a few thoughts . . .

 . . . about you-know-what:

1.) News stories are circulating about how Clarence Thomas now wants to revisit Obergefell v Hodges and Griswold v Connecticut. He wishes to, not because he's a repressed, stodgy old fuddy-duddy who desires to oppress various groups of people, but because he's deeply concerned by the concept of substantive due process. Substantive due process uses the Fourteenth Amendment to ascribe to court cases outcomes never envisioned by the amendment's authors. 

2.) This is why John Hart Ely objected to Roe v Wade:

"What is frightening about Roe," noted the eminent constitutional scholar and Yale law professor John Hart Ely (who personally supported legalized abortion), "is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers' thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation's governmental structure. … It is bad because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be."

3.) I'm seeing a number of memes with the basic message that if opposition to Roe v Wade were really about babies and children, "we'd" have free prenatal care, more generous family leave policies, universal pre-K and such. A number of questions arise. I presume this "we" refers to society at large, but how do "we" accomplish these things? Does it not require bills to be put forth in local and/or state legislatures and/or the federal legislature, voted on and passed? Does that not require getting majorities of candidates favorable to such initiatives elected to these bodies? Perhaps we could go the Rexford Tugwell route and have unelected bureaucrats in executive-branch agencies impose these things, but I would wager that there's a great swath of the public that wouldn't go for that, me included. And wouldn't much of a policy like that require curtailing the free market? There's another aspect of it that I for one would vehemently oppose.

4.) All laws, pretty much by definition, set limits on what a citizen can do with his or her body. You are not allowed to point a gun at someone and exert pressure on the trigger with your finger. You are not allowed to depress the gas pedal of your automobile with your foot beyond the extent needed to drive the posted speed limit. You are not allowed to clutch an item of merchandise in a store, lift it with your arm and walk out without paying for it.