The Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling that most abortion is illegal in the state under an 1864 law throws a grenade into the election battle between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
Possession of the presidency may hinge on Arizona. It’s the third hardest toss-up state for Biden to win but has probably now been made easier for him. That’s because, for the past two years, abortion has helped Democrats whenever voters see it on a ballot or are reminded of it by the party.
Blue activists do all they can to portray anything short of abortion up to the moment of birth as a central, retrograde, and malevolent element of the MAGA agenda. This is despite Trump’s obvious indifference to the issue from a moral point of view and preference that the subject would just go away. He and his party don’t see eye to eye on it at all.
Biden, who is often absurdly referred to as “a devout Catholic” by his news media acolytes, sides as clearly as his limited capabilities allow with a practice that the church calls “objectively evil.” At his most recent press conference, the president said voters should reelect him because he doesn’t cling to old-fashioned notions about the sanctity of life. “Elect me,” he said. “I’m in the 20th century — 21st century. Not back then. They weren’t even a state.” Characteristically, he failed to stick his landing on what should have been a fairly simple shot at Republicans, but you can still get his drift.
Either way, just because Biden is suddenly better placed to win Arizona’s 11 Electoral College votes doesn’t mean the court ruling on the abortion law was somehow wrong, much though simplistic commentary suggests otherwise. Judges are not supposed to decide cases according to the policies or political consequences they favor — that is the Democrats’ way — but according to what laws actually say. It was just such a straightforward and principled understanding of the role of the judiciary that in 2022 ended the abortion right that had been invented in 1973 by the egregious Roe v. Wade decision.
Cynicism is so woven into the warp and weft of left-wing thinking that its adherents cannot see any controversial issue other than as a chess piece to be played in a game of political victory or defeat. It does not compute for them that anything can be on a higher plane than that — a moral crisis vastly more important than the question of who wins the next election.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Progressive and conservative understandings of cause and effect differ in this vital way. People active in the pro-life movement see the election of Democrats as a grievous setback in the conservative struggle against the industrial-scale moral outrage of abortion. But they have been fighting consistently through wins and losses for generations now and will continue to do so. Those on the Left, by contrast, see the demise of Roe v. Wade in political terms, as a colossal and helpful blunder by the Right that opens up new electoral opportunities.
For conservatives, political power is a means to practical, ideological, or moral ends. For the Left, ideological and moral questions are circumstantial variables that either help or hinder the pursuit of political power.
