Consistency in the civil rights struggle

Intellectual honesty requires the question of how the civil rights movement to end injustice and discrimination can focus on the humanity of some but deny it in others.

The great-great granddaughter of Dred Scott says she opposes abortion and believes the Supreme Court should overturn Roe v. Wade in the same way it reversed itself in the landmark civil rights case. Just as the 1857 high court case ruled black Americans were not persons, the 1973 decision said unborn children aren’t people with a right to life.
In the decision in the Scott case, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered the majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court and seven of the nine justices agreed that Dred Scott should remain a slave.

Taney ruled that as a slave, Dred Scott was not a citizen of the United States, and therefore had no right to bring suit in the federal courts on any matter.

The court appeared to be sanctioning slavery under the terms of the Constitution itself, and saying that slavery could not be outlawed or restricted within the United States.

Ultimately the decision led to the election of Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860 when the Republican Party coordinated a new campaign effort to gain control of the Congress and the courts.

Ironically, the same sort of campaign battles play out today as pro-life advocates look to the ballot box and the courtroom to overturn Roe and give legal rights to babies before birth.

They can count Scott’s descendant, Lynne Jackson, as one who agrees that the high court was wrong a second time in the abortion case…

Jackson said her pro-life views were solidified when she saw a video of an abortion procedure.

“You see this beautiful form of a darling baby just floating around, doing well, and then you see the introduction of these pincers that go in and the baby starts to flinch and move back and forth, as if to get away from this thing that’s poking and prodding at them,” she explained.

“Then it becomes pretty violent,” she added.

“So now you’re just looking at stuff floating, where a minute ago you were looking at a baby. And it is a baby, and life does begin at conception,” Jackson concludes.

Rights are for all, not for some. Otherwise they’re wrong…and dishonest.