Overturning Roe is theocratic

The news has just broken in Politico: "Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows".

We can't say for sure whether the supposed draft opinion actually is what Politico's article claims, namely, work product of the U.S. Supreme Court. If it turns out to be a hoax, well, that will be that.

However, the idea of overturning Roe unquestionably is and has been for decades an obsession of social conservatives. The whole point of the sorry history of recent Court apppointments — and more to the point, denied appointments (the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Mitch McConnell's infamous and indefensible refusal to let Merrick Garland's nomination even be considered by the Senate) — has been for conservatives to appoint reliably anti-Roe Justices until a majority was in place to overturn that decision.

Now, my understanding from TV coverage is that the draft opinion attacks the "weak" Constitutional basis in the reasoning of Roe v. Wade. That has long been a criticism of social conservatives. However, it has always seemed to me a secondary excuse, one cobbled up by social conservatives to cover their real interest: they consider abortion nothing less than murder. That is why the issue is so motivational for them: nothing is as stark as the accusation that murder is being condoned under the law.

Is abortion murder, though?

Science can't tell us when (or if) a human life begins prior to a fetus leaving the womb. (At least, it can't tell us yet; I question if it ever will.) So to stake out the absolutist position that abortion is murder, one has to have a different basis for believing that an unborn fetus is alive.

The only basis for that belief is religion. Specific religious sects hold that abortion is murder.

However, not all religions or sects do. Nor, for that matter, do all nonbelievers. There is not widespread agreement, or even majority agreement, that abortion is murder. Poll after poll shows that the majority of Americans want abortion of some kind to be legal. Where to draw the line on times and procedures is hotly debated but the principle of access is not.

What will your good-faith belief that abortion is not murder be worth after this decision is issued? Even if that belief is grounded in your own religion's creed, too bad. The free exercise of your religious belief will be illegal.

This purported Supreme Court decision imposes nothing less than the religious beliefs of a minority on the entire population. It turns the logic of protection of minorities on its head — and it perverts the logic of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause by enshrining the creed of a handful of religious sects as the law of the land.

That's theocracy.