Supreme Court reporter Ariane deVogue of ABCNews.com covered the 40th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade abortion decision in a strange and very slanted way: in light of how an "abortion backlash persists" and the high court will rule on “gay marriage” in the coming months. At this point, her liberal experts are willing to admit Roe was too broadly decided – at least in terms of how it unintentionally spurred a vibrant pro-life movement and elected conservatives like Ronald Reagan to office.
All of deVogue’s quoted experts were looking for a way for the Supreme Court to give the leftist LGBT lobbyists a victory without helping conservatives in any political way:
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, before she was nominated to the Supreme Court, wrote an essay in 1984 for the University of North Carolina School of Law arguing in part that Roe would have been "more acceptable as a judicial decision" if the court had focused on the extreme Texas statue that was before it instead of issuing such a sweeping decision.... Heavy-handed judicial intervention was difficult to justify and appears to have provoked, not resolved, conflict."
It is something that has not been lost on gay-rights advocates.
In his book, From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage, historian and legal expert Michael Klarman talks about the backlash Roe created.
"When the court intervenes to defend a minority position or even to resolve an issue that divides the country down the middle, its decisions can generate political backlash, especially when the losers are intensely committed, politically organized and geographically concentrated."
Klarman writes, "Roe v. Wade generated a politically potent right-to-life movement that helped elect Ronald Reagan president in 1980 and has significantly influenced national politics ever since."
Before that book was finished, Klarman wrote a blog post saying he also felt that Brown v. Board of Education empowered George Wallace and Miranda v. Arizona helped elect President Nixon. His abortion language was stronger than ABC News would like:
Relatively small percentages of Americans favor the extreme positions on abortion — that it is always or never permissible. Most people favor a woman’s right to abortion with qualifications. By adopting a position near the extreme pro-choice end of the abortion spectrum, Roe almost inevitably generated backlash.
That extreme pro-choice end of the spectrum is exactly where ABC and other networks have planted their political flags.
ABC’s deVogue noted that the gay left carefully built a local-and-state strategy to built lower-profile momentum before getting federal courts involved, and she quoted more leftists: Janson Wu of the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, and gay professor and activist Kenji Yoshino, who has written for The Nation and the Village Voice:
In a recent piece on Scotusblog, Kenji Yoshino, a professor at New York University School of Law, explains ways that the court could hand a victory to gay-rights advocates, yet stop short of a ruling that would affect all 50 states.
One such ruling would focus on the "lack of justification for giving same-sex couples all the rights and responsibilities of marriage but withholding the word 'marriage' from them." The ruling would affect only a few other states, including California.
Yoshino advocates that the justices impose a "stately pace" on the march to inevitable victory for the gay lobby. Nowhere in this story did ABC have a quote from anyone who opposes Roe or the “gay marriage” lobbyists. ABC stood for "Ariane Blanks Conservatives."
This piece ended as it began, with only the left getting a voice, hoping the justices keep conservatives from gaining any political momentum to resist: “gay-rights advocates hope that if the Supreme Court issues a broad opinion in their case, the 40th anniversary of the ruling will not include large protests in the street.”
