When Kamala Harris wins -- we still must carry the great moral cause
After a Kamala Harris victory, we must bring justice to persons targeted in Texas, Alabama and Florida resulting from Fundamentalist-imposed values
Kamala Harris, our Joyful Warrior, who wipes the floor with Trump, looks to win handily in the popular vote and to pierce red walls in the electoral college.
And victory is coming so soon.
Ahhhhh.
But wait.
When Kamala Harris wins, we still have states with a version of Jim Crow.
Texas, Florida, Alabama are among states that defy Federal law to create hardships on minorities.
We live in a Federal system, and several states, including Alabama, even try on Theocracy.
A while back, Joyce Vance had given us a sample of what that looks like in Alabama, as the Supreme Court – no shortage of Fundamentalism there – ruled that life begins at Conception – which is de facto a religious belief. The Alabama ruling, in fact, complies fully with the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic faith as set out in the universal Catholic Catechism and Canon Law.
I doubt seriously that the Court thought much about Roman Catholicism at all. But the Roman Catholic Church has developed a canon law and magisterium over the centuries, ultimately defining life as beginning at conception. This, for example, is the reason why the Roman Catholic Church made the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception to be an article of dogma. Not only did the Savior have to be born of a Virgin; but, under logic disputed for many centuries until 8 December 1854, when Pope Pius IX required the doctrine in his encyclical, Ineffabilis Deus. The logic was that the Mother of God, herself, could not be born in Original Sin.
The dogma that life begins at conception has real consequences in the Roman Catholic Church and its Magisterium and Canon Law.
Imagine a State Supreme Court, whether conscious or not about Catholic doctrine, that is ascetic for religious practitioners but can work unconscionable risks for women and girls!
For her article, see:
This judicial imposition of de facto Catholic Dogma upon the Protestant and others (including secular) people of Alabama has resulted in the total shut down artificial insemination.
The hospitals were prudent to shut down the program, because the medical risk management committees of the hospital would not assume the risk of the hospital being charged with homicide in the case of accidents with united cells.
So, the Alabama State Supreme Court enacted a de facto Theocracy, totally compliant with Roman Catholic Magisterium but Constitutionally defective, made it impossible for childless couples to try well-proven methods of insemination in Alabama.
An irony here is that the University of Alabama Medical School provides expert, national-class medical care, equal to some of the best elsewhere in the country. Make no mistake, the University of Alabama is excellent, as is its medical school.
Although the State Legislature, to its credit, has attempted to remedy the chaos created by the Theocratic Court, tinkering with common law is a very tricky matter.
All the way from Edward Coke through William Blackstone through John Marshall and through Felix Frankfurter, and at state levels, we have developed common law through the centuries.
The law has evolved through trial judges, close to the facts, close to the arguments of counsel, close to the great jurisprudential writings of the centuries, develops law, in consonance with tradition, that is practical for the man, woman, or child before the court with that person’s immediate problems.
When the state Supreme Court totally overthrows common law wisdom, substituting literally the doctrine of the universal Catholic Catechism – which is, note this, part of the Sacred Magisterium of The Church – and state legislatures try to draft legislation that regulates – or, more probably, prohibits abortion – also against common law heritage – one shudders at the unintended consequences of the remedial language.
The problems are extremely complex as they underly a woman’s pregnancy, the beginnings of life, the changes in the mother’s body, the mother’s overall health and her lifestyle, her physical ability to make it through, much less the complexity of life, and the woman’s good faith weighing of decisions that are morally right – which may well include abortion – which to her is not a frivolous decision (as the Fundamentalist would have you believe), but which may, in fact be essential to the woman’s health, her welfare, or even to the welfare of other children the woman may now or in the future bear. What if the pregnancy arises from rape, from an incestuous and unconscionable sexual assault that traumatizes a young girl? And these conditions do not not begin to sum up what weighs on a woman’s mind.
There is no way the state legislator, with the best of intentions, can tinker with “life begins at conception” and piecemeal remediation of the State Supreme Court decision.
I will assume that Fundamentalist state legislators really value the life of a baby and see a pregnancy as requiring protection of the fetus. Being human, it is impossible not to know of women or girls for whom absolute prohibitions on abortion would be unconscionable.
The common law, assuming no state legislation, left the woman, the girl free to make her own decisions with the help of her physician and counselors.
Once one starts imposing criminal law on a matter untouched by common law, one legislates, and the legislator is very far removed from the realities of every day lives of these women and girls.
That distance is not even a result of bad will. It is a result of the nature of personal relations. The common law puts parties — human beings — before the judge, who has to interact with the practical situations of everyday human life to arrive at judicial decisions that are humane and just.
Even the best motivated state legislature cannot duplicate the judge’s exposure to human reality.
That is why our English and American common-law system has produced such great jurists and generally produces fair results in such fields as contracts, torts and the like.
The legislator cannot possibly foresee all the consequences of an artificial definition by law on such a medical matter as pregnancy.
These practices de facto, and in violation of the First Amendment, impose a state religion.
Catholicism, maybe even many Christian denominations subscribe to a value that life begins at conception.
But that is only one religion, not to speak of the secular. In fact, the secular value is that of the First Amendment and of the Constitution.
But even other religions handle the matter of pregnancy and abortion differently.
As an example only, unlike for the Fundamentalist, whose leaders are callous about a woman’s life, if one judge’s by their doctrine and the laws they pass, the ancient Jewish religion has always put the priority on the life and health of the woman.
My closest Orthodox Jewish friend tells me that he would never, not ever question the decision of a woman about abortion, but that it is between her, her rabbi, and the medical doctor.
So, the abortion bans are Theocentric and specifically Catholic Theocentric, which is ironic, since Fundamentalists are very, very far from the sound scholarship and profound philosophy that is within the Catholic Church and many Catholic universities.
As far as harm to women, CellyBlue wrote two very tightly reasoned articles that make compelling reading on this topic:
And,
First, CellyBlue (“I do know this!”) lives up to her moniker. CellyBlue does know this!
In her article on the parallel between Jim Crow and Jane Crow, CellyBlue states:
“Black women have been dealing with Jane Crow Laws as long as there have been Jim Crow Laws. Welcome white women to the full throttle of supremacy through systemic sexist laws put in place to keep women in line.”
CellyBlue points out the hypocrisy of what I have called Alabama’s Theocracy here:
“Abortion in Alabama is illegal. In any form. For any reason other then a serious health risk to the mother.
“Alabama has a female governor who signed the most restrictive abortion bill in the country. Her reason was everyones life is sacred. Yet in the Summer of 2024 she refused to feed poverty stricken children in the state for the summer. Her reasoning. It was a matter of timing and funding.”
Please, please read those two articles of CellyBlue (I do know this).
And when you are through, search through the Substack of CellyBlue. CellyBlue (I do know this!) brings out so much in the heritage of the civil rights movement – Which is the great moral movement of our time. As only an example, CellyBlue has a very moving account of the 15 September 1963 bombing of the Birmingham Church that cruelly killed four precious young black women and maimed another:
The Fundamentalist movement in America is the core behind the racist, Blood-and-soil rhetoric of Trump and his “immigrants poison our blood” race-baiting.
Meanwhile, Alabama, busy endangering the health of women and girls, also creates impossible burdens for newly naturalized citizens.
Here we take a page from Joyce Vance:
Here is an extensive quote from Joyce Vance – and ask yourself, Does this remind me of Jim Crow? –
“Alabama, where Secretary of State Wes Allen, a Republican, recently announced that 3,251 people . . . (who have been) . . .assigned an alien number and . . . (even though most of these have already) . . . become citizens who are qualified to register and vote. Allen removed those people from the voter rolls without making any effort to ascertain what their status was. . . . . Allen made the changes less than 90 days before the election, which . . . he cannot do.
. . . Allen’s actions are. . .voter suppression justified by fake complaints of voter fraud. If it succeeds in Alabama, it will spread to other states.
“Late (on 27 September 2024), the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division stepped in and sued Alabama and Secretary of State Allen, challenging the program to remove voters from election rolls because it was “too close to the Nov. 5 general election, in violation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA).”
. . .
“The Justice Department is asking the court for injunctive relief. . . DOJ is also asking for training of local officials and poll workers to address “confusion and distrust among eligible voters accused of being noncitizens.”
“. . . Nothing keeps people away from the polls like making them fear arrest or deportation if they vote, even when they’re eligible to.”
Today, in “Blue Notes” Diane (“Diane K24) does a critical study of a Fundamentalist movement called The New Apostolic Revolution, which plays a critical role in the lie about stolen elections and draconian remedies under the guise of “election integrity” but in reality quashing minority votes.
Diane’s excellent column is here:
Diane here cites the work of Matthew D. Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, who is publishing a work about The New Apostolic Revolution to be published in the fall, namely, The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian movement that is threatening our democracy (2024, Broadleaf Books).
See: https://icjs.org/people/matthew-d-taylor/
Dr. Taylor sees The New Apostolic Revolution as the movement that threatens new January 6th violence.
Dr. Taylor reserves special attention to a New Apostolic Revolution leader, Lance Wallnau – whom, you see, God had told that Kamala Harris was the Devil’s means to enter the White House to morally destroy our homeland.
Mr. Wallnau’s remedy for America: As early as 2013, Wallnau panicked:
“It will require nothing less than the government of God to dispossess and occupy the territory dominated by the gates of hell."
Diane had cited and commented much on the above-cited from Popular Info, and I highly recommend you read Diane’s column. Today’s and as a regular habit, Diane (“Diane K24”) is reliable and from a woman of real integrity and sound values, whose writings I follow all the time.
In sum, our Joyful Warrior, Kamala Harris looks to carry us to a promising future.
But this future must not be soiled by states imposing Theocracy upon thousands or even millions of good citizens of such states as Texas, Alabama and Florida.
Yet this has long been the practice of such race-baiting as Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis with cruel practices towards immigrants.
I will definitely write more of this later.
Thank you for your very thorough treatment of the whole issue of theocratic governance. And thanks for crediting Celly Blue and Judd Legum who inspired my article.
Yes!!!