Sometimes the First Amendment is Inconvenient, but Still Must Be Obeyed

Over two years ago, I wrote about the legal issue decided today by the Supreme Court: laws banning videographic depictions of animal cruelty are unconstitutional content-based restrictions on speech. The challenger of the federal law, passed in 1999, claimed he was researching dogfighting's history and cultural implications through his videos, rather than appealing to a purely prurient interest.

The 1999 law was intended to ban the production and distribution of so-called "crush videos," in which women in high heeled shoes stomp on and kill small animals such as mice and kittens. The decision today apparently leaves open the possibility that such speech could still constitutionally be outlawed (presumably by arguing it is purely directed at a prurient interest) if the law is rewritten in a much narrower fashion. The flaw in the existing law, per the SCOTUS, is that it was vastly overbroad and could encompass speech that should be protected.

This is one of those situations when I don't really like the end result, but I can't argue with the reasoning. In fact, I predicted this would probably happen in my first post years ago. When Congress tries to write a law that it knows is on thin constitutional ice, bad things tend to happen. This is but one example.

On the margins of the Sotomayor confirmation hearing

If you watched yesterday's first round of confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (I couldn't stomach the condescension and hypocrisy from Sessions et al.), you may have noticed a woman in the gallery began yelling at one point about overturning Roe v. Wade. She was promptly removed and arrested.

She was Norma McCorvey, aka Jane Roe.

McCorvey's path to this point has been a strange and sad one. As a young poor pregnant woman, she became the plaintiff in the landmark case that legalized abortion. It was too late for McCorvey, who gave her own baby up for adoption because the SCOTUS case was decided well after her due date. In the 1980's, McCorvey "came out" as Jane Roe and began to assert that she had been used by the lawyers who argued her case. In the 1990's she came out as a lesbian, and wrote a book about her experiences in the case and since. She worked at several abortion clinics and was an ardent advocate for abortion rights.

Strangely, despite the general distaste among the conservative Christian anti-abortion crowd for homosexuality, McCorvey was befriended by several anti-abortion activists after her book came out. They baptized her and eventually converted her to their side, and she has since become an extreme anti-abortion activist in her own right, working with Operation Rescue. (I'm just guessing here, but the guilt angle that she had caused the legalization of a procedure that has led to millions of abortions was probably a pretty powerful tool in the Operation Rescue folks' conversion arsenal.) She petitioned the Supreme Court in 2005 to reconsider and vacate its ruling in her case, though that motion was denied. Since her conversion, McCorvey went from being a Baptist to a Catholic, and then proclaimed that she was no longer a lesbian.

Thinking about the strange twists and turns of McCorvey's life, I get a sense of a woman who never really felt like she belonged anywhere, and who was always looking for acceptance and purpose. I wish she could have found that from the women like me who want to thank her for being the face of the fight for the right we hold so dear.