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Comment by dryanau | Hacker News Reader

Could you explain this a bit more please? (I'm not from the US so I'm possibly missing something but your comment is surprising at a broad strokes level)

Edit: I see you've edited your post already with a quote which is helpful.

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The original Roe v Wade ruling, regardless of opinion on the outcome, was widely viewed as being based on a weak and poorly reasoned judicial argument. The risk of leaving defective judicial reasoning as precedent is that it enables a whole class of undesirable legal outcomes in the future unrelated to abortion. For this reason, it was expected that the Supreme Court would eventually fix this mistake. This ruling doesn't outlaw abortion, it merely moves it outside that court's jurisdiction and leaves it to other parts of government to decide.

I support this ruling for this reason even though I am against outlawing abortion.

It wasn't. This ruling is not about the constitution it's about power. Roe vs Wade was fine. This ruling is based on the fact that Republicans after decades got 6 extreme social conservatives on the court who decided they don't like Abortion

Sorry for the late edit.

I basically see people holding states more accountable now. State politicians who are pro-life are on notice. They can no longer cry about it and blame the federal government. The issue is now on their plate- and it's a thorny one. People need to vote.

But the Supreme Court just banned the rights of states to decide how they apply gun laws. Specifically, New York was prevented [days ago](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-gun-law-new-york-...) from deciding how concealed carry should be implemented.

Surely you can see the hypocrisy in only being in favour of state rights when it suits you.

I think that it's more complicated than that. My take away was that NY gun laws allowed people to concealed carry with approval but were basically denying lawful approvals which ran afoul of the second amendment.

It ran around of the 14th amendment. Only people who donated money to the right politicians got approved for CCL. NY is still free to regulate handgun carry requirements, they just can't deny permits arbitrarily.

As much as it pains me to point this out, you cannot draw much of an analog between abortion and gun laws when it comes to states rights, because guns are protected by the Constitution very explicitly, abortion is not.

10th amendment

It isn't hypocrisy, because there is an amendment that says you have a right to a gun, and there isn't one that says you have a right to an abortion.

You should read the actual opinion, and not the "summary" that this journalist put together. They didn't "ban the rights of states to decide how they apply gun laws". Simply that certain types of "may issue" permitting are at odds with 2A, because they deny Americans the exercise of an enumerated right for arbitrary reasons.

Permit Requester: I want to carry a pistol outside the home for self defense reasons.

Issuer: I don't believe your self defense claims are legitimate.

Requester: Why?

Issuer: I don't have to tell you.

SCOTUS enters the chat: This is no longer allowed.

There's a big difference in how you framed it, how that journalist framed it, and what actually happened. There is no hypocrisy here.

That sounds good in theory, but we know about the states where the republicans seemingly cannot be voted out of office - not helped by all their changes to the election system to prevent that. But indeed it would be ironic, if the public reaction to this were that strong so that a lot of red states turn blue. But I don't have too high hopes. Too many people in the whole spectrum don't see a ban of abortion affecting them while it is too easy to be "pro life".

Here is a thought: I'm a pro-choice New Englander. If those states like Kentucky are so strongly pro-life, then who am I to push my New England center/lib culture onto them?

It's liberating in a way- I don't need the whole country to subscribe to living like me or holding the same beliefs and that's okay.

To what extent are you willing to let other states restrict rights of US citizens because their cultural majority is different from yours? Is there a line? Perhaps 330 million people is too many to have in a single culture.

I am starting to come around to that view myself. The mythology of America has been dying for some time, and accelerating dramatically in the last few decades. Without that mythology to bind us together, it may be that we are more different than we thought. Arguably the majority of people in the southeast, for example, do not share the same values as people in the northwest. Maybe they should not try.

Our mythology has always been life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. Freedom of speech and religion. Democracy. Rule of law. They aren't as radical and in vogue today but this was and still is our "mythology", IMO.

I think that's an idealized interpretation of a young country that spent it's first 100 years believing humanity is attached to skin color, fought a brutal civil war over that before spending its next 100 years preventing most of them from entering commerce, and its last ~50 years incarcerating as many of them as possible. And things like shadow wars in Cambodia do not look good on a country proclaiming "rule of law". So perhaps that's how you perceive it's shared methodology, but certainly not "how it has always been".

Mythology does not equal reality. It's a target to aim for. No countries "mythology" matches their reality.

My theory is not that mythology kept you together, but that there was enough cultural and physical space to peacefully ignore each other if anyone so wished, simply by moving a bit further away. Communications were slow enough that they could be digested or ignored more or less at will.

The problem is that, between natural population growth and the rise of the internet, both the cultural plane and the physical one have largely run out of space. Figurative "midwest zealots" just cannot live their lives ignoring "coastern heathens" even if they'd like to, and viceversa. And so the fights have broken out and will likely continue for a long time.

This is not a state issue or a cultural issue, it is an individual issue.

It does not matter what people in Kentucky think. They do not have the right to an opinion on another person's life decisions. Even if every person in Kentucky, or every person on the planet believed abortion is wrong, that would not impact an individual person's right to an abortion. Abortion is outside the scope of what governments can legitimately legislate, because individuals have sovereign control over their bodies.

> They do not have the right to an opinion on another person's life decisions.

The other side says that the fetus is a person with rights that are being trampled. And around and around we go forever. I am personally pro choice but I do understand that this is 100% my own subjective opinion.

Are you at all concerned that now that this becomes a State level issue we move the wedge from a single federal level to 50 different wedges clogging up legislatures? We've been arguing about Roe for half a century, will this lead to resolution or is it a metastasization? Just an initial thought I had, even though I agree on all your points.

I'm not sure the political currents present in America today indicate that states won't eagerly trample the right's of their citizens. Especially considering the voting restrictions and minoritarian rule pet projects of the right.

America is also rife with examples of the federal government intervening to protect citizens from their states — Brown v Board, or most extremely the Civil War.

"People need to vote" is insufficient for regressions on issues that affect people's livelihoods. For example, Texas has a larger democrat-voting population than many blue states, "just voting" won't do anything to improve their livelyhood in the foreseeable future.

> People need to vote.

Ahmen to that. We wouldn't be in this situation if liberals took voting as seriously as conservatives.

I've seen 100's of comments over the last year about how "I'm done voting because the student loans were not forgiven" ... I don't think the next period in America is going to go very well.

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