FBI opens sweeping probe of clergy sex abuse in New Orleans

The probe could deepen the legal peril for the archdiocese as it reels from a bankruptcy brought on by a flood of sex abuse lawsuits and allegations that church leaders turned a blind eye to generations of predator priests.
Archbishop Gregory Aymond conducts the procession to lead a livestreamed Easter Mass in St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, April 12, 2020. The FBI has opened a widening investigation into Roman Catholic sex abuse in New Orleans, looking specifically at whether priests took children across state lines to molest them. The FBI declined to comment, as did the Louisiana State Police, which is assisting in the inquiry. The Archdiocese of New Orleans declined to discuss the federal investigation. “I’d prefer not to pursue this conversation,” Aymond told AP. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)

June 29, 2022
By Jim Mustian

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The FBI has opened a widening investigation into sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in New Orleans going back decades, a rare federal foray into such cases looking specifically at whether priests took children across state lines to molest them, officials and others familiar with the inquiry told The Associated Press.

More than a dozen alleged abuse victims have been interviewed this year as part of the probe that’s exploring among other charges whether predator priests can be prosecuted under the Mann Act, a more than century-old, anti-sex trafficking law that prohibits taking anyone across state lines for illicit sex.

Some of the New Orleans cases under review allege abuse by clergy during trips to Mississippi camps or amusement parks in Texas and Florida. And while some claims are decades old, Mann Act violations notably have no statute of limitations.

“It’s been a long road and just the fact that someone this high up believes us means the world to us,” said a former altar boy who alleged his assailant took him on trips to Colorado and Florida and abused him beginning in the 1970s when he was in the fifth grade. The AP generally does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted.

The FBI declined to comment, as did the Louisiana State Police, which is assisting in the inquiry. The Archdiocese of New Orleans declined to discuss the federal investigation.

“I’d prefer not to pursue this conversation,” Archbishop Gregory Aymond told the AP.

The probe could deepen the legal peril for the archdiocese as it reels from a bankruptcy brought on by a flood of sex abuse lawsuits and allegations that church leaders turned a blind eye to generations of predator priests.

Federal investigators are now considering whether to seek access to thousands of secret church documents produced by lawsuits and shielded by a sweeping confidentiality order in the bankruptcy, according to those familiar with the probe who weren’t authorized to discuss it and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity. Those records are said to document years of abuse claims, interviews with accused clergy and a pattern of church leaders transferring problem priests without reporting their crimes to law enforcement.

“This is actually a big deal, and it should be heartening to victims,” said Marci Hamilton, a University of Pennsylvania professor and chief executive of Child USA, a think tank focused on preventing child abuse. “The FBI has rarely become involved in the clergy sex abuse scandals. They’ve dragged their feet around the country with respect to the Catholic Church.”

The U.S. Justice Department has struggled to find a federal nexus to prosecuting clergy abuse, hitting dead ends in cases as explosive as the ones outlined in the 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report that disclosed a systematic cover-up by church leaders. Federal prosecutors subpoenaed church records in Buffalo, New York, the same year in an inquiry that similarly went quiet.

“The issue has always been determining what is the federal crime,” said Peter G. Strasser, the former U.S. attorney in New Orleans who declined to bring charges in 2018 after the archdiocese published a list of 57 “credibly accused” clergy, a roster an AP analysis found had been undercounted by at least 20 names.

Strasser said he “naively” believed a federal case might be possible only to encounter a host of roadblocks, including the complexities of “putting the church on trial” for charges like conspiracy.

But federal prosecutors have in recent years employed the more narrowly focused Mann Act to win convictions in a variety of abuse cases, including against R&B star R. Kelly for using his fame to sexually exploit girls, and Ghislaine Maxwell for helping financier Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse teenage girls. In 2013, a federal judge in Indiana sentenced a Baptist pastor to 12 years in prison for taking a 16-year-old girl across state lines for sex.

Among the priests under federal scrutiny in New Orleans is Lawrence Hecker, a 90-year-old removed from the ministry in 2002 following accusations he abused “countless children.” Hecker is accused of abusing children decades ago on out-of-state trips, and other claims against him range from fondling to rape.

Hundreds of records currently under the confidentiality order “will reveal in no uncertain terms that the last four archbishops of New Orleans knew that Lawrence Hecker was a serial child predator,” Richard Trahant, an attorney for Hecker’s alleged victims, wrote in a court filing.

“Hecker is still very much alive, vibrant, lives alone and is a danger to young boys until he draws his final breath,” Trahant wrote.

Asked by telephone this week whether he ever abused children, Hecker said, “I’m going to have to hang up.”

More recent allegations are also drawing federal attention, including the case of Patrick Wattigny, a priest charged last year by state prosecutors after he admitted molesting a teenager in 2013. His attorney declined to comment.

Wattigny’s 2020 removal from the ministry came amid a disciplinary investigation into inappropriate text messages he sent a student. The case sent shockwaves through the Catholic community because church leaders had frequently characterized clergy abuse as a sin from the past.

“It was happening while the church was saying, ‘It’s no longer happening,’” said Bill Arata, an attorney who has attended three of the FBI interviews.

“These victims could stay home and not do anything,” he added, “but that’s not the kind of people they are.”

Clergy abuse is particularly fraught in Louisiana, a heavily Catholic state that endured some of the earliest scandals dating to the 1980s. Last year, it joined two-dozen states that have enacted “lookback windows” intended to allow unresolved claims of child sex abuse, no matter how old, to be brought in civil court.

But with few exceptions, most notably a former deacon charged with rape, the accused clergy have escaped criminal consequences. Even at the local level, cases have been hamstrung by statutes of limitation and the political sensitivity of prosecuting the church.

The archdiocese’s 2020 bankruptcy case has also frozen a separate court battle over a cache of confidential emails describing the behind-the-scenes public relations work that executives for the NFL’s New Orleans Saints did for the archdiocese in 2018 and 2019 to contain fallout from clergy abuse scandals.

While the Saints say they only assisted in messaging, attorneys for those suing the church have alleged in court records that Saints officials joined in the church’s “pattern and practice of concealing its crimes.” That included taking an active role in helping to shape the archdiocese’s list of credibly accused clergy, the attorneys contend.

Attorneys for those suing the church have attacked the bankruptcy bid as a veiled attempt to keep church records secret — and deny victims a public reckoning.

“Those victims were on the path to the truth,” Soren Gisleson, an attorney who represents several of the victims, wrote in a court filing. “The rape of children is a thief that keeps on stealing.

New World Council of Churches head draws criticism over Israel remarks

Jewish leaders voiced frustration with the Rev. Jerry Pillay's comparison of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians to apartheid in South Africa.

The Rev. Jerry Pillay, the general secretary elect of the World Council of Churches. 

Photo by Peter Williams/WCC

June 30, 2022
By Jack Jenkins

(RNS) — Since being elected to lead the World Council of Churches earlier this month, the Rev. Jerry Pillay, former general secretary of the Uniting Presbyterian Church in Southern Africa, has been rebuffing critics who accuse him of making antisemitic remarks by referring to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as tantamount to apartheid.

Pillay, the dean of the University of Pretoria, is slated to assume leadership of the global ecumenical Christian group at the beginning of next year. As many in the WCC celebrated his June 17 election at a meeting of the group’s central committee, some Jewish leaders expressed outrage that the WCC would elevate someone who has in the past called out Israel in language that many Jews believe crosses a line.

David Michaels, director of United Nations and intercommunal affairs at B’nai B’rith International, a Jewish service organization, described Pillay’s election as “astounding and alarming” and accused him of espousing “simplistic ideological extremism” and having “a problem with Jews — at least those supportive of Zionism.”

Michaels and other critics pointed to a theological paper Pillay published in 2016 titled “Apartheid in the Holy Land: Theological reflections on the Israel and/or Palestine situation from a South African perspective.” The paper concludes that a “comparison between the Israel-Palestine conflict and the South African apartheid experience is, indeed, justifiable.”

Pillay also reportedly gave a speech at a 2014 event organized by the Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), which took place during the denomination’s general assembly. Like the paper, the title of the talk delivered by Pillay was reportedly “Apartheid in the Holy Land.”

Besides Pillay’s invocation of apartheid — the term used to describe the historic, racist subjugation of people of color in South Africa — Michaels also challenged Pillay’s positive references to the controversial “boycott, divestment and sanctions” movement directed at Israel.

Michaels accused the WCC itself of being “complicit in a predominant contemporary strain of anti-Semitism,” saying a faction in the WCC has worked to “weaponize” the organization against Israel.

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, South Africa’s Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein called on Pillay “to retract his 2016 statements accusing Israel of apartheid and calling for a boycott of the Jewish state.”

Pillay responded in a statement issued by the WCC on June 23, saying: “I support the Jewish people preserving their identity and practicing their religious beliefs and values. I believe that all religions must be respected and people of all faiths — and no faith — must work together to create a world of justice and peace in which we express love, unity and reconciliation.”

The World Council of Churches logo. Image courtesy of WCC

“This stance has been and continues to be that of the World Council of Churches, and it would never elect a leader who practiced or preached antisemitism in any way, shape or form,” the statement said.

“Consequently,” it continued, “the WCC will continue to stand firmly behind United Nations (UN) resolutions on the occupied territories and speak out against all forms of injustice, regardless of where or who they come from.”

Comparisons between South African apartheid and the occupation of the West Bank, long invoked by Palestinian activists, have increased since at least 2007, when former President Jimmy Carter drew criticism for titling a book on Israel “Peace Not Apartheid.” The late Desmond Tutu, a South African archbishop renowned for his work as an anti-apartheid activist, also sparked pushback for invoking the comparison later in his life.

“When you go to the Holy Land and see what’s being done to the Palestinians at checkpoints, for us, it’s the kind of thing we experienced in South Africa,” Tutu told Religion News Service in 2013. “Whether you want to say Israel practices apartheid is immaterial. They are doing things, given their history, you think, ‘Do you remember what happened to you?’”

In January of last year, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem published a report describing the Israeli government as overseeing a nondemocratic “apartheid regime.” Human Rights Watch also used the word in a 2021 report accusing Israel of “apartheid and persecution.” Amnesty International followed in February of this year, releasing a report titled “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel system of domination and crime against humanity.”

At least one prominent Israeli has made the allusion: In February, former Israeli Attorney General Michael Benyair declared Israel “an apartheid regime.”

Jewish groups in the United States rebuked the stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Rev. J. Herbert Nelson, in February for characterizing the occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel as “21st century slavery.” He also referred to “dismantling apartheid” in the same speech.

On Wednesday, the PCUSA’s International Engagement Committee passed a resolution in a 28-3 vote that argues the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians “fulfill(s) the international legal definition of apartheid.”

An array of Israeli officials, Jewish leaders and Jewish organizations has passionately condemned the apartheid characterization, calling the term inaccurate, offensive and dangerous, saying it can encourage antisemitic views.

The Israeli foreign ministry railed against Amnesty’s report even before it was released, calling it “false, biased, and antisemitic.” The Union for Reform Judaism, the largest Jewish group in the U.S., also blasted the report and singled out its use of the label apartheid, calling it “deeply wrong.”

“It is particularly incumbent upon those of us who have condemned the Occupation as a moral travesty, advocated strongly for its end, and who have a lengthy record of advocating for the human rights of the Palestinian people including the right to self-determination, to express our profound disappointment and explicit condemnation of this report,” read the group’s statement.

In January, the Anti-Defamation League, a prominent anti-hate organization dedicated to combating antisemitism, criticized use of the label as “inaccurate, offensive, and often used to delegitimize and denigrate Israel as a whole.” The group further argued invoking apartheid is “counterproductive to resolving issues related to injustices within Israeli society or the complex Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Big cats in urban jungle: LA mountain lions, Mumbai leopards


© Provided by The Canadian Press

Los Angeles and Mumbai, India, share many superlatives as pinnacles of cinema, fashion, and traffic congestion. But another similarity lurks in the shadows, most often seen at night walking silently on four paws.

These metropolises are the world’s only megacities of 10 million-plus where large felines — mountain lions in one, leopards in the other — thrive by breeding, hunting and maintaining territory within urban boundaries.

Long-term studies in both cities have examined how the big cats prowl through their urban jungles, and how people can best live alongside them — lessons that may be applicable to more places in coming decades.

“In the future, there’s going to be more cities like this, as urban areas further encroach on natural habitats,” said biologist Audra Huffmeyer, who studies mountain lions at the University of California, Los Angeles. “If we want to keep these large carnivores around on the planet, we have to learn to live with them."

FREEWAYS AND FRAGMENTED HABITAT

Twenty years ago, scientists in Los Angeles placed a tracking collar on their first cat, a large male mountain lion dubbed P1, that defended a wide swath of the Santa Monica Mountains, a coastal range that lies within and adjacent to the city.

“P1 was as big as they get in southern California, about 150 pounds,” said Seth Riley, a National Park Service ecologist who was part of the effort. “These dominant males are the ones that breed — they won’t tolerate other adult males in their territory.”

With GPS tracking and camera traps, the scientists followed the rise and fall of P1’s dynasty for seven years, through multiple mates and litters of kittens. “2009 was the last time we knew anything about P1,” said Riley. “There must have been a fight. We found his collar, blood on a rock. And never saw him again. He was reasonably old.”

Since then, Riley has helped collar around 100 more mountain lions in Los Angeles, building a vast database of lion behavior that’s contributed to understanding how much territory the cats need, what they eat (mostly deer), how often they cross paths with people and what may imperil their future.

As with medieval European kings, the biggest threat turned out to be inbreeding. Living in small territories separated by highways has caused some males to mate with daughters and granddaughters, who weren’t able to naturally disperse farther away. That's led to genetic problems such as fertility issues and kinked tails.

“Based on genetic analysis, we know that P1 mated with P6, his daughter – that was the first case we documented of this very close inbreeding,” said Riley.

LEOPARDS IN URBAN LANDSCAPE

In Mumbai, one of the world's most densely populated cities, the leopards are packed in, too: about 50 have adapted to a space ideally suited for 20. And yet the nocturnal cats also keep mostly out of sight.

“Because these animals are so secretive, you don’t know much about them. You can’t just observe them,” said Vidya Athreya, director of Wildlife Conservation Society in India and part of a research team that recently fitted five leopards with tracking collars.

The leopards’ core range is centered around Sanjay Gandhi National Park, a protected area boxed on three sides by an urbanized landscape, including a neighborhood that's home to 100,000 people and nearly a dozen leopards.

Researchers tackled specific questions from park managers, such as how the cats cross busy roads near the park.

To get the answer, they collared a big male dubbed Maharaja. They found that it walked mostly at night and traversed over 60 kilometers (37 miles) in about a week, from the park in Mumbai to another nearby. The leopard crossed a busy state highway, using the same spot to pass, on three occasions. It also crossed a railway track.

The path chosen by Maharaja is nearby a new highway and a freight corridor under construction. Researchers said that knowing the big cats' highway crossing habits can help policy makers make informed decisions about where to build animal underpasses to reduce accidents.

LIVING ALONGSIDE BIG CATS

In Los Angeles, long-term mountain lion research showing the harm of fragmented habitat helped fuel a successful campaign to build a wildlife crossing bridge over U.S. Route 101, one of the city’s busiest freeways. Construction began on April 22.

When it’s finished in three years, the bridge will be covered in native plants and include special sound walls to minimize light and noise disturbances for nocturnal animals. It will connect Santa Monica Mountains and Simi Hills, enlarging the dating pool for resident mountain lions.

But learning to live alongside cats is not only a matter of infrastructure decisions, but also human choices and education.

When Athreya first started advocating for co-existence with Mumbai's leopards, she was met with skepticism and pushback from other biologists and policy makers. They thought it would be impossible for big cats to live alongside people without significant friction, or worse.

“The dominant narrative was about conflict,” she said. But she helped push the conversation to be about “negotiations, improving the situation for both wildlife and people.”

That is not to say living alongside a big predator is without perils. In Mumbai, Purvi Lote saw her first leopard when she was 5, on the porch of a relative’s home. Terrified, she ran back inside to her mother. But now the 9-year-old says she isn’t as afraid of the big cats.

Like other children, she doesn’t step outdoors alone after dark. Children and even adults travel in groups at night, while blaring music from their telephones to ensure that leopards aren’t surprised. But the most fundamental rule, according to the youngster: “When you see a leopard, don’t bother it.”

AVOIDING DEADLY CONFLICTS

Leopards in Mumbai adapted to mainly hunt feral dogs that frequent garbage dumps outside the forest and mostly attacked people when cornered or attacked. But in 2010, 20 people in Mumbai died in leopard attacks, said Jagannath Kamble, an official at Mumbai’s protected forest.

The turning point was the realization that the understaffed forest department couldn’t just keep reacting to individual attacks by capturing and transporting leopards to forests since they returned. Instead, it decided to focus on trying to get people to coexist with the predators.

Officials roped in volunteers, nongovernmental groups and the media for a public education program in 2011. Since then, fatalities have dropped steadily and no one has been killed in an attack since 2017.

The last known victim was Muttu Veli’s 4-year-old daughter Darshini. Veli, an office worker who came to Mumbai in 1996, said Darshini was playing outside their home in a slum at the edge of the forest and she just didn’t return home. Eventually, her mauled body was recovered.

“My daughter is gone. She won’t come back,” he said.

In Los Angeles, there have been no human deaths attributed to mountain lions, but one nonfatal attack on a child occurred in 2021.

Both cities have learned that trying to capture, kill or relocate the cats isn’t the answer.

“Relocation and killing makes conflict worse,” said Beth Pratt, California regional director at National Wildlife Federation. “It’s better to have a stable population, than one where hierarchies and territories are disrupted.”

Avoidance is the safest strategy, she said. “These big cats are shy — they tend to avoid human contact as much as they can. They’re really extreme introverts of the animal kingdom.”

___

Larson reported from Washington and Ghosal from Mumbai, India.

On Twitter, follow Larson @larsonchristina and Ghosal @aniruddhg1

Follow AP’s Science coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/science

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Christina Larson And Aniruddha Ghosal, The Associated Press

RIP

Legendary Hells Angels chieftain Sonny Barger dead at 83

Brad Hunter - Toronto Sun

Criminal visionary Sonny Barger of the Hells Angels is dead.

Notorious Hells Angels boss Sonny Barger has taken his final ride.

The longtime leader of the outlaw motorcycle gang has died after a long battle with cancer. He was 83.

According to media reports, Barger died Wednesday in California surrounded by his wife, Zorana, friends and relatives.

A message was posted on the biker’s Facebook page: “If you are reading this message, you’ll know that I’m gone. I’ve asked that this note be posted immediately after my passing.

“I’ve lived a long and good life filled with adventure. And I’ve had the privilege to be part of an amazing club.”


Penchant for trouble. A mugshot of the future Hells Angels boss. 

ALAMEDA COUNTY SHERIFF

Barger added: “Stay loyal, remain free, and always value honour.”

The Angels were founded in California shortly after the Second World War by former bomber pilots still craving adventure and hell-raising.

Barger launched the Oakland chapter of the Angels and eventually crafted the organization into something bigger — and more profitable — than simply cracking heads at Podunk watering holes. Under his watch, the Hells Angels grew into an international criminal powerhouse.

Chapters stretch from Halifax to Vancouver in Canada.


Sonny Barger has a lot of famous friends. CORBIS/ GETTY IMAGES

“Barger converted a sloppy, rudderless gang into a lean, mean organization,” author Yves Lavigne told CNN in 1992.

The longtime biker and former longshoreman said in his autobiography that he was inspired by the pioneering 1953 Marlon Brando biker epic, The Wild One.

The iconic Barger always seemed to stay one step ahead of law enforcement. He and three others were acquitted in 1973 of murdering a Texas dope dealer.

It was a narcotics beef that tripped him up. He was sentenced to a decade behind bars after being pinched with drugs and a weapon.

But Barger only served four-and-a-half years of his sentence. While not promising to go straight, Barger was ambivalent about returning to a leadership role in the club he birthed.

In 1980, he walked on a RICO beef.

Cancer has been as big a threat to Barger as the Bandidos, Outlaws and Pagans over the past few decades. Diagnosed with throat cancer, he had his vocal cords removed.

The Hells Angels leader went back to jail in 1988 after he was found guilty on a slew of drug, weapons and explosives charges. The feds said Barger received explosives designed to “kill, maim or threaten.”


© Allen McInnis

Hells Angels vests on display in Quebec.

While Barger was never directly tied to the notorious Lennoxville Massacre of the Angels notorious North chapter in Quebec on March 25, 1985, gang experts believe he gave the green light.

By the time the dust was settled, five Angels were dead and cops were fishing their bodies out of the St. Lawrence River for months.

bhunter@postmedia.com
@HunterTOSun

HOW OTHERS SEE US

Beijing: Forced Labor Exists in US, Not China


TEHRAN (FNA)- There is forced labor in the US, not in China, Zhao Lijian, Spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said at a press conference on Monday, noting that the US has repeatedly hyped up the outrageous lie about so-called forced labor in Xinjiang and tried to create “forced unemployment”, which reflects the guilt of the US itself.

Zhao pointed out that forced labor is a chronic problem that has existed in the US since the birth of the country, adding that the long history of slavery is a reminder of the forced labor issues in the US, The Global Times reported.

A total of more than 12.5 million Africans were trafficked to America to engage in forced labor from 1525 to 1866, Zhao stated, highlighting that a large number of black slaves were forced to work at the bottom of society in terrible working conditions.

Zhao added that the US is still the epicenter of forced labor, making it a “modern slavery country".

Zhao said at least 500,000 people in the US are living under modern slavery and forced labor conditions, according to an article published on the website of the University of Denver.

Forced labor is ubiquitous in the US, especially in fields of housekeeping, agricultural cultivation, tourism, and catering services, with as many as 100,000 people per year being trafficked from abroad to engage in forced labor in the country.

The US still has about 500,000 children engaged in agricultural work. The International Labour Organization (ILO) has for years expressed concern about serious injuries among child farm workers in the US.

Zhao stressed that while the US government is busy spreading lies and rumors about forced labor in other countries, it turns a blind eye to the issue of forced labor at home, with the US having yet to ratify the Forced Labor Convention of 1930.

The US should face up to its serious problem of forced labor as soon as possible and respond to the concerns of international society, rather than making groundless accusations against others, Zhao continued.

Canadian radio station plays Rage Against the Machine song on repeat after DJ layoffs

2022/6/30 
© Advance Local Media LLC.

Vancouver, Canada's KiSS-FM radio station has been playing Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name" on repeat after laying off their DJs on Tuesday.

Vancouver, Canada’s KiSS-FM radio station has been playing Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” on repeat for hours after laying off three of their DJs on Tuesday.

Three of the pop-soft rock station’s popular DJs and radio hosts, Kevin Lim, Sonia Sidhu and Tara Jean Stevens, were laid off after five years of working at the radio station, according to Pitchfork.

“KiSS is changing and, unfortunately, we were informed that we will not be part of this new chapter,” said Lim and Sidhu during their final broadcast yesterday. “It comes with mixed emotions, as you can probably hear.”

When a listener reportedly called in to request a different song, the DJ allegedly ignored it and continued to play “Killing in the Name,” according to The Vancouver Sun.

Upon learning of the protest song’s repeated airplay on Canadian radio, Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morelloretweeted this one fan’s suggestion that the choice of song was deliberate due to staff changes.

The Bible says nothing about abortion. So being anti-choice is a cultural and political decision, not a biblical one

THE  CONVERSATION
Published: June 26, 2022 

In many churches across the United States of America, and even perhaps here in Australia, Sunday worship would have been an opportunity to celebrate the decision of the US Supreme Court to overturn the protections established in the case of Roe v. Wade in 1973. On Twitter one theology professor has responded to the news with “Well, praise the Lord!”, while another just gave a “Hallelujah”.

It’s clearly the case that the decision to overturn is seen as a victory for the Christian Right in the US and vindication of their role in electing President Trump.

The decision will be seen by many as a recovery of “biblical” values; a return to the Bible’s teaching on the sanctity of human life and the moral abhorrence of voluntary abortion.

So, this is a good time to remind ourselves that the Bible says nothing directly about abortion, the indirect evidence relating to biblical perspectives on the sanctity of life is deeply conflicted, and that one of the two major religious traditions that looks to the Bible as an authoritative text clearly affirms the moral necessity of abortion in certain cases.

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The Bible is silent on abortion

Discussions about, and laws pertaining to, the practice of voluntary abortion can be found in the literature of the Ancient Near East and Hellenistic worlds in which biblical texts were written.

It seems to have been a concern in Assyrian society around 1500–1200 BCE. There, if a woman was discovered to have had “a miscarriage by her own act” she was to be prosecuted and, if guilty, impaled (alive or dead) on a stake.

Aristotle said abortion is appropriate as a means of controlling the size of a family, but should be performed early, “before sensation and life”.

But the Bible is simply silent on the question on which the Supreme Court has now pronounced. Old Testament scholar John Collins is right to say “on this issue, there is no divine revelation to be had”.

What the Bible does contain are some verses which seem to refer to the status of the unborn fetus. The most famous and commonly cited is Psalm 139:13–16, a poem in which the Psalmist expresses the view that God created them in the womb.

In fact, the passage seems to suggest God “saw” who the poet was before they had even been conceived, let alone born (see also Jeremiah 1:5).

It’s hard to see that the passage has any direct relation to the ethical/legal issues at stake in the modern debate, such as the nature of personhood, bodily autonomy, or the negotiation of competing rights.

More specific is Exodus 21:22–25 which imagines a scenario in which a pregnant woman is injured through her involvement (or perhaps her intervention) in a fight between two men. The Hebrew version of this passage is clear about priorities: if all that happens is the fetus is lost through miscarriage then the man who injured the woman should just pay a fine. In the world of Exodus 21, this is the equivalent to losing ox or a donkey: the money is to make up for lost earnings and so the fetus is regarded as property.

But, if the woman herself suffers harm, then more direct restitution is required, depending on the severity of injury: “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, etc.” The most important “person” in this scenario is clearly the woman. The Greek translation of this text, perhaps reflecting ideas of Aristotle outlined above, changes this latter injunction to make it clear it refers to any harm incurred by any child born “fully formed”.

Read more: Trump still enjoys huge support among evangelical voters — and it's not only because of abortion

Jesus said nothing on the unborn

When it comes to the New Testament there’s even less to go on.

Yes, John the Baptist “leaps” in Elizabeth’s womb. But any attempt to extrapolate from that specific statement to general ideas about the personhood of the unborn is, in the words of New Testament scholar Richard Hays, “ridiculous and tendentious exegesis”.

And we do find condemnation of those who practice pharmakeia (sorcery or magic), which some suggest includes mixing potions to induce abortion. But we have no way of telling what practices are being referred to by that term.

Jesus isn’t remembered as saying anything about the unborn. Paul is silent on the issue.

Attempts to claim otherwise are ideologically informed cases of special pleading.

So, the clear moral prohibition on abortion which we find in early Christian literature outside of the New Testament needs some kind of explanation.

That prohibition emerges in the late first or early second century in texts like the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, and, with highly disturbing threats of the eternal torture of women, the Apocalypse of Peter.

It seems to have occurred as a particular interpretation of the Old Testament commandments “you shall not murder” and “you shall love your neighbour as yourself”, but then developed by way of cultural accommodation to the Greek/Platonic idea that the fetus is a living being.

The Christian rejection of abortion seems to have been predicated on assumptions the fetus is a person. The woman, without whom the fetus would be nothing at all, disappears from view. But on such questions, Jesus and the early apostles say nothing.

Yet, around the same time, Jewish teachers were clarifying a position on abortion in which the woman carrying the fetus continued to play a central role. The second century discussion in the section of the Mishnah called Oholoth states clearly that if a woman is “in hard labour” then the fetus should be aborted “because her life takes precedence over the life of the child”. This requirement is only waived if the fetus has already been substantially born (defined as “the greater part [of its head] has come out”).

While we find nothing of this sort in the New Testament either, Jesus is remembered as invoking the same principle of the priority of saving life even if it means breaking Sabbath laws. Jesus’ ethical convictions owed far more to the traditions of Judaism than to the philosophical deliberations of early Christian treatises.

The recent decision of the Supreme Court is seen, in legal terms, as a victory for “originalism”: the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted according to some notion of its “original meaning”.

Applying the same criterion to the biblical texts would help to clarify that Christian support for legislation prohibiting abortion is a cultural and political stance. It has nothing to do with the Bible.

Author

Sean Winter
Associate Professor (New Testament Studies), University of Divinity

Abortion legal and apolitical in Japan, but cost and consent present barriers

A participant in a Women's Day march in Tokyo in 2019 | BLOOMBERG

BY MAGDALENA OSUMI
STAFF WRITER
Jun 28, 2022

Last week’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn its landmark 1973 decision that deemed abortion a constitutional right has reignited the controversial debate over access to the procedure in the United States.

In Japan, where abortion is relatively accessible, it is rarely a political issue like in other countries. Nonetheless, there are various issues women face if they decide to have an abortion.

Experts and women’s rights advocates in Japan say that the nation’s abortion laws are problematic mostly on two counts: married women seeking an abortion need spousal consent, and the procedure used is unsafe and costly.

Is abortion legal in Japan?

Yes, albeit only under certain conditions. Under the Maternal Health Act, initially enacted in 1948 as the Eugenic Protection Act, abortion can be performed if the continuation of a pregnancy or the delivery of a baby will be harmful to the mother’s health for physical or economic reasons, if pregnancy endangers the child’s life or if they face serious impairment.

“Economic reasons” is defined by the health ministry as an instance in which childbirth would place a significant economic burden on the mother and her household, and damage the mother’s health.

Abortion can also be carried out when the fetus would not survive outside of the woman’s body, or when the pregnancy was caused by assault or intimidation.

But abortion must be carried out within 21 weeks of the first day of the last menstruation.

Also, married women seeking an abortion must obtain spousal consent. The only exceptions are when the spouse is dead, is unknown or cannot express an intention.

According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, a global organization seeking to ensure the protection of reproductive rights, Japan is among 10 countries and regions with this requirement.

While the health ministry has said the partner’s consent is not necessary for unmarried women and women who were impregnated by abusive partners or through rape, this policy is not well known. As such, doctors often demand a man’s signature for fear of getting into legal trouble, rights advocates say.

According to the health ministry, there were 145,340 abortions in 2020, down 7.3% from the previous year.

What methods are used in Japan?

With abortion pills still awaiting approval, a surgical procedure is still the most common method of terminating a pregnancy.

The cost of abortion is a big issue in Japan. Surgical abortions conducted in the first eight weeks of pregnancy costs around ¥100,000 ($740), while those performed beyond the 12th week can cost double that. The number of women who struggle to pay for the procedure has been on the rise since the pandemic started, according to the health ministry.

Abortion rights advocates say the high price of a surgical abortion — which is not covered by national health insurance, except in limited cases — has driven some women to seek other options, such as illegally importing abortion pills from overseas. Such practices can put a woman’s health at risk, experts say.

In contrast, a medical or surgical abortion in the first trimester in the U.S. costs about $550, but it could be triple the amount if the procedure is in the second trimester. Meanwhile, abortions in Britain are usually available free of charge under the country’s National Health Service.

Moreover, health experts question the safety of surgical procedures in Japan. The main method of choice of OB-GYN doctors in the country is dilatation and curettage, especially in cases less than 12 weeks into the pregnancy. A 2021 report by Kumi Tsukahara, an expert on reproductive rights associated with the Women’s Studies Association of Japan, pointed to a significantly higher rate of complications resulting from this method than when the vacuum aspiration method is used. The latter procedure, which is the main one used abroad, uses gentle suction to remove an embryo through the cervix.

In December, Britain’s LinePharma filed for approval of its oral abortion pills ー mifepristone and misoprostol ー with the health ministry. The medications, used in more than 70 countries, are considered a safe and affordable method of inducing an abortion in the early stages of pregnancy.

Is there an abortion debate in Japan?

Religious views have played a predominant role in the enactment of legislation concerning reproductive rights worldwide.

While not as high profile or politically charged as in other countries, Japan has had its own abortion debate. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, religious groups and some members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party tried to remove the “economic reason” clause from the Eugenic Protection Act, but their attempts failed due to resistance from women’s rights groups and opposition party members, according to a 1993 paper on the history of Japan’s abortion policy by Misako Iwamoto, then at Mie University.

Nonetheless, abortion continues to be stigmatized in society, as it is viewed as a woman’s sin or a sign of bad motherhood, or even equated with a mother’s killing of her baby.

“Usually in Japan, only women are held responsible for abortion,” Tsukahara explained in a 2014 paper that compared abortion methods and values among various countries. “Therefore, abortion should be among the very critical problems targeted by efforts to end gender discrimination in this country, but this importance is rather unacknowledged among the Japanese people.”

An Irish solution to a US abortion problem

Human rights framework that fuelled political change in Republic can also be effective in America

Abortion rights demonstrators outside the supreme court after Roe v Wade was overturned. 

File photograph: New York Times

By Julie F. Kay

Mon Jun 27 2022

Abortion was illegal when I moved to Ireland in 2000. As an American it felt like I’d stepped through the looking glass. I successfully sued the Irish government at the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of three women who had travelled for abortions — A, B and C — and celebrated as the Republic legalised abortion less than a decade later. Today I’m on the other side of the glass: an American stunned to see that the US supreme court has overturned Roe v Wade.

It’s America now that is going against the global trend, shrinking rights while the rest of the world expands reproductive freedom. On Friday, the US supreme court’s ruling in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization wiped out nearly a half-century of abortion rights in the US with one stroke of the pen. As we saw in the Republic, banning abortion does not make it go away but it does put women’s health and wellbeing in harm’s way.

This judicial fiasco results directly from the polarisation of American politics. When Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, Democrats lost control of the supreme court. The vast majority of Americans — as much as 70 per cent — favour abortion rights as defined by Roe v Wade. Right-leaning, evangelical voters turn out to fervently support anti-abortion candidates, often voting as single-issue voters. These anti-abortion-focused voters turned a blind eye to Donald Trump’s indiscretions in exchange for his appointing three ultra-conservative justices to the supreme court — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Doing so tipped the balance of the nine-member court solidly in favour of curtailing abortion rights.

Constitution

In overturning Roe, the Trump-appointed trio was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, conservatives who rely heavily on the literal language of the constitution. Chief Justice John Roberts joined with less enthusiasm and more concern about the legitimacy of the court that bears his name. The majority brazenly overturned nearly 50 years of its own precedent simply by asserting that the US constitution contains no mention of abortion. By supplementing this with a false historical narrative about the legality of abortion around the time when the constitution was first drafted, it held that Roe had been wrongly decided in 1973. The dissenting opinion by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan recognises that once Roe’s framework is discarded, “from the very moment of fertilisation, a woman has no rights to speak of. A state can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs”.

Now that the US constitution no longer provides protection for abortion rights, each of the 50 states can decide whether to permit abortion. More than a dozen will immediately ban abortion through laws they already had on the books. At least another dozen are expected to enact severe restrictions within the next several months. In total, abortion will likely remain legal in approximately half the US states. Moreover, those states that will preserve legal abortion are clustered on the east and west coasts with broad abortion deserts in between.

Conspiracy

Travel for abortion services will now be the American solution to the American problem and many states are set to welcome abortion migrants. However, some anti-abortion states are threatening to ban travel for abortion services through enacting specific legislation (Missouri) or by construing abortion travel as a conspiracy to do an act in another state (Alabama) or as aiding and abetting someone to commit a crime. Add to this the fact that America’s criminal justice system is inherently racist, and the threat of prosecution for women of colour who miscarry or use medications to self-induce abortion is significant.

Nonetheless, many charity organisations exist nationwide to fund abortion travel and services. With the threat to abortion rights rising, these organisations have been receiving increased financial support from individuals and sympathetic state and local governments. Anticipating the overturn of Roe, New York state governor Kathy Hochul, a long-time supporter of abortion rights, signed legislation that granted $35 million (€33 million) to support abortion providers in the state. Other “blue” or Democrat-led states have done similarly.

Now with state and federal elections set for November, abortion rights activists are urging supporters to focus on every candidate’s position on abortion. The issue has fallen squarely along party lines for more than a decade now: more than 70 per cent of voters for the Democratic party support abortion rights; only 34 per cent of Republican voters do and you’d be hard-pressed to find a pro-choice Republican official these days. Republicans control 30 state legislatures while Democrats control 18 making progress difficult. The Dobbs ruling is expected to motivate voters to turn out for those who support abortion rights.

Meanwhile, we are starting to see a shift in how the American public views abortion. Corporations that once shied away from mentioning it as “too controversial” are now stepping up to pay for employees to travel out of state for abortion services. They need to do more, including putting their voices and their electoral and philanthropic dollars toward supporting abortion as a human right. Religious leaders of many varied denominations are vocal in their support of these rights.

Ultimately the legal and political work and the mass activism that led to the legalisation of abortion in the Republic can serve as a model for the US. The human rights framework that fuelled protests and political change in Ireland can be effective in the US as well. It brings into focus that the state should not interfere with an individual’s decision about whether, when and with whom to have a child, neither should any woman be forced to risk her life or health during pregnancy. Americans will now have to fight to restore these rights, state by state and at the federal level as well, all while supporting those who need immediate access to abortion. It’s a long road but one we have no choice but to travel.

Julie F Kay is an American human rights lawyer who argued against the Republic’s ban on abortion before the European Court of Human Rights and the co-author of Controlling Women: What We Must Do Now to Save Reproductive Freedom.

How to Fight Decades of Environmental Racism

The NRDC’s new head of justice and equity talks about what environmental justice means, and how community power-building is essential to that work.

By Danielle Renwick

Twitter
JUNE 28, 2022
THE NATION
JULY 11/18, 2022, ISSUE


Melissa Lin Perrella. (Ann Johansson for the NRDC)


The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Melissa Lin Perrella sees a direct line from her childhood in a small town in Central California in the 1980s to her work on the front lines of environmental justice.

This article is copublished with Nexus Media News and was made possible by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.

“We looked different from most everyone else; my house smelled different, because the food we ate was different,” she said. She was bullied. “It [affected] my confidence and what I thought was possible for myself, but it also made me the advocate that I am.” Today, Lin Perrella is the head of justice and equity for the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, a role that was created last year. The move is part of a larger shift among environmental organizations toward recognizing that climate change and pollution do not affect all communities equally.

Lin Perrella got her start with the NRDC nearly 20 years ago in the organization’s Santa Monica office, where she worked alongside communities near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, areas with some of the worst air quality in the state. 

“That’s where I learned that in order for environmental policies to be responsive and durable, they have to be prioritized and really led by the communities that are most impacted by them,” she said.

DANIELLE RENWICK: How has your understanding of environmental justice changed over the years?

MELISSA LIN PERRELLA: In the beginning, I was very focused on outcomes. But what I think has deepened over the years is my understanding of how to do that work—the need to honor local community leadership and intentionally take care not to supplant it. Even a well-intended organization can disrupt local power-building if it does not intentionally look for ways to share power. I’ve learned that environmental justice means reducing pollution in communities of color and low-income communities, and building community power is part of that work.

DR: How does that relate to your new role at the NRDC?

MLP: If we’re working alongside communities to close down a polluting facility, NRDC shouldn’t stop there. We should also be working alongside communities to transition workers that were working at that facility [to green jobs]. If we’re going to propose new green spaces, we should be working alongside housing advocates to ensure that the new park doesn’t result in gentrification.

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DR: You’ve said that being bullied as a child for being Asian American is part of what brought you to advocacy work.

MLP: All forms of violence, whether it’s a punch to your gut or pollution that burns your lungs, is targeted at those who are perceived as unable to fight back. Attackers choose who they attack. I’m vulnerable because of my race, my gender, my size—and similarly, polluters don’t site their facilities randomly. They go for communities that are perceived as lacking the power to resist. That’s why I think it’s so important for the environmental movement to support community power-building so that these perceptions change.

DR: Tell me about your work on clean air in Southern California.

MLP: The operations at the ports of LA and Long Beach produce more smog-forming pollution than all 6 million cars in the region. When I was an NRDC clean-air attorney, we recognized that if we wanted to make any dent in Southern California’s air pollution problem, we had to tackle the air pollution coming from port operations. That’s all of the ships, trains, the trucks and equipment. Something like 40 percent of all the goods that come into the US by water come in through the ports of LA and Long Beach.

The movement of all of those goods has created diesel death zones in Southern California. These are communities with higher rates of cancer and premature death and childhood asthma. NRDC has worked alongside community partners for about 20 years now, developing innovative, first-of-their-kind clean air policies with the port and suing the port when we felt like we needed to and standing next to the port when we thought they adopted a good policy.

DR: The Biden administration has pledged to deliver 40 percent of federal climate-related investments to “disadvantaged communities,” and it released a screening tool to determine which ones to include. The tool has been criticized because it doesn’t include race. Can a “race-neutral” environmental justice strategy succeed?

MLP: You need a comprehensive suite of policies and tools that consider race in order to correct long-
standing environmental racism, and to see whether the policies enacted actually reduced racial disparities in environmental protection and health outcomes. Some of these policies include restrictions on siting new environmental hazards in places that already get high and disproportionate amounts of pollution. They should also include actions to reduce existing pollution burdens on low-income communities and communities of color.

It’s not a mystery what needs to be done. Environmental justice advocates’ vision and policy priorities can be found in initiatives like the federal Environmental Justice for All Act, a bill that environmental justice leaders have been instrumental in crafting. From where I sit at NRDC, I can use the organization’s platform to lend its support to these movement voices and efforts.

ABOLISH SCOTUS

Thomas and Alito Are Appropriating Racial Justice to Push a Radical Agenda

Cynical whataboutism is the conservative legal movement’s new ploy.

Mother Jones illustration; Chip Somodevilla/Getty

MELISSA MURRAY

Mother Jones

JUNE 28, 2022

Just a day after the Supreme Court issued a radical decision on gun rights, it officially declared Roe v. Wade a dead letter. In all of the tumult surrounding the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, even eagle-eyed Court watchers would have been forgiven for overlooking one curious detail. After all, it was overlooked when it appeared in the draft opinion that was leaked in May. Nestled among Justice Samuel Alito’s arguments laying waste to nearly 50 years of abortion precedent lurked an unassuming footnote documenting a narrative advanced in amicus briefs submitted to the high court. These “friend of the court” briefs, Justice Alito explained, “present[ed] arguments about the motives” of those favoring “liberal access to abortion,” namely “that some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population.”

According to Alito, claiming abortion is a tool of racial genocide is not beyond the pale. “[I]t is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect.” After all, he noted “[a] highly disproportionate percentage of aborted fetuses are black.” As further support for the view that abortion has functioned as a tool of eugenics, Alito cited Justice Clarence Thomas’s separate opinion in 2019’s Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, a challenge to an Indiana law that prohibited abortion where undertaken for reasons of race or sex selection or because of the diagnosis of a fetal anomaly. The Court declined to review the law, deferring the question of the constitutionality of such “reason bans” to another day. While Justice Thomas agreed with the decision to decline review, he nonetheless wrote separately to emphasize that the day was coming when the Court would have “to confront the constitutionality of laws like Indiana’s,” which, in his view, merely reflected a “compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.”

Justice Thomas noted that “[t]he foundations for legalizing abortion in America were laid during the early 20th-century birth-control movement,” which “developed alongside the American eugenics movement.”

As evidence of the “eugenic potential” of abortion and reproductive rights, Justice Thomas noted that “[t]he foundations for legalizing abortion in America were laid during the early 20th-century birth-control movement,” which “developed alongside the American eugenics movement.” Indeed, reproductive rights advocates like Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and the modern birth control movement, and Alan Guttmacher, who served as the President of Planned Parenthood in the 1960s, worked hand in glove with the eugenics movement, endorsing contraception and abortion as effective methods for “controlling the population and improving its quality.” But if the eugenics movement was principally concerned with optimizing the genetic profile of the white race, Sanger and Guttmacher’s commitment to population control through reproductive freedom reflected a shared concern for high maternal mortality rates and a commitment to allowing women to make decisions about childbearing—and the size of their families—for themselves.

Uninterested in this nuance, Justice Thomas maintains that the work of these birth control pioneers was shot through with racial animus. Margaret Sanger, he notes, “campaigned for birth control in black communities”—creating a birth-control clinic in Harlem as well as the “Negro Project,” which worked with Black leaders like W.E.B. DuBois and Black clergy to promote birth control in poor, Southern Black communities. Thomas’s implication is clear: contraception and abortion—the twin pillars of reproductive rights—are not merely rife with “eugenic potential,” they are, put simply, tools of racial injustice.

Justice Alito’s decision to include this footnote, and its not-so-subtle association of abortion with eugenics and racial genocide, in the leaked draft opinion in Dobbs is puzzling, if only because, as a matter of law, it is entirely gratuitous. Having laid out his case that Roe is “egregiously wrong” because the abortion right is unmoored from constitutional text and lacks deep roots in the country’s history and traditions, there was no need to invoke racial eugenics. So, why did Justice Alito, a shrewd tactician when it comes to advancing the conservative legal project, insist on this unusual aside?

Perhaps it was merely an anodyne gesture of collegiality toward Justice Thomas, who, as the most senior justice in the majority, could have kept this plum opinion assignment for himself, but instead allowed Justice Alito the opportunity to spear Roe’s great white whale. After all, Justice Thomas has diligently husbanded the notion of “eugenic abortion” to great effect, helping it to flourish in the lower federal courts, particularly among conservative jurists. When the Sixth Circuit, for example, recently upheld an Ohio law that barred doctors from performing abortions on women who choose to end their pregnancies because the fetus has Down syndrome, the majority opinion and all but one of the concurrences referenced Thomas’ Box concurrence and its condemnation of “eugenic” abortion. Judge Richard Allen Griffin explicitly noted “Nazi Germany’s horrific implementation of eugenics,” musing that the tragic practice of eugenics “continues today with modern-day abortions.”

Colleagueship aside, Alito’s footnote seems like a strategic choice—an effort to till new ground in an opinion that will be dissected and scrutinized for generations to come. With this in mind, the footnote seems less like an inadvertent aside or a gesture of collegiality, and more like a poison pill, laying the foundation for extending the assault on reproductive rights to contraception, with which Margaret Sanger is most closely associated. This prospect is not far-fetched, especially considering that the Court has previously justified revisiting and overturning earlier decisions in order to remedy racial injustice—Brown v. Board of Education’s overruling of Plessy v. Ferguson’s separate but equal doctrine is perhaps the most famous example. Indeed, in his own concurrence to the Dobbs majority opinion, Justice Thomas made the case for revisiting—and eventually overruling—precedents securing the right to contraception, same-sex marriage, and same-sex sexuality.

The conservative impulse to use race as a means of toppling reproductive rights has unexpected roots. Over the last 20 years, reproductive justice advocates have made the case that restrictions on abortion and contraception are disproportionately borne by women of color and poor women, and that it is essential to consider reproductive rights in concert with economic and environmental justice, immigration status, disability, and race, class, and sexual orientation. This critique has proved incredibly effective, prompting mainstream reproductive rights groups, like Planned Parenthood and NARAL, to expand their agendas beyond abortion to include things like access to affordable contraception, sex education, pre- and post-natal care, family leave, and childcare.

Conservatives also noted the reproductive justice movement’s success in reframing the debate. In time, the pro-life movement too began to recast antipathy to abortion as a matter of social justice. Responding to claims that abortion was a reasonable choice for women of limited means and resources, the pro-life movement invested heavily in the expansion of crisis pregnancy centers—which sought to dissuade pregnant individuals from abortion, in part by providing free or low-cost access to prenatal testing, prenatal care, diapers, and other newborn essentials.

Simultaneously, the pro-life movement began emphasizing the supposed harms that abortion posed to minority children and their communities. The Radiance Foundation, an antiabortion group, placed billboards in predominately Black neighborhoods staunchly asserting that “Black children are an endangered species.” Life Always, another prominent pro-life group, orchestrated a billboard campaign in minority neighborhoods that proclaimed “The Most Dangerous Place for an African American is in the Womb.” More recently, the tagline Black Lives Matter has been met with retorts from antiabortion groups that unborn Black lives matter.

The right’s embrace of racial justice may seem curious—particularly given the conservative assault on identity politics, anti-discrimination laws, and voting rights protections. But in some respects, this pivot is entirely predictable. It’s not the first time the conservative movement has repackaged some of its core agenda items in the wrappings of racial equity.

Ten years ago, for example, the defense of Second Amendment rights was framed primarily in terms of public safety. But more recently, advocates have recast their support of more robust gun rights as an appeal to racial justice. And once again, Justice Thomas has led the charge. In a separate concurrence in 2010’s McDonald v. City of Chicago, Justice Thomas linked the right to bear arms to thwarted Black citizenship. As he explained, the federal government’s failure to protect Second Amendment rights during Reconstruction “enabled private forces, often with the assistance of local governments, to subjugate the newly freed slaves and their descendants through a wave of private violence designed to drive blacks from the voting booth and force them into peonage, an effective return to slavery.” In conjuring up images of lynchings and other forms of racial violence, Justice Thomas effectively insisted that more expansive gun rights are antidotes to racism.In conjuring up images of lynchings and other forms of racial violence, Justice Thomas effectively insisted that more expansive gun rights are antidotes to racism.

Justice Thomas reprised these arguments in his majority opinion in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Court’s recent decision striking down New York’s concealed carry permitting regime and holding that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms in public spaces. He noted the systematic efforts to disarm newly freed Blacks and recounted how “blacks used publicly carried weapons to defend themselves and their communities” in the postbellum period. Indeed, in a truly stunning aside, Justice Thomas cited Dred Scott v. Sanford, the 1857 case that precipitated the Civil War, for the view that the right to bear arms was so clearly understood as a marker of citizenship that Chief Justice Roger Taney, the author of Dred Scott, fretted that recognizing Blacks as full citizens would permit them “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” Not to be outdone on racial wokeness, Justice Alito concurred separately to detail circumstances in which “[o]rdinary citizens frequently use firearms to protect themselves from criminal attack.” In particular, he noted that the Court had fielded amicus briefs from groups, including the Asian Pacific American Gun Owners Association, “whose members feel that they have special reasons to fear attacks.”

This racial pivot is a potent form of “whataboutism” that can be incredibly hard to refute—what about the unarmed Blacks, like Ahmaud Arbery, who are left vulnerable to white supremacist violence? Do they not deserve the Second Amendment’s protection to defend themselves and their families against racial violence? In another amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court in Bruen, the National African American Gun Association, a group of Black gun owners, doubled down on this point, observing that, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Southern states relied on gun control laws to enforce Jim Crow. Their brief even recounts Martin Luther King, Jr.’s unsuccessful efforts to secure a gun license in the face of credible threats against himself and his family.

This kind of racialized logic is not only hard to refute—it is hard to resist, wooing some strange bedfellows to the gun rights cause. Because the scourge of gun violence has disproportionately impacted minority communities, Black voters have mostly sided with gun control measures. But a racialized reframing of gun rights has prompted a reappraisal by some. A group of Black Legal Aid Lawyers filed an amicus brief in support of striking down New York’s concealed carry permitting law. The brief raised eyebrows—legal aid lawyers do not tend to be conservative, after all. But they argued that because gun restrictions are often selectively enforced, such laws provide a potent vehicle for increased state surveillance—and criminalization—of minorities. It was the kind of argument that liberals would typically make. And perhaps that was the point. When the decision in Bruen was announced, the group applauded it as “an affirmative step toward ending arbitrary licensing standards that have inhibited lawful Black and Brown gun ownership in New York.”

Abortion and gun rights are the twin pillars of the modern conservative legal movement. And while this Court, with its 6-3 conservative super-majority, has just overruled Roe and expanded gun rights, they surely recognize that broad swaths of the country object to their vision of the Constitution. Which is why this pivot to race is so attractive. And it is hard, perhaps even impossible, for any other Justice to refute Justice Thomas’s account of racial harm. He is, after all, the only member of the Court that can speak from personal experience about the issues facing the Black community. Ketanji Brown Jackson will surely alter the Court’s racial dynamics, providing a useful foil to Justice Thomas’s account of race, but her voice was not yet available in these two consequential decisions.

The appeal to race also usefully complicates the traditional ideological alignments, fracturing the coalition of social justice groups, while uniting the conservative legal movement and some unexpected allies under the banner of racial uplift. And perhaps most importantly, pivoting to race provides the Court with the veneer of racial justice that helps to insulate their most egregious decisions from the inevitable public blowback. After all, when progressives decry the dismantling of Roe and the expansion of the Second Amendment, conservatives need only parrot back these new racial talking points to insist that they are the ones who are centering the needs of minority communities.

The right’s newfound interest in race speaks to the left’s success in centering questions of racial justice in contemporary political discourse. When millions of protesters lined the streets to mourn George Floyd and challenge the status quo, they made clear that our political and legal discourses would have to grapple with questions of race and racialized violence. The right’s recent embrace of race—even as it decries identity politics and critical race theory—would be amusing if it weren’t so obviously cynical. The Court has cloaked its radically conservative legal agenda in a mantle of wokeness that conservatives would be quick to denounce—if it weren’t so useful for achieving their most deeply cherished goals.

ABOLISH SCOTUS

Poll: Confidence in Supreme Court collapses as just 33% agree with decision to overturn Roe v. Wade

Andrew Romano

·West Coast Correspondent

Tue, June 28, 2022 

A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that more than six in 10 Americans (61%) now have little or no confidence in the Supreme Court after its decision Friday to overturn Roe v. Wade — a near-total reversal from the 70% of voters who expressed at least some confidence in the court right before conservative justices gained a 6-3 majority with the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett in October 2020.

A more recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll conducted in May 2022 — immediately after Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion on Roe first leaked — found that the court’s standing was already slipping with conservatives in control.

Since Roe was officially reversed, however, the number of Americans who express a total lack of confidence in the court has soared by 14 percentage points (to 39%), with large increases among Democrats (+24 points) and independents (+14 points). A clear majority of Democrats (54%) now say they have zero confidence in the court, while another 22% say they have only “a little”; just a quarter have “some” (18%) or “a lot” (7%).

Since Friday's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, 54% of Democrats say they have lost confidence in the Supreme Court. (Yahoo News/YouGov)

At the same time, half of all Americans (50%) now disapprove of the way the Supreme Court is doing its job, an 8-point jump from last month (driven by increases of 11 points among both Democrats [to 70%] and independents [to 52%]). Overall, just 37% of Americans approve.

And even fewer (33%) say they agree with the court’s actual decision to overturn Roe v. Wade — the decision at the center of its collapsing reputation.

The other two-thirds of Americans either disagree with the court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health (49%) or say they’re not sure (18%).

Now that Roe is gone, the new survey of 1,630 U.S. adults, which was conducted from June 24 to 27, is striking in part because it reveals a counterintuitive gap in energy and emotion between Americans who favor abortion rights and those who oppose them.

For decades, so-called pro-life forces have been portrayed as the more passionate side in U.S. politics. But Dobbs may change that.

Lisa Turner holds her teenage daughter Lucy Kramer during a candlelight vigil outside the Supreme Court on Sunday night. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

When asked to choose from a list of emotions describing their reaction to the end of Roe v. Wade, for instance, far more Americans say they are "disgusted" (34%), "outraged" (30%) or "sad" (31%) than say they are "happy" (16%), "grateful" (16%) or "thrilled" (11%). When combined, nearly twice as many Americans place themselves in the first category (46%) than in the second (24%).

Why? Because while 74% of Americans who think abortion should be mostly legal say they feel disgusted, sad or outraged, a far smaller percentage of Americans who think abortion should be mostly illegal say they feel grateful, happy or thrilled (57%).

This could have political consequences in the 2022 midterms. For one thing, more Democrats now name abortion (17%) over inflation (16%) as “the most important issue to you when thinking about this year’s election,” suggesting that the issue could motivate them to turn out at the polls. Among all voters, abortion (11%) now ranks third behind inflation (34%) and democracy (20%), with crime (4%), immigration (7%), health care (5%) and climate change (5%) trailing well behind.

Likewise, Americans now say the Democratic Party (40%) would do a better job handling abortion than the Republican Party (31%), up slightly from 38%-32% a month ago.

Adjectives used to describe the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade tended to be more negative than positive in a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll. (Yahoo News/YouGov)

But perhaps most importantly, the new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that 45% of registered voters now say they would vote for a Democrat for Congress if the election were held today, versus 38% who say they would vote for a Republican — a 7-point gap that has nearly doubled since last month. And when explicitly asked to choose between a “pro-choice” Democrat (47%) and a “pro-life” Republican (32%), that same gap actually doubles again, to 15 points.

Since Friday, national Democrats from President Biden on down have argued that “Roe is on the ballot” this fall; on Monday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the U.S. House would soon take up legislation to "further codify freedoms which Americans currently enjoy.” Meanwhile, former Republican Vice President Mike Pence, among others, has said conservatives “must not rest and must not relent until the sanctity of life is restored to the center of American law in every state in the land.”

If the coming congressional elections do become a battle between national abortion protections on one side and a national abortion ban on the other, Democrats will likely be on firmer political footing.

Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, 52% of registered voters say they want Congress to pass “a law that keeps abortion as legal and accessible nationwide as it has been under Roe”; just 35% of voters oppose such a law. Even more voters (64%) oppose "passing a law that bans abortion nationwide” (i.e., the Pence position). Less than a quarter (23%) favor such a ban — including only half of those who say abortion itself should be illegal in most or all cases.

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The Yahoo News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,630 U.S. adults interviewed online from June 24 to 27, 2022. This sample was weighted according to gender, age, race and education based on the American Community Survey, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, as well as 2020 presidential vote (or non-vote) and voter registration status. Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S. adults. The margin of error is approximately 2.9%.