There is a group down in Florida who think it’s time to stop messing around and update the state constitution to define procuring or performing an abortion as capital murder — meaning eligible for the death penalty.
A new effort underway in Florida would establish the harshest penalties ever proposed for those who both perform and procure abortions.
Abolish Abortion Florida has launched a ballot initiative to amend the state’s constitution to punish abortion as capital murder, both for the physician who performs the procedure and the woman who seeks it. Additionally, it defines “abortion” to include “any abortifacient drug or device that can kill an embryo by preventing implantation, as well as the intentional destruction of unwanted IVF embryos.”
There is a similar effort underway in Ohio.
A proposal to amend the Ohio Constitution to classify abortion as aggravated murder has been presented to the Ohio attorney general for review.
Petitions were submitted Friday to Attorney General Mike DeWine’s office — the first step in a long process to reach the Ohio ballot. DeWine must decide whether the proposal moves to the second step by Monday.
These are both instances of something I’ve been talking about and predicting for a long time: As the evangelical right is moved by cultural change to the margins of public life, they’re just going to get crazier and crazier. And, of course, in abortion clinic shootings and bombings, and yesterday’s shoot-em-up at a Houston mall by a neo-nazi, we have already begun to experience the violence that goes with it.
Because we are a secular democratic state with plenty of built-in relief valves, I don’t think we’re in for the sort of massive uprisings that have deformed and led to the failure of so many other countries (Rome, for instance), but we are certainly in for a long time of instability. It is not transient political events that are at the heart of America’s political problems, but an epochal philosophical shift. Science and technology are eating the supernaturalism and mysticism that underpin the metaphysics of the Abrahamic faiths just as Christianity ate paganism.
Their day is ending, and they are not going to be good sports about it. Expect more craziness.