“And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?” as spoken by St. Thomas More, “Man for All Seasons,” Robert Bolt
Rita and I will often walk Sachuest Beach. Sometimes we sit at Surfer End and pray or watch the surfers or the waves on a smaller wave day. We have been transfixed watching them build with the wind far out into the bay. As they approach the shore, the larger ones will break twice: once about fifty feet out and a second time when gravity again overcomes momentum and the top curls over very near shore.
Thousands of gallons cascade over suddenly with a noticeable thump that can be heard and felt up on the seawall. Why anyone would ever bring a sound maker to a beach has always been a mystery to me. Just the waves please. Breaking. Breaking. For a million years.
Recently the big ones breaking twice set me thinking about Brown v Board of Education and the more recent Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision. Both were big waves that broke twice.
“To separate children from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Chief Justice Earl Warren about Brown v Board of Education
In 1954 Brown v Board of Education overturned Plessy v Ferguson in 1896 that enforced separate but equal segregation, zealously guarded practices mostly in the South. For fifty-eight years, segregation held sway. Separate facilities for black folks: lunch counters, bus seats, restrooms, hotel accommodations, sports teams, and most damningly, schools.
In Plessy, the Court held that “separate but equal” satisfied the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment. But “separate but equal” was separate only. Equal was a far piece off. In Brown, justice finally prevailed.
A quick and just overturning of a gravely mistaken Supreme Court decision half a century ago, and all was set right overnight. Not exactly. The wave breaks twice. Those of us of an age will never forget the interim.
For the next decade or more, the battle raged with the Federal government stepping in many times to enforce integrated facilities when the various states refused to comply. Democrats pushed hard back for many years to sustain the old “Jim Crow” laws that stifled opportunities for minorities. Opportunities to ride at the front of the bus, opportunities to drink from the same water fountain, opportunities to eat at the same counter in the cafeteria or restaurant, opportunities to an equal education in the same school or college as white kids. Blood was shed. Dr. Martin Luther King and others were shot, hung, burned, and martyred to the cause of equality of rights and opportunity. “We Shall Overcome” was sung by Joan Baez on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and on the march to Selma, Alabama with Dr. King and became an anthem most of us knew well. The “I Have a Dream” speech on the Lincoln Memorial steps in 1963 can still bring chills almost another sixty years later.
The wave breaks twice, and it’s a brutal turmoil under the swelling surface.
“Like the infamous decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, Roe was also egregiously wrong and on a collision course with the Constitution from the day it was decided. We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision…” Majority opinion in Dobbs v Jackson
As it was with Plessy, so it is with Roe. A gravely flawed decision from nearly fifty years before was justly undone. The second break is building. The segregationists brought out the dogs. The abortion lobby and their political allies are hard at it now with different dogs. This time many states are passing laws and trying to protect those who have no voice, while the Feds are working for the abortion lobby. The Feds have largely ignored almost two hundred attacks on churches and crisis pregnancy centers from vandalism to fire-bombing since the preliminary Dobbs decision was illegally leaked to a complicit press.[i] Those praying and holding signs at abortion clinics have not been so lucky. For them, it’s been predawn arrests in front of their families by heavily armed Department of Justice and FBI storm troopers.[ii] The confusion, draconian policies, and rhetoric we read and see every day is the interim as it was in those fifteen years following Brown v Board of Education. For us, it’s just the beginning.
Perhaps at some future point, a case will be adjudicated about the personhood of the pre-born human being. The science of embryology is settled without exception about the human nature of the fetus with her unique and complete genome. The sticking point is ideological and philosophical, not scientific. When does a developing human being gain the protection as persons under the law? When in the continuum of human development should the dividing line between life and extinction be drawn? Or do we simply ‘follow the science’ and protect innocent human life during its most vulnerable period from the start?
“The person—especially a woman—may be disillusioned by the fact that over time a man’s affection turns out to be only, so to speak, a cover for desire or even for an explicit will to use. Both a woman and a man may be disillusioned by the fact that the values attributed to the beloved person turn out to be fiction. Because of the dissonance between the ideal and the reality, affective love is sometimes not only extinguished but even transformed into affective hatred.” – Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility
The false binding of abortion to the freedom of women has made this discussion most knotty. Once the argument is framed as chattel or forced pregnancy, the humanity of the fetus is quickly pushed to the back of the bus.
What if we considered the discussion from the other side of the mirror, a changed vantage point? What if the sexual revolution has brought about a new type of enslavement for women? Perhaps if men were held accountable more explicitly for their participation in the baby making act, this deeper joint responsibility would allow the developing human to become once again hallowed and an invitation to nurturing, not destruction. Three generations of aggressive and irresponsible sperm donors have risen like specters from the sexual revolution. Women, rather than gaining freedom, are held primarily responsible for an unplanned pregnancy[iii]. The hook up culture assumes hooking up as an expectation, but if the baby making act makes a baby, well, the mom better take care of things because she blew the protection, right? And the kid is thrown into the soul blasted bargain.
Section 17 of Pope St Paul VI’s famous (or infamous according to your light) “Humanae Vitae” accurately foretold the predictable outcome of ubiquitous contraception as a proposed solution to this changed expectation, unprecedented in the history of our culture as a norm. “Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.”
One-night stands or a few weeks hook up became far too common, and the surrounding “with care and affection” often was a forgotten victim, along with the baby. Has this been a ‘freedom’ or an impoverishment for women? Does any woman, no matter how frightened and abandoned and alone, in her heart of hearts want to destroy the baby in her womb?
The momentum shift jerked the culture off its center of gravity, and the tilted axis left men, women, and developing babies profoundly undone.
“Love consists of a commitment which limits one’s freedom – it is a giving of the self, and to give oneself means just that: to limit one’s freedom on behalf of another. Limitation of one’s freedom might seem to be something negative and unpleasant, but love makes it a positive, joyful and creative thing. Freedom exists for the sake of love.” Karol Wojtyła, Love and Responsibility
[i] https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/256390/2023-witnessed-continued-attacks-on-pro-life-pregnancy-centers-churches
[ii] https://www.heritage.org/crime-and-justice/commentary/fbi-justice-department-twist-federal-law-arrest-charge-pro-life
[iii] After forty years of Rita and I involved in helping women in this predicament, the guy walking or threatening to walk if the woman becomes pregnant is commonplace. The expectation of the man to “do the right thing” is a quaint and naive anachronism.
No sophistry, no rhetoric, no emotional, political, jaded language about rosaries and ovaries, theocracy or state power or keep your hands off my uterus or any of the shopworn slogans, just this: Why does the big person get to kill the little person solely because the big person wants or even needs to do so? As a right?
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