SONGEZO ZIBI | US abortion reversal shows the dangers of mixing religion, state and politics

I love history, a lot. I think the knowledge thereof is important, including seemingly little or insignificant kinks in what might otherwise be a long, overarching journey through time. It is by plotting those little kinks that we get to appreciate the colour and nuance of each era within that story, and develop a much better understanding of what we may be dealing with in the present, and how we navigate same in the future.

In the light of the long-expected and predictable decision of the US Supreme Court to remove a woman’s right to make personal and medical decisions about her own body, by overturning the 1973 decision of the same court to install that same right in a case called Roe v Wade, I had intended to write about the history before and since that decision. Each of them matters.

That decision gave women in the US the right to abort a pregnancy as an integral part of the right to privacy. The court has now decided that is no longer the case, setting off a frenzy of protests and commentary in that country. Roe v Wade was the culmination of a long history of litigation, with the Griswold v Connecticut decision probably being the most significant jurisprudential precedent before the 1973 Roe v Wade decision. In that case, the court decided that contraception was part and parcel of a woman’s right to privacy.

There is also a general assumption that the decision is the culmination of years of fightback by the US Christian right wing, but it’s not. In fact, the largest evangelical denomination in the US, the Southern Baptist Convention, recognised that notwithstanding its opposition to abortion in most cases, a woman had the right to make private medical decisions, including contraception and termination of pregnancy.

It was also not until 1981 that racist, segregationist preacher Jerry Falwell started advocating for a complete ban on abortion. At the time the court decided Roe v Wade, there were Republicans who supported abortion rights and Democrats who opposed it.

It was only in the 1980s that the Republican Party hacks, in an apparent move to attract Catholic voters, decided to take a more hardline position given that Baptists were already Republican. This was an interesting reversal given how controversial John F Kennedy’s Catholic faith had been source of consternation for Republicans. In fact, when Kennedy met Pope Paul VI on July 2 1963, many Protestant Americans were preoccupied with whether their president would commit the cardinal error of kissing the pontiff’s ring.

One of the reasons the reversal of abortion rights became a political cause célèbre for the US right wing was that it became a way of pulling in the church community into its political orbit.

He didn’t, and the country heaved a sigh of relief. Of course the US would soon have bigger things to worry about, such as a grinding war in Vietnam that would kill over 50,000 young American lives and multiple times more Vietnamese. The small matter of whether the presidential lips would connect with the pontiff’s ring soon took its rightful place as a triviality in a gratuitously entitled country.

But, I digress into history, which I promised to avoid.

So instead of digging into the kinks of the past, I will write about something else — the state of democratic discourse today and how it got here.

First, let me put out there my own personal position on the matter. The decision of the US Supreme Court is intolerable. It represents everything a modern, democratic and inclusive society is not — male chauvinism, misogyny, Calvinism, reactionary politics, fascism and toxic masculinity that are, sadly, supported by far too many in a terrible conflation of faith and religion.

This outcome shows the danger of religious fundamentalism and the conflation of religion and state. It is for this reason that I feel it is time that Christian fundamentalists are equated to their favourite bogeyman idea of religious fundamentalism, the Taliban, to which they refer as “evil and backwards” in particular as it relates to its desire to exert extreme controls on women. I cannot think of a time when the similarities between the two movements were so stark. 

The “constitutional textualists” on the US Supreme Court choose to interpret the US constitution “as written” hundreds of years ago, and seemingly with no desire to accommodate the reality of modernity. It is for this reason that one of the most extreme advocates of “textualism” on the court, associate justice Clarence Thomas, openly stated in his concurring opinion (as judgments are called in the US) that women’s right to access contraceptives and gay marriage rights must be reviewed, too.

So, many similarities there, but I digress yet again. This moment has been long in the making.

One of the reasons the reversal of abortion rights became a political cause célèbre for the US right was that it became a way of pulling in the church community into its political orbit. The idea is to force voters into binaries where, having elected people who propagate the reversal of abortion rights, the same people also keep the federal minimum wage unchanged or let the gun industry go unregulated despite countless massacres of children.

It is how people who profess “family values” and morals can also elect a total degenerate and amoral crook called Donald Trump, who is multiple times divorced and a certified serial cheat. Trump made it clear early on that if elected president, he would appoint Supreme Court judges who would take away the right to abortion. That assertion secured the complicity of the Christian right as Trump destroyed the US’s democratic culture and eventually nearly pulled off a coup.

The now entrenched binary political culture means that tens of millions of Americans have lost the capacity to listen and reflect to make carefully considered political choices. It is for this reason that the US political right wing focuses on so called “culture wars” rather than bread and butter political issues. They take away the inclination to listen to opposing views and consider that the best position may be in the middle.

And so it is that there are new issues all the time, such as the overblown and distorted complaint about “wokeness and critical race theory”, or the concerted, oppressive attacks against gay and transgender children, who are called paedophiles. It is a dystopian universe where the very foundations of faith, such as kindness and forgiveness, have been replaced by violent vitriol and daily screaming matches in every gathering, from school meetings all the way to political rallies.

These cultural issues have become so pervasive that some of the most pressing public policy issues are now left either unattended or politicians have a window to do whatever they wish, no matter how harmful to the public. This is why PPresident Joe Biden’s climate change mitigation legislation stood no chance in Congress. People who are elected on the basis of cultural wars merely block legislation and move along to more cultural issues, while their country and the planet continue to suffer.

It is a stunning reversal of democratic ideals that has a severe impact on real people. The first victims of that destructive, anti-democratic politics will be millions of women who, for the first time in the lifetime, will have to face the prospect of a police investigation when they suffer the terrible misfortune of a miscarriage, an already traumatic event.

The decision of the US Supreme Court demonstrates aptly why democracy can only survive, let alone thrive, if citizens are alert and committed to the idea of electing people who do not seek office for power’s sake, but to make a difference in the community. How do we spot those? They propagate the politics of fear and division, carefully skirting the limits of free speech by advocating violence and coercion.

We have plenty of those in our land. We must be vigilant.

Songezo Zibi is the author of ‘Manifesto — A New Vision for South Africa’.