Wading into a world of woe, post-Roe

The definition of liberty in the United States has changed, which is more significant even than access to abortion, or gun rights, or the Chevron doctrine.

Nearly every U.S. citizen can trace his or her presence here to a decision by an ancestor to be free of the theocratic autocracies that infringed on the freedom to make basic personal decisions. That is what has changed with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, stripping away women’s right to make the most basic personal decisions—here, the right to choose to have an abortion—from their constitutional rights.

We are returned to a time when narrow minorities, proudly driven by religious dictates, decide how our lives will be led. Our forefathers—although few of us look like them—fought a war to free us from the heavy hand of governmental intrusions into our lives. No more. Liberty in the United States has changed—and with it our understanding of who and what we are.

The nonsense of having each state determine our basic individual choices is a cheap canard. We fought a second war to establish that these are the United States, not a collection of roughly hewn jurisdictions, not a bunch of feckless senates, deciding to be slave or free. We know how that ended!