Brad and Dan dedicate this episode to discussing the state of reproductive rights, activism, and law one year since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Brad begins by going through the numbers on support for abortion in the country, policy and campaign surprises since Roe's fall, and the ways Democrats and Republicans have responded.
In the second segment Dan outlines the American religious groups who are suing to have abortion bans overturned in their states on the basis of religious freedom. The argument: abortion is a religious right that is part of their religious practice.
This leads to a broader discussion of how law and religion work in the USA and why using religion as a means of policy change is so effective.
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
To Donate: venmo - @straightwhitejc
Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
Visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Ornishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
I am here today with my co-host.
Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Good to be with you, Brad.
Brad is hardcore, is not feeling 100% today.
As I look at him right now, he's like those cartoon characters with a blanket wrapped around him and the ice pack on his head.
You're still sticking it out and so dedicated to the cause.
Glad you could make it.
The show must go on and there's important things to talk about.
So yeah, we may.
Who knows what'll happen today, but in my delirium, who knows what I'll say?
We have no idea.
So it's all good.
It's going to be super fun.
Brad's fun when he's not delirious.
So delirious, Brad, for those who've never seen it, is just a real treat.
So we'll see.
Yeah.
I mean, treat might be the wrong word.
I spent this week at the Asian Pacific American Religious Research Initiative Conference, APARI.
It was pretty awesome, Dan.
And I have to tell you, I was Conference on Asian Pacific American religion.
So, a lot of the folks there were Asian, Asian American.
And it was the only conference I've ever been to where we had a boba break.
So, that's pretty sweet.
And everybody who attended the conference got their own boba straw.
So, it was pretty amazing.
I'm not going to lie to have a boba break in the afternoon.
It's pretty cool.
I will just say that my daughter probably advocates having a boba break like every afternoon.
So, I'll have to let her know.
She'll be pleased about that.
It was, it was pretty great.
The conference dinner was really good.
It was at this amazing Chinese restaurant.
Anyway, no one cares.
I'm just, I just, I just wanted to say that because it was really fun and shout out to Apari and everyone who was there.
Okay.
Today, it's been one year, uh, more or less since the fall of Roe, and we're going to talk about abortion rights and what that looks like across the country.
We're going to talk about, I think in depth, Dan's really going to help us understand how there are a lot of American religious community, uh, religious communities that see abortion as a religious right and the lack of access to abortion and various forms of reproductive care as an infringement upon their religious rights.
And so we want to sort of explain that and lay that out.
So let me start, Dan, by just giving some lay of the land here in terms of what things look like a year after the fall of Roe.
What do attitudes towards abortion look like in the country?
How is this affecting people on the ground?
Is this something that, are things shaking out the way that experts and others expect it?
So here's what we've got.
This is from PRRI.
Just under two-thirds of Americans say that abortion should be legal in most or all cases.
Roughly one-third say it should be illegal.
So it's about two to one when it comes to, you know, the way that Americans feel about abortion.
Two-thirds of Americans are for abortion in some form, about a third are not.
30% say abortion should be legal in all cases.
So nearly one out of three Americans are like, in all cases abortion should be legal.
34% say it should be legal in some and And then 25% say it should be illegal in most, and 9% say it should be illegal in all.
So that gives you kind of more of the insider look.
Now, since PRI started tracking this in 2010, the share of Americans who say abortion should be legal in most or all cases has continued to increase.
So Dan, abortion is an increasingly popular sort of issue, being for abortion in some cases increasingly popular in the country.
Now, there's been very little movement, however, about abortion's legality in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision.
In March 2022, right before the decision, 64% of Americans thought abortion should be legal, pretty much what it is today.
So, not much has changed in terms of how people feel across the country.
Now, when you start talking to folks who are in this space and seeing what the fall of Roe has done on the ground, you get a little bit more of a clearer picture.
So, nice piece at the New Republic.
And Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder and CEO of Whole Women's Health, which has abortion clinics in New Mexico and Minnesota, Illinois, Virginia, and other places, says this.
I've been saying for a decade that we live in two different Americas as abortion providers.
It's really crazy to live in a country where your rights depend on your zip code and where you live.
So since the fall of Roe, many of you know that abortion Over a dozen states had trigger laws that went into effect such that abortion became either illegal or nearly illegal in those states.
So what you're seeing is a situation where there are two Americas.
Now, I think Hexter Miller is right.
This was true before the fall of Roe, but it's even more stark now that there are people, Dan, who are driving out of Texas to go to various states.
Or they can find abortion care.
You're seeing that all over the country.
People trying to get out of Florida or get out of other places.
Abortion is banned altogether in 13 states and it's seriously restricted in many others.
And there's just uncertainty.
If you look at Arizona or Wisconsin, there was a big decision in Iowa recently that we'll probably get into later on.
There's uncertainty about the status of abortion and its legality.
All right, let me just tell you Dan a couple of experts and then I'll throw it over to you.
There are folks who are thinking about all of this and what it means going forward.
John Culhane, Distinguished Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Health Law and Policy Institute at Delaware Law School says this.
The biggest surprise might be the continuing actions by some states to ignore the flashing red lights of voter outrage and continue to pass increasingly restrictive laws.
In North Carolina, Trisha Cotham defected to the Republican Party to help pass the highly restrictive abortion law, although Cotham had been a vocal defender of abortion rights before her switch.
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida signed into law a strict six-week limit on abortion access, a move that surely will not benefit his campaign for the presidency.
So one of the things that people are wondering about is what is the Republican strategy going forward?
The Washington Post notes that it does not seem that they have one.
They still don't really have even good talking points.
Roe is ended.
Abortion is something that is in question.
And there's just this ongoing hardcore stance on the issue.
And the question is why?
The data has not changed.
64% of Americans are for abortion in some form.
This does not seem to be a winning issue for the GOP.
Robin Marty, author of the new Handbook for a Post-Royal America and Operations Director at West Alabama Women's Center in Tuscaloosa, says this.
It has been one full year now since Alabama lost the right to legal abortion, and what surprises me most is how quickly the Christian conservative activists and politicians behind our total abortion ban abandoned their pretext that this was ever about anything other than making babies for their families to raise.
Twelve months later, we have not seen one single public policy introduced that would help a person avoid pregnancy.
No subsidizing of affordable, accessible contraception.
No expansion of Medicaid for pregnancy prevention or earlier prenatal care.
No additional funding for hospitals, clinics, or other medical centers.
That are feeling the burden of additional pregnant patients needing services.
So, Marty really notes here that this is not about life.
This is not about human flourishing.
This is not about helping people avoid unwanted pregnancies by ways that are not abortion.
Not about that at all.
The pretext has seemingly been pulled away.
I got a couple more things, but I'll just say, given the lay of the land, any thoughts before we jump into abortion as an issue of religious freedom and religious rights?
Yeah, so there have been a few really good articles of these kind of retrospective looks, and Politico had another one that was the sort of what people said a year ago, what they're saying now, some of the same people that you're citing.
The things that really stood out to me is, number one, the GOP and conservatives
For reasons that I can't fully understand being surprised by some of the what I think even for them were unintended consequences so some of these people have talked about the difficulty of doctors and hospitals knowing what they can do in terms of miscarriage care right like what counts as a miscarriage when can you treat a miscarriage what can you do to save somebody who's having a life-threatening miscarriage because of these abortion laws and you've got legislators saying oh of course that's not what we intended and that's not but
They wrote these laws with such a heavy hand that it's unclear.
It blows my mind that this could be surprising to people who supposedly write legislation for a living, who understand the nuances and difficulties of that.
But that's one thing that has stood out as a consequence.
Of course, the effects on communities of color and women of color and access and all of these that Lots of people said would be an issue, have borne out.
I think the other thing that you just picked up on, the quote that you were last going through picked up on, but something that we've talked about literally since the first episodes of this podcast—this is something I used to say when I was an evangelical pastor—was the criticism of the so-called language of the culture of life.
There are lots of people in these retrospective kind of things, including lots of conservatives, who are somehow surprised, Brad, that they're like, gee, I really thought GOP legislatures would put more money into prenatal care and into all the programs you just listed, right?
Programs to help with medical care for pregnant mothers, things with education, whether it's education on how to avoid becoming pregnant, abstinence-based or not.
Whether it's education on how to be a mother, whether it's assistance programs or expansion of programs, anti-poverty programs to help mothers and so forth.
And they're somehow shocked that this hasn't happened.
This has never been a GOP priority.
That I find naive beyond comprehension that people are surprised by this.
States that opposed abortion for decades did not have massive social safety nets To help young mothers or impoverished mothers or people with infants with developmental problems or other things because they were brought full term.
So that's one that I find really interesting.
It is the telling point that it has never been about a culture of life.
I don't want to belabor it too much.
You just brought it up.
We've talked about it a lot.
But again, I've said on the show that for these people, God cares about you and demands your life until you're born, and then you're on your own.
If you happen to be born to wealthy, affluent parents, good for you.
If not, hopefully you've got bootstraps to pull yourself up by because that's your only option.
And I think the other one that somehow surprises people, and again, it's surprising to me that this is surprising, are the people who believe the GOP when they said for decades it was about states' rights, and they throw it back to the states.
And so there are people who've been surprised in the last year that you've had moves to try to move on a federal ban, that you've had the efforts to attack medical abortion to try to attack that federally.
So, for example, the The decision about the FDA and the suit about that would criminalize that or prohibit the use of those drugs nationally and so forth.
Again, people who, for reasons that I don't understand, seemed to take the GOP at their word for decades when they said that this isn't about religion, this isn't about forcing our views on others, this is about states' rights.
They got that.
And of course, many in the GOP are trying to expand that.
As you said, there's no clear GOP strategy.
There's not one voice on that within the GOP.
But those are things that stand out to me as consequences that to me were completely foreseeable.
We called it, lots of other people called it, but it has surprised some, including, I think, some conservatives who opposed abortion access, but really thought that something that George W. Bush might have called compassionate conservatism Was a real thing and was somehow going to materialize in a post-Roe world.
And instead I think we're seeing something that looks a lot more like the kind of apocalyptic landscape that many people predicted.
Well, and if we just talk about electoral politics, Joe Biden is running for president again.
We haven't really talked about it, Dan.
We haven't really addressed it.
It's probably something we need to get ourselves to spend a good half an hour on here in a coming Friday.
But what I will say is, like, there is a world where Roe has not been overturned, and there are a lot of young Democrats who are very, very unenthused about voting for 80-something-year-old Joe Biden, okay?
There's a world we live in now where many young people, and I think you and I see these people on our campuses, 21 and 24 and 26 years old and 31 years old, who are like, I don't care who's running for president.
I'm voting because of and for reproductive rights.
And so there's an energy that might be possible.
To push Biden to a second term that is all a result of reproductive rights and the fall of Roe, that would not have been there if this had not happened.
So, I mean, I think that's very plain to say, but I think it's something we have to say.
Like if Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee, The 25 and 35 year olds are not going to be that excited, much less some other people.
But if it means somehow protecting reproductive rights going forward, at least in ways that are possible, or if it means voting against the party that just doesn't care, has closed their ears to the desires of the electorate, 64% of people, then Then people will turn out, I think, and vote for the Democrats as they did in the 2022 midterms.
Before we go to break, let me read something that I wrote, Dan, in 2018.
And it really goes to what you just talked about in terms of the evangelical mindset, the religious right, Christian nationalist mindset about this.
And I've always thought that abortion is not only But it's also just such a justification for not having to care about anyone else.
So here's what I wrote back in 2018.
The abstract compassion for the unborn is easier than the fleshy, bodily, messy love for those annihilated at the hands of an AR-15.
Evangelical love for the innocent is ad hoc.
It doesn't apply to everyone.
It's selective, outraged, masked as holy indignation.
But it serves a key function.
First, you get to deny the messy stakes of loving the born and bodied, those with melanin in their skin, different kinds of hair, genderqueer expressions, immigrant parents and non-Christian faiths.
Second, you get to deny the messiness of the social contract, of the political realm and all its irreducible details and multiple voices.
You are absolved of responsibility for the brown skin of dreamers, the unwashed hair of refugees, the cry of bullied trans teenagers, the morning songs from families of black men and women killed by police.
Myopic and unwavering focus on abortion is the way to avoid the cardinality of the living, breathing beings next to you.
The way to get away from bodies, away from the bodies of murdered children, away from the body politic.
It's a way to render love for angels while pretending you are one.
And I really think, Dan, that there's a kind of like some of that naivete you talked about and surprise of like, oh, who knew everyone would be so mad?
And who knew that legislatures wouldn't propose actual programs to help people avoid pregnancy or help those who are actually born?
To me, abortion as an evangelical, when it was my issue, was always an issue of now that I'm on the moral high ground with abortion, no other political issues can ever touch me.
I don't have to care about the cries of the hurt, the marginalized, the excised.
I don't have to worry about the inequality of our social square because you know what?
I'm on the moral high ground.
I'm voting for the unborn babies.
And so I'm good.
And I think people are surprised that the actually bodied, carnal, incarnate people of the United States are pretty effing angry about the overturn of Roe.
And they're not going to just sit here and say, yeah, you know, go ahead, vote for your angel babies and keep pretending you are an angel while the rest of us suffer.
So anyway, final thoughts before we go to break?
I think the only other final thought I have, and I don't have hard numbers on this right now, they wouldn't be hard to come by, but it occurs to me as we're, you know, sitting here doing this live, is that, you know, we talk a lot about the religious right working for 50 years to do this, but the politics around abortion changed in that time, right?
Abortion did become more culturally accepted.
We have better science and better medicine and better interventions and things that can be done in ways that they couldn't before.
I think that's another dimension to this, where it's like, here's this This item that was born at a time when we had a lot more public opinion on our side of we're the evangelicals.
And by the time we finally got it, by the time the dog caught up to the car, so to speak, the car had changed direction.
And I think that they still are coming to grips with that and have really no idea what to do about it.
Yeah, I agree.
All right, let's go to break.
We'll come back and Dan, you can help us get into how this looks from the perspective of various religious communities and their religious freedom.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, so one of the things that you and I were ingrained with as evangelicals was there's no way abortion could be something that was permitted by God.
I mean, abortion is the ultimate evil.
I mean, that's what you and I thought.
And then as we become scholars of religion, it's become much more detailed and complex and nuanced.
And what we've realized, among many other things, is that there are religious groups, including certain Christian groups, but certainly many others, that recognize abortion as actually part of their religious liberty.
So, how's that playing out in contemporary America as we speak?
Yeah, and so this is something that it wasn't just us who said it, but there were people who said when Roe fell, there are going to be challenges to abortion bans on religious grounds.
And this really came up for me this week.
I want to give credit.
Politico Magazine had a great article called The Sleeper Legal Strategy That Could Topple Abortion Bans, and it was written by Alice Miranda Alstein.
I just wanted to give credit there because it really is an article worth looking up if people are interested in this.
I'm going to be referring to it quite a bit because she does a great job of pulling together how these things are actually taking shape, right?
And we see all the time Whether it's abortion bans, or the anti-trans legislation, or whatever it is, right?
There's this lag time in the legal system, but we're beginning to see these challenges.
And so one of the things this article talks about, what it's calling the sleeper legal theory, are religious groups Christian, the Satanic Temple, Buddhist groups, Jewish groups, a range of religious practitioners in the United States who are challenging abortion bans on the grounds that it violates their religious freedom.
And they are, in many cases, number one, targeting states, and number two, using the religious freedom laws that the right has passed in a number of these states, places like Indiana and Texas and Missouri and others.
Why?
Because these states are oftentimes more protective of what they call religious liberty.
They mean Christian privilege, but what they call religious liberty than the federal constitution.
And so they are using these to try to make these arguments.
And so they highlighted, excuse me, she highlights in the article, for example, this is a quote, a first-of-its-kind lawsuit arguing that Missouri, to use the case of Missouri, blurred the line between church and state, imposed a particular Christian idea of when life begins over the beliefs of other denominations, and threatened their ability to practice their religions.
And this, Brad, is the interesting thing, I think, for us It's not just the claim that they impose a particular Christian belief.
I think lots of people would agree with that, would recognize that.
Lots of unaffiliated people, lots of atheists and others, lots of those like Americans United for Separation of Church and State would make the same argument.
This is different because they're arguing that it threatens their ability to practice their religion, right?
So they are using the religious practice argument to argue against these.
In Indiana, and people might remember before he was Vice President Mike Pence, when Mike Pence was in Indiana, they passed a restrictive religious liberty law, and it caused all kinds of hubbub, and there were all kinds of issues related to it and so forth.
Well, now in Indiana, I'm quoting again, or reading again from the article, a group of Jewish, Muslim, and other religious plaintiffs sued over the state's near-total abortion ban.
Their argument?
That it violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act signed into law in 2015 by then-Governor Mike Pence.
A lower court—and this is significant, Brad, this is the most significant gain of this argument so far—a lower court judge sided with them in December and blocked the state's ban from taking effect, the most significant win the religious challenges have notched so far.
And then earlier this month, that is June, The Indiana judge granted the challengers class action status, meaning that a win for them could apply to anyone in the state whose religion supports abortion access in cases prohibited by state law.
So this is really interesting to me.
This is something you know, and everybody's probably tired of me saying, that this is one of my strategies, whether it's the book bans, whether it's this, whatever it is, is to say, okay, take these laws And show what would happen if they were actually applied in a way that didn't just privilege Christians, right?
And force conservatives and Republicans to have to face up to that.
That's part of what these are doing.
And there's lots of responses to this, right?
Lots of legal analysts think these have strength.
Lots of them don't.
Conservatives have different kinds of responses.
I'll just go walk through a couple of these and then throw it over to you to jump in here.
Here was a response that one conservative had, okay, and this is Denise Harle, or Harley, I'm not sure how to pronounce her last name.
She's senior counsel with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group that filed briefs defending state abortion restrictions.
So she is an anti-abortion activist.
This is what she said.
She said, quote, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained in one free exercise case.
Right.
And again, just to remind folks, the First Amendment has sort of two clauses about religion.
One is what's called the Establishment Clause that says Congress can't establish a religion.
The other is the Free Exercise Clause that says that Congress can't limit free exercise.
And there's a tension between those.
But these are the issues at work.
So she said, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained in one free exercise case, the right to swing your arm ends just when the other man's nose begins.
Even if you have religious freedom, there is a line at which you are doing actual deadly harm and destroying human life, so it's appropriate to limit what can be done in the name of religion.
What is she arguing?
She is arguing the basic point that people have rights and freedoms, but their freedoms extend only to the point where they harm others.
Very old political idea.
Completely common sense.
And that's her argument.
But here's the point, Brad.
It's completely question-begging.
It's completely circular.
Because, of course, that's the issue.
That hasn't been settled is that abortion bans are in place because life begins at conception, right?
So conservatives who are opposed to these have to appeal to the argument they need to prove in order to make the argument work.
It's not going to stand up in court.
I've got other thoughts, lots of things on this, but I've been rambling along for a while.
What are your thoughts so far or points that you would add to this as you've looked at these issues?
Well, so the scholar in me and the nerd in me really wants to think about that phrase that is used in the lawsuit that you mentioned at the top there, which is arguments over when life begins or conceptions, a conception of life.
When does life actually start?
And to me, that sort of gets my mind racing because it brings in all these strands that I think have preoccupied the two of us for like 25 years now, like religious questions.
The beginning of life, who created life?
Did someone create life?
Did a god or gods, et cetera.
So you have that whole question.
It's a cosmic question.
You have a legal question, like when does the state recognize that life has begun?
And then you have something that is just a part and parcel of American society or is supposed to be, which is we often have different conceptions of things of really high importance.
And one of the things that there's obviously disagreement about is when does a life begin, right?
The reason this has viability, and I know that there are legal scholars, scholars of religion and law out there who know much more about this than I do.
I'll shout out one person is Finbar Curtis, who's written a great book about this.
Another is Charlie McCrary.
And there's many other folks out there that study law and religion that can talk to you about this.
But because religion is such an expansively protected category in the United States, oftentimes the best way to fight for rights and recognition in this country is to do so under the banner of religion.
That is exactly what's happening here.
You have Jewish groups, you have others that are saying, Abortion is part of our religious tradition.
It's part of our religious practice.
And so, by you not allowing that, you are preventing us from doing things that are actually part of our sincerely held religious belief.
Now, there's precedent for this.
Some of you might remember, going back about a decade, there was an amendment passed in North Carolina that would essentially make marriage between one man and one woman.
It's called Amendment 1.
And the reason that amendment was overturned is the United Church of Christ stood up and said, for us as a church to marry people of the same sex or people who are not one man and one woman is part of our religion.
Sorry, you need to let us do this.
And it was really hard for the courts to say no, because it makes a lot of sense.
So that is what we have in these cases.
I think we're going to just see these continue to pop up.
And I think they're going to be quite successful.
So those are my initial thoughts.
I have a couple of things, other things, but I think you got more cases and more details for us.
What do you got?
Yeah, just a couple more pieces, because everything you say is right, and there are more pieces.
So the first is the argument that, number one, that this established religion, right?
That's the sort of argument that these people are making.
And again, this is an argument that the ACLU would make.
This is an argument that, again, probably Americans United for Separation of Church and State, I should probably—they have made these arguments, right?
And this is what one legal analyst who's pretty bullish on this, who thinks that they have a strong case, quoted.
And this is Marcy Hamilton, who's a professor of constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania and is part of a team representing clergy in Florida in one of these suits.
But she said, we have a really strong Establishment Clause argument because it's clear these bills were passed for religious reasons.
The 15-week bill, again, she's talking about the Florida law, was signed in a church, and members of the state legislature repeatedly referred to God when arguing why this had to be done.
So, one observation, I guess, to make about this, and this gets into the things that I'm interested in, you're interested in, Christian nationalism, and so forth, is you can only go so far in asserting your identity, your Christian identity, and how it motivates everything you do, and so forth, And then try to argue, as they're going to have to argue in court, that in fact this didn't have any religious intention.
It had nothing to do with religion.
We signed it in a church, we talked about God a lot, we read scripture from the floor, and you can look at all these different places.
That's one piece then, is that de facto this is So, if I'm listening at home, what you're saying is that one of the ways that lawyers are going to go at these various abortion restrictions and bans is to say, look, these laws are based on religion.
They're based on one particular religion.
They're based on a Christianity that sees abortion as not okay.
And here's the proof.
The proof is they signed it in the church and you ask these lawmakers, hey, why did you do this?
Because that's what God wants, right?
So, you're basically saying, These laws establish one religion, and that goes against the separation of church and state, and the Constitution's promise not to establish any one religion, and that's the legal strategy.
So is that, do I have that correct?
Yeah, that's the legal strategy.
And again, that's a strategy that lots of people who maybe oppose religion, maybe they're very anti-religious, right, or whatever, would make.
The flip side of it is what you were just highlighting, what we've been highlighting, is those who say, no, this is actually part of our religious practice.
And this is interesting for a number of reasons for me.
Number one, conservatives have dismissed this and said, oh, this is just them saying that it's not actually part of their religion.
They're just spinning this out to try to claim that this is a sincerely held religious belief.
And this is what's really interesting about that, right?
There are a number of people who say, oh, these aren't deeply held.
But as you say, you've had the United Church of Christ says this.
For example, this is about the Missouri ban.
It cites the United Church of Christ vote in 1971 to acknowledge the right to abortion.
And members quote, autonomy to determine what happens to their own bodies.
Also cites the Episcopal Church, another plaintiff, the Episcopal Church's longstanding opposition to any government attempt to infringe on reproductive choices.
In other words, these are official religious positions that these denominations have had for a very, very long time.
Further along in Kentucky, it talks about Jewish challenges to the Kentucky law.
They cite religious texts, including the Mishnah, That says that life begins when a baby takes its first breath, not when it is conceived?
The point is, that's a tradition that goes back centuries, right, in the Jewish tradition.
One of the things that it highlights for me is that, number one, and I'm going to throw it over to you in a minute because I'm interested in your thoughts on this, is that, number one, I think American evangelicals actually know very little about other religious traditions or other Christian denominations, right?
This sense that Jewish people oppose it because what?
Because the Judaism of the first century in the New Testament, they think, might have opposed this?
Missing hundreds of years of development.
I've heard from evangelicals who are shocked that there would be Muslims who would argue that there's a religious right to this.
The Satanic Temple has argued that it observes abortion as a religious right.
So, number one is the lack of cultural awareness that I think shows both their cultural privilege, it shows the lack of historical awareness.
For evangelicals, there are two things that matter.
There's the period the Bible was written, and there's now.
And everything else in between doesn't exist.
The naivety to claim that these are not sincerely held religious beliefs, when you've had groups articulating this for hundreds of years, the UCC articulating this for decades, and that 1971 resolution is not the only resolution from them, and the UCC is not the only Christian denomination to advance positions like this.
So one is the naivety of that.
But number two, and this is where, again, the religion and the law folks would know more about this, but courts have been very, very reluctant to weigh in on the sincerity of a religious belief.
That is one thing that has generally held true, and it goes to your point about making religious practice arguments, is because courts have not wanted to be in the business of having to say who real Christians are, who real Muslims are, who real Buddhists are.
And just to prove that point, again, anti-vaccine.
We have talked about this.
I grew up in evangelicalism.
You grew up in it.
I went to a Southern Baptist college.
I went to a Southern Baptist seminary.
I pastored a Southern Baptist church.
Not once anywhere in my theological education did I encounter the idea that it was a deep-seated part of Southern Baptist identity or evangelical identity that we oppose vaccines.
This is a new phenomenon.
That has been put forward as a sincerely held religious belief, and guess what?
Courts have not typically challenged that idea, right?
They've gotten in the issue of whether that requires a religious exemption or not, but they haven't gone in and said, nope, Southern Baptists, you're not actually a real Southern Baptist if you say that.
Or something like that.
So that's the other piece of this that I think is really, really interesting to watch, is I find it unlikely that the courts are going to do this.
I think these have real merit.
The last point that I'll make is that people have also noted the two pieces, and this came through in Indiana, whether this would lead to religious exemptions to the abortion bans and what that would look like.
And whether it will actually topple them in certain states, and that's going to be another thing to watch, is how broadly, if they notch court victories here, how broadly those victories will reign.
So a lot of stuff there.
Throw it back your way for any thoughts you have about evangelical history, awareness of other denominations, any of that.
I got two.
One's historical, one is conceptual.
One's going to get super nerdy, but let me start here.
I think you're right that one of the things that most evangelicals, and Catholicism is slightly different on this just for a lot of reasons, but many Christian nationalists as well are just Very unaware of the fact that, and we've said this on this show I don't know how many times, and so if you're a new listener or somebody who's only been listening for a year you may not have caught it yet, but we have said on this show so many times if you read works about the religious history of abortion in the United States
The 1960s, you have something like 90% of Texas Baptists who are for abortion in some form.
The head of the Southern Baptist denomination, totally on board with abortion in some form.
We talked about the Southern Baptist Convention last episode.
The Southern Baptist Convention in the 70s had a resolution affirming broad ranging access to abortion.
It was taken over by conservatives after that.
That is not the position of the SPC now, but just to make your point, It's a piece of convenient historical amnesia.
Went to a Southern Baptist college, went to a Southern Baptist seminary, never learned that in either of those institutions.
And so you have this situation where How did abortion get to be this good or evil issue?
Well, we've been through it on this show.
I go through it in my book.
You can read Randall Ballmer's The Abortion Myth.
You can read so many sources on this.
But abortion was a political operation.
If you could get conservative white Christians thinking that abortion was murder, you could win elections.
That's what the moral majority and the religious right and Paul Weyrich and many others in the 70s and especially in the early 80s with people like Francis Schaeffer They figured this out.
So if you get to the 1980s, this is how this sort of starts to develop.
Okay, that's my historical point.
Here's my conceptual point that's gonna get way nerdy, Dan.
One of the things that conservative Christians will say in response to the Jew who claims that abortion is part of their religious tradition, or anyone else, the satanic temple, Or whoever may be.
They will say, there is no way that you could hold that position because it just seems crazy to me.
But also, you're not being sincere.
You're just saying that.
You just found someone who claimed to be Jewish and they claimed that abortion is important to them.
Again, Finbar Curtis and Charlie McCrary show this in their work.
The idea that you have a sincerely held belief is Christian to start with.
So what do I mean by that?
You as a government may not want to say, well, this is a real Christian and a real Muslim and a real Jew and a real Hindu and a real Buddhist, but this is not.
We're the state and we're deciding that.
But the idea that the criterion for Being actually religious is that you would have sincerely held belief is the most Protestant thing anyone can think of.
You know what Protestants are really into?
Belief.
Protestants are really into what do you believe.
They're really into doctrine.
They're really into creeds.
Any religious historian worth their salt will tell you most religious traditions emphasize not belief but ritual, right?
A community.
So many other aspects of being religious than what do you believe.
So this is a super nerdy point, this is a super meta point, but it's just worth making at least once on the show, that by saying to a Muslim or a Jew or the Satanic temple or Baha'i or anyone else who talks about abortion as a religious right, well prove to me that you sincerely hold that belief.
You're already putting a Christian criterion on their recognition as American people who are religious.
You're already saying fit into a Protestant mold.
And so I'm not sure if that's going to make sense to people.
I'm happy to talk about it more later on.
But anyway, all right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and finish up our discussion this week of the world one year after Roe fell.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, I got a couple of cases I want to highlight just from this week, and then I'll throw it to you for kind of final thoughts today.
One is out of Iowa, and some of you might know this already, but Iowa is a place where there was a Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, who was doing everything possible to make it almost Almost impossible for anyone to get an abortion in Iowa.
Well, the state's high court declined to reinstate that law.
The law kind of had an injunction on it, and they did not reinstate the law, meaning that the law that would have prevented abortion from happening in Iowa will not go into effect.
So, that was somewhat of a surprise.
This has led some Pastors to call for the impeachment of the Supreme Court justices, not because they are, I don't know, taking money from billionaires and going on fishing trips like the Supreme Court, you know, and Samuel Alito, but just because they didn't rule the right way on abortion.
There's that.
One that may be less known at the moment is what's happening in Arizona.
So Governor Hobbs in Arizona just this week Is barring Arizona's 15 county attorneys from prosecuting abortion-related crimes and centralizing that authority under the Attorney General's office.
So what this means, Dan, is that the only way that you can prosecute an abortion-related crime is through the Attorney General of Arizona, who is a Democrat, rather than through the county Attorneys who are in charge of their jurisdiction.
So, this is basically centralizing power with the governor and with the state office and the state attorney general.
Arizona is a weird case when it comes to abortion.
There's like a law that was in place before Arizona was a state.
So, there's a lot of like debate over like what it looks like now that Roe has fallen.
Does that law count?
Does it not count?
Blah, blah, blah.
I'm not going to lie.
This strategy of centralizing the authority on abortion with governors Scares me because it basically is taking away power from counties and putting it all in the governor's hands.
However, I'm not going to lie.
I understand why the governor did this because there are extremists who would go to extreme measures in Arizona and prosecute crimes in a way that would be cruel.
So, I'm not going to lie.
I've not had enough time to think about how I feel definitively about this, but I thought it was a case that's worth highlighting just so people know what's happening across the country.
Final notes from you, thoughts on these issues or more?
I think thoughts on this, just to bring it full circle to some of where we opened with, of these reflections of a year later, is I still read people who I think honestly somehow, and this really surprises me, thought that the abortion question would kind of be done being litigated once Roe was struck down by the Supreme Court.
It's going to go into the Supreme Court again, because some of these issues, we've talked about other issues, right?
Whether it's the medical abortion issue, whether it is the trying to enforce state law across like keeping people from traveling to other states and those kinds of things work out.
But we've also seen, if there's anything that I find endlessly fascinating, if I put on my analytic geek hat about the American legal system, it is how Inventive people are finding ways to like challenge things or probing at loose points or loopholes or pulling on loose threads, whatever metaphor we want about these laws.
And I think this is all very much in play here.
I think the last piece is that I think one thing that unites some of these challenges to abortion bans with issues related to trans rights, and there have been a number of some big wins recently where those have been called into question, is the medical claims.
The claims that this is somehow protecting life, protecting patients, and so forth, when The only way to have the total kind of abortion ban that some of these places want is to actively endanger people who need medical procedures that could be construed as abortion in some way, or don't clearly enough say that it's not abortion to make doctors and hospitals and insurance companies not think that they're going to be sued.
I think that that's another issue that comes through and brings these together.
And if people look at some of these, it's the lack of exceptions, it's broad language, it's language that sounds punitive, it's language that looks like it's criminalizing the saving of a life, all in the name of supposedly preserving life.
It's those kinds of issues that come out.
I think the people who thought that abortion was somehow going to go away as a political or legal issue as a result of SCOTUS a year ago, again, I don't know how they thought that, but it certainly isn't born out a year later.
I just think this is a moment to say this is where state representatives matter.
It's where county supervisors matter.
It's where mayors matter.
I mean, every ligament, tendon and muscle of the American body matters on this issue.
And you may think, oh, it's a Supreme Court or it's far away at the White House, far away.
No.
These things are being battled over in states and counties, okay?
So this is my plug for anyone listening to say, right, 2024, a year from now, we will be in the absolute swamp of election season.
What are you going to do right now to say that, hey, when it comes time, I'm going to support a candidate, I'm going to support a campaign, I'm going to support an organization to fight for reproductive rights in the country?
Because this is a moment where you can ask yourself, how am I going to do that?
Am I going to get involved with Center for Reproductive Rights?
Am I going to get involved with NARAL?
Am I going to get involved with Planned Parenthood, ACLU, whatever may be?
I just want to challenge you to think about that at this moment.
All right.
Let's wrap up, Dan.
We're going to go to Reasons for Hope and then we'll be done for today.
I'll go first.
Workers at over 150 U.S.
Starbucks stores are striking over pride decorations.
So about 3,500 employees nationwide strike because Starbucks caved to people who were upset over pride decorations and symbols in Starbucks stores.
And I just want to point out why this matters.
And I just, I had the opportunity to read a piece by a scholar named Justin Friel, who made this point.
And the point is this, is that when you visit a store like Target or go to Starbucks, you may think, does it really matter?
And I understand the arguments for folks that say that Corporate activism like having Pride display in Target doesn't do much for queer folks on the ground.
But what I learned from Justin on this point was that it makes it something that is part of your everyday environment.
Something that you see and feel.
Something that very subtly says it's okay to be you, right?
Now again, is it going to foment the revolution in terms of queer inclusion and representation?
No.
But I, I began today, Dan, talking about a Boba break.
Okay.
I want to talk about that Boba break again.
I'm at a conference, other Asian Americans, Asian people, and, and, and others.
And we have a Boba break in the afternoon when you probably would normally have a coffee break.
It just felt really cool.
And I think everyone at the conference is sort of like, Oh man, this is like unexpected, but so awesome.
Why?
Because for Asian, Asian American folks, Boba is sort of just like, Kind of, you know, part of our landscape.
It's kind of a cultural landmark.
It's something that is part of the air you breathe.
People drinking boba and talking about boba.
It's just sort of like a thing.
Having a boba break was just like this small recognition of like, hey, this conference is about Asian and Asian-American religion, Pacific Islander religion.
And there's a lot of Asian and Asian-American people here.
We're having a boba break.
And it's just a small thing.
Would the conference have been bad if we didn't have that?
No.
But it felt like someone saw everybody who was attending and said, hey, I want you to know I see you and I feel like I care about what's important to you.
And I want to give you a little nod to culture, to way of life, to whatever.
Okay?
So when you have a Starbucks and there are pride decorations in there, what Justin Friel argues is it's just one small, subtle way that you see yourself in what's around you.
And it may be not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, but those little things add up.
They tell you from public, from your surroundings that you matter and that you're allowed to be who you are.
So I'm glad to see that the workers are striking and I'll be watching to see what happens next with this story.
For a reason, I hope just the last point to jump onto what you just said, Those pride displays may not feel big or feel like they do much.
The removal does.
That's the other thing, is once they've become a kind of established thing, when you remove them, it communicates all kinds of stuff.
My reason for hope was anti-trans legislation starting to lose in court.
A couple cases about this.
One that really caught my attention was in Arkansas.
And the reason was that the judge's reasoning was the same as we have argued on here since these started.
He very explicitly said, based on the testimony of experts, medical experts, mental health experts, social scientists, and others, that the anti-trans law Hurts the populations that it claims to help.
I don't want to put all of my hope in judicial decisions.
We've seen where that goes when you have conservative courts like the Supreme Court.
But I am gratified to see that, again, some of these things are beginning to win their way through the court process.
And really, number one, hopefully bringing real relief to some of these trans families and kids who are threatened by this, but also showing, I think, the hypocrisy of what's at work here.
Specifically, these claims that these are somehow intended to help people to increase freedom when they are aimed at targeting people, at limiting freedom, at denying their ability to be who they are, to exist, relates to the pride issues, all of those things overlapping.
So I had a lot of hope with those court decisions this week.
All right, y'all.
As always, find us at Straight White JC.
Find me at Bradley Onishi.
One announcement, my audiobook is out this week, narrated by yours truly.
So I tried to do the Chewbacca voice, and the technician was like, no.
And then I tried to do all kinds of other voices, you know what I mean?
Like Daffy Duck.
And none of them were allowed.
So I read it in my voice, and it's out now.
So check it out if you're an audiobook person preparing for war, the extremist history of white Christian nationalism.
Is available now.
Other than that, if you're wondering how to get all the research we mentioned, you may be thinking all these articles, all those like pieces, where can I get those?
Sign up for our sub stack.
It's free.
And every week you'll get an email that basically lists every article that we talk about in the show.
So if that's something you're interested in, please sign up for our sub stack.
