On Monday, July 29th, the Supreme Court rule against a Louisiana abortion law that required Abortion doctors to have at a local hospital. Walter Weber, writing for the ACLJ, made the following remarks about the Court’s decision:
“It was not surprising that Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan, voted to overturn the Louisiana law. These four Justices consistently vote in favor of abortion and in 2016 had voted to strike down a Texas law very similar to the Louisiana law challenged in June Medical. But Chief Justice Roberts had dissented in that case. Yet here is what he stated yesterday in June Medical:
I joined the dissent in Whole Woman’s Health and continue to believe that the case was wrongly decided. . . . Today’s case [involves] a Louisiana law nearly identical to the Texas law struck down four years ago in Whole Woman’s Health. . . . The Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons. Therefore Louisiana’s law cannot stand under our precedents.
What? He admits the prior decision was wrong, claims this new case is essentially the same as the prior case, yet now he goes along with a decision he admittedly believes is wrong? How can this be?
The Chief Justice cites the principle of stare decisis – adherence to precedent. The idea is that, generally, it is more important that an issue be settled than that it be settled correctly.
In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas responded: “when our prior decisions clearly conflict with the text of the Constitution, we are required to ‘privilege [the] text over our own precedents.’” That is, the Court is obligated to follow the Constitution first, not the Court’s previous erroneous decisions.
Justice Thomas forthrightly condemned the Supreme Court’s abortion cases:
those decisions created the right to abortion out of whole cloth, without a shred of support from the Constitution’s text. Our abortion precedents are grievously wrong and should be overruled.
Justice Thomas is exactly right. He and the other three Justices (Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh) who dissented in June Medical rightly decried the majority’s vote to strike down Louisiana’s regulation.”
You can read the full article here from Mr. Weber at the ACLJ.
The fact is the Supreme Court has overridden its own decisions many times throughout its history because the Court does in fact get things wrong. And yes, as Justice Thomas put it “the right to abortion” was created “without a shred of support from the Constitution’s text”. Just as the recent decision granting new LGBTQ rights was also created out of whole cloth as well.
Ultimately though, as Christians, we must realize something even more important than what Justice Thomas said. Our rights do not come from the Supreme Court creating them or even because the express text of the Constitution says so. Our rights come from God, not government. God ordained civil government to protect the rights he has given to mankind, not to add to them or take away from them. But this does not mean we as Christians should not hold our civil leaders accountable through peaceful protests, voting and attempting to change the culture starting at the family level, then working in the local schools and churches and ultimately at the state and federal