If you listen to Supreme Associate Justice, ultra-right-wing Clarence Thomas, reversing Roe vs Wade, should be the beginning of a monumental shift in American values into doctrinaire evangelical beliefs. “The Supreme Court ‘should reconsider’ rulings that rely on the same legal reasoning as Roe vs. Wade, including ones that protect gay sex, same-sex marriage and married people’s use of contraception, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion released Friday [6/24].
“In his concurring opinion in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe vs. Wade, enabling states to ban abortion, Thomas wrote that the high court has a ‘duty to correct the error’ established in Obergefell vs. Hodges (2015), which legalized same-sex marriage; Lawrence vs. Texas (2003), which protects same-sex relations; and Griswold vs. Connecticut (1965), which protects married couples’ access to contraception.
“Although Thomas signed on to the majority opinion, he wrote separately to urge the high court to reexamine these cases. All three rely on substantive due process, the idea that the Constitution protects certain rights its text doesn’t explicitly mention.” Los Angeles Times, June 25th. Thomas has the ethics of a crocodile as he has refused to recuse himself from cases that deal with Donald Trump’s efforts at reversing the election, including his lone dissent in a ruling that mandated that the former President be required to provide subpoenaed documentation to the House January 6th Committee… documentation which contained a slew of emails to the White House in support of Trump’s Big Lie pattern of disruptive conduct from Thomas’s own wife. Supreme Court Justices are not accountable to any cannons of ethics that apply to all other federal judges. Outrageous.
And if you think the Republican Party is done with abortion banning, think again. A very large segment of the GOP is hell-bent on making the ban national. “Former Vice President Mike Pence said Friday that social conservatives in the post-Roe era “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.”
“Republicans have introduced bills to recognize a right to life from the moment of fertilization, legislation that would prohibit abortion nationwide. The Senate bill has 19 supporters and the House version has 164 — far short of the number needed for passage if Republicans controlled either chamber of the House… Many Republicans have publicly tiptoed around the idea of a national ban. After a draft version of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s opinion was published in Politico last month, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said a national ban is ‘possible’ if the court overturned Roe. He later walked back the comments, saying there are not 60 votes — the number needed to overcome a filibuster — for new abortion legislation from either side of the aisle.
“Conservatives will now be faced with decisions about how aggressively they will pursue their efforts to outlaw abortion in each state and nationwide. Some are cautioning against overreach. ‘It is going to be very important for pro-lifers to exercise prudence, principled incrementalism, not make the perfect the enemy of the good,’ Ed Whelan, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia, said at a presentation at the conservative Heritage Foundation this month. ‘It is going to be very important, especially going into the elections in November, that we not overreach.’” Jennifer Haberkorn writing for the June 25th Los Angeles Times.
Remembering the angst and worker walkouts against the leaked Alito opinion and the “don’t say gay” anti-CRT legislation in Florida, and Florida’s punitive reaction to Disney’s coming out publicly against that law, corporations – especially with significant operations in red states vulnerable to similar punish legislative reactions – corporate America is faced with some difficult choices. Yet it is precisely those red state employees who face the most immediate and expensive solutions to unwanted pregnancies. Even the US military has some hard choices, since military forces do not choose where they are assigned to work.
Writing for the June 25th Associated Press, Melody Petersen tells us about companies who are willing to take risks to retain their employees’ loyalty: “Abortion will remain legal in California. But some large companies, including Tesla and Oracle, have recently left and moved to states such as Texas, where abortion will soon effectively be illegal.
“Corporate executives in many industries — including banking, technology and entertainment — vowed Friday to do what they could to help their employees continue to access the procedure… Some companies offered to pay as much as $10,000 to help cover travel and other costs if employees find they must leave their state… ‘Business leaders must step up to support the health and safety of their employees by speaking out against the wave of abortion bans that will be triggered as a result of this decision, and call on Congress to codify Roe into law,’ Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement Friday [6/24]…
“Most employer health insurance plans cover the cost of abortions, but companies say they are now finding ways to do more to help workers living in states where the procedure will soon be banned.
“Here’s what some companies have offered: … Amazon, one of the nation’s largest private-sector employers, told its staff in May that it would cover up to $4,000 in travel expenses for medical treatments including abortion, according to Reuters. Amazon’s benefit is already in effect and applies to employees in corporate offices and warehouse jobs… ‘As of December, Amazon employed 25,000 people in Kentucky and 7,000 in Louisiana, two states with immediate bans on most abortions. It has 95,000 people in Texas and 12,000 in Oklahoma, where abortion is already functionally illegal and will be officially outlawed via trigger laws within the next month. The company has an additional 59,500 people in states that have trigger laws banning abortion.
“JPMorgan Chase , one of the largest banks in the nation, said that starting July 1 employees will be eligible for travel benefits in order to obtain an abortion if they can’t access one within 50 miles of their home… The benefit was announced in a memo sent to employees June 1 and was part of an overall expansion of healthcare travel benefits, which were previously available only for certain services such as organ transplants.”
Additional companies offering employee abortion benefits, and facing red state wrath, include Tesla, Walt Disney Co., Snap, Meta, Yelp, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Douglas Elliman, EBay, Discord, Rakuten, Compass, Dell and Pinterest. Coat-hanger medicine, unexpected infections from botched procedures, unwanted children growing up to be part of a permanent lower class, perhaps forced to crime to sustain their lives, and rich people finding the cost to be a trivial inconvenience… all come with the decision to reverse Roe vs Wade.
I’m Peter Dekom, and what do you expect from untruthful radical right-wing justices whose first loyalty is always to a small extremist segment of the American people?
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