DK CURRENT POST EXCERPT WOMENS RIGHTS

One might subtitle this excerpt:

"How the Womens' Movement queered the Democratic Party, and gave the government to the Republicans"

See Brooks, Goldberg, NYT, today...

"...But although some of these decisions also fueled Republican rhetoric, they cannot be compared in their political impact either to Brown or to the court's next big move Roe v. Wade in 1973.

"I supported abortion rights early in 1973, as I do now, but I was startled in January of that year when the Supreme Court voted 7-2 that the Constitution contained an implied right to abortion.  This was not the first step towards legalization of the procedure. Both New York and California--then our two largest states--had passed laws legalizing it in recent years, and it was certainly possible that other states might follow.  And to find the right to abortion in the Constitution, the Court had to rely on a relatively obscure doctrine of "substantive due process," which allowed it to declare a right that was not enumerated in the Constitution.  It was not, in short, immediately obvious to an intelligent lay person--and I continue to think that it is not obvious--that Roe V. Wade was in any sense inevitable given the text of the US Constitution.  It is equally clear, in my view, that the Constitution does not ban abortion.

"For proponents of abortion rights, however, the Constitutional issue was secondary from the beginning, while feminist conceptions of rights were primary.  1970s feminism refused to allow women to be defined by their role as mothers and insisted, in effect, that the choice to become a mother should be theirs alone.  No less an authority than Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her confirmation hearing, declared that without the right to abortion, women could not be equal to men--presumably because men did not have to face pregnancy.  And as tribalism (including tribalism based on gender) has taken over our politics, liberal women have become more and more insistent that the right to abortion is as fundamental as any right in the Constitution, whether it can specifically be found there or not.  Yet that view, obviously, has never won the assent of many millions of Americans who reject abortion on religious and other grounds--including millions of women.  That presumably is why the language of the abortion rights supporters has continually evolved, from pro-abortion to pro-choice to, now, "reproductive rights."  Perhaps some ambivalence even among supporters of abortion has also played a role in this.

"A vehement anti-abortion movement became a pillar of the Republican coalition in the 1970s, as the Republican Party successfully created a new majority in the 1980s.  Many on the left undoubtedly believed that opposition to abortion would fade with the passage of time, but that has not happened...."DK 


Of course the Civil Rights Movement came first, and made the Democratic Party the Party of blacks. This was what really sent them in droves to the Republicans. Professor Kaiser fails to mention that in his current post, but he has referred to this important point in the past.

Once the Womens Movement got under way, it was the wedge for other fringe movements, LGBT, etc, which only further queered the Party.