conspiracy theories and so, they can’t even breathe near a microphone right now, lest they lose the vote of racist lunatics. This is a hard reality of our current voter demographics. I could be wrong, but I don’t believe that Ronald Reagan, or either of the Bushes, nor even Donald Trump were actually personally opposed to a woman’s right to choose or, for that matter, gay rights, nor would they, in their heart of hearts, defend the right of a deranged 18-year-old nut to buy a military weapon. But they acted like they were anti-abortion, pro-assault rifle, and anti-same sex marriage in order to court the votes of the fanatical fringe. The thing is, most of us realized, at least so far as Reagan and the Bushes were concerned, that this was nothing but performative politics. They had no intention of actually doing anything about overturning Roe, they were just throwing out enough red meat to keep their fringe voting blocks in their camp . . . not horribly unlike the way many Democrats have feigned interest in matters of concern to black and brown voters only long enough to win an election and then they went back to work full time for their political donors. I wish that I was just being cynical about politics but if I were to invite you to prove me wrong, you wouldn’t have many things to point to that would contradict what I have just said. Abortion has been a part of performative politics for years. Some states have managed to nibble away at the edges of abortion rights, often passing laws that they knew had no chance of standing up to legal review, but they passed them to make it look like they were taking the issue seriously. But after decades of promises and fake gestures, the chickens have come home to roost. It is sort of like Putin threatening to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield. He knows that would be totally insane and that it would probably bring an end to Russia’s existence, but, if you threaten it enough, you wake up one day and find that it is your only option. We are in greater danger of a global nuclear war right now than we have ever been before, and almost entirely because of the lust for power on the part of one man. Many years ago, I had a young woman in my congregation who was so angry at a boyfriend who had broken up with her that she started stalking him, breaking into his house, and finally repeatedly making suicidal gestures to get him back. At some point, when she claimed to be sitting in her running car in her garage, she called her ex to “say goodbye.” He called the police, who broke in and took her to a mental hospital. The next day I went to visit her in the hospital, and she said something very profound that I have never forgotten. She said, “I have learned that if you act crazy long enough, people will start to treat you like you are crazy.” Not that the Democratic Party hasn’t broken my heart many times, and it is not that insincerity and incompetence are litmus tests to be a Republican candidate, but, folks, what I am saying is that the Republican Party has acted crazy for long enough. It is time for us to start treating them like they are crazy. I’m not saying that we need to lock them away and never hear from them again . . . at least, I don’t think that I am saying that . . . I believe that we must have at least two viable political parties and I honestly wish that we had four or five and not just two, but we must have at least two. But what the Republican Party has become . . . what they are today, we just can’t have them as one of those two parties. Nobody needs that level of crazy. The quote is attributed to several different people, but I like to think that it was Mark Twain who said that “All political parties eventually die, choaking on their own lies.” It has been a long time since one of the leading parties in the United States has died, leaving room for a new party to take its place, but please consider this to by my eulogy for the Republican Party. They no longer have a defensible place in the United States. We have room for a conservative party, if they are conservative about economics, business practices, defense, and immigration, but we don’t have room for racism, misogyny, homophobia, and gun violence. Overturning Roe v Wade will allow abortion laws to revert to the states and, folks, no state should be able to take away anyone’s civil rights. We wouldn’t leave freedom of speech or freedom of religion up to states! If we did, can you think of a state in the Midwest where it would continue to be legal for us to exist? That’s why the constitution went to print with a bill of rights in the first place. Some things are beyond being revoked simply by popular vote. There are lots of people on the lunatic right who not only want to deport all of the brown people, if they could, they would deport all of the liberals of all colors…. And sure, most of us talk about self-deportation a lot, but I still want it to be my choice when I disappear onto a tropical island never to be seen again. But folks, it won’t stop at being a state-by-state option. There is already talk of passing a nationwide ban on all abortions and it won’t stop there either. Thomas and Alito voted against the 2015 decision to legalize same sex marriage. Now that there is a bullet-proof majority of right-wing fanatics on the Supreme Court, how long do you think it will be before they overturn that decision as well? Can even birth control and interracial marriage be safe from this Christian Taliban? That may seem crazy but a couple of years ago, a lot of people thought that the fear of overturning Roe was crazy and now we see that crazy has come to town. I would remind you that the last three conservative judges all said in their Senate hearings that they considered Roe to be settled law, even calling on the legal concept of stare decisis to imply that they will allow past decisions to stand. Now, I don’t know who believed them when they were offering those assurances, but they looked the senate in the eye, leaned into the microphone and lied like a cheap rug. Senator Susan Collins assured journalists that she was absolutely confident that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh would not overturn Roe before she voted for their confirmation. If she was, I suspect that she was the only sentient creature in Washington, D.C., a possibly small crowd, who actually believed them. After this draft was leaked, she told the press, "If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office," which, to quote pop singer, Billie Eilish, “Duh.” I don’t want to be trite about politicians lying. Politicians say what they have to say to get elected. We had a guy running for city council in my little hometown of Glasgow, KY who promised voters in 1972 that he would “bring our boys home from Vietnam.” I was too young to vote then but I sure was in favor of bringing our boys home from Vietnam before I had to join them, not that the city council in Glasgow, KY had much to say about it. An unscrupulous jurist will say anything they have to say to be granted a seat on the Supreme Court. As late as 1991, Clarence Thomas just dodged the question of Roe v Wade by saying that he hadn’t thought much about it. Which, if someone hadn’t thought much about the most famous Supreme Court decision since Plessy v Ferguson, you might legitimately ask what on earth they were doing in a position to be considered for a seat on the high court, but, obviously, he was also lying. He knew what he thought about Roe, and he has been waiting for 30 years to be in a majority of justices so that he could cast this vote. When I knew that Biden was going to appoint a black woman to the court, I secretly wished that he would pick Anita Hill. I don’t really have a sadistic streak in me, but I do have a certain lust for justice, especially when it has been delayed for 30 years! I did my Masters’ thesis on the treatment of addiction, and 40 years ago, the best program of recovery that I could study was A.A. and AlAon, and I can tell you, all of these decades later, I am still grateful for every evening I spent in those meetings because they were more educational than any class I ever took at Vanderbilt or Harvard. A.A. is obviously the meeting for recovering alcoholics. AlAnon was for the family members of those alcoholics who needed to learn that they could not make their spouse or their father stay sober. The addict’s recovery was not up to them. But they did need to learn how not to enable the addiction. One of the most important pieces of advice given to the people in the AlAnon meetings was to stop acting like they believed the addict’s lies. Drug addicts and Alcoholics invented gaslighting . . . “Of course I didn’t steal the money from your purse! I can’t believe that you would accuse me of such a dastardly act! You should go and confess your sins to our priest!” Stop believing the lies. Stop acting like you believe them, Susan Collins. The mistake that I made in grad school was thinking of people lying to get what they wanted was somehow uniquely related to addiction. It is not. Nor is it unique to politicians. But it is an aspect of being a sociopath and, men and women, we have to stop electing sociopaths to national office or appointing them to Supreme Court seats. You used to hear the saying that a woman voting for a Republican was like a chicken voting for Col. Sanders. But what if you are not a woman, what if you, say, have a sister? Or a daughter? Or maybe you just believe in justice for women, even if you don’t have any specific woman in mind to defend? Maybe you just care about justice? Voting for someone like Trump may not make you a racist, or a homophobe, or a xenophobe, but it does mean that you are OK with racism, that taking rights away from gays and lesbians and the transgendered is not a deal breaker for you, and that all of those kids in cages on the border is just law enforcement…. The little criminals, wanting to eat and all that. The women who went out and marched the day after Trump’s inauguration knew what they were talking about. It did matter. Sure, he’s an idiot, but he has appointed dangerous ideologues to the Supreme Court and we’re going to have to keep fighting against them and their decisions for a long time. I wish that the USA had a real Green Party. I wish that we had a legitimate Labor Party. Heck, you know me, I wish that we had an intelligent Democratic Socialist Party, but people, as long as people like Mitch McConnel and Donald Trump are in positions of leadership in the Republican Party, I beg you, stop buying ammunition for your own assassins. Voting is now our only means of changing our government into a more compassionate and intelligent government. I would like to remind you, in closing, of the insight of one of our nation’s most insightful founders, Thomas Paine, who said: To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead. The Republican Party has abandoned American democracy in favor of a form of kleptocratic fascism and as such, simply is not a viable option for American voters, in much the same way that Fox is not a news station, Precious Moments statues are not art, and, though my daughter and I still do not agree, the Spice Girls were never musicians. But, of course, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.