Democracy, Majority Rule and Abortion Rights
What happened yesterday in the Red State of Kansas was a triumph for democracy: the people have been heard, the heartless theocrats wholly repudiated. With respect to abortion rights, Kansas is like an oasis of freedom in the midst of a desert of tyranny: that, like all oases, may ultimately save hundreds or even thousands of lives.
At 9:30 we had just concluded watching a very grim Netflix series (“Seven Seconds”) foregrounding ten episodes of murderous police racism, and turned to MSNBC with foreboding–and there it was: 64 to 36! Unimaginable: the numbers seemed to burst out of the screen like a roller-coaster in some early 3-d movie: 64–36! To use a quaint and somewhat self-contradictory metaphor, Our hearts leaped for joy.
But wait, wait–what am I doing celebrating “the people,” when I’ve consistently argued that millions of “the people” are behaving as though they are beyond redemption? Would I celebrate the people’s moment if they had voted the other way? What could be wrong with Majority Rule?
Plenty, of course, but since the precise difficulty is not always grasped in its concretion, I want to begin the answer with a formulation:
First: The majority is not always right; the laws it or its representatives make, almost always coercive in application, are not necessarily just. Nor are they necessarily wise. We all know that. But there’s a crucial distinction here:
Other things being equal–that is, the appropriate procedures being followed–unwise laws (ignoring climate change, for example) are perfectly legitimate. But the case is different where justice is at stake. That is, most importantly in a liberal democracy the majority does not have the legitimate authority to abrogate equal or universal rights. To do that, or attempt to do that, is to betray democratic principles.
Conversely, only the majority has the legitimate authority, directly or through its representatives, to make and enforce coercive laws. Under various circumstances minorities may have the right to defend themselves against unjustly coercive majorities (that’s the alleged justification, often given falsely, of the filibuster), but no minority can ever have the right themselves to pass laws that are coercive; nor, above all, to insist that they have a “right” the gist of which consist of denying other people–especially other minorities–of their rights
Even the Supreme Court has no legitimacy in doing this. Its job is to uphold rights, not suppress them. To uphold the separation or division of powers, not to override them. Faithless to their oaths, those wretched Five.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly at the moment, persons are never being deprived of anything if an opinion of theirs is rejected by others. They can reject the other side’s opinions right back. Nor, as must be stated in the present climate, is it a sign of “elitism” or “media bias” or an alleged hatred of “life” to have anti-choice arguments treated with disrespect. All the ultrasounds in the world, as emotional an impact as they have, cannot turn a pre-viable fetus into a person with rights that override the rights of a living human being–let alone potentially her life. To do that, at a very minimum fetuses would have to be counted in the census, or toward any counting that is used to restrict or grant eligibility for any purpose. Never gonna happen.
To overcome that obvious objection, anti-choice spokespersons or their followers assert that the fetus is a person as though that is a scientific fact. But of course it isn’t, it’s just an opinion that has never passed any kind of objective test or confirmation. No matter how earnestly they–especially women–assert their humanism, their love for all persons including those not yet born to other women, the only test of that assertion is how they treat other people who disagree with them–including pregnant females and the doctors who provide them with medical attention. We are seeing to what horrors that “love” can lead every day: but at last, not in Kansas.
When a reporter asked a woman who was going to vote “NO” why she was doing that, it took her about one second to respond. “For my daughters,” she said.
We don’t get many occasions to rejoice, but this sure as hell is one.
