From Colosseum to Confederacy: Trump's abortion position is barbaric and un-American
If you could paint a picture of the abortion position of Donald Trump and his Republican Party, you would get something like Gerome’s gladiator time capsule, Pollice Verso.
The gladiator, with foot atop a human neck, looks to the crowd for a “yea” or “nay” on whether to kill a man. No external force readies to save the victim from death. Rights for the weak are not considered. Morality is ignored. The gladiator trusts in the power of his arm, and turns to the will of the people to select death or life.
It doesn’t matter which side they choose. It’s still a corrupt game. A majority could side mostly for life, or pledge to kill only one person per year, and the system would remain an unjust violation of human rights.
When the majority plays God, no one is safe. Unless rights are safeguarded by the community, human beings are reduced to a playing piece in somebody’s wicked, arbitrary game.
While this sounds far-fetched in our day—where constitutions, self-evident truth, and equality are taken for granted—the ancient barbarism of “might makes right” is being resuscitated by Republicans who think a mother’s womb is an arena for majority rule. They don’t seem bothered by the implications of placing human rights on the ballot.
America’s founding precept: rights are God-given and unalienable
Our nation was founded on the assertion that rights are God-given and therefore “unalienable.” This means government doesn’t create rights. Government was created to protect rights, especially and most easily the right to life.
Unalienable rights cannot be given or taken away. They are certain. They already exist. They cannot be voted on.
But that is exactly what President Gerald R. Ford proposed to do in the 1970s on the question of murdering unborn babies.
Ford, who made clear after his presidency that he supported abortion, proposed amending the Constitution to give “each State the authority to enact abortion statutes which fit the concerns and views of its own citizens.” Confederates would have loved such language on behalf of slavery.
Under the lure of state choice, Ford’s perverse standard would guarantee abortion stays around. That’s because “states’ rights” on abortion requires violating the right to life and being derelict in our natural obligation to protect children.
Trump continues Ford’s barbaric advocacy
The idea of placing human life on the ballot had no real traction until Donald Trump, a “strongly-pro-choice” liberal, eyed the Republican presidential ticket.
In a few short years, with a GOP remade in his image, and judges handpicked to emulate Roger Taney’s ruling in Dred Scott, Donald Trump has neutralized the fight against abortion by swapping a baby’s right to life for state choice.
“Now the states have it, and the states are putting out what they want,” Trump said in April, 2024. “It’s the will of the people.”
Dismissive of the life of the child, Trump has dared give an emphatic “no” to the question of a national abortion ban. Let the states trample on humans, says our 21st-Century Jefferson Davis in Republican clothes. Trump’s true stripes show more and more.
In a recent Truth Social post, Trump looked like his old pro-abortion self: “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”
Sounding a dog-whistle to abortion supporters, Trump’s wife suddenly emerged from the shadows with a grotesque zeal for killing babies—all with the former president’s knowledge and endorsement. “Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body,” she writes in her book, as though we’re talking about blemish removal and not a child. Melania’s memoir was timed to affect the election.
Candidate Trump used to be more careful to not offend pro-lifers. But these days, he figures they are satisfied with state choice, so there’s nothing left to do but crawl back to his starting point, undetected.
In the first presidential debate of 2024, Trump endorsed abortion drugs. After being told these pills are used in “about two-thirds of all abortions,” Trump responded without concern: “First of all, the Supreme Court just approved the abortion pill. And I agree with their decision to have done that, and I will not block it.”
Asked in August if he supports Florida’s six-week abortion law, Trump said, “I want more weeks,” in a macabre demand for more time to kill babies. “I think the six weeks is too short. It has to be more time. And I’ve told them I want more weeks.”
At a rally a month later in Pennsylvania, Trump showed moral indifference over the great abomination of child murder in our country, and ridiculed the anti-abortion cause: “You will no longer be thinking about abortion. That’s all they talk about, abortion.” He complained, “Everything is wrong with our country. Nothing’s right. And all they talk about is abortion.” To get the point across further, he repeated, “The country’s falling apart. We’re going to end up in World War III, and all they can talk about is abortion. That’s all they talk about.” The issue “no longer pertains,” he said, because it’s “now where it always had to be, with the states and the vote of the people.”
Trump: “tough” anti-abortion laws will be “redone”
Trump constantly promotes the “right” of states to place the lives of babies up for a “vote of the people.” In the next breath, predictably, he discourages states from penalizing abortion.
Appearing on Fox News in October, Trump criticized “tough” anti-abortion laws, and voiced no problem with the “much more liberal” pro-abortion initiatives gaining momentum in the states, such as Ohio, which responded to Trump’s judges by placing a “right” to kill babies in the state constitution. Trump didn’t complain, and instead instructed the Fox News audience that “tough” anti-abortion restrictions will be “redone.”
He outlined his thinking: “You end up with a vote of the people, and some of them, I agree, they are too tough. Too tough. And those are going to be redone.”
Back in April, the Arizona supreme court found the state’s 1864 abortion penalties enforceable. Trump decried the law and stated, “It’ll be straightened out, and as you know, it’s all about states’ rights.” Trump then encouraged the Democrat governor and legislature to water down or repeal the statute, and “bring it back into reason.” Democrats promptly nixed the law, as Trump desired.
GOP platform gutted
Trump has inexplicably been able to accomplish the failed goals of Rockefeller Republicans, like President Ford, who wanted the GOP to stand against unborn human life. Back in 2000, Ford worked unsuccessfully with the label “Republican Pro-Choice Coalition” to attempt to strike anti-abortion language from the party platform.
With Trump the new head of the Republican Party, Ford’s dream was fulfilled. The party has now scrubbed the platform of its longstanding anti-abortion statement—originally influenced by Ronald Reagan—that had sat untouched for four decades in its call for “legislation to make it clear that the 14th Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.” Sadly, the agenda item never was taken seriously by Republicans, but it still provided a rallying point for righteous action.
Trump’s 2024 GOP platform ignores the rights of babies and reads like the 1856 Democratic Party platform that endorsed “states’ rights” on slavery. “Congress has no power . . . to interfere with or control the domestic institutions of the several states,” said the confederate-minded Dems. The Democratic Party stood on “the right of the people” to allow “domestic slavery” at the state level, while the Republican Party sought federal intervention on behalf of a dehumanized class.
Turning back the clock—and switching sides—the Trump-inspired Republican platform pledges to “Defend a Vote of the People, from within the States.” It boasts, “because of us . . . power has been given to the States and to a vote of the People” to decide whether to kill babies. (States can never legitimately have such power.)
Dobbs v. the Constitution
Trump proudly takes credit for Dobbs v. Jackson—which should be known as Roe v. Wade with a confederate makeover. In this repeat of a bad chapter in American history, Justice Brett Kavanaugh sides with Dred Scott v. Sandford to endorse democratic tyranny: “[T]he Constitution is . . . neither pro-life nor pro-choice. The Constitution is neutral and leaves the issue for the people and their elected representatives to resolve through the democratic process in the States or Congress[.]” (Dobbs v. Jackson, concurring opinion)
Kavanaugh also makes the dangerous claim that rights are the creation of government: “[W]hen it comes to creating new rights, the Constitution directs the people to the various processes of democratic self-government contemplated by the Constitution—state legislation, state constitutional amendments, federal legislation, and federal constitutional amendments.” (Ibid.) Similarly, Dred Scott erroneously declared that blacks have “no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant them.”
Kavanaugh must think American law sprang from nothing higher than the Roman Colosseum and its twisted disregard for human life.
He must not have read Federalist 51, which defends the Constitution as a guardian for “the weaker as well as the more powerful,” against anarchy and oppression. “Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society,” said Federalist 51. “[A]narchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger[.]” Federalist 84 explains that the Constitution protects rights through the preamble: “Here is a better recognition of popular rights, than volumes of those aphorisms which make the principal figure in several of our State bills of rights.”
Were the Constitution as “neutral” as Kavanaugh says, our nation would have crumbled long ago.
Any reader can see that the U.S. Constitution is not “neutral” on life. It does not allow murder. It does not create gladiator-style contests at the state level to deprive a child of life. The preamble and Fifth Amendment stand on the foundation laid by our nation’s organic law, in the Declaration of Independence, which separated us from the Crown on the basis that governments must protect God-given rights.
Continuing in the vein of its founding precept, the Constitution declares that it exists for the benefit of “posterity,” current and unborn, and it guarantees a republican form of government, not majority rule.
After Jefferson Davis and his states’ rights claim was defeated in the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted to make clear that every state must provide “equal protection” for every person.
By this law, our government rises above the games of brutes and exists to protect the weak from destruction.
Reagan: the Constitution protects the unborn child
This is something Ronald Reagan understood and articulated. In a 1984 debate, Reagan said that because “all the evidence” shows the unborn child is “a living human being,” then “that child is already protected by the Constitution.” Reagan made this remark the same year the Fourteenth Amendment language entered the GOP platform.
Reagan wasn’t perfect, but today’s Republicans obscure his real contributions on life, and use his name to deceptively advance abortion loopholes, even ones he repudiated. They stand against the solid ground of the Fourteenth Amendment argument, and prefer the slippery slope of playing games with little babies’ lives.
For the longest time, the goal to save babies has been gambled away or punted down the field, hampered by political stunts and misdirection, and not addressed with the urgency required to rescue those being led to the slaughter. Republicans’ use of the term “pro-life” has become a tool to gain political office, when so many “pro-life” candidates intend to do nothing, or take steps to hurt the cause—like Donald Trump.
Republicans talk of 6 weeks, 15 weeks, 20 weeks, heartbeats, fetal pain, partial birth, state choice—all compromises and dodges, all fads and slogans they hope will translate into votes and change nothing. They make new rules for the “game,” while never thinking their job is to stop babies from being tossed into an arena of death.
The new “confederate” Republicans are wrong. Human rights cannot be determined by vote, when they were already determined by God.
(“In the name of Christ, stop!” See Reagan’s story of the brave Telemachus, who brought an end to the gladiator games.)
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-annual-national-prayer-breakfast-5
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