Abortion

Danimal put up an interesting post over at his blog dealing with the abortion issue. He asked his readers to chime in on this question: "Will women have a federal constitutional right to an abortion five years from now?" He got some pretty good responses.

I'm thinking that a woman's right to choose might be limited over the next few years but that there will be no federal ban. Although Justice Kennedy's real position on abortion is unclear, I doubt he'd support an outright ban, meaning that Bush will need to appoint one more ScAlito-type justice to make his dream of banning abortion become reality. Plus, I'm not entirely convinced that Chief Justice Roberts would vote for a ban, even though his vote on the Oregon Death With Dignity Act makes it appear that he would.

Plus, the folks who will really be pushing for a ban are the members of the radical religious right, and I think the political dominance of these extremists is coming to an end, much like the days of the neoconservatives are coming to an end. I'm thinking that the Terri Schiavo debacle will ultimately be viewed as the Religious Right's Iraq. Even though the Corporate Media kept insisting that the country was "split" on the Schiavo deal, the truth was that 80% of the country thought the fundamentalists were off their rockers on that one, and the extremists may never recover from that politically. Schiavo demonstrated just how disconnected the religious right is from reality.

And I'm getting the feeling that America is finally beginning to emerge from its Dark Age after coming perilously close to turning into a fascist theocratic state; and it may not ultimately matter who is on the Supreme Court because I don't think you can discount the power generated from such a changing political mood.

Two years ago, I thought that this country was heading into some pretty dark times politically. Tom DeLay was at the height of his power back then; and when he made his claim that he was going to ensure that the GOP would be the dominant party for decades to come, I thought he just might succeed at achieving that, particularly given that the Democrats seemed incapable of effectively challenging DeLay's malevolent "thousand-year reich"-type vision.

But despite the Democrats' ineffectiveness, the American people appear to be coming around. Bush's approval rating is at 34%; and even though the corporate media is doing their best to help Bush, he has a 30% approval rating on his handling of Iraq. Remarkably, most Americans now say that Bush does not care much about people like themselves. And the once-powerful Tom DeLay appears to be on the brink of joining Newt Gingrich in the dust bin of disgraced GOP leaders.

Americans appear to be waking up. Whether this process of waking up will spill over into areas such as the abortion debate is yet to be seen, but I am hopeful.

My question is this: Are most Americans merely one terror attack away from going back to sleep again? Here's hoping we'll never find out.