Death trumps life in 2022

Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness?

This year’s national celebration of the Declaration of Independence — which declares life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to be unalienable rights — was marked by yet another gun massacre, one of already more than 300 mass shootings in 2022. A Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Ill., became a death scene. And yet, in the face of such overwhelming gun violence, the Supreme Court just struck down a nearly century-old New York law that restricted the right to carry a gun. This ruling in effect expands gun rights and makes it more difficult to legislate for the protection of public health and safety.

Gun rights trump life.

At the same time, the Supreme Court just stripped away the nearly half-century Roe v Wade reproductive health care protections and personal privacy rights of women, thereby endangering life, perversely in the name of “unborn” life. Deprived of reproductive choice, women will die, and the quality of their health care and of all our lives will suffer, especially the quality of the lives of those with limited financial resources.

The “unborn” trump life. In overturning Roe, the Supreme Court not only rejected the right to privacy and reproductive choice, but also trampled on our sacred First Amendment rights. This decision places a greater value on the so-called “unborn” than on the mother without whom this “unborn” has no independent existence. Something that is unborn, by definition, is not born. How can it possibly have the same personhood rights as those of us who are born and exist independent of the womb? Such notion of personhood at conception is a religious belief that’s peculiar to certain Christian religions, notably Evangelical Protestantism and Catholicism, not at all universally shared.

My religion does not consider a fetus to be a being with personhood until it is born. According to Jewish law, the life of the mother must always take precedence at any stage of pregnancy. A fetus that threatens the life of the mother must be removed. The overturning of Roe v. Wade allows states to ban abortion even if it is to save the life of the mother, or to save a rape victim from having to bear a child of rape, even if that victim is a child. Such state government bans on abortion violate Jewish law that gives priority to the physical life, mental life, and overall well-being of the mother. Such bans constitute government prohibition of the free exercise of religion.

Nobody forces those with antichoice religious beliefs to ever have an abortion. But the Supreme Court’s decision allows state governments to force anti-choice religious beliefs on those who don’t subscribe to such beliefs. When government takes away reproductive choice, it imposes one set of religious beliefs on all; it takes away not only reproductive freedom, but also religious freedom.

The “unborn” trump liberty. In another anti-life decision, the Supreme Court ruled, in West Virginia v. the Environmental Protection Agency, that the EPA does not have Congressional authority to curb carbon emissions from existing power plants through a shift to cleaner sources, even though the very purpose of the EPA is to protect the public health, especially from environmental pollution. Given the threat that climate change poses to the very life of our shared planet, and the urgency of addressing this threat, the Court’s decision to favor polluters over regulators threatens all life.

Death trumps life. And with liberty curtailed, and avenues closing to the pursuit of happiness, it seems more like we’ve been experiencing an oppressive imposition of misery. The words of the Declaration of Independence ring hollow now 236 years later in the wake of these recent Supreme Court rulings.

Do we still hold these truths to be self-evident?

To secure these rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the Declaration says, governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. But an unelected, unrepresentative, politicized, Republican-dominated Supreme Court of lifetime appointees (two seats stolen by a Republican Senate) now rides roughshod over these rights. And the governed, who never consented to this rule, are powerless to remove these rulers from office.

Our unalienable rights are hardly secure.