I’ve seen this argument elsewhere and it seems (pardon me) like patent horseshit.
Why is this a state’s right? What makes a uterus in Delaware different than an uterus in Nebraska? I’m a woman and an American citizen. Everyone keeps telling me that I live in a first-world nation. This makes no sense. “Oh sorry. You live in a first world nation, but you picked the neighborhood of Ohio.”
And let’s be realistic - I can afford to travel to anywhere that local, precious state laws where I live are irrelevant.
The idea of state autonomy made sense in some way in the America that existed before telephones. Emergency decisions might need to be made and horses are slow. But let’s be honest for just a moment. The whole idea of federation was a hard sell to the slave states and invested powers. These were a mixture of landowners and merchant classes who had been running things locally in their colonies. They didn’t want to give up control, and who could blame them? Meanwhile, the young country needed to have everyone on board for some sort of federation if post-colonial America was going to survive. States rights were a compromise. We’ve been choking on it for 200+ years.
As a country we should have evolved past this many years ago. But we haven’t. The biggest disruption to our American system was the Civil War. States rights again. Yeah, so we have that to look back upon but never really seem to reckon with it. The last time I heard anyone significantly whine about infringement of “states rights” was with regard to chattel slavery.
I’ve seen this argument elsewhere and it seems (pardon me) like patent horseshit.
Why is this a state’s right? What makes a uterus in Delaware different than an uterus in Nebraska? I’m a woman and an American citizen. Everyone keeps telling me that I live in a first-world nation. This makes no sense. “Oh sorry. You live in a first world nation, but you picked the neighborhood of Ohio.”
And let’s be realistic - I can afford to travel to anywhere that local, precious state laws where I live are irrelevant.
The idea of state autonomy made sense in some way in the America that existed before telephones. Emergency decisions might need to be made and horses are slow. But let’s be honest for just a moment. The whole idea of federation was a hard sell to the slave states and invested powers. These were a mixture of landowners and merchant classes who had been running things locally in their colonies. They didn’t want to give up control, and who could blame them? Meanwhile, the young country needed to have everyone on board for some sort of federation if post-colonial America was going to survive. States rights were a compromise. We’ve been choking on it for 200+ years.
As a country we should have evolved past this many years ago. But we haven’t. The biggest disruption to our American system was the Civil War. States rights again. Yeah, so we have that to look back upon but never really seem to reckon with it. The last time I heard anyone significantly whine about infringement of “states rights” was with regard to chattel slavery.