A BIT OF HISTORY
©
SARAH BECKER
Women’s Equality Day, 2022? Yeah, Right. “Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote in February 2022. “For the first 185 years after the adoption of the Constitution, each State was permitted to address the issue in accordance with the views of its citizens. Then, in 1973, this Court decided Roe v. Wade 410 U.S. 113.” Moral, as defined by the American Heritage dictionary: “Of or concerned with the judgment or instruction of goodness or badness of character and behavior. Morals: “Rules or habits of conduct, esp. of sexual conduct.” In America such rules are grounded in religion, a political mix of religions and Sir William Blackstone’s 1765 Commentaries of the Laws of England—the Law of Coverture. Today’s politicians mostly favor the moral opinions of those affiliated with the Christian right: Evangelical Protestants, Conservative Catholics, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, and the Eastern Orthodox Church. Also: The Federalist Society [est. 1982], Evangelical Protestant Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law & Justice [est. 1990], and Rachel MacNair’s Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America 501(c)4 & PAC [est. 1992]. Pat Robertson, a Virginia Republican is Southern Baptist.
8 August 2022
Call us back when you get serious. In 2016 Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network professed “Christianity is where the power is. There is no separation of church and state.” Amendment 1 of the Constitution’s 1791 Bill of Rights is called the Establishment Clause. It “build[s] a wall of separation between Church & State, adhering to…the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience,” President Thomas Jefferson [DR-VA] told the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802. In 1776 Abigail Adams asked husband John to Remember the
Laidies [sic] when making the colonies “new code of laws.” She did not want “unlimited power put into the hands of the Husbands.” “Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex,” Abigail continued. Vassal: “a subordinate or dependent.” “My security depends not upon your [John’s] passion, which other objects might more easily excite, but upon the sober and settled dictates of Religion and Honour,” Abigail later explained. “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law,” Blackstone
wrote, “that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything.” Married women, femme coverts were property. As of 1966—two years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964—at least twelve states adhered to the Law of Coverture [U.S. v. Yazell of Texas]. The states, as listed in the Brief were: Texas, Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Nevada, and North Carolina. “The Texas ‘law of coverture’…rests on the old common-law fiction that the husband and wife are one,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black [1937-1971] said. “This fiction rested on what I had supposed is today a completely discredited notion that a married woman, being a female, is without capacity to make her own contracts and do her own business. I say ‘discredited’ reflecting on the vast number of women in the United States engaging in the professions of law, medicine, teaching, and so forth.” According to the 2020 Census “more than 1 in 3 Lawyers are women.” Justice Black also believed “that the liberties guaranteed in the Bill A BIT OF HISTORY > PAGE 9
Old Town Crier
