Abortion and the Boxing Lesson
Today we’re definitely taking the long way around to get where we’re going so we might as well get started.
Back in the late 1970s a friend of mine was a boxing reporter and he’d take me with him to local boxing matches and we’d sit ringside and could hear everything a boxer and his handlers said between rounds which was often informative and sometimes entertaining.
So one night this young boxer comes in and he’s clearly supposed to be the Next Big Deal.
He’s got entrance music and tassels on his shoes and a velvet robe with his name and nickname on the back and what appears to be a NACAR pit crew to help him get through the fight and he’s facing some Nobody they probably picked sight unseen out of a book of possible opponents which is how they sometimes do it (or at least used to) at the lower levels of boxing.
The Nobody looks like he’s in his early 40s, had a hard time getting there and shows up wearing a bath robe, has no handlers at all and it’s clearly just a payday for him before he goes back to whatever 40-hour-a-week, blue-collar job he has to do during the day, which is fine with everyone because the Nobody’s supposed to be just one more win on the Next Big Deal’s record as the Next Big Deal works his way to a very lucrative title shot.
But there was just one problem with that scenario:
The Nobody beat the living shit out of the Next Big Deal.
What made the fight even more memorable was all the inspirational advice his handlers were giving the Next Big Deal which the Next Big Deal wasn’t buying because while they were telling him he was doing great, he kept asking questions like:
“Where the hell did you find this guy?”
“Who the fuck is he?”
And when one of the handlers gave the NBD some boxing advice, the NBD said:
“Why don’t you get in the ring? Because this guy is kicking my ass.”
Which, weirdly enough, pretty much explains exactly how I feel about abortion: men can have all the opinions they want and be chock-full of advice and tell women what they ought to do next, but we’re not the ones in the ring.
As you might have already noticed, people without kids of their own will tell you how to raise yours, sports fans who have never played football will tell NFL teams exactly who they should draft and men who have absolutely no chance of getting pregnant are happy to tell women what they should do if it happens to them.
I can tell you with 100% certainty I’ll never have an abortion under any circumstances; I’m less certain I have the right to make that decision for someone else.
And I’d take abortion opponents way more seriously if they didn’t insist every life was sacred and had to be protected, but then turn around and try to cut social programs that would help the kid they claim has a right to life.
The right to life appears to last about nine months and after that, those kids are on their own.
And some of the same people who said government has no right to tell them what to do when it came to masks and vaccination because those are personal decisions are now saying government does have the right to tell women what they have to do if they get pregnant.
Which brings us to…
Hypocrisy…and lots of it
Constitutional “originalists” believe the Constitution is frozen in time and we have to interpret it just exactly as the Founding Fathers intended at the time they wrote it and they didn’t specifically say abortion was legal so it’s not.
You know what else they didn’t specifically say was legal?
AR-15s.
But Constitutional “originalists” seem to pick and choose when they want to make that argument and even if they were consistent (which they’re not) as the following article points out: in the 21st Century does it really make sense to interpret the Constitution using the standards of 1787 when they had no clue we’d eventually develop automatic weapons, penicillin, the electric light, nuclear bombs, cars, indoor plumbing and really awful karaoke nights?
The article also points out that if you’re going to rely on history to decide what we should do today, you better know your history and a lot of people who claim to be “originalists” don’t.
They cherry pick historical examples that allow them to do whatever they want to do currently and ignore the historical examples that disagree with their positions and if you want to read a really interesting explanation of what the Second Amendment actually meant at the time it was written, here you go:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/06/26/conservative-supreme-court-gun-control-00042417
(Short version: turns out that “well regulated Militia” reference is way more important than the gun nuts of today want the rest of us to think.)
And here’s another article whose author seems to have spent more time thinking about this than Clarence Thomas and his colleagues who claim to be originalists, but then either re-interpret or make up history to justify imposing their political opinions on everybody else:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/clarence-thomas-gun-decision-bruen-anti-originalist.html
And they’re not done yet…
According to the following CNBC story, Justice Clarence Thomas has also said maybe it’s time to take another look at the following cases:
1. Griswold vs. Connecticut which gave married couples the right to obtain contraceptives.
2. Lawrence v. Texas which established the right to engage in private sexual acts.
And…
3. Obergefell v. Hodges which said there is a right to same-sex marriages.
So if Mr. Fun here has his way you couldn’t buy contraceptives even if you were married, engage in sex acts that weren’t approved by the government or marry the person of your choice, all of which points out just how full of crap Conservatives are when they say they don’t want government interfering in our lives.
If you want to pollute the environment or spread COVID-19 or walk around carrying a bazooka, government needs to butt the hell out, but if you want to have weird sex (and let’s face it, that’s the very best kind) government has every right to stop you from having fun with another consenting adult.
Maybe realizing Supreme Court Conservatives have climbed pretty far out on a very shaky limb, Justice Samuel Alito wrote:
“Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”
But Supreme Court Liberals called bullshit on that when they wrote this:
“And no one should be confident that this majority is done with its work.
The majority could write just as long an opinion showing, for example, that until the mid-20th century, ‘there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain [contraceptives],'” the justices added. “So one of two things must be true. Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.”
If we wind up going down that very dangerous road, it’ll be interesting to see just how many men thought it was fine and dandy to tell women they couldn’t have an abortion, but lose their damn minds when they’re told they can’t buy condoms or choose who to have sex with or what kind of sex they can have if they get that lucky.
According to this Cornell University website, as recently as 1960 sodomy was illegal for everyone in the United States, but heterosexual males didn’t worry about it because even though sodomy is defined as a sex act involving the sexual organs of one person and the mouth or anus of another, the only time anyone enforced the law was when gay guys had sex.
But let a bunch of uptight, religious nuts decide what the rest of us can do and not do (and just in case you didn’t notice, we just crossed that line) and we’ll see how straight guys react to the news that they can no longer legally get a blow job because Clarence Thomas thinks it’s icky.
BTW:
To circle back to where we started; after the Nobody convincingly kicked the crap out the Next Big Deal in every round, the decision went to the judges and just like the ones in Washington, D.C., the judges did what they were put there to do (in that case, protect the career of a kid who was supposed to make everybody money), screwed the Nobody and gave the decision to the Next Big Deal.
Life is unfair and it just got a little unfairer.
fuck
We are standing in the sink of eternity watching our country circle the drain.