I assume everyone has heard about the Roe v. Wade for Men lawsuit in Michigan. If not, here's the story. I haven't kept up with the banter much, so what I say here might not be very novel, but my overall take: I like it.
Roe is based on the contraceptive mentality: sex is for enjoyment, so why should women be saddled with the effects after the enjoyment is over? They set out to have fun, after all, not a baby. All the cacophony surrounding Roe tends to wipe out the nugget that abortion is all about: preserving sex, preferably of the wild and irresponsible kind.
Well, if sex is about enjoyment and any effort by government to limit that enjoyment--even in the name of preventing murder--is a violation of the constitution, why can't men have that enjoyment without repercussions, too? It plainly treats men differently than women, giving rise to a violation of the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment to the constitution. It also invades a man's privacy because it hinders his attempts at intimacy, which then violates the privacy clause of the Brennan & Co. amendment to the constitution.
When it comes to equal protection, the court can rule that the government has a compelling reason to violate equal protection. Here, commentators believe the courts will rule that society has a compelling reason to make sure the child receives support. Otherwise, the burden is more likely to fall on the rest of us. Fair enough. Given our paternalistic governmental system, they're right.
But if that's the case, doesn't the government have a compelling reason to force unwed women to get an abortion, especially those who don't know who the father is? For that matter, might the government have a compelling interest in outlawing fornication and adultery altogether, since those are the activities that produce the bastard children to begin with?
It is, quite frankly, a mess, but it's the mess that results when a group of nine tyrants decides to impose its ideological views--wholly detached from complex traditional mores that have grown over hundreds of years, detached from any sense of conventional morality that is written on the heart--on the rest of society.
