Right of Free Travel, Texas-style

 Politics today is an endless cultural war. Democrats seem intent on policy issues such as infrastructure, strengthening the economy from the bottom up and the middle out, voting rights, dealing with the menace of climate change, while Republicans focus on limiting the rights of LGBTQ+ people, banning books, turning education into indoctrination – and of course, pursuing the war on women’s health by limiting reproductive choice. 

In her Letters from an American from 1 September (which I repost daily on Facebook and Twitter), Heather Cox Richardson writes that 

Meanwhile, Republicans continue to focus on ending abortion, and their determination is leading them to assert power over citizens of Republican-dominated states in a way that is commonly associated with authoritarian governments.

Having won the battle over Roe v Wade in last year’s Dobb’s decision by a Trump-packed Supreme Court, the Republicans have found out (and continue finding out) that when you decide to ride a tiger, there is no option to dismount. Even rural Wisconsin is not a place where the “win” over Roe brings out the Republican faithful. People who believe in women and their rights remain way fired up over the SCOTUS travesty and they are not backing down. The article notes that less than a fifth of GOP voters in this rural Wisconsin county (which Biden flipped blue in 2020) support banning abortion except to save a woman’s life.

So the MAGA group is taking a new tack. Labeling driving a woman who seeks an abortion in Texas “abortion trafficking” (as George Orwell wrote in 1946, “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”), 51 jurisdictions so far (towns and counties) have enacted ordinances prohibiting the use of roads and highways for the purpose of “transporting” a woman who seeks an abortion on their roads. They use the clever ploy of allowing private citizens to report such efforts and sue anyone who assists in these endeavors. 

The right to travel across state boundaries is inherent in Article IV of the U.S. Constitution and in fact was in effect under the Articles of Confederation. The MAGA crowd, by using vigilantes to enforce their ordinances, shields governments (local or state) because it is a difficult matter to sue private citizens in these circumstances. This sounds to me like something the ACLU ought to challenge with the intent of taking it to SCOTUS. Even the corrupt likes of Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito would have to twist themselves in knots to rule these ordinances as Constitutional. 

HCR in her letter makes the analogy that this is indeed the same as with Blacks in South post-Civil War:

While such circumstances affect most authoritarian governments, it is impossible to miss the parallels between these ordinances and the various laws that circumscribed the lives of Black Americans before the Civil War here in the United States. In that era, free Black Americans had to carry identification papers, known as “free papers,” to prove they should be allowed to travel. White Americans had no such requirement. 

This makes citizens into subjects.

If you believe that the rotten approach of the antiabortion clan needs to be reversed and women’s full rights must be restored, get busy now and work to oust from office the politicians who practice christofascism. We are not a theocracy. Likeminded people must work hard to make all the elections in 2024 reinforce democracy.