From: nyikos@math.scarolina.edu (Peter Nyikos)
Subject: Re: 20 YEARS AFTER ROE, SUPREME COURT CHIPS AWAY AT ABORTION RIGHT
Organization: USC  Department of Computer Science
Date: 21 Jan 93 19:21:02 GMT

In <73664@cup.portal.com> L-Bueno@cup.portal.com (Louis Alberto Bueno) writes:

>	Copied without permission from: 
>	The Los Angeles Times, January 15, 1993

>	20 YEARS AFTER ROE, SUPREME COURT CHIPS AWAY AT ABORTION RIGHT

chipping away : pro-choice :: slippery slope : pro-life

>	By Carol Sobel

>	Last term, a majority of the Supreme Court reiterated the
>fundamental nature of a woman's right to choose abortion. This week, the
>court placed a hurdle in the path, saying pregnant women could exercise
>this right only if they had the physical and emotional stamina to get past
>the mobs they would face at the clinic door.

This isn't quite as much of a falsehood as the headline I saw in the
_Atlanta Constitution_, which went about like this: `Supreme Court
Okays Clinic Blockades'.  But it's close.

The only thing the Supreme Court ruled on was the inapplicability
to OR of a FEDERAL law made in 1871 in reaction to the activities of the
Ku Klux Klan.  State laws, even state laws of similar wording,
remain untouched.

[...]

>discrimination on the basis of gender. In truth, Scalia's opinion is a
>transparent attempt to cloak his own vehement opposition to abortion rights
>behind the veil of a legal nicety. The court's deliberate focus on the
>definitional contrivance of the anti-abortion demonstrators reveals the
>true agenda of the majority's opinion.

I hope this was a column, or editorial.  You never can tell about these
things nowadays.

>	Operation Rescue defines its aim as saving the "innocent victims of
>abortion from the abortionists." Scalia explicitly adopted this language as
>the court's.

I'd like to see the context.  Could it be simply the official Supreme
Court description of The Stated Aim of Operation Rescue?  

If Ms. Sobel is anything like Susan Garvin, the foregoing is a reasonable
question.

> But the true victims are the women who are pushed and shoved
>as they are denied a fundamental right.

An amazing display of even-handedness, eh?

I have seen a woman with an apron labeled "pro-choice escort" on NBC
TV pushing and shoving someone.  I have not seen TV footage of women
going for abortions being pushed and shoved.  The closest was the case
of pro-choice clinic defenders locking arms just as a pro-life woman
was rushing for the door of the clinic, and having their arms pushed
as they restrained her.  

Could Ms. Sobel be talking about the fundamental right of abortion 
clinic defenders to remain untouched by OR members, unless they initiate
the pushing and shoving?  Or even after they initiate the pushing and
shoving? 

>	The transparency of the majority's anti-abortion agenda did not
>escape the dissenting justices. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor recognized that
>if Operation Rescue members wanted simply to oppose abortion, there are
>myriad lawful avenues available.

None of which have had any success in the 20 years since Roe v. Wade
was adopted.

I am not implying that what OR is doing is justified morally.  I do not
yet know whether it is more similar to the Civil Rights Sit-ins of the
sixties, or the activities of the Weathermen of the late sixties and
early seventies, although the available evidence seems to point more
towards the former.

I know it is illegal, but I do not think the 1871 law is appropriate
either.

>logic. Under that reasoning, if Clarence Thomas held a different view on
>racial discrimination from Jesse Jackson, there could be no issue of
>inequality on the basis of race because African-Americans would be on both
>sides.

The foregoing 4 lines contain a major logical fallacy.  And that is
independent of anything the part I deleted contained.

>providers. O'Connor correctly recognized that the court should be looking
>at women, not fetuses, as the victims.

A statement even  Larry "pointed out that" Margolis  could learn from.

>	Throughout modern civil-rights history, the federal courts have
>played a critical role in protecting the rights of individuals against mob
>assaults

How does sitting passively in front of a door, blocking it physically,
constitute mob assault?

> when state officials would not or could not respond. Anyone who
>saw the TV reports of Operation Rescue blockades during the 1988 Democratic
>Convention in Atlanta or the terror Operation Rescue brought to Los Angeles
>knows full well that these are mob attacks.

I must admit I missed these.  I have heard that these--to pull a Chris
Lyman-- _alleged_ mob attacks were met with police brutality every bit
as violent as the Rodney King beating, by the selfsame LAPD, and that 
there is video footage to prove it.

I have seen a TV broadcast, by NBC affiliate Channel 10, Columbia,
SC, of clinic blockaders in Greenville, SC lying flat
on the ground, hands cuffed behind their backs, face down, lifted onto 
stretchers with the police lifting them by the handcuffs AND NOTHING
ELSE.

I do not recommend this way of lifting up anybody.

>(Sobel is a lawyer with the ACLU of Southern California and counsel in a
>pending federal case against Operation Rescue.)

Love those unbiased sources!

Peter Nyikos

Newsgroups: talk.abortion