“States’ Rights” Has Always Been a Cover for States’ Wrongs
The Founders left it to states to decide whether Black people should be free or enslaved. Trump says let states decide whether Women should be free or enslaved.
Rather than focusing their reporting about the video on abortion that Donald Trump posted on social media Monday on its one truth (that he is proud and responsible for taking away women’s ownership of their bodies), its outrageous lies (everyone on both sides was demanding that Roe be ended; “we now have abortion law where everybody wanted it”; “Democrats … support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month … and even execution after birth”), and its nonsensical statement that everyone should follow their heart or faith when he was endorsing making that impossible), the mainstream media were unanimous in headlining another key point about his position: that he said it is a matter of states’ rights.
That is critically important in a way that neither the media nor Democrats have so far pointed out.
On Monday morning, as part of his “Make America Gilead” campaign, with his face makeup looking even more outlandishly orange than usual against the pale gray portions of his face his cosmetologist missed, Donald J. Trump (Fascist, FL), the presumptive presidential nominee of the Anti-Republic Party, came out foursquare in favor of women being categorized as property, not people, though only in states that choose to enslave them.
The former occupant of the White House indicated that the question of whether women are property or people should, as was the similar question of whether people of African ancestry are human beings or should be enslaved, be left to each state to determine.
Trump has tied himself to the most extreme abortion bans in the most anti-women states.
It took only a little more than 24 hours after Trump’s statement for a full view of what the hellscape of leaving the decision over whether women should be free citizens or property enslaved to the states to come into focus.
On Tuesday, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that, because the United States Supreme Court, with three Trump appointees, overturned the protections of Roe, an 1864 law criminalizing all abortions except when a woman’s life is in danger still enforceable. There are no exceptions for rape or incest.
“Because the federal constitutional right to abortion that overrode § 13-3603 [the 1864 Arizona territorial law prohibiting abortion] no longer exists, the statute is now enforceable,” the court majority wrote.
The law that may now be enforced in Arizona, making women and doctors criminals facing imprisonment for receiving or providing needed healthcare, dates to 48 years before Arizona became the 48th state. That was 56 years before women secured the right to vote through the Nineteenth Amendment.
And 1864 was a year before the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery.
For all the headlines about Trump saying, “leave it up to the states,” there has been little or no focus on how that stance on the “question” of whether human beings with ovaries and uteruses are people or property parallels how the south wanted the “question” of whether human beings with dark skin are people or property to be dealt with.
Abraham Lincoln’s famous words at the 1858 Illinois state convention of the new Republican Party should be repurposed by Democrats in 2024:
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing or all the other.”
Today, slave or free applies to women. Compare these maps of the United States in 1860 and 2024. (They are simplified in that of course in the non-slave states in 1860 African Americans were far less than free and equal and some of the states in red in the 2024 map do allow abortion up to from 6 to 18 weeks.):
States where humans with dark skin were property (red) and where they were people (blue) in 1860.
States where humans with ovaries and uteruses are property (red) and where they are people (blue) in 2024.
I have argued for months that the colors the media uses to identify the parties should be changed from blue and red to blue and gray:
Democrats need to drive home this point and what it means for women and Americans whose ancestors came from what Trump considers “shithole countries” rather than “Nice countries, you know like Denmark, Norway, and Switzerland.” By “nice,” he obviously means “Aryan.”
“Take America Back” means take America back to the days before Robert E. Lee and the traitors of the Enslavers’ Rebellion surrendered 159 years ago this week (a year after Arizona enslaved women):
Thank you for this! Please share this info with the members of the DNC who can focus on this and President Biden!