Arizona- where women are once again property. Make America 1864 Again!!

How do we know the American Taliban are winning? When they can reinstate an 1864 abortion ban.

I don’t know that I’ve really had a problem with religion as a concept. In junior high, I was an Evangelical Christian for a few years. Then, I began to see and hear things that led me to question my faith and my place in it. Eventually, I reached a point where I could no longer rationalize being part of a faith tradition that placed so many limits on what I could think and/or do.

I left Christianity when I was 14 or 15 and never looked back, but I’ve never condemned those who still believe. The problem I’ve always had is with those who occupy leadership positions and abuse their authority within the church. Whether that abuse is emotional, physical, and/or sexual hardly matters; abuse is abuse, and it shouldn’t happen, especially when it involves a power imbalance.

I also detest those who use their faith as a club they employ to bludgeon others. Faith is a very personal matter; what you believe is important and meaningful only to yourself. It has no impact, nor does it convey upon you the authority to influence or control others around you.

Your faith does not ipso facto make you superior to others. A woman on Truth Social actually told me, “My belief is superior.” Yes, as every bit as arrogant as that sounds, what stunned me was that I know she’s not the only one on that social media platform who feels that way…and she was dead serious.

If you had to travel to another state to get an abortion, it’s not the worst thing in the world. Buying a bus ticket to go somewhere to get it is not the worst thing in the world.

- Mark Simone, 2024 Fox News Mansplainer of the Year

This is something I would never stoop to using this argument in a discussion with a Christian, but it’s true, nonetheless. Your belief in an imaginary Sky Daddy is not superior to my belief that we are the prime drivers of our fates, and that there is no Supreme Being or Sky Daddy looking over my shoulder.

What I resent more than I have the words to formulate is the idea that someone who believes in a God whose existence they cannot prove believes they have the right to legislate based on that belief. In other words, their beliefs can and should be used as the basis for statute law in this country, but mine can and must not, because my atheism doesn’t qualify as a “legitimate” belief.

My being “good with God” makes me ineligible to run for office in seven states, despite the Constitution explicitly stating that no religious litmus test may be applied to anyone running for office.

We now have a cabal of American Taliban jurists on the Arizona Supreme Court who’ve decided that it’s perfectly acceptable to require the state to adhere to a total abortion ban dating back to…wait for it…1864. Yes, that’s every bit as barbaric as it sounds, but if you think God’s Own Party just scraped the bottom of the barrel, wait until you learn that their barrel has no bottom.

Arizona’s 1864 abortion ban predates Arizona being a state. Arizona Territory had somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,000 people; it’s now home to seven MILLION. Women did not yet have the right to vote. Slavery was still legal in the Confederacy. To say the world of 1864 had nothing in common with today would be an understatement. Yet Arizona’s Supreme Court is OK with using an 1864 abortion ban as the law. That it harkens back to a time when women were property and had few rights independent of their husbands or fathers appears to matter not at all.

This one, of course, can be laid directly at the feet of Donald Trump, who, in taking credit for the shitcanning of Roe v. Wade, set the stage for the madness and misogyny that has become red state anti-abortion (and anti-woman) policy, as

Heather Cox Richardson

tells us:

[F]ormer president Trump released a video celebrating state control over abortion; today, a judicial decision in Arizona illuminated just what such state control means. With the federal recognition of the constitutional right to abortion gone since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, old laws left on state books once again are becoming the law of the land.

In a 4–2 decision, the all-Republican Arizona Supreme Court today said it would not interfere with the authority of the state legislature to write abortion policy, letting the state revert to an 1864 law that bans abortion unless the mother’s life is in danger. “[P]hysicians are now on notice that all abortions, except those necessary to save a woman’s life, are illegal,” the decision read.

The court explained: “A policy matter of this gravity must ultimately be resolved by our citizens through the legislature or the initiative process…. We defer, as we are constitutionally obligated to do, to the legislature’s judgment, which is accountable to, and thus reflects, the mutable will of our citizens.”

The idea that abortion law must be controlled by state legislatures is in keeping with the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. But it’s an interesting spin to say that the new policy is protecting the will of the citizens. 

The Arizona law that will begin to be enforced in 14 days was written by a single man in 1864. 

Because, of course, it was. Who knows better what women need, even in 1864, than a White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexual male?

And as Ms. Cox Richardson goes on,

In 1864, Arizona was not a state, women and minorities could not vote, and doctors were still sewing up wounds with horsehair and storing their unwashed medical instruments in velvet-lined cases. 

And, of course, the United States was in the midst of the Civil War.

In fact, the 1864 law soon to be in force again in Arizona to control women’s reproductive rights in the twenty-first century does not appear particularly concerned with women handling their own reproductive care in the nineteenth—it actually seems to ignore that practice entirely. The laws for Arizona Territory, chaotic and still at war in 1864, appear to reflect the need to rein in a lawless population of men. 

The 1864 Arizona criminal code talks about “miscarriage” in the context of other male misbehavior. It focuses at great length on dueling, for example—making illegal not only the act of dueling (punishable by three years in jail) but also having anything to do with a duel. And then, in the section that became the law now resurrected in Arizona, the law takes on the issue of poisoning. 

In that context, the context of punishing those who secretly administer poison to kill someone, it says that anyone who uses poison or instruments “with the intention to procure the miscarriage of any woman then being with child” would face two to five years in jail, “Provided, that no physician shall be affected by the last clause of this section, who in the discharge of his professional duties deems it necessary to produce the miscarriage of any woman in order to save her life.”….

The law that Arizona will use to outlaw abortion care seemed designed to keep men in the chaos of the Civil War from inflicting damage on others—including pregnant women—rather than to police women’s reproductive care, which women largely handled on their own or through the help of doctors who used drugs and instruments to remove what they called dangerous blockages of women’s natural cycles in the four to five months before fetal movement became obvious.

Written to police the behavior of men, the code tells a larger story about power and control.  

In 1864, women, when they were considered at all in a legal sense, were primarily afterthoughts, secondary to efforts to control the misbehavior of men, no small thing in an often ill-behaved and often lawless Arizona that was still at war.

The good news, such as there is to be found in this sorry saga, is that Arizona Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes has promised that as long as she’s in office, no woman in Arizona will face prosecution for obtaining an abortion. She can do this because Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic Governor, issued an executive order allowing her the power to do so.

It’s difficult to know how the American Taliban will react to efforts by Arizona’s Governor and Attorney General to limit the damage done by the 1864 law, which a look back through history will show has no connection to today’s world. I haven’t read the court’s decision, so it’s difficult to know if their intent really was to drag Arizona kicking and screaming back into the mid-19th century. More likely, I suspect it was that rabidly anti-choice jurists saw a chance to inflict their prejudice upon an entire state and jumped on it.

I wonder, though, if the Arizona Supreme Court considered the historical context of the 1864 law, made as it was at a time when

a legislature of 27 white men created a body of laws that discriminated against Black people and people of color and considered girls as young as ten able to consent to sex, and they adopted a body of criminal laws written by one single man.

And in 2024, one of those laws is back in force in Arizona.

Now, though, women can vote.

Before the midterm elections, 61% of Arizona voters told AP VoteCast they believed abortion should be legal in most or all cases, while only 6% said it should be illegal in all cases. A campaign underway to place a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights on November’s ballot needs to gather 383,923 verified signatures by July; a week ago the campaign announced it already had 500,000 signatures.

It seems likely that voters will turn out in November to elect lawmakers who will represent the actual will of the people in the twenty-first century. 

Ms. Cox Richardson is correct in her assessment. The Sturm und Drang occurring now is well-deserved, but the campaign to put a measure protecting abortion rights on November’s ballot in Arizona will almost certainly succeed. If past is prologue, the ballot measure will pass easily, as has happened in every state that has voted on abortion rights.

If Donald Trump really wants states to decide on abortion, he may be disappointed at the results. And it’s not exactly great news for Arizona Republicans who are running this fall in a state that believes abortion should be legal in almost all cases by a 61%-6% margin.

Good luck with that, eh??

It says a lot that, in their fight against abortion and reproductive rights, the Right has to go all the way back to the Victorian era, with its ridiculous abortion laws, Comstock laws and, I’m just going to assume here, arsenic complexion tablets (I mean, it would explain some things). People haven’t wanted to live this way for a really long time, and most people probably didn’t want to live that way back then either, only they didn’t have the power to change things. Now we do.

So perhaps the ones who should really be “on notice” are those who think that Arizonans and others in states that try to pull this nonsense will not use that power to crush their tradwife dreams.

In the American Taliban’s rush to turn America into Gilead, they’ve conveniently forgotten that they’re a pronounced minority and that they WILL eventually lose this battle. They might have something resembling momentum at the moment, but this moment isn’t destined to last long.

A pronounced majority of Americans strongly favor allowing women the right to bodily autonomy. They understand that discussions regarding reproductive care should take place between a woman and her doctor, NOT a woman, her doctor, a minister, a Republican legislator, and anyone else who can horn their way in.

Arizona, like other states, will undoubtedly vote in favor of abortion rights, so, like Donny Diaperfull said, the states should decide…but I doubt this is what he had in mind.

Yeah, well…he can eat a bag of dicks.

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