It’s all fun and games, this states’ rights business, until the Arkansas National Guard won’t let Black students into a Little Rock high school under a federal order to integrate.
That’s when a president only mildly interested in racial civil rights, as Dwight Eisenhower was in 1957, drew the line and sent in 1,000 U.S. Army troops from the 101st Airborne Division to allow the kids of the Little Rock Nine to go to class.
It was insubordination, and General Eisenhower wouldn’t stand for it.
Racial segregation is what I always think about when Americans in some yahoo state or another start howling about local democracy in action being the reason they get to clamp down on … whatever. We’re all Americans here, and, along with other right-thinking Yankees, I don’t want to live in a country that segregates its schools. Or allows open carry of bazookas. Or, as the rest of the world is following our half-century lead and allowing women the right to choose to use contraception and whether or not to have an abortion, suddenly finds itself at the whim of a newly antedeluvian United States Supreme Court majority poised to go all “Handmaid’s Tale” on us.
The United States Constitution doesn’t want us to live in such a country, either. While it expressly reserves some rights to the states, it reserves plenty of others to the nation as a whole.
When it comes to Proposition 1 on the California ballot this November, which protects women’s right to choose, you might say that it’s a perfect example of states’ rights at work. Californians are overwhelmingly pro-choice, and this, you might argue, only codifies that. And then, let Idaho be Idaho.
But I say instead that this is an example of the power of symbolism in politics. It’s true that even with the wicked Supreme Court ruling that struck down the freedoms of Roe v. Wade throughout the land, the right to choose is not in the short term in danger in California — though it very much is in Idaho, and in much of the rest of our country. Again, not a country I care to live in. Going backward is not what I’m all about. So the reason it’s important to vote yes on Prop. 1 on Nov. 8 is, yes, partly a symbolic one.
But symbolism is important. And so that yes vote is also a way of saying to the national GOP leaders such as the miserable Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, currently promoting new federal limits on abortion just months after howling about how this is merely a states’ rights issue, that we’re not going to take it anymore. We, a nation in which the majority of Republicans as well as the majority of Democrats believe in a woman’s right to choose, are not going to be bullied into going backward here in 2022. We’re going to work for and vote for at every opportunity the furthering of contraception and abortion rights, not the limiting of them.
Because not to do so, even when the naysayers — some of whom pretend to be “pro-choice,” when they are not — claim that they are doing their nasty work in the interests of moderation in all things, is give up on the idea of progress in this world. To do so is to tacitly support the legislators in Idaho, who are using the sick momentum of the Supreme Court decision to push for laws that would bring murder charges against not only physicians who perform abortions as they legally have in America for 50 years, but against women who have abortions as well.
Such legislation has indeed passed out of a legislative committee in Louisiana, thanks to the extremes among the Supremes.
Dixie, and Dixie-ish, states don’t get to maintain racially segregated schools. That’s not my America.
Nor, or so you would think, do they get to prosecute women for exercising the right to choose. Except that, thanks to this reactionary high court, it looks like they do. Two-thirds of Americans are pro-Roe. About 57% support a woman’s right to choose for any reason. But now at least 20 states are on their way to banning all abortions, making criminals of women who have been raped, banning even going to other states or ordering mail-order pills for their healthcare, seizing their phones for their period-tracking apps.
Vote yes on Prop. 1 to put protection for abortion and contraception in our state constitution, and as a symbol showing the rest of the nation how to let reproductive freedom ring, loud and clear.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.
