Bill Napoli, member of the arbitrary Senate over the state of South Dakota, 3 March 2006:

You know, I we are really think we’re pushing the envelope on that issue. I’m not sure that the Supreme Court is ready for us yet, but what’s that old saying, There’s no time like the present?

— Bill Napoli, interviewed, Online NewsHour (2006-03-03): South Dakota Abortion Ban

The Guardian, 8 March 2006:

But, unusually for conservatives emboldened by the installation in the White House of a committed Christian, the prospect of a confrontation over abortion has caused some uneasiness in the anti-abortion movement. Is the US public ready for an absolute ban on abortion? Is the supreme court prepared to reverse 30 years of legal precedence? Governor Rounds apparently thinks so.

He and other abortion opponents argue the time is ripe for the supreme court to overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 decision that granted a woman’s legal right to abortion. In the past five months, two justices have been sworn in to America’s highest court, chosen by Mr Bush for their conservative credentials. The reversal of a supreme court opinion is possible, Mr Rounds said.

The law he endorsed this week takes a maximalist approach, affirming that: Life begins at the time of conception, a conclusion confirmed by scientific advances since the 1973 decision, including the fact that each human being is totally unique immediately at fertilisation. It would make it a crime for doctors to perform an abortion even in cases of rape or incest, punishable by a $5,000 (£2,850) fine and a five-year jail term. It makes an exception where a woman’s life is endangered.

The law does not come into effect until July 1 – giving supporters of abortion rights time to challenge it in the courts.

Abortion opponents in other states also believe the balance at the supreme court has swung in their favour and have readied their own challenges to Roe v Wade. The state legislature in Mississippi voted for an abortion ban last Thursday – with exceptions for rape and incest – and legislation has been introduced in Missouri, Alabama, Oklahoma, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee since the second Bush term began.

— Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian (2006-03-08): State’s abortion ban fires first shot in a long war over women’s rights

Mike Rounds, arbitrary governor over the state of South Dakota, 6 March 2006:

HB 1215 passed South Dakota's legislature with bi-partisan sponsorship and strong bi-partisan support in both houses. Its purpose is to eliminate most abortions in South Dakota. It does allow doctors to perform abortions in order to save the life of the mother. It does not prohibit the taking of contraceptive drugs before a pregnancy is determined, such as in the case of rape or incest.

In the history of the world, the true test of a civilization is how well people treat the most vulnerable and most helpless in their society. The sponsors and supporters of this bill believe that abortion is wrong because unborn children are the most vulnerable and most helpless persons in our society. I agree with them.

Because this new law is a direct challenge to the Roe versus Wade interpretation of the Constitution, I expect this law will be taken to court and prevented from going into effect this July. That challenge will likely take years to be settled and it may ultimately be decided by the United States Supreme Court. Our existing laws regulating abortions will remain in effect.

— Statement by Gov. Mike Rounds on the Signing Of House Bill 1215 (2006-03-06)

The Guardian, 8 March 2006:

The South Dakota challenge marks a change in strategy for the anti-abortion movement, which had focused its energies on limiting the numbers of abortions in the US. Over the years, activists have restricted government funding, access to abortion past the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and access for minors.

In South Dakota, there is only one abortion clinic, on the edge of a state that spans some 400 miles. Abortions are performed only eight days a month. The state’s Planned Parenthood clinic in Sioux Falls was already fielding calls yesterday from women anxious that the facility might close. There already were huge logistical mountains to climb for women in South Dakota. It is an intolerable situation today, and the South Dakota legislature and governor made it even worse if such a thing can be imagined, said Sarah Stoesz, president of Planned Parenthood for Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota.

The situation is nearly as dire in Mississippi – which also has just one clinic prepared to perform abortions – and also difficult in other states.

— Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian (2006-03-08): State’s abortion ban fires first shot in a long war over women’s rights

Scott McClellan, official press flack for the arbitrary President over the United States, 7 March 2006:

Q Scott, as you probably know, the Governor of South Dakota has now signed this abortion measure that the state legislature passed. Do you anticipate the administration will weigh in on this as it makes its way through the courts?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, let me express to you the President’s views. The President believes very strongly that we should be working to build a culture of life in America, and that’s exactly what he has worked to do. We have acted in a number of ways, practical ways, to reduce the number of abortions in America. The President strongly supported the ban on partial-birth abortions. This is an abhorrent procedure, and we are vigorously defending that legislation. We have acted in a number of other ways, as well.

Now, I think this issue goes to the larger issue of the type of people that the President appoints to the Supreme Court. And the President has made it very clear he doesn’t have a litmus test when it comes to the Supreme Court, that he will nominate people to the bench that strictly interpret our Constitution and our laws. But this is law that was passed by the South Dakota legislature and signed into law by the Governor of that state. And the President’s view when it comes to pro-life issues has been very clearly stated, and his actions speak very loudly, too.

Q So, again — now it’s going to wend its way through the courts. Will the administration weigh in, in the appeals process that is going to inevitably —

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, this is a state — this is a state law.

Q No, but it’s going to become a federal matter —

MR. McCLELLAN: It’s a state matter. The President is going to continue working to build a culture of life. He believes very strongly that we ought to value every human life, and that we ought to take steps to protect the weak and vulnerable, and that’s exactly what we have done. Now, you’re getting into the question of a state law, and so that’s something that will — the state will pursue.

Q But, Scott, no, maybe you don’t understand — it’s going to become a federal issue because it’s going —

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, let me reiterate. Maybe I’m not being clear — because the President has stated what his view is when it comes to the sanctity of life. He’s committed to defending the sanctity of life. He is pro-life with three exceptions — rape, incest and the life of — when the life of the mother is in danger. That’s his position. This is a state law, Peter. And I’m not going to —

Q So he would embrace this law as passed by South Dakota?

MR. McCLELLAN: This state law, as you know, bans abortions in all instances, with the exception of the life of the mother.

Q And not rape and incest, and so therefore, he must disagree with it, doesn’t he? Doesn’t he, Scott?

MR. McCLELLAN: The President has a strong record of working to build a culture of life, and that’s what he will continue to do.

Q I know, but you’re not answering my question, you’re dodging.

MR. McCLELLAN: No, I’m telling you that it’s a state issue —

Q He is opposed to abortion laws that forbid it for rape and incest —

MR. McCLELLAN: Les, look at the President —

Q Isn’t that true, Scott? That’s what you said.

MR. McCLELLAN: Les, let me respond. Look at the President’s record when it comes to defending the sanctity of life. That is a very strong record. His views when it comes to pro-life issues are very clearly spelled out. We also have stated repeatedly that state legislatures, when they pass laws those are state matters.

Q He disagrees with South Dakota on this one, though, doesn’t he?

MR. McCLELLAN: Les, I’ve addressed the question.

Q He does, on rape and incest.

MR. McCLELLAN: I’ve addressed the question.

— Scott McClellan, White House Press Flack (2006-03-07): daily White House Press Briefing

The Guardian, 8 March 2006:

But there are a lot of conservatives who are afraid of the prospect of galvanising liberal and women’s groups into action by backing so uncompromising an assault on abortion as South Dakota’s. They fear that the supreme court is still delicately balanced on the issues of abortion and life, and it would be more prudent to wait, and hope that Mr Bush has the opportunity to make another conservative appointment.

This probably wouldn’t be the best law to do, and the best time to sign it, said Daniel McConchie, vice-president of Americans United for Life. If this was to show up on the supreme court desk tomorrow they would just reject it out of hand, and having this law waiting in the wings will certainly make it more difficult to get that fifth potential justice that might vote in favour of overturning Roe in this way. Now that Mr Rounds had signed the law, Mr McConchie said his organisation would support it. But we are advising the other states to pass laws that would do other things to help reduce abortion.

Supporters of abortions rights also face tough choices. They can file a lawsuit against South Dakota in a federal court and wait for the matter to reach the supreme court where they say they are confident it would be thrown out — the standard strategy. Or they can fight a direct challenge by gathering the signatures to put a referendum on the South Dakota ballot in the November elections, a course of action Ms Stoesz says is needed to rouse liberal organisations who have failed to organise effectively.

We have controlled a lot of bad public policy but we haven’t built a movement. I am not trying to be overly self-critical here, but it’s hard to organise around a lawsuit, Ms Stoesz said. And so we have given people a false sense of complacency: Don’t worry. Planned Parenthood will file a lawsuit and save the day — and that alleviates responsibility for them taking action.

— Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian (2006-03-08): State’s abortion ban fires first shot in a long war over women’s rights

Lucinda Cisler (1969):

… The most important thing feminists have done and have to keep doing is to insist that the basic reason for repealing the laws and making abortions available is justice: women’s right to abortion.

… Until just a couple of years ago the abortion movement was a tiny handful of good people who were still having to concentrate just on getting the taboo lifted from public discussions of the topic. They dared not even think about any proposals for legal change beyond reform (in which abortion is grudgingly parceled out by hospital committee fiat to the few women who can prove they’ve been raped, or who are crazy, or are in danger of bearing a defective baby). They spent a lot of time debating with priests about When Life Begins, and Which Abortions Are Justified. They were mostly doctors, lawyers, social workers, clergymen, professors, writers, and a few were just plain women—usually not particularly feminist.

Part of the reason the reform movement was very small was that it appealed mostly to altruism and very little to people’s self-interest: the circumstances covered by reform are tragic but they affect very few women’s lives, whereas repeal is compelling because most women know the fear of unwanted pregnancy and in fact get abortions for that reason.

… These people do deserve a lot of credit for their lonely and dogged insistence on raising the issue when everybody else wanted to pretend it didn’t exist. But because they invested so much energy earlier in working for reform (and got it in ten states), they have an important stake in believing that their position is the realistic one—that one must accept the small, so-called steps in the right direction that can be wrested from reluctant politicians, that it isn’t quite dignified to demonstrate or shout what you want, that raising the women’s rights issue will alienate politicians, and so on.

Because of course, it is the women’s movement whose demand for repeal—rather than reform—of the abortion laws has spurred the general acceleration in the abortion movement and its influence. Unfortunately, and ironically, the very rapidity of the change for which we are responsible is threatening to bring us to the point where we are offered something so close to what we want that our demands for radical change may never be achieved.

–Lucinda Cisler (1969), Abortion law repeal (sort of): a warning to women, ¶Â¶ 2–10

Hopelessly Midwestern on Gov. Round’s statement, 6 March 2006:

In the history of the world, the true test of a civilization is how well people treat the most vulnerable and most helpless in their society. We in South Dakota feel that the best way of getting around this difficult moral obligation is to pretend that human embryos and fetuses constitute a class.

Oops, I might be paraphrasing a little bit.

— L., Hopelessly Midwestern (2006-03-06): South Dakota HB 1215

Geekery Today, 8 March 2004:

Today I want to honor the occasion with a reflection, and a call to action. Abortion rights are the front line of the battle over women’s reproductive rights, and women’s reproductive rights are an absolutely central issue in the struggle for women’s liberation. A woman has the right to control her own body, and that includes her uterine walls; that means that no-one, neither a foetus nor the State, can rightfully compell her to carry a pregnancy to term if she wants to end it. Any State that says or acts otherwise is legalizing reproductive slavery; the forced pregnancies, the jailing of women who defy the prohibition, and the back-alley butcheries that will inevitably rise again if abortion is outlawed are nothing less than forms of State violence against women.

Those who are against abortion are saying nothing more and nothing less than that they have the right to force women not to end their pregnancies against their will; they are saying that if someone else depends on the use of a woman’s body (even if that someone else is, as it usually is, an undifferentiated cluster of cells or an embryo no larger than a grain of rice) she does not have the right to say No. They are, that is, saying that they have the right to control her body and her behavior just because she has a womb—that is, just because she is a woman. In this respect the George W. Bushes and Jerry Falwells of the world are no different from batterers and rapists writ large. (That there are anti-choice women does not impact the analysis, either: a woman who professes the right to force other women to carry their pregnancy to term because those other women are women and pregnancy is a woman’s natural duty is no better than a man who does this. Nevertheless, it’s worth pointing out that 77% of anti-abortion leaders are men…)

— Rad Geek, GT 2004-03-08: April March

Bill Napoli, member of the arbitrary Senate over the state of South Dakota, 3 March 2006:

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Napoli says most abortions are performed for what he calls convenience. He insists that exceptions can be made for rape or incest under the provision that protects the mother’s life. I asked him for a scenario in which an exception may be invoked.

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

— Bill Napoli, interviewed, Online NewsHour (2006-03-03): South Dakota Abortion Ban

Hopelessly Midwestern, 23 February 2006:

If pressed, they probably won’t deny that we’re human. But so what?

— L., Hopelessly Midwestern (2006-02-23): South Dakota

Geekery Today, 18 November 2004:

This is a culture of life we’re building here, folks. And that means doing everything we can with pro-life laws to stop young women from getting abortions from a safe, medical provider. And throwing them in a pro-life prison when they finally make a desparate attempt to end the pregnancy at home without the aid of a doctor.

Or taking a pro-life gun and shooting them in the neck with a pro-life bullet if they do make it to the clinic:

INDIO, Calif. A California teenager has been convicted of attempted murder for shooting his pregnant girlfriend inside a Riverside County abortion clinic.

The shooting left the 16 year-old victim a quadriplegic.

She testified during the trial that 17-year-old Jeffrey Fitzhenry told her before the shooting that she was depriving him of his unborn child.

The prosecutor told jurors he also threatened, If you take something of mine, I’ll take something of yours.

As Sheelzebub puts it at Pinko Feminist Hellcat:

Apparently, he didn’t like the idea of her getting an abortion. Or rather, he was an abusive sociopath. He reportedly told her: If you take something of mine, I’ll take something of yours.

Except the fetus was in her body not his, and she’d be the one to deal with the health risks and potential complications, not him.

Now, you might think that it’s unfair of me to sit here pinning the actions of one abusive boyfriend on the anti-abortion movement as a whole–but how are Jeffrey Fitzhenry’s actions different in any salient respect from the legal action that pro-life laws are pushing pro-life prosecutors to take in Macomb County? Enforcing laws that stop young women from obtaining medical abortions means stationing armed men who are ready to shoot you in the neck to keep you from getting an abortion. Enforcing laws that punish women for getting an unauthorized abortion means using violence against young women who try to get one through other means. The fact that the abusive sociopath wears a suit and works in Congress does not make it any different. The fact that the shooting is done by men with badges does not make it any different. The fact that any complaints against the men who shoot you will be dismissed by men in black robes does not make it any different. The only difference is that Jeffrey Fitzhenry is only one sociopath, with only one woman as his target. The pro-life state would be a sociopath with armies at its disposal, with all young women as its targets. …

Jeffrey Fitzhenry didn’t care about life; he shot his ex-girlfriend in the neck because he wanted control over her body, and he wanted to take revenge when she didn’t comply. He is not pro-life; he is an abusive sociopath. And nothing less is true of the legislators, presidents, or prosecutors who use deceptive bills to enforcing a culture of life at the barrel of a gun.

— Rad Geek, GT 2004-11-18: Culture of Life

What you need to realize is that we are facing off with people (and, let’s be clear, most of them are men) who have absolutely no compunction with commandeering real women’s lives, livelihoods, and bodies in the name of their theologico-political power trips, because their victims are women and women are (in the minds of the bellowing blowhard brigade) made for the Culture of Life’s use, even if that means involuntary servitude enforced at the point of a pro-life bayonet. Meanwhile the sanctimonious politicos (and, let’s be clear, most of them are men, too) supposedly on our side bite their lips and palaver about the tragedy of necessary gynaecological surgery and generally act as though their brothers’ claims of dominion over other women’s bodies deserved something less than contempt and resistance. We are the new abolitionists, and it is long past time for the Clintonian hand-wringers and the take-one-for-the-party doughfaces who claim to be part of this movement to shut the hell up and get to the back. If they refuse to, I suggest that it’s our duty to jeer them into silence until they do. Can we get some moral outrage here? Some feminism? Some creative extremism?

William Lloyd Garrison, abolitionist and feminist, 1 January 1831:

I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.

— William Lloyd Garrison, To the Public, in The Liberator (1831-01-01)

Happy International Women’s Day.

Further reading

• Hopelessly Midwestern (2006-02-22): South Dakota
• Hopelessly Midwestern (2006-03-06): Bill Napoli hates you. No, really.
• I Blame the Patriarchy (2006-03-06): Bill Napoli is a fucking perv.
• Hopelessly Midwestern (2006-03-01): Regarding life
• Cleis, Sappho’s Breathing (2006-02-22): Coerced Pregnancy
• Shakespeare’s Sister (2006-02-22): South Dakota Abortion Bill Passes State Senate
• Mikhaela Reed (2006-02-03): Katha Pollitt is Awesome
• Katha Pollitt, The Nation (2006-01-26): Prochoice Puritans
• GT 2006-01-22: Roe v. Wade Day #33

I suppose that if I’m going to be issuing public calls for corrections on other people’s articles, I ought to hold my own articles up to the same scrutiny. So here’s some e-mail I received from Nate yesterday, writing from the heart of the Confederacy, apparently in reply to my article GT 2005-01-03: Robert E. Lee owned slaves and defended slavery (cf. also GT 2006-02-24: Over My Shoulder #12: Michael Fellman (2002), The Making of Robert E. Lee):

Fuck you you fucking yankee son of a bitch you can go strait to hell for all care you dirty lieing son of a bitch. You need to die before any one else is taunt by your motherfucking lies. How dare you call the confedrates as Neo-confderate if that is trying to call me a Nazi then fuck you my Grandfather was a proud southerner and went to france and D-Day and killed hateful Nazi sons of bitches like your Dumb ass. For your fucking info Robert E. Lee didn’t own slaves but Gen. Grant did so get your fucking facts strait before you post shit. I mean you aloud to freedom of spech which I don’t deny you that right but I have freedom of speech too and I’m going to fucking cuss you the fuck out you fucking hateful son of a bitch go to hell. You need a lesson in History before you start critsing my hertage you son of a bitch I hope you get messages like this daily because you need it maybe it will crame some truth into your Dumb ass head.

signed go to hell,
Citizen of the C.S.A.

Well, then. I stand corrected.

In unrelated personal news, my parents are coming up from Yankee Alabama to visit toward the end of this month. Also, there’s been a lot of new additions to the Fair Use Repository since last I mentioned it; for example, check out William Lloyd Garrison’s American Colorphobia, from The Liberator of 11 June 1847.

You know the rules. Here’s the quote. This week’s is not bus reading; it’s plane reading. Also a source for transcriptions for the Fair Use Repository (a note about that shortly). I give you a passage from William Lloyd Garrison’s On the Constitution and the Union, from The Liberator of December 29, 1832:

There is much declamation about the sacredness of the compact which was formed between the free and slave states, on the adoption of the Constitution. A sacred compact, forsooth! We pronounce it the most bloody and heaven-daring arrangement ever made by men for the continuance and protection of a system of the most atrocious villany ever exhibited on earth. Yes–we recognize the compact, but with feelings of shame and indignation, and it will be held in everlasting infamy by the friends of justice and humanity throughout the world. It was a compact formed at the sacrifice of the bodies and souls of millions of our race, for the sake of achieving a political object–an unblushing and monstrous coalition to do evil that good might come. Such a compact was, in the nature of things and according to the law of God, null and void from the beginning. No body of men ever had the right to guarantee the holding of human beings in bondage. Who or what were the framers of our government, that they should dare confirm and authorise such high-handed villany–such flagrant robbery of the inalienable rights of man–such a glaring violation of all the precepts and injunctions of the gospel–such a savage war upon a sixth part of our whole population?–They were men, like ourselves–as fallible, as sinful, as weak, as ourselves. By the infamous bargain which they made between themselves, they virtually dethroned the Most High God, and trampled beneath their feet their own solemn and heaven-attested Declaration, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights–among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They had no lawful power to bind themselves, or their posterity, for one hour–for one moment–by such an unholy alliance. It was not valid then–it is not valid now. Still they persisted in maintaining it–and still do their successors, the people of Massachussetts, of New-England, and of the twelve free States, persist in maintaining it. A sacred compact! A sacred compact! What, then, is wicked and ignominious?

–William Lloyd Garrison (1832), On the Constitution and the Union, from William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight Against Slavery: Selections from The Liberator. Edited with an Introduction by William E. Cain. The Bedford Series in History and Culture.

Post your own on your website or in the comments, as you see fit.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I ought to start a feature leading up to the (upcoming) 5th anniversary of Geekery Today, called Dumb Things I’ve Said. The basic idea being that anyone who spends five years writing regularly on controversial topics is likely to change their views over time, and it’s better to spend your commemorative anniversary posts hammering out your own errors than clapping yourself on the back, because you’ve probably said things you later ended up thinking were pretty dumb. I’m no exception, and what I wrote a couple years ago in belated recognition of Bill of Rights Day is a case in point. I doubt that I’ll actually start the feature, but that won’t keep me from ragging on myself for today, at least.

It’s been 214 years today — December 15th — since the first ten amendments, commonly known as the Bill of Rights, were scribbled onto the end of the United States Constitution by order of the several states and the Congress of the United States. Folks with too much time on their hands have dubbed it Bill of Rights Day and think you ought to celebrate the grand legacy of those ten amendments. A couple years ago, I took the opportunity of the 212th anniversary to sing the praises of the Bill of Rights, to bemoan the erosion of some of their traditional protections, and hope that a brighter day would dawn soon. It was a bunch of nonsense, and I should have known that it was at the time, but it took me a while to really see through the dust that the canonical fairy-tales about legal history kick up.

Not surprisingly, I had started doubting the usefulness of leaning on the Constitution when I became an anarchist. But old cognitive habits die hard, and it wasn’t until last year, when I really started reading about William Lloyd Garrison and the rest of the disunionist abolitionists, that I began to feel anti-constitutionalism in any serious way, and it was largely through the Garrisonians that I came to realize the importance of making your arguments from moral basics rather than from legal hermeneutics. Voting abolitionists, and even Lysander Spooner, insisted on twisting the Constitution every which way they could to avoid the conclusion that it was (1) a pro-slavery alliance, and thus (2) an objective force for evil, the covenant with Death and agreement with Hell that Garrison denounced. But as interesting as Spooner’s argument was, it was really Garrison that was right about the Constitution (as I think Spooner came to realize later in his career); the important thing wasn’t constitutionality, but justice, which is not subject to legislative fiat. The Garrisonians, because so many of them were fervently religious, talked about a higher law than the Constitution; that’s partly right, but in a sense it’s also a matter of a lower, more human law; any serious theory of justice has to start from our ordinary claims to justice and dignity, the kind of demands that we ordinarily address to our fellow human beings (don’t attack me without reason, don’t trash my stuff, mind your own business if it’s not hurting you) rather than the ritual incantations that you might utter before a Court (Eighth Amendment, Public Use Clause, penumbral right to privacy, blah blah blah).

But as of a couple years ago my recognition of all this was nowhere near complete, and so my half-complete anti-statism didn’t stop me from singing the Bill of Rights’ praises, piously hoping that other branches of government would force the Bush administration to stick more closely to it, and absurdly describing it as that good old parchment barricade against tyranny.

Well, the thing about parchment barricades is that they don’t hold up very well against pressure. (That’s why you usually want to make barricades out of mud or bricks, at a minimum.) Constitutions don’t protect liberty; people do. Or don’t, which is the legacy the Constitution of the United States leaves us with today. Whatever protections the Bill of Rights was supposed afford white male citizens from the federal government, and whoever those protections were supposed to be extended to in the present day, we have (just to pick a few arbitrarily-selected examples) the FBI spying on us in secret, increasingly arrogant and militant paramilitary police ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5]) occupying our cities, a rampaging global war machine, deliberate and systematic gutting of habeas corpus, and a Justice Department that seems to believe that it can threaten and arrest people for failing to comply with secret laws whose terms they refuse to disclose. Either the Bill of Rights permits this kind of abuse, in which case it does not deserve the praise of rational people, or it forbids it but is incapable of stopping it, in which case it is useless.

In either case, my whining that this sort of thing oversteps this or that clause is bloody well irrelevant; the problem with invading people’s lives with unwarranted searches and seizures, government-sponsored religious persecution, seizing guns, maintaining a standing war machine, inflicting cruel and unusual punishment, or rounding people up and throwing them in prison forever without charges, is not that they’re unconstitutional; it’s that they’re evil. There may be cases where something is wrong just because it violates some bit of positive law — respect for human life demands that you drive on the side of the road other people drive on, but it’s a matter of arbitrary convention which side that should be — but these are certainly not that sort of case. The right to your own body, to self-defense, to your conscience, to peace and freedom, are prior to any law or compact, the only possible foundation for any just law or legitimate authority at all, and therefore not dependent on the Constitution saying one mumbling word about them.

Human rights don’t need to be written on scraps of paper to be worth defending, and wasting your time and energy wrangling over the right enchantments to invoke The Law on your side is a distraction and a sucker’s bet. I’ll take my rights. You can keep the bill.

Further reading

• GT 2005-09-17: International Ignore the Constitution Day
• GT 2005-09-02: Definition 2
• GT 2005-07-04: Burn, baby, burn
• No Treason! 2005-12-11: Bush Gets it Right

Did you know …

1. … that Christian anarchism (think William Lloyd Garrison or Leo Tolstoy) is just like anti-abortion terrorism and Christian Reconstructionism?

2. … that if you, personally, don’t mind chipping in for public roads, schools and sewer systems, that constitutes a knock-down refutation of the anarcho-capitalist complaint against taxation?

3. … that anti-capitalist anarchists are in fact Maoists who want a do-over of Bolshevik totalitarianism?

4. … that dismantling the right of habeas corpus is, in fact, a step towards anarchism?

5. … that Republican legislators and lobbyists who occasionally express contempt for government are, in fact, paradigm cases of anarchists?

It’s true! I read it on the Internet.. (Thanks, Guerilla Science.)

Here, at least, is something that anarchists of all sects, organizations, and creeds can come together on: Lisa Jones is a know-nothing blowhard. You can let her know what you think at HeyJones@gmail.com. Here’s my contribution:

Ms. Jones,

I recently read your column, The battle between law and anarchy, for the Rocky Mountain News. You wondered if most political debates today aren’t between right and left, but between anarchism and rule of law. I think you’re probably right, but I can’t say that I’m entirely convinced by your brief in favor of the rule of law.

There’s a lot to wonder about; for example, your comparison of the pacifist Christian anarchism of Leo Tolstoy or William Lloyd Garrison (who described complete nonviolence as one of the highest Christian duties) to the statist politics of the Christian Reconstruction movement seems a bit strained, as does your attempt to compare anti-capitalist anarchists such as Emma Goldman or Mikhail Bakunin to the death march of forced collectivism under Mao Zedong. (For the record, you might try reading the extensive and fierce anarchist polemics against Bolshevik tyranny, such as Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia.) I was also a bit puzzled by your attempt to portray Republican lobbyist Grover Norquist as an anarchist, when part of the point of the quip that you refer to (about making government so small you can drown it in the bathtub) is that he doesn’t want to abolish the government.

But for the moment I want to focus on a more theoretical point. In the course of criticising anarcho-capitalism, you say:

But anarcho-capitalists also oppose taxation and the very existence of the state. They want to privatize all public institutions, such as schools, and rely on a self-regulating competitive marketplace instead of government. …

Plus, I don’t mind chipping in for public roads, schools and sewer systems. Insofar as tax revenues are used wisely for the common good, I support limited taxation.

Actually, all anarchists oppose taxation and the very existence of the state. That’s what makes them anarchists rather than statists. But I’m a bit puzzled by the justification you give for limited taxation. If you, personally, don’t mind chipping in for public roads, schools, and sewer systems, then no anarchist would suggest that you shouldn’t be allowed to get out your checkbook and make a donation. But that’s not taxation. Taxation is what happens when other people who don’t want to chip in are forced to do so. Do you think that you have the right to sign away other people’s money without their consent? If not, why does your personal willingness to pay for public goods have anything to do with the argument?

Curiously,
Charles Johnson

Let’s hear your response!