Category: reproductive rights

Understanding Project 2025

by Rev. Dean Hokel

Project 2025 is a 900-page plan for an ideal America.  It is a Presidential Transition Project spearheaded by Heritage Foundation and supported by more than 80 organizations, many well known for pushing hate and (white) Christian Nationalism.  The goal is to take back our country from the radical left by developing a robust governing agenda and the right people to implement it. 

Project 2025 greatly enhances the executive branch’s powers.  The entire project is devoted to aggrandizing executive power by centralizing authority in the presidency.  Opposition elements are seen as attempting to destroy the real community.  Project 2025 paints progressives and liberals as outside acceptable politics, and anti-American. 

Project 2025 imposes on all Americans policies favored by (white) Christian Nationalists.  Targeting vulnerable communities is a core tenet of Project 2025.  It would strip rights protections from LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, women, and people of color.  It would dismantle much of the federal government and replace our apolitical civil service with far-right partisans it is already training in anticipation of a power shift.

There are two factors that are key to growing authoritarianism: stoking violence and corrupting elections. A Reuter’s investigation published in August 2023 showed that political violence began rising in 2016 in tandem with Trump’s leadership.  National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE) published that same month found that threats against public officials are growing.   

Project 2025 would politicize key institutions such as the Department of Justice and strip civil rights protections from multiple communities.  Racism is evident in the Project’s denunciation of Critical Race Theory.   Project 2025 appears to describe a two-fold threat.  Internationally it is China.  Domestically, it is the left, immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, and those advocating for racial and social justice.  They are treated as enemies of the state.

 The LGBTQ+ community is treated as deviants with ill intent.  The LGBTQ+ community and the “woke” are described as subversive elements aimed at destroying the country and its real values.   

The Convention of the States (COS) president is Mark Meckler who is also co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots.  Among the senior supporters of COS is ALEC, Michael Farris, former CEO of the anti-LGBTQ+ Alliance Defending Freedom and former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.  Also supporting COS is Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk (Turning Point USA).  The Convention of the States plan is to alter the constitution using Article V, which empowers states to call for a constitutional convention.  The article reads, “on the application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments.”  It should be noted that almost no rules apply to an Article V Convention and the consequences could be dire for our democracy and our civil and human rights.  So far, 28 states, six shy of the required 34, have called for a constitutional convention aimed at sharply reducing federal powers.  COS adopted a proposal to restrict the Commerce Clause, which is the basis for most federal environmental, labor, consumer and civil rights protections, and nullify all existing laws and regulations in conflict with COS reading of the Constitution. 

(White) Christian Nationalism favors a government mandated by biblical principles, which excludes certain communities from civil rights protections.  It rejects the separation of church and State, privileging religious beliefs over civil laws.  Christianity should enjoy a privileged place in society, and that the government must take steps to ensure this is clear in every section of the plan. 

The Project’s Christian Nationalist goals are inherent in its dehumanizing language about LGBTQ+ people, putting them in the same sentence as pornography and pedophilia, rejection of “wokeness,” its promotion of the “traditional family” writing that, “Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.  The federal government should recognize only two unchanging sexes, male and female. The Project wants a statement that the government will not enforce any rules against sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination by healthcare providers who receive federal funds in the Affordable Healthcare Act and indeed, the DOJ should aggressively defend a provider’s right to discriminate.  Project 2025 supports Conversion Therapy.   Under the banner of “Restoring the Family” Project 2025 aims to gut protection for the LGBTQ+ community.  Rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status and sex characteristics.  The Project dehumanizes the trans- gender community.  Gender affirming healthcare is considered child abuse.  Reverse policies that allow transgender people to serve in the armed forces.  They would restrict medical care for the transgender community. Project 2025 would abolish the Gender Policy Council and eliminate comprehensive sexuality education.

Regarding education, the Project would upend the accreditation requirements for schools and universities to remove rules the Project sees as biased against religious schools or doctrine, but still allow Title IV funds to be available to these institutions.

One of the Project’s key efforts is to replace as many civil service employees as possible with conservative partisans, and materials indicate they are already identifying and training those people.  The plan is dedicated to eviscerating departments and agencies, essentially gutting the federal government.  They have laid out in detail how to fire supposedly ‘un-fireable’ federal bureaucrats; how to shutter wasteful and corrupt bureaus and offices; how to muzzle woke propaganda at every level of government.  Any employee that has been involved in diversity, equity, and inclusion should be subject to termination.

A particular target of Project 2025 are Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs.  Such projects are viewed as hostile attacks. The Project would end efforts to improve racial equity.  It would end the teaching of Critical Race Theory.  They would pass a new law barring the use of taxpayer dollars to teach Critical Race Theory. 

Project 2025 would ban all abortions, ban all abortion pills, and restrict people’s body autonomy and sexual and reproductive health and rights.  The DOJ would be required to prosecute providers and distributors of such medication.  Because I don’t believe in abortion, you can’t have one!  They would end Medicaid funding of Planned Parenthood. The Project would force all Americans, to abide by the wishes of those Americans for whom abortion violates the conscience and religious freedom rights.  The Project actually attacks contraception in many different ways. 

Project 2025 will defend the borders. “Immigrants are a crime-ridden-plague.”  They would dismantle the Department of Homeland Security and use the military to protect the border – expanding the border wall.

Project 2025 would end programs to address climate change.  Department of Energy should end its war on Fossil Fuel, respect the right of Americans to buy and drive fossil fuel cars.  The Project opposes the eye sore of windmills.  They want to open up many areas to oil, gas, and coal development.

Bad law, bad logic, and bad interpretation philosophy

by Brendan Mahoney

Many are rightly shocked by the Supreme Court’s repudiating the constitutional right to reproductive choice.  Less surprising is the Supreme Court’s recent history of saying anything, however contradictory, to get to a desired result.  Because issues of constitutional law are not always easily understood, some explanation is helpful, but it is also likely to cause further shock over the Supreme Court’s disingenuous philosophies of legal interpretation called “originalism” and “textualism.”

The Bill of Rights, adopted in 1791, applies to the federal government, not the states.  That means that the US Constitution, when written, prohibited the federal government from infringing free speech, for example, but the states were free to do otherwise (and they often did, depending on their own constitutions).  

After the Civil War in 1868, the US adopted the 14th Amendment, and the critical portion insofar as rights go is in Section 1:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. (emphasis added)

The “due process” clause of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, over time, came to be understood as incorporating, selectively, the original Bill of Rights to be made applicable to the states, meaning, states cannot infringe free speech, religion, search and seizure, etc.  Notably, the Second Amendment right to bear arms was not incorporated into 14th Amendment jurisprudence until 2010.  This is an example of the Supreme Court continuing new rights in the 14th Amendment while it rejects the concept of other rights such as reproductive choice in the 14th Amendment as being “non-textual.”  The 14th Amendment, however, does not mention guns either, so that non-textual right is just fine.  Justice Clarence Thomas further believes that the rights to contraception, freedom of consensual same-sex activities, and same sex marriage also should go because they are non-textual.  He conveniently omitted from that list the right to non-textual interracial marriage (his own marriage is interracial).

The willingness of the current Supreme Court to say anything in support of a favored result under the guise of textualism and original intent is flabbergasting.  Last Thursday, the Court declared unconstitutional a 100-year-old New York law concerning licensing for firearms.  The Court insisted it must look to the laws in 1791 for original intent (few restrictions on gun ownership) rather than 1868 where gun restrictions were common in order to clairvoyantly divine the intention of the drafters.  One day later, in the case overturning Roe v. Wade, the same court did just the opposite.  It insisted that for reproductive rights, we must look to 1868 for original intent, where restrictions on abortion were common, rather than to 1791 where abortion restrictions were nearly unheard of.  

Originalism and textualism are just sophistry – the Supreme Court’s willingness to dodge and weave in methods of analysis shows that clearly.  It’s no different than Biblical literalism, which allows a person to declare an interpretation literal and any other views non-Biblical.  One of the most famous conservative Supreme Court Chief Justices, Oliver Wendell Holmes, had this to say in 1920 about original intent in interpreting the text of the Constitution:

 “[W]e must realize that [the Framers] have called into life a being[,] the development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters. … The [Constitution] must be considered in the light of our whole experience and not merely in that of what was said a hundred years ago.” Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416 (1920).

 The Supreme Court’s decision to repudiate the constitutional right to reproductive choice is more than just morally wrong.  It is bad law, bad logic, and bad interpretation philosophy.  Worse, they know that too.

Will the Minority Rule Again?

by Rev. Dr. Richard Einerson

There is a strong majority in this country that is pro-choice for women.  Yet the minority can rule on this issue if we allow it.  I have some background in medical ethics and from that background I feel compelled to make some comments.  I was co-chair of the Medical Ethics Committee at Meritcare Medical Center in Fargo, ND where I was a chaplain for 18 years.  In that role I attended weeklong seminars in medical ethics at the University of Washington as well as the “Managing Mortality” conference at the University of Minnesota.  I heard the families of two major medical ethics cases, Karen Ann Quinlan and Nancy Cruzan.  The first had to do with disconnecting a ventilator, the latter with discontinuing feeding tubes.  Ever since the religious right has fought to have the government enforce quasi-religious values in families and personal life which continues today.  (Comas:  Karen Quinlan, Nancy Cruzan, and Terry Schiavo, Chapter 2). We are in the middle of that fight over women’s health and pro-choice issues now. 

The battle has been going a while.  I had an annual lecture in medicine and religions and invited Kristie Cruzan White, Nancy’s sister to tell their story to our physicians and community.  Shortly thereafter (around 1991} I invited Dr. Daniel Maguire to lecture.  His topic was going to be on grief in families who lose young children to incurable diseases as he and his wife had experienced.  Maguire was a Jesuit teaching at Marquette but had become in the top ten on the hit list of his Catholic Church by an article he published in the Christian Century describing a visit he and his wife had made to a Planned Parent Center in Milwaukie.  Contrary to the Republican notion that it is primarily “loose women” who get abortions, they found it was often women such as a schizophrenic whose medications would malform the fetus; other women whose pregnancies were not proceeding normally. 

As a result of his unorthodox notions on abortion, I received a phone call on a Monday morning from the Chairman of the Bank which funded our lecture and who was more than nervous about our choice of lecture.  I inquired who was objecting.  It was the Bishop’s office and at least one of our conservative physicians.  I said: “Norman, would you give me 24 hours to speak with them.”  He reluctantly agreed.  But in mid-afternoon I got a call from the President.  After several statements I said:  “Are you suggesting we pay his honorarium and have him stay home?”  Of course, the answer was yes.  Fortunately, we had friends in the philosophy department at Moorhead State University across the river who paid his airfare, and we had the largest turnout ever in their huge auditorium.  Then Maguire did talk about abortion, quoting a Catholic Bishop in the 16th century.  With his Irish humor he said: “He didn’t lose his job, and his lectures weren’t cancelled!”  Let’s be clear:  This was an attempt of overruled FREEDOM OF SPEECH. 

In another article, A Question of Catholic Honesty, Maguire takes on his church’s absolute stance on abortion:  wrong all the time.  He says: “As a Catholic theology I find this situation abhorrent and unworthy of the richness of the Roman Catholic traditions that have nourished me.  I indict not only the bishops, but also the ‘petulant silence’ (Beverly Harrison’s phrase) or indifference of many Catholic Theologians who recognize the morality of certain abortions, but still will not address the subject publicly.  I also indict the male dominated liberal Catholic press which does too little to dissipate the myth of a Catholic monolith on abortion.”

To me this is clearly an issue of women’s healthcare.  It is an issue to be dealt with honestly in the privacy of a doctor’s office.  I personally, as a man, cannot imagine the agony a woman goes through who may need an abortion.  But I know that many of those who have FREEDOM as bumper stickers are all for LIMITING FREEDOM OF CHOICE FOR WOMEN. l It is amazing the me that the Supreme Court may be seriously nullifying Roe v Wade, established precedent.  It says more about this court than it does about law.  But if it does so, it is up to Congress.   Our question as a society is:  will be allow the minority to rule?  Is the filibuster more important than a woman’s civil liberties?   It is time for the majority to work at claiming its power.  We should query and pressure our congressional representatives and senators.  We should show up in the streets.  The minority and their religious dogmatism should not prevail!  It is time that the most strident voices be put down.  I am not talking about their freedom of speech, but their trying to impose their will on the majority. 

An unfortunate concomitant of the extreme right is the downright viciousness of their attacks.  I mention the Nancy Cruzan case.  The right consistently demonstrated where Nancy was lying in a persistent vegetative state.  One of the signs on that Christmas eve read:  LOOK WHAT NANCY GOT FOR CHRISTMAS:  DEATH!   I would hope that kind of viciousness might cease but I doubt that will ever be the case.  Religion always has its zealots.  They must not win this battle.  We need to demonstrate that there are other Christians who are not zealots, who are champions of women’s rights, and who believe in the constitutional rights of all Americans!

Life AND Choice Are United

by Rev. Dr. Barb Doerrer-Peacock

I wasn’t sure whether this writing wanted to be a poem or an essay. So, I just wrote. This is the result: my thoughts/feelings about the current threat to women’s reproductive rights.

They would like us to think it’s about
Sanctity vs. sacrilege
Life vs. death
Federal vs state
Truth vs. lies
Constitution vs. changeable laws
Protection of one vs. another
A woman’s issue, and not a man’s
A womb and not a penis
A fetus and not a whole human life
A private decision and not
a whole human culture.

They would like us to think it’s about
when life begins and when it ends,
and whether it is a God
or a human decision.
whether it is male or female
conservative or liberal
Biblical or profane
pro-choice or pro-life.

They would like us to think…
but not really.
They would like us to react.

The tyranny of the binary
creates knee-jerk reactions,
reactions create polarizing gulfs,
gulfs create intractable division:
Us or Them
Other or Self
Win or Lose.

The authority of the binary
creates warring clans and tribes
Us vs. Them
Loyalty vs Disloyalty
Good vs Evil
Right vs. Wrong
Security vs. Fear.

The power of the binary is
dominance of definition
over ambiguity
privilege of power
over powerlessness,
control of cultural commonality
over difference and diversity.

They would like us to think that
this is what it’s all about.
It is not.
It is only yet another mask of
Either/Or
the binary.

A continuing incarnation of something
rather small and insidious,
like a worm that burrows unnoticed
into an orifice and lays its eggs
waiting, growing in the dark
to ultimately take over its host
with fear and madness.

But Life AND Choice are united.
The two entwining, eternal lovers of
God’s Good Creation.
Holiest Gifts
out of which everything is born.

Without Choice – there is no Life.
All is dead.
Without Life – Choice ceases to exist,
All is inanimate.

I refuse the binary trap.
Instead, I CHOOSE LIFE
Together, both, whole.

I choose to believe
life has no beginning
or end – all is in the presence of God
who was, and is,
and forever will be.

I choose to believe
sanctity can be manifest
In all soul-wrestling,
anguished decisions:
to end a pregnancy, AND
to continue a pregnancy
despite all odds, AND
a myriad of other
LIFE CHOOSE-INGS.
All are in the presence of God.

Sanctity evaporates
and the presence of God dims
when
our capacity to
CHOOSE LIFE
Is stolen.

So today,
I CHOOSE LIFE.
And I denounce
those who would be its
thieves.

The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice put together this stunning video of Barb’s poem.