One Nation Under Continuous Assault
I’m publishing this series of articles to share and discuss my ruminations on coping with a troubled and messy world. You can “follow” me to never miss an article.
Writing in his latest Op-Ed, Jamelle Bouie rightly criticizes what Supreme Court Samuel Alito has wrought via his role in overturning Roe versus Wade[i]. Although Alito insisted that “it was more modest than it might appear,” it was anything but. No longer shackled to a prior dictate of the Supreme Court, the people were supposedly free to choose their stance on Abortion.
The trouble is that repealing Roe versus Wade not only permitted the States to go their own ways on Abortion — mostly prohibitive — but it also further opened the door on limiting Voting Rights and Anti-Trans Legislation.
As Bouie puts it:
“You cannot disentangle abortion from reproductive rights. You cannot disentangle reproductive rights from bodily autonomy — like the right of transgender Americans to exist in public as themselves. They are also the same lawmakers waging a broader campaign to restrict the ability of people in their states to live and think as they please.”
As Bouie makes perfectly clear, that although “Alito wanted the public to believe that while he believed he was striking a blow for democracy,” it was a decisive step towards less freedom.
In the same edition of The Times, David French makes clear that Christian Nationalism poses no less of a serious Threat as well[ii]. Namely, in many Red State, in order to be elected, one has to be a devout Christian. More broadly, Christian Nationalism would relegate non-Christians to the status of second-class Citizens. In short, it’s the firm belief that Christians and only they should rule.
Every day and in every way, our Democracy is Threatened.
[i] Jamelle Bouie, “Samuel Alito Opened the Door to Reproductive Hell,” The New York Times, Monday, February 26, 2024, P A18.
[ii] David French, “What Is Christian Nationalism, Exactly?,” The New York Times, Monday, February 26, 2024, P A19.
Ian I. Mitroff is credited as being one of the principal founders of the modern field of Crisis Management. He has a BS, MS, and a PhD in Engineering and the Philosophy of Social Systems Science from UC Berkeley. He Is Professor Emeritus from the Marshall School of Business and the Annenberg School of Communication at USC. Currently, he is a Senior Research Affiliate in the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, UC Berkeley. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Management. He has published 41 books. His latest is: The Socially Responsible Organization: Lessons from Covid, Springer, New York, 2022.
Photo by Ian Hutchinson on Unsplash
