Letters

“Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion, or the free exercise thereof …”

Yet our U.S. Supreme Court gives itself permission to use the voiding of Roe v. Wade to entrench firmly in their version of our Constitution an ideology held by a religious minority in our country. This minority religion claims that “life begins at fertilization,” thus imposing life-and-death rights on a fertilized egg inside a woman’s womb, in effect endowing “personhood” on a nonviable clump of cells and blood with rights that trump the rights of the pregnant woman.

Are you kidding?

Not only is the Catholic faith a minority religion in this country, but a significant percentage of Catholic women support Roe v. Wade and all women’s right to an abortion.

Hell, if it’s against your religion, don’t have an abortion. But get the devil out of my bedroom, my body, my rights.

Unfortunately, since civics is no longer taught, our pitifully uneducated electorate may not realize that, throughout U.S. history, the Supreme Court has been a continuing brake on progress, a continuing force to entrench the rights of the rich and powerful, the rights of slave owners, the rights of men but not women, the rights of the exploiters of labor against the workers.

Isn’t it about time that Congress uses its jurisdictional authority to cut down the power of and the abuses by nine unelected judges, who lie their way through Senate confirmation hearings, throw U.S. Supreme Court procedural customs like stare decisis to the wind, and now, even violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment? (I dealt with the U.S. Supreme Court’s violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution in an earlier Letter to the Editor.)

Our Constitution is not engraved in concrete. It was a pretty good document to build on in protest against King George III, but it has long since shown the legal weakness, moral failure, and structural impediment to modern times in the continuation of (1) the Electoral College instead of popular vote in choice of U.S. presidents; (2) the absurd assignment of two Senate seats to every state, regardless of the size of population in other states thus disenfranchised; (3) the obeisance to a bunch of often-mediocre jurists to play havoc with our Constitution by twisted interpretations (Second Amendment), disenfranchisement of Black voters (disembowling the Voting Rights Act), and finally installing a Middle Ages concept of men’s rights over women’s bodies in the Supreme Law of our republic.

And, by the by, we have never yet had a democracy. We have had a distressfully inadequate republic, which has long failed to represent all the men and women in our country.

Evelyn Konrad

Attorney at law

Southampton