We Win, And We Will Win Again
By a 6-3 decision, the Roberts Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, presenting the issue of abortion’s legality to state jurisdiction. This is an historic day. It is the feast of the Sacred Heart, as well as that of St. John the Baptist. In what is obviously unrelated news, the planets perfectly aligned.
Celebrate this day. It is a beautiful day. It is a day that, speaking on account of this writer’s own apparent deficiency of hope, I never thought I’d ever actually see. But God has smiled on us this day, and more importantly, revealed our—or at least my—own utter weakness of faith. I happily stand corrected. God is great! And through Him are all things possible. I am humbled. Overturning Roe is insignificant; it is but a small mountain He could move, if only we asked it. But it is nonetheless magnificent.
We know that Roe formed one of the primary structural pillars of the sexual revolution. We know it stands alongside contraception (Griswold) and pornography (any number of the obscenity decisions) as a cornerstone of contemporary liberalism. As Justice Thomas implied in his written decision, Griswold, Lawrence (sodomy laws), and Obergefell all have their parts to play, and all should be reevaluated. Whether or not this is to happen is up to us, and up to God. But we can ask God. He will deliver.
We will look, briefly, at what this decision means for the future. And we will take away from it lessons that we should apply.
Roe As a Weapon
Roe served a deeper purpose than first appearances might indicate. Where the transgender movement and the Obergefell decision mock both common sense and common courtesy, neither of them are quite as openly genocidal in their aims as the Roe decision turned out to be. They were only capable, however, in a society that had already accepted abortion. Abortion detached the ends of sexuality from its means in a way more violent than even contraception. Only by forcing this practice on the country, and spending decades reframing the procedure as a matter of liberalism, of women’s rights, was it possible for murder to be rebranded as a sexual practice.
Roe shaped an entire mode of thought. It became integrated into the psychological landscape of America in a way that only the most landmark cases of the courts ever do. Within the decade of its passing, life itself had been redefined. This was subsequently followed up and, absurdly, judicially labeled in the Casey decision some seventeen years later. By the time Millennials were born, abortion was considered sacrosanct by the liberal regime; women were supposed to be able to murder their children if they so chose. They held the power over life and death, not by simple physical ability subject to moral judgment, but with a specific positive spin: it is good for women to murder their children. It is good for them to do this. Children aren’t good. They aren’t to be safeguarded.
No one who has ever seen a baby really believes this, except the most committed of psychopaths. They exist, and they are still somewhat rare, but they are not as rare as they once were. Standardizing abortion as the default position of the liberal regime concerning the value of infants has enabled their ranks to swell. The general sense of malignant self-destruction to be found in the liberal ethos is not unconnected to the embrace by the Regime of Roe. That court decision was not just a weapon against the unborn, but a psychological weapon, tool of demoralization, against the living. If you can be led to believe that the most innocent and youngest of a society do not deserve life, then you can be led to believe that you don’t, either. Those that deny this face public humiliation, but those that go along with it face a deeper humiliation: they force upon themselves the contradiction that life apparently holds no value, and then spend enormous efforts, if they are able, to project some meaning upon this void in order to escape the obvious conclusion of this train of thought.
The other decisions relevant to the sexual revolution all play roles in this demoralization. For the most part, their roles are in providing avenues of coping with the social-psychological impact of abortion as a means of demoralization. If the future can be slaughtered and the present emptied of meaning, which are the effects of institutionalized child murder, then all that’s left for the liberal are his passions.
Political Future
It has been this writer’s belief for some time now that the Regime would go to the mat over preserving Roe. This belief has not been changed, despite the Dobbs ruling. It seems, if we’re preserving our optimism, that the mat has come to the Regime, whether it asked for it or not. But now we get to see how well the Regime plays its ground game in 2022, and how vicious it’s willing to be. It doesn’t play by the rules, after all, and we know that. Most of us should, anyway.
So what options do they have for their ground game?
Remember: the overturning of Roe is a victory. Of this there is no doubt. Even if it is only one state that outlaws the practice (it’s far more than that at the writing of this piece), the Dobbs decision is a victory. In 2019, the CDC claims that more than 629,898 abortions were carried out. Anything that decreases that figure is good.
That said:
Federal legislation is the first, easiest answer. They will—and have already tried once, just a month ago—try to push through abortion access as a right preserved under federal law. It didn’t pass, thankfully, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try again. Knowing who stopped it only gives them targets as to who target in the midterms. The absolutely disastrous state of the country right now, with a recession well underway and guaranteed to get worse, gas topping seven dollars a gallon in some places, and violent crime on the rise, seems like it could be a bizarre blessing in disguise for the pro-life movement. Not a single person who actually has to live in America wants to vote for Democrats right now. Some may try to suggest that overturning Roe is going to rile up support for the decimated Democrats’ cause this November. This is wrongheaded. The radicals will be riled up by Roe’s decision, and there are certainly a lot of them, but it’s not enough, historically speaking, to deal with the fact that the supply chain is getting destroyed because it costs too much for truckers to fill up their gas tanks.
Fertilizer is absurdly expensive, gas is absurdly expensive, and there are have been shortages of items in stores for months. This is going to get worse. The easiest read on this is that overturning Roe came at the worst possible time for the Regime. The second easiest read is that the Regime is flying apart at the seams, and the Dobbs decision plays exactly into this. More on this below.
In the mean time, it’s possible, indeed it is even likely, that the midterms will be subject to the same sort of electioneering we witnessed two years ago. Fraud in the American system is par for the course. It’s expected, in fact, at least in certain doses, in certain areas, and limited to certain groups of people. But it’s rare to see the fraud so obvious and blatant as it was in 2020’s presidential run. Democracies maintain their liberal veneer because enough people are willing to play along, and the Regime insiders keep the political games and tricks they play behind a curtain.
But for the last fifteen years or so, the insiders tasked with keeping that red curtain vacuumed and dusted, or even suspended and covering what it’s supposed to, have been woefully derelict in their duty. Maybe they don’t feel like they have to do it anymore. Or, what is starting to become apparent, maybe they can’t. The theater the curtain is hanging in has holes in the roof, the seats are in disrepair, and the lights don’t seem to work anymore. The curtain hangs in a building desperately in need not just of remodeling, but of complete structural rehabilitation. This place is about to collapse.
Regime Change
The Regime of 2022 is not the Regime of the 90s. Or, in another sense, it is, because it’s comprised of almost the same exact group of people, but that should tell you something. They have no plan for the future, and the last 20 years or so hasn’t exactly gone the way they wanted it to, despite appearances to the contrary. They do not have a future. Their system is falling apart at the seams, and the overturn of Roe should be understood in this context. They don’t have the institutional support to preserve it like they have had for the last five decades. They have been weakened. All it took was one president who played things slightly off script enough to get three justices in. Trump’s legacy, for whatever else he did, has been completely and totally solidified. The man has been vindicated.
But the Regime will go to the mat over its defense. It’s not enough. And it’s not that they aren’t strong enough, per se, to force the issue. The FBI has already made it clear to Catholics that there are real and credible threats of violence as a result of this. And yet it seems unlikely that this summer will burn quite as brightly as the summer of 2020, if only because the demographics riled up to loot and pillage that year were groups historically coached and coaxed into doing so for the last half-century (arguably longer, even). The abortion advocates, by contrast, come across as Antifa types: women whose BMIs are higher than their IQs, and men who sport the vegan physiognomy of meth heads. They’ll be mad, but they’re also on Xanax.
And as the old saying goes, weak men create hard times. These are the weak men.
But the Regime still have a system, for now, and it still seems to function. Their ground game will include more local efforts to push for abortion legislation on a state by state basis. Abortion advocates will leverage local regions where they have more power, and organize in pro-life strongholds where they don’t, in order to maintain and further push their psychological and genocidal fury. They aren’t going to go away any time soon, and we should not expect them to.
There is little doubt that they will try to cause violence. They will have their protests and marches and fires. Those started back in May, with attacks on pregnancy crisis centers during a nationwide formula shortage. Remember just a year ago, In Canada, false claims of mass graves resulted in a streak of Church arsons for which, as far as we can tell, no one was prosecuted. The violence that will manifest from this will initially be directed at the pro-life movement in general, but make no mistake: the Catholic Church will be positioned as the main target before long. This has been coming for a while.
This also signals the insurmountable divide that exists within the country, and crystalizes it at the state level. Already, there are now the states where it is legal to murder your unborn children, and there are the states where it isn’t. That this signaling indicates a general grouping of other like-minded political beliefs is not surprising, but with Roe‘s overturning, the irreconcilable differences between so-called red and blue cultures cannot be papered over.
In the short term, if the violence from the current protests gets bad, then this will almost certainly mark the wake-up call to the American Bishopric. So far, that response has been wonderful. The USCCB’s statement on the ruling was wonderful, and the hierarchy remains, as to be expected, united in its open signaling.
That said, the cozy relationship that our bishops have spent years cultivating—or, in some cases, tolerating and dealing—with the Democratic Party is going to be hard to maintain when those same Democrats will be openly advocating for violence, just as they did during the George Floyd riots. But where some of these players in the Church have been able to play a tightrope act in their language concerning race, the Church’s position on abortion is and has always been crystal clear: intolerable! Letting the issue be, trying to redirect attention to other social issues, or otherwise pretending like there’s no disagreement: these will no longer be options now that the storm is raging. Liberal prelates who seek these later options will find themselves without friends both inside and outside of the Church, and should be prayed for, if only because of their stubbornness concerning the greatest human rights violation of the 20th Century.
Lay Catholics, too, will have to come to terms with the obvious facts. Many of the faithful are engaged with or at least support pro-life efforts. That’s great. But too many of the faithful, mostly of the Boomer generation, have drank deeply from the poisoned well of the revolution. The bishops and the priests will be tasked with holding to account personal conscience and how this overlaps with matters of the spirit. We can presume how this will ultimately go, given the behavior of so many of our prelates in the past. But it seems improper to consider it purely coincidence that the importance of the Eucharist, of contrition, of communion, and of personal belief have been topics of argument for the past several years in the American Church. It isn’t just because Joe Biden ended up being our president.
Overturning Roe will have a lot of so-called liberal Catholics having to decide if they will leave the Church, or—more likely—remain within it according to their own pride. The latter seems worse, and it makes for worse enemies, as the history of the Church since the 1960s has evidenced. But the priests who lead these flocks must be prayed for to be strong in the face of what is sure to be a very stressful. Diocesan parishes have been between a rock and a hard place for decades regarding attendance and parish life. If the Boomers, generationally speaking, stick to the revolution and leave the pews, the funding situation at diocesan level is going to get worse than it already is.
God is great! The future of this fight must be entrusted to His glorious plan. The reaction is not some organic thing that arises as an ambiguous counter-force in history; it is piloted and comprised of men, and driven by God’s providential designs. Again, vigilance is key!
What To Do With Them
The unhappiness found on the left today is, of course, rooted in the impression that rights have been stripped from women. Agency has been curtailed in favor of life, which, famously, the left rather disdains. This is indicated best when the more common arguments in favor of infanticide include the belief that life isn’t worth living in the first place, especially if you’re poor, disabled, or sired by abusive parents. So now that forced euthanasia upon the unborn is taken off of the table, their anti-depressant fueled loathing is given a great spectacle.
But make no mistake, there is something greater here at play. Because abortion was politicized, they are angry not just that its enshrining in federal presumption has been abolished, but angry specifically at their opposition. They are angry because it is a political item, and for the irreligious liberal, politics take on religious energies even when they lack obvious and codified liturgy or theology. These energies, rather than beholden to some objective authority, are rooted in personal inclinations and their own disordered interior lives. It’s an over-simplification to reiterate the now ancient meme, but ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’ touches on a core component of the liberal operating system: how they feel about particular ideas decides how they view the world, and especially what should determine right and wrong. These are confused, bitter, lost people, consumed with a Godless loneliness into which the devil whispers. Pray for their conversion, and be on guard against their attacks.
There is one last lesson for the right. There is value in using, even if one does not respect or particularly believe in, the liberal electoral system. This victory was won by decades of lobbying, organizing, social work, and messaging. It was done by people with less at their fingertips than we have today with the internet, as well as those with access to money and power who chose to use the system at hand. The fight is obviously not over, but if even one child’s life is saved—and this is already the case—then that work has been worth it. There are some battles in which victory is measured not in sweeping triumphs but in taking one more shell hole in the no-man’s land.
It is one thing to disengage from national politics in a sort of uselessly informational sense. Most of us are not in positions to change what happens in congress or within the administration. But ‘community organizing’, even just being active in your local organizations, is tantamount to this sort of movement forward. This is political action, and it can eventually reap great dividends. Expecting the collapse of the system at any time is not necessarily unhealthy, but banking on it almost ensures that you will be wasting your time until—or even if—it actually happens. Not being an actor or politically engaged is fine. But excuses for non-action when one is critical are to be ignored.
Prayer, however, is more important still. By prayer we will be moved to act. Roe is overturned. Phase two of this war begins.
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