Well, quite the week for Supreme Court decisions. My totally amateur take on them as a run of the mill citizen. Mostly on why I think the decisions are for the most part positive and not nearly as ground-breaking as the coverage might warrant.
- Carson v. Makin – The short version is Maine had a law that allowed families to receive financial assistance if there was not a secondary school in their county to send students to in order to pay for local private school tuition, unless the private school was affiliated with a religion or run by a religious organization. The Court struck down the law as discriminatory.
My take:
A bad law that doesn’t sound as bad as it really was. Key point, these were not some sort of schools teaching people nothing, but religion all day. These were were fully accredited schools, approved by state and regional accrediting agencies to be teaching a general education, just had the religious teaching in addition to it.
Now imagine if Blue Mountain College, Freed-Hardeman University, or Belhaven University had suddenly had their students’ ability to qualify for Federal Pell Grants taken away, simply because they had a religious affiliation and taught religious concepts as part of their curriculum. Also imagine Baptist, Methodist, St. Dominic, or St. Francis hospital and healthcare systems suddenly were deemed to no longer qualify for Medicaid payments. Both examples are the same as the situation in this Maine law. Both examples would be blatant discrimination as long as the quality of the education being provided for non-religious studies and/or healthcare procedures being performed were truly as good as totally secular institutions. As long as a benefit is being provided by the government to a private entity, it should make no difference whether the private entity is religious in nature or affiliated with a religion. Overall, I agreed with the decision.
- New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen – The short version is that New York has a state law on the books to allow concealed carrying of firearms, but only if a person who applied could show what the state deemed to be a “proper cause” that justified the need of the person to carry a gun. The Court struck down the law saying that requiring people to show a “proper cause” that the state of New York agreed with, above and beyond a general desire to protect oneself, was an undue burden on the part of the citizen to exercise their 2nd Amendment right to bear arms.
My take:
A good decision for those who, as I do, believe in the Constitutional right of the individual to bear arms. Key points are that the Court did not say that having to get a concealed carry permit was unconstitutional. The Court did not say there could not be restrictions on certain public “sensitive locations” where the right could be restricted. The Court did not say that the state could not limit the right to own a firearm to those without certain mental illnesses or criminal records. What the Court did rightly say was that it is not up to any state to simply decide that my reasoning as a law-abiding citizen of sound mind for carrying a gun was somehow not “worthy” of the ability to exercise my constitutional right. The 2nd Amendment gives the right to bear arms to citizens. If you want to bear them to hunt, to protect yourself, to carry to sell to someone, or whatever otherwise legal reason you might wish to carry them, then the government should not interfere with that right. As a believer in the Constitution and all the rights in the Bill of Rights, I have to agree with this assessment.
I am a gun owner. I believe that the Founding Fathers knew full well what they were doing by creating the 2nd Amendment. It helps to insure the safety of the individual and their property, the individuals ability to provide food for their family in times of need, and the ability in the rarest of rare occasions to protect themselves from a government, such as the British monarchy’s colonialism, which is tyrannical and does not allow the individual any say in their own governing.
However, I would also add that it saddens me the loss of respect I see with many gun owners for the awesome responsibility that is gun ownership toward our fellow citizens. A gun is an item that easily can take away the lives of many other people in a relatively short amount of time. All my life, I was taught by virtually every adult to show respect for firearm safety and not view a gun as a toy or something to be flaunted like a teenager trying to assert his “manhood.” The adults in my family and community would have stood in line to give me the whipping I rightfully would have deserved, if I whipped out my gun in public and made the various women or other community members in my presence nervous or scared. Yet now, a certain subset of gun owners has decided it is so funny to strap a tactical looking gun on and waltz into a public place with people who are scared or made nervous. It is simply not right to do something that is immature like this and irresponsible. The gun owner should be a person whose judgement demonstrates to non-owners that they are of the most sound judgement and the most respectful of others. Such foolish behavior causes such non-owners to potentially become anti-gun ownership in general!
Likewise, when I was growing up, I would have been beaten by all responsible adults in my family and looked down upon in my community if I had a gun in a public place and purposefully displayed it until I had a reason and true intent to use it. The mantra I grew up with was “Never let them see it, unless you are going to use it.” I was brought up to believe that anyone other than a law enforcement officer or those engaged in security actions on a premises was being foolish and immature to simply display their weapon for all to see. I have been in so many public gatherings where there probably was not enough table space to hold all of the guns present on responsible, law-abiding individuals present. However, few if any, other than the one with the gun knew it was even present. Those type of men and women, who are responsible, mature, level-headed gun owners are the individuals you want to have a weapon in the case of some criminal activity. If you feel the need to flash your gun, then it is an indicator that you may not be the most level-headed individual present to calmly and purposefully do what needs to be done with that gun in the event of something criminal occurring. If you feel the need to display or wave around a gun to show your toughness or manhood, then you have issues with your toughness or manhood. As gun owners and carriers, we need to be of the Andy Griffith temperament and behavior, and not Barney Fife.
Lastly, I do not agree with and think it causes terrible problems among the non-gun owning public, who we want to support our rights, to purposefully take an infant or small child and show a picture of them with a gun. As responsible parents and adults who are aware of the amount of accidents which happen amongst children with firearms, there are few things more misguided than having your toddler continually posing with a gun or even a very small child handling a gun to pose in pictures and videos sent out to the public in a fashion like he is ready to hit the jungles of Vietnam. Responsible parents who own guns should show them and expose them to guns to take away the curiosity that drives children to seek out the “forbidden” and potentially harm themselves. Likewise, we should show them the deadly power of a firearm and that we have to respect it in our handling and use of it firsthand. As children age, we should show them how to use a gun safely and respectfully. However, when we plaster pictures of very small children dressed up in full tactical weapons, it does nothing but project some sort of odd need on our part to alarm those who do not own guns or simply those who might be the type who worry constantly about the safety of children, as many of the best mothers and parents do. They might fear for our children, since we are dressing them up as little soldiers of fortune and for some reason acting like it is a game to laugh about, then our children might have unsupervised access to such guns at other times and endanger themselves or others. Again, if we are mature parents and gun-owners, we want to display that we are sober people who do not intentionally try to provoke others into emotional responses and who teacher are children to be equally respectful, safe, and sober around the firearms we own as our Constitutional right. As the old saying goes, “with great power comes great responsibility.” Guns are powerful and there is a reason that they are and have been called “equalizers.” We have the right to possess that power, which can be deadly, but then we have an even greater responsibility to handle that power in a mature, safe, and sober fashion to protect others and to make sure that those who do not have a real opinion on gun ownership do not become “anti-gun” because of our recklessness.
Back to the Court’s decision. It was a good one. Our rights are not something that law-abiding citizens should have to demonstrate some government-decided “good enough reason” for us to exercise freely.
- Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization – The short version is that Roe v. Wade, which first declared a constitutional right to abortion in 1973, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which re-affirmed that right in 1992 were challenged based upon a Mississippi law heavily restricting abortion. Under those prior decisions, no state could pass a law interfering significantly with this “constitutional right” to have an abortion, though it was a right not specifically mentioned in the Constitution itself, as several others are not. The Court overturned those rulings and deemed them in error by giving a Constitutional right to privacy as part of substantive due process where there was none implied in the Constitution.
My take: I am pro-life. I believe, based on biology and supported by my faith, that distinctive, individual life begins prior to a child physically leaving the mother’s body. Since, we all believe that the right to life of any individual is worthy of legal and moral protection, then I believe that the life of the unborn is legally and morally deserving of protection from harm or being ended. While this decision will generate much attention and is groundbreaking in terms of overturning precedent, it will not make abortion illegal across the country. Instead, it simply brings things back to how they were before the 1973 decision, where individual states had the freedom to make their own laws allowing or restricting when and if an abortion can be performed. For the vast, vast majority of our country’s existence this is how things functioned with many abortions being performed in many places across the country. I agree with the Court’s decision legally, as I believe it went too far in “inventing” from the judicial bench rights which are not actually part of the Constitution itself and interfered from the federal level with the powers given to the states to make laws in this area.
That being said, while I agree that life begins before physical birth and that baby is a real person, I have to recognize that when exactly this occurs is a bit gray for some people in terms of religion and biology. My opinion is that life is so valuable that I have to defer to the point that I know is safest to protect that unborn life, which is when the egg and sperm combine to form a new cell with distinct individual DNA. Thus, I defer to recognizing life begins at the moment of conception to be safe. Yet, there are and historically have been individuals, even those who fervently believe in Christ, who do not believe that the soul enters at that moment. There are others who for biological reasons and who may or may not even believe in a soul do not believe that an individual separate from the mother exists until the cells of the fetus are organized enough to form a heartbeat, form a brain that has conscious thought, develop enough to carry on life outside of the mother’s internal body, or other cutoffs. Now, I feel that I have to be respectful of these positions, as I cannot make a purely black and white, book, chapter, and verse argument that refutes them without proving it using indirect and inductive reasoning. These are not people who believe in taking unborn lives of innocents, but instead those described are people who do not agree with me on when that moment of distinct self or indwelling of spirit occurs. Far from the individuals who would gladly “abort” a child literally up until the moment of natural birth, whom I cannot comprehend.
Yet, even those who believe what I believe to be infanticide, the “aborting” of unborn children up until the point of natural birth, I recognize their right as citizens to believe whatever in the heck they want to believe and express it. No matter the fact that I believe logic, reason, and morality itself oppose their position. Even more so, I must respect that abortion does delve into many “gray areas” among those of us who consider ourselves “pro-life.” What of those who oppose abortion, except in the case of rape, incest, or danger to the mother? Many of us fall into this category, whether we realize it or not. After all, it was the exact position of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, even. Before you say you oppose such things, think of an ectopic (tubular) pregnancy? Would we watch a woman and an unborn child both die, simply because we thought it always wrong to take an unborn life, as would be the case if an ectopic pregnancy, which can never make it to survivable term and will put the mother’s life in clear and present jeopardy? No, I would gladly tell the doctor to end the unborn life, which would only be hastening the inevitable, in order to protect my wife or any other female who I had input on the decision. What if the pregnant female were a child, even as young as five years old? Impossible, far from it. Abuse victims of molestation and incest can certainly get pregnant any time post-puberty with some younger than age twelve. Should they have a baby and carry it to term, with the potential for incestuous birth defects, psychological damage to a young mind already injured on the strain of carrying a child, and the health effects as an immature body attempts to provide nutrients and prepare for birth of a child, when they are literally a child themselves? Does such not place them in real danger of their life or at least their health? Again, though I believe that life begins at conception, I do not oppose an abortion at all when the life of the mother is in any sort of danger. That is her decision and the doctors. On a spiritual level, I know that the unborn child will have an eternal life in Heaven, and I would sadly support preserving the life of the woman carrying the child. Also, unless you thought my remark on a five-year old carrying a child was a typo, look up the case of Lina Marcela Medina de Jurado, probably repeated victim of incest by a family member who due to a rare biological condition was found to be pregnant and even gave birth, due to the fact no one suspected her condition was an actual pregnancy. God forbid my five year old had a man do to her what poor Lina had done to her and that her childlike body had to attempt to carry a child and her mind comprehend what occurred due to the evil action of some monstrous male in her life. Would I be prepared to tell such a family that they legally would be forced to carry that child to term? Even if I deemed it the choice that should be made, would I believe it something that others who disagreed with me should force their child to go through? Such questions need answers and should make us mindful when we decide what our state laws regulating abortion can and should look like.
Again, I am overall glad of the decision. I believe it is Constitutionally correct. I believe many innocent lives will be saved due to it. However, I believe we need to be mindful, realistic, and extremely thoughtful as we regulate abortion on the state level, where I think it should be regulated. If we consider ourselves Christians, we should not somehow gloat or try to provoke others who might think differently than us on it. That is the opposite from any Christlike example in the Bible. Instead, we should thoughtfully seek to convince them of the reasoning behind our beliefs, feelings, and opinions in order to hopefully win them over to the merits of those ideas and ultimately perhaps even win them over to our belief in Christ as well. Shouting, yelling, gloating, and other behavior wins no one and leads the opposing side to believe the worst about all those who might wear our same label or share some of our ideas. On a related note, I also hope I do not see the emphasis among the faith community to support adoption and crisis pregnancy centers that present pro-life options for those who are pregnant fall off due to this change in law. We should still support those efforts even more so now, as some will need help to get proper prenatal care for children who might have otherwise been aborted, many times those with the fewest resources. Simply making abortion illegal is not the end of the pro-life duties of the Christian individually or as the Church, but only one aspect of it as we support those who are less fortunate than us and try to provide good, stable, healthy lives for all children both during their brief period developing inside the womb and their much longer period developing into the type of healthy and hopefully Christian adults we desire them to be. Now, is where we find out whether many people who might have proclaimed themselves loudly as pro-life for political gain are willing to do and support the real work of being pro-life, which is to be pro-child, when the political landscape has changed and their old rallying cry has to be revised.
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