Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed official guest host Grant Henry in the studio for another edition of Grant’s Rants.
GRANT HENRY:
Ladies and gentlemen, we are living in a uniquely stupid time. A time where systemic idiocy frequently gives way to group-think chaos, eventually leading to actual violence. And we’re witnessing yet another episode of that phenomenon right now.
Last week, a pro-abortion group that claims to carry on the legacy of former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg published a map containing the home addresses of the conservative Supreme Court justices and fanatics have started protesting outside their homes already.
I’ll say that again, in case you missed what I just said. A group unironically calling itself Ruth Sent Us doxxed the Supreme Court justices and is now protesting en masse outside their homes. This group is literal walking irony.
It’s like putting shoes on an oxymoron. A mob fueled by confirmation bias and media hysteria. Clearly, they’ve never read anything that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had to say about the Roe v. Wade decision, so, allow me to enlighten them.
Although Ginsburg was a staunch pro-choice advocate, she did not support the Roe v. Wade decision. She believed that Roe was wrongly decided under the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause and that it, “would have been better to approach it under the Equal Protection Clause, so it would be less vulnerable to attempts to have it disbarred.”
See, Ginsburg knew that Roe was based on faulty legal analysis and it was only a matter of time before it was overturned. In fact, in 2013, at the University of Chicago Law School, she said, “Roe isn’t even really about a woman’s choice, now, is it? It’s about a doctor’s freedom to practice. It was not woman-centered … it was physician-centered.”
Of course, this calls into question the modern mantra of a woman’s right to choose, and “my body, my choice.” And in the New York University Law Review, Ginsburg argued that Roe had halted a political process that was moving in a reformed direction and thereby, prolonged the divisiveness and deferred stable settlement on the issue.
In other words, Ruth Bader Ginsburg said herself that by creating a set of rules that displaced virtually every state law across the nation, the Roe decision only fueled the controversy because the people were not able to decide the issue for themselves.
She truly believed that given enough time, Americans would have solved this issue without the need for the courts’ intervention. See, she was especially critical of the framing and the speed at which Roe was pushed through.
In a much-quoted lecture she gave to New York University in 1992, Ginsburg said that the Roe decision was a textbook example of “doctrinal limbs too swiftly shaped may prove unstable.” She knew that if an alleged right to abortion were to be established, it must have been set on a foundation of the consensus of the people.
And the people simply did not agree with abortion as a ubiquitous right in 1972. The Founders of our frame of Constitution were excellent social psychologists.
They knew that democracy had an Achilles heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people. And the Democratic communities are subject to the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.
See, the key to designating a sustainable Republic, therefore, was to build mechanisms to slow things down, to cool passions, to require compromise, and to give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people on Election Day.
Just like our founding fathers, Ginsburg knew if you’re going to make massive changes to society, you must do so slowly and calmly, convincing your fellow man along the way, lest you risk destabilizing the entirety of society.
The decision of Roe v. Wade was the opposite of this basic precept. So, clearly, a group called Ruth Sent Us marching against the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is a scenario better suited for a Saturday Night Live skit. We’ve reached the point of pure idiocy rarely seen in American history, and I can only hope that we recover soon.
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
