Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Coming from Trump and the Republicans, you know it’s bad. But you’re not sure HOW bad. Answer: It’s too bad to let stand. It’s too bad not to fight. Things turn to shit incrementally, and we need to resist every step of the way.
Judge Neil Gorsuch has never ruled on an abortion rights case, per se. He hasn’t left many footprints, but those that he has left really smell like shit.
As a federal judge on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Gorsuch ruled on the side of Hobby Lobby in the landmark Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby case about access to contraception. He said that the Hobby Lobby corporation has a “religious faith” that entitles it to deny their employees contraceptive coverage mandated by the Affordable Care Act.
In other words, any religious zealot yarn-monger who wants to call “Jesus!” has more say in your access to birth control than you do. Now let’s learn more about scrapbooking! The judge felt the same in his dissent in Little Sister of the Poor v. Burwell where he held that angry nuns’ “free exercise of religion” includes control over your birth control.
He went out of his way to file an amicus brief in an assisted suicide case in which he wrote that requiring public hospitals to offer abortions was an instance of the court overriding “the conscience of health care providers.”
On top of all that, in a book he wrote about euthanasia, Gorsuch noted that if the Supreme Court would just define a fetus as a “person,” (which anti-choice crusaders have been steadily pursuing for years), then there is no “constitutional basis” for a right to abortion.
Bad enough for you? We don’t want to get into a position of (to paraphrase Pastor Martin Niemoller) “First they tried to foist this asshole on us, and I did nothing….” The ONLY argument in favor of Neil Gorsuch is that Trump could have done worse. TRUMP WILL DO WORSE — next time. That’s why we can’t roll over this time.
