(Dobbs) Are The Dark Ages Coming Back?
From tracking Republican goals, the appalling answer might be yes.
This looks like a return to the Dark Ages.
It’s no surprise if you’re not sure whether I’m talking about Afghanistan or the United States of America.
These days, it could be both.
In Afghanistan, the Dark Ages rarely have been pierced by light— my everlasting if grisly metaphor is the sports match I came across long ago near Kabul where teams were playing polo with the head of an enemy.
Now, the Dark Ages there are turning even darker. Early this month, the Taliban’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice—that’s the reinstated name for the short-lived Ministry of Women’s Affairs— announced that allowing women seen out in public to merely modestly cover their faces, their legs, and their hair is no longer good enough. A new decree demands, they must cover themselves from head to toe.
— Photo from CNN.com —
What this means is, the only parts of a woman that now can be seen in public are her hands, and the shoes on her feet. According to a spokesman for the ministry, only when she drapes herself in a burka— with a woven screen covering even her eyes— will a woman be safe from any “disturbance.”
It mirrors what a Saudi prince— a U.S.-educated Saudi prince— once told me on a flight across his country in a private jet when I asked about his own nation’s treatment of women: “Everything we do, we do for them, we do it all to protect them.”
In Afghanistan, that kind of primitive “protection” extends to proclamations that prevent most women from working, that disallow them from taking road trips without a male relative, that forbid them from even just sitting in a vehicle without a veil, and the darkest of them all, the rule that bans Afghan girls from school after sixth grade.
And why? “We want our sisters to live with dignity and safety,” says the man who leads the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. It seems they didn’t ask many women.
— Photo by Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times —
Which brings me to the U.S.A. If I were to write about “a Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice” in our nation, you might be excused if immediately you think about the governors and senators and representatives… and even the Supreme Court justices… from the far Republican Right. To say nothing of the legions of legislators at the state level.
No, they’re not issuing moral decrees about women in public places. They’re issuing decrees about women in private places. They are trying to impose their moral standards— even if some only embraced such standards to get themselves elected— on darned near everything. Most alarmingly right now, they would eliminate a woman’s right to choose, a woman’s right to choose to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. The leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that would abolish Roe v. Wade, which almost fifty years ago affirmed that constitutional right to choose, might only be the first step of our own American descent into the Dark Ages.
NYU law professor Melissa Murray read the Roe v. Wade draft, written by Justice Samuel Alito, and told the news site Vox what she sees coming for other established rights. “Although Justice Alito insisted that the draft opinion’s antipathy for settled precedent was limited to abortion, the opinion was littered with casual references to Lawrence v. Texas, a 2003 decision decriminalizing same-sex sodomy; Obergefell v. Hodges, a 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage; Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 decision that legalized contraceptive use; and Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 decision legalizing interracial marriage.”
We can disagree ourselves about which practices seem palatable in modern American society, but by and large, each is an expansion of every citizen’s civil rights, every citizen’s human rights. Same-sex relations? It’s not for all of us, but who are we to tell someone else that it’s not for them either? Contraceptives? Woe be the world where every couple produces a dozen offspring. Interracial marriage? If that were illegal, Justice Clarence Thomas might be a bachelor.
What’s more, in her analysis, Professor Murray didn’t even include other issues under attack. There are laws or legislation in Republican-dominated states to censor lessons to schoolchildren about our nation’s harsh racial history, to limit the rights of everyone who is LGBTQ and even of anyone who dares to discuss LGBTQ issues in elementary and middle school classrooms, and in the spirit of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, to ban what these self-proclaimed moral icons consider offensive books from libraries— not just school libraries, but public libraries too.
This is what America’s Dark Ages might look like. It is an age where there is no bottom.
And abortion? The first step, if the High Court affirms the draft opinion next month, would enable individual states to prohibit it. In some cases, it would be banned even when a pregnancy is the result of incest or rape, which used to be acceptable exceptions even in conservative legislation.
— Photo by Kenny Helston for The New York Times —
But the next step is even more authoritarian. There are moves afoot to codify a nationwide ban on abortion. If the day comes when far-Right Republicans control every branch of the federal government, such a ban can become reality.
The Dark Ages? Louisiana recently threatened to take us all the way down that dystopian path. Before its state legislature decided Friday that there is a boundary they choose not to cross, there was support for a bill that would make abortion a criminal act, and open the door to charging women who terminate their pregnancies with murder.
Before Roe, women with no safe way to terminate a pregnancy had to quit a job— and lose an income— to have that child. Some terminated anyway, resorting to crude instruments like coat hangers to force the abortion. Many died. Advocates for the elimination of the right to choose evidently would prefer to return to those Dark Ages in America.
Even anti-abortion advocate Matthew Walther, editor of a Catholic journal called The Lamp, admits that there is a dark side to abolishing abortions. “I believe that those who oppose abortion should not discount the possibility that its proscription will have consequences that some of us would otherwise regret. No matter what we do, in a post-Roe world many children who would not otherwise have been born will live lives of utter misery, and many of our fellow Americans will be indifferent to their plight.”
Indifferent, indeed, to the plight of those children, and to the plight of every citizen who until now had reason to believe that his or her rights were guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States of America.
“Imagine,” The New York Times rightly hypothesized in the lead sentence of an editorial, “that every state were free to choose whether to allow Black people and white people to marry.”
Imagine that every state were free to choose whether to ban books. Or to make it hard again for minorities to vote. Or to reinstate slavery.
I had thought we were past that. Maybe not.
The purpose of having a constitution for the whole nation, a constitution that sometimes supersedes those of the states, is to enshrine rights for every American, not just those in states that choose to respect those rights.
If our Constitution and the rights it protects aren’t respected, the Dark Ages come next.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Alas, i agree. You’ve laid out thr danget well and that a minority of Americans pining for an earlier era could impose this on us all?