“STATES RIGHTS” THREATENS CITIZENS’ ABORTION RIGHTS NATION-WIDE
July 14, 2022 -Durt Fibo

As I predicted elsewhere, Republican-party run states are moving to outlaw abortions performed on their residents outside their own borders. As I already knew, in 1850, like-mindless senators passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which legally forced non-slave states to capture and return escaped slaves to their place of unwilling residency.

Even before the Supreme Court strangled federal protection of abortion rights this past June, many of the 26 states that were primed to abolish those rights as soon as the ruling fell in their favor were also preparing multi-faceted ways to outlaw anyone exercising or upholding those rights in territories where they remained 100% legal.

Drunk on the success of their defeat of federal supervision, they are now more likely to increase their fury, until no victim is unbattered. Fools like these could hurl new illogical laws at doctors, samaritans and citizens whether they have transgressed in or outside of the particular state in question. Such is the unendurable contradiction of states rights in America. States rights are no more mathematically possible than universal blasphemy laws; what is obligated in one religion is forbidden in another. As dictators have so often used the machinery of democracy to reach the peak from which they could unleash a biblical flood and erase all trace of democracy, these alleged ‘states rights’ champions have used the power of their federal presence in an attempt to usurp different states’ rights.

States which misbehave and work themselves into pandemonium have had to have the federal government brought in to babysit them ever since the country was born. Instances within easy memory are President Eisenhower having to send the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas just so 9 black students could enter and exit the town’s high school alive, or 1960, when US federal Marshals guarded 6-year-old Ruby Bridges as she was finally allowed into school in New Orleans. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson had to enforce voting rights for blacks all through the southern states, and needed to take command of the Alabama National Guard (working with federal marshals and the FBI) to protect the Selma to Montgomery march led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Before those –after the American Civil War- President Ulysses S. Grant had to dispatch federal troops back to the south to protect black citizens and even their elected representatives of their state governments.

No observer of American life ever expected to find coherency in that land. But the individualist aggressions easily and frequently spill out in a deluge of hypocrisy. Since the founding of the nation, states rights have been a deceitful excuse for one group to constrict the liberties of mind and body of another. The first drafts of the United States Declaration of Independence actually banished slavery. But some of the 13 colonies, chiefly Georgia and South Carolina, refused to ratify it until slavery was restored as fully legal and slaves were measured in as part-human so as to give those states even greater representation in the federal government.

By the 1820s it was clear that the activities of the slave states were comprised of feudal operations grinding their gears against the overwhelming growth of American capitalism. Within the lower states, it began to evolve as an industry in that the northernmost slave states bought, bred, raised and sold slaves as a literal cash crop to their more southerly neighbors. As the national territory expand in huge chunks, Missouri and Maine, awaiting statehood, became the symbolic and nominal “compromise” which allowed the extension of slavery into Missouri and any new lands south of the 36 parallel if Maine were to be admitted as a non-slave state. By 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Compromise and simply gave the choice of being a slave- or non-slave state to each new territory formally joining the USA. And again this was not rewarding enough for the pro-slave states: pro-slavery militants promoted their demands for ‘freedom’ and ‘states rights’ with violence for five years –a period known as Bleeding Kansas. Two years afterwards, Abraham Lincoln was elected president and the southern states immediately seceded and began a horrendous, bloody war.

That carnage, which appalled the world, was the American Civil War, which the pro-slavery Confederation claimed was in ‘defense’ of ‘states rights’. But if one bothers to apply coherence, the cause would actually be an offensive war ‘for states rights’ …to own human slaves…and to impose by force their internal laws on external states.