10 Sep A Tally Mark in a Column Labeled “Life” – On Being Sick, Abortion, and Mercy

Early last year I had a severe auto-immune reaction.

One day all the joints on the left side of my body exploded with inflammation. My knee was the size of a grapefruit. The fingers on my left hand were so stiff I struggled to open jars. I’d wake up each morning with ripe, throbbing limbs and the tinny echo of my medication reminder going off. I remember dreading that first step onto the floor, because that’s when I would really know if it was going to be a good day or a bad one.

It was often bad, in those early days. I ate oatmeal with almond yogurt, because the label on the pill bottles said “take with food.” I used a package of frozen raspberries wrapped in a towel to ice my knee. I stayed horizontal until the meds kicked in and I could move again without pain; usually around 1 or 2 in the afternoon.

One week, my doctor’s office made a mistake and forgot to refill a prescription. “Sorry, we don’t have anything for you,” said the pharmacist. I called my doctor. “We sent the refill last week!” they insisted. I called my pharmacy. Nothing. I called the doctor’s office. “It should be there. Tell them to check the faxes.” I called the pharmacy.

It took a combined sixteen phone calls, back and forth, to sort it out. Two more days would pass before I had my meds in hand, and I wasn’t allowed to take over-the-counter anti-inflammatories in the meantime. I laid on my couch and tried to ignore the angry bass-thump of pain in my body. There are kinds of suffering that feel unsustainable. I texted one of my group chats: “If I ever feel okay again I’m going to cry.”

I bookmarked my CVS login page, to save time.

I’m fortunate to be able to afford decent insurance. Even so, I was barely mobile for the better part of two months while my rheumatologist and I tried to find the right mix of drugs to pacify my rogue immune system. Eventually we did. The inflammation diminished and (mostly) disappeared. I had my life back.

One of the drugs I take is called methotrexate, and it doesn’t only treat the pain: my diagnosis —arthritis— is a degenerative disease. Before effective medications like methotrexate were available, rheumatoid arthritis patients (the most common kind of arthritis) could expect to die ten years earlier than their peers. My meds keep my joints from sustaining permanent, life-altering damage. Over a million people in the U.S. have RA.

Methotrexate treats psoriasis, lupus, Crohn’s disease, cancer, and more; even a rare disease that attacks healthy tissue in your eyeballs. It literally keeps people from going blind.

It is also used to treat ectopic pregnancies. Technically, it is an “abortifacient;” and as a result of Roe repeal, pharmacists around the country are refusing to fill prescriptions for people with conditions just like mine.

***

Texas had just passed its six weeks abortion ban when Kaitlyn and her husband got the news: skeletal dysplasia. The fetus’ lungs were underdeveloped and it was slowly suffocating. If it survived childbirth, its bones would break just from being held.

Since the Texas law only allows for abortion if the mother’s life is threatened, Kaitlin’s pregnancy fell in a legal “gray area.” Afraid of being sued, her doctor didn’t even bring up the possibility of ending the pregnancy. Kaitlyn had suffered from postpartum depression after the birth of her first son. If she hadn’t been able to travel for an abortion, she doesn’t know what she would have done.

The prospect of carrying a fetus that was destined for suffering and death was unfathomable. “I don’t know if I could have got up and gone to work with that baby inside of me for seven months,” she said. “I could see suicide being an option.”

Dobbs is barely 10 weeks old, and the worst fears of reproductive advocates and healthcare experts are already being realized: ambiguous abortion ban language and the threat of harsh financial and criminal penalties are proving disastrous for timely and effective reproductive care.

In Alabama, patients having miscarriages were being refused treatment even before Roe v. Wade was overturned; in some cases being turned away from ERs while they were bleeding and passing clots. The Monday after the Supreme Court ruling, a ten-year-old Ohio girl –six weeks pregnant– had to travel to Indiana to get the medical care she needed. The Texas Medical Association reported one case of a hospital telling a physician “not to treat an ectopic pregnancy until it ruptured.”

A woman in Louisiana is being forced to deliver a fetus missing most of its skull.

The loudest anti-choice voices mostly seem stung by the backlash, as if these stories of pregnant people in crisis are primarily calibrated to impugn their “pro-life” bonafides. “That’s not what the law says!” they protest. “No pro-life bills conflate abortions with miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies.”

This may be effective political messaging, but in a clinical setting: it is nonsense. The medical term for a miscarriage is “spontaneous abortion.” Miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies are treated by evacuating the uterus or administering “abortifacients.” An abortion is an abortion.

Anti-choice fundamentalists are trying to pass off a moral distinction as a medical or legal one. God has told them this is a sin and that isn’t. But sepsis doesn’t much care about your theological or metaphysical priors. Neither do the corporate lawyers. The Texas woman who bled into her bathtub while waiting two weeks to get treated for a miscarriage will not be impressed or made whole by a bullet-proof pro-life apologetic.

A patient of Louisiana doctor Vanessa Williams was recently forced to endure hours of labor to deliver a non-viable fetus. “She was screaming – not from pain, but from the emotional trauma,” Williams wrote in an affidavit.

“There is absolutely no medical basis for my patient, or any other patient in this state, to experience anything like this. This was the first time in my 15-year career that I could not give a patient the care they needed. This is a travesty.”

This perfect storm of confusion and fear has doctors and pharmacies refusing to dispense medication for safe IUD insertion, ectopic pregnancies, and miscarriages. And yes: it has also impacted access to drugs like methotrexate for non-pregnant people with auto-immune and other chronic conditions; people like Becky Schwarz, who takes methotrexate to manage her Lupus:

“Roe was overturned six days ago. In less than one week I lost access to healthcare that I need because the drug could be used to induce abortions,” said Becky, in a tweet that quickly went viral. “Don’t tell me you’re pro-life.”

She wasn’t alone. Dr. Cuoghi Edens, an assistant professor of internal medicine and pediatrics at University of Chicago Medicine, has also been hearing from patients: “I have gotten some reports where children have been denied methotrexate for their juvenile arthritis until they’ve proven they’re not pregnant.”

In one case, a pharmacist initially refused to dispense methotrexate to an 8-year-old girl in Texas. In a note the child’s doctor shared with Edens, the pharmacist wrote, “Females of possible child bearing potential have to have diagnosis on hard copy with state abortion laws.”

Without methotrexate, many juvenile idiopathic arthritis patients could no longer hold a pencil or type on a computer. Others face irreversible damage to organs and joints.

***

It was easier to buy the conservative vision of the world when I was younger, when I still thought I knew everything; when I was healthy.

Before the anxiety migrated from my head to my body: twisting my gut, torquing my neck and back muscles, inflaming my nervous system, and defying medical diagnosis. Before I experienced a long, colorless depression. Before my immune system got its wires crossed and unleashed a firehose of cytokines on my joints.

Auto-immune conditions can be physically debilitating, but they are also a total mindfuck. I woke up one day with a mirrored rash on both of my thighs. A dark spot appeared on my forehead. I’ve had urinary tract issues and been diagnosed with STIs, but the tests always come back negative. The doctors don’t really know what to make of my condition.

“Well, it seems like your parents gave you a really weird immune system,” shrugged one infectious disease expert, after another battery of tests came back negative.

When you’ve been attacked (seemingly randomly) by your own body, your whole existence feels sort of precarious. I never can tell if I’m under- or over-reacting to each fresh symptom. Is that a mosquito bite or am I having a flare? Is my wrist sore from chopping onions or about to blow up like a balloon? Is that a new freckle? Have my eye sockets always looked like that?

In addition to the methotrexate, I give myself a shot every other week. It’s one of those scary Big Pharma Drugs that you’ll see on CNN ad breaks, complete with the comically endless side-effect scroll. Without insurance (something I likely won’t be eligible for if the GOP gets their way), one year’s supply would cost me about $84K.

Earlier this year my injection pens were delayed due to “issues with shipping.” Auto-immune patients will recognize how stressful this is; the immune system is famously finicky. I remember how discouraged I felt when my rheumatologist told me it could take years to wean myself off the drugs, even if I was in remission. You have to go very slowly and gently. Even small disruptions in medication schedules are scary.

I was about twenty-four hours late with my injection and thankfully I didn’t flare. But I would later, after stepping down my methotrexate dosage from ten pills weekly to seven over the course of three months. Still not gradual enough. Fresh urinary symptoms surfaced, my skin puckered and blushed. I could feel the old stiffness in my thumb.

My rheumatologist balked and now I’m back to ten pills a week.

If you spend some time on RA/auto-immune twitter threads and message boards, you’ll inevitably come across something like this sentiment: “If I didn’t have my meds, life wouldn’t be worth living.”

When the quality of your days is tethered to the global supply chain as well as the competence (and willingness to risk litigation) of individual pharmacists and doctors, the culture war program becomes not just unworkable; it is an active threat.

***

After President Biden recounted the story of the ten-year-old Ohio rape victim who travelled to Indiana for abortion care, the Wall Street Journal ran with the headline: “An Abortion Story Too Good to Confirm.” The body of the op-ed calls it a “fanciful tale” and smugly identifies the source for the account –an OB doctor in Indiana– as someone with a “long history of abortion activism in the media.”

The National Review, The Daily Caller, Fox News, and many other right-wing outlets joined the pile-on. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost told Jesse Watters he hadn’t heard “a whisper” about the case and called it a “likely fabrication.” “Another lie!” tweeted house rep Jim Jordan.

The next day the Wall Street Journal appended this update to their original article:

The Columbus Dispatch reported Wednesday, a day after this editorial was published, that a Columbus, Ohio, man has been charged with the rape of a 10-year-old Ohio girl who traveled to Indiana for an abortion.

You’d think the shame –or at least the cognitive dissonance– would slow them for a second, but no; the whole machine pivoted seamlessly to highlighting the alleged rapist’s undocumented status.* Indiana’s Republican AG got his five minutes in, saying that he would be investigating the doctor who cared for the young victim.

“We’re gathering the evidence as we speak, and we’re going to fight this to the end, including looking at her licensure if she failed to report.” state Attorney General Todd Rokita said on Fox News on Wednesday night.

The Indianapolis Star has since confirmed that the doctor met all filing requirements. Further reporting revealed she had previously paused her abortion practice after the FBI warned her employer about a plot to kidnap her daughter. She is listed on “pro-life” websites as an “abortion threat.”

This is all starting to sound harrowingly familiar.

Responding to the case, James Bopp of the National Right to Life Committee affirmed that, in the ideal pro-life scenario (and in the NLRC’s model legislation), no exceptions would be made for rape or incest:

“She would have had the baby, and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child,” Bopp said in a phone interview on Thursday.

The NLRC expects its model legislation to inform imminent abortion bans in Indiana and around the country. Some “pro-life” groups –including the NRLC– want to criminalize traveling out of state for the procedure, even sharing information about reproductive care online. The Texas GOP recently threatened legal action against companies that have promised to cover abortion-related expenses for their employees. Republicans in several statehouses are looking into banning IEDs and birth control.

House Republicans are pushing for a federal abortion ban.

It turns out that if you shout “abortion is murder” relentlessly for three decades, some people will start to act as if it were true.

***

I can’t recommend developing an auto-immune condition in the middle of a global pandemic. My meds are a godsend, but they treat my symptoms by throttling my immune response. With a deadly, highly-contagious, and still-mysterious pathogen hanging in the air: I suddenly had to be wary of everyone else’s body as well as my own.

Though I’m vaxxed up, it’s an open question how my system would respond to a Covid infection. I’m not eager to add this unpredictable viral variable into *gestures at my body* whatever is going on in there.

So I’ve been careful. I consult with my doctor. I attempt to separate signal from noise and stay up on the latest science. I wear an N95 and avoid confined, indoor spaces (you know, mostly). I communicate my health situation to my housemates and friends and ask for their consideration. I attempt impossible risk/reward calculations, weigh my need for social interaction against the chance of catching the latest variant. How much of a mental health boost justifies a 25% infection risk? Ten dopamine hits? Five dopamines? Will another human creature laugh at one of my jokes? Give me a hug? Times are tough. Depending on the day, I might consider it.

Three years and over a million deaths –in the US alone– into a worldwide health crisis, and still conservative politicians and pundits (and a few of my Christian friends) characterize people like me as “hysterics” compulsively performing “Covid theater.” Tucker Carlson routinely spreads anti-vax misinformation and has equated masking your kids with child abuse.

Even though there are no meaningful, state-sanctioned mask mandates or Covid mitigations anywhere in the country, Tucker and all his right-wing clones get positively apoplectic when they see somebody like me masking up anywhere outside of an emergency room. “Sheep!” they scream gleefully, spittle flying.

It’s wild.

Of course Tucker doesn’t care about masks one way or the other. He’s richer than God. He could buy himself a new immune system if he wanted. The mask thing is just part of the culture war froth he whips up every night in primetime to pad his inherited fortune. And his message is reaching its intended audience.

A couple of my Christian friends and family –decent, thoughtful people who love me– have looked me in the eye and repeated an anti-vax myth common in far right media: that Covid deaths have been overcounted because “most of those people had pre-existing co-morbidities.”

Like, that’s me? You’re talking about me. Arthritis is on the “big 10” chronic conditions list, along with heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and hypertension. Should our lives not “count?”

***

I’m a white guy and I live in California; my meds will likely remain available to me. I share all this stuff about my dumb, weird body because I wanted to remind us of some of the actual “life” that happens in between our putative “start” and “end” dates:

Like those days I spent on the couch last April, binging Succession and trying to disassociate from my body. Or the ambient stress of a disabled and immuno-compromised person navigating a crowded supermarket during a Covid wave. Changing your ringtone; because the old one reminds you of the moment you found out your baby would be born with bones of glass. A cancer diagnosis and a partner’s knowing look. The way a single piece of bad news can tip the scales towards despair. Watching the light in someone else’s eyes go dim.

These are the kinds of moments that aren’t captured by a simple tally mark in a column labeled “Life.” The evangelical, anti-choice ethic –like the legislation it has produced–  is both too abstract and too severe. It cannot account for the particularity and messiness of material reality. A desired pregnancy and healthy birth? Tick. A baby that will only live for a few minutes or hours? Tick. A ten-year-old carrying her rapist’s child to term?

Tick.

To complicate a David Dark phrase: “There are so many ways to love God.”

Years ago a distant relative of mine tried to raise my grandma from the dead in the middle of her funeral. He was convinced he had heard from God. So was Paul Hill, the “pro-life” minister who gunned down Ohio abortion doctor John Britton. Dr. George Tiller was ushering at his Lutheran church (in a flak jacket) when Scott Roeder walked in and shot him in the face. Both of these men believed they were serving and loving God. Perhaps Bill O’Reilly did too? Martin Luther King Jr. was a man of faith, as was John Brown. David Duke is a Christian. So was Fred Rogers. It was a Christian mentor who counseled me to avoid my gay friend in college. It was a Christian professor who put his hands on that same friend’s shoulders and told him: 

“There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s this place that’s the problem. It’s okay to leave.”

Some of my evangelical friends will see the professor’s actions as the personification of Christian grace and the toppling of an idol. Others will call it heresy. Your mileage may vary.

I understand that you can’t tell a pat story about a demographic as broad as “Christianity.” Most of the evangelicals in my life are wonderful, empathetic people. I know that many of you reading this aren’t Tucker Carlson acolytes or Donald Trump fans. I don’t automatically assume that y’all would claim Dave Yost or James Bopp as ideal ambassadors for your faith. Some of you even disagree with Roe repeal or at least hope the “party of life” will pivot to pro-social policies that support families and expectant mothers.

But I’m curious: do my evangelical friends disagree with what Dr. Bopp said or just the graceless nature of his delivery and timing? Do you still believe that “abortion is murder?” Do you think the women and pregnant folks in these stories can fairly be characterized as “baby-killers?” Are you willing to affirm that they should be free to make their own decisions about their lives and bodies? What about pregnant people who aren’t facing permanent physical deformation or imminent death?

I confess I’m unsure how thoroughly to dis-aggragate your Jesus from all the things that people have done –are doing right now– in his name. How did these incurious, authoritarian theocrats amass all this power in the first place? Who voted for them? Can we distinguish the “real Christians” from these “bad apples?”

How should I understand the distance between conservative evangelicalese like “same-sex attraction” and the language that followed from it? Gay “agenda.” “Gay” plague. “God’s judgment.” “Trans Indoctrination.” “Groomer.” How much distance is there, in terms of actual impact, between “life begins at conception” and “abortion is murder?”

Isn’t this a story of continuity, not rupture? Aren’t they all the same people? Wasn’t it us? 

***

I’m not some random outsider. I was raised on A Beka Book and Ken Hamm. I went to David Noebel’s culture war apologetics camp in the Colorado mountains, where they showed us a gruesome video of a late-term abortion.** I watched The Buttercream Gang, McGee n’ Me and Veggietales. I judged Sandi Patty for her divorce.

Lately I find myself returning to those heady, culture war days: I think about how often we were encouraged to interpret “difference” as a threat; how words like “secular,” “liberal,” even “Catholic” curdled into slurs on the tongue.

Some of us evangelical kids went to school together, maybe even waved those signs outside of a Planned Parenthood. I bet I wrote an “Abortion is Murder” essay at some point. We weren’t cruel, exactly. We didn’t cheer Dr. Tiller’s death, but we wielded the same arguments as his murderer. Our pastors likely didn’t preach bald racism from the pulpit, but our Christian textbooks told us that “the majority of slaveholders treated their slaves well.” We weren’t encouraged to use words like “slut,” but we were taught to believe in the concept. We had affection for our LGBTQ friends, but nevertheless told them to their faces that they were broken in important ways: incorrect, misshapen, sinful at their very core. “Love the sinner,” we intoned, but also: “What’s next? Sex with dogs? LOL.”

In his Dobbs opinion, Clarence Thomas signaled his desire for the Supreme Court to re-visit Lawrence, Griswold, and Obergefell, important privacy cases that established the rights to contraception and gay marriage. Ted Cruz agrees. Texas AG Ken Paxton has said he’s open to enforcing anti-sodomy laws still on the books in his state, should the court overturn Obergefell. The lawyer who wrote Texas’ restrictive abortion law has sued to restrict access to PREP HIV medication because it “encourages sinful behavior.”

In Jesus’ name.

A few years ago, a friend told me a story that has always stuck with me. He grew up gay in the evangelical, Bible-belt milieu, fought his way through chronic depression and a couple of suicide attempts to health. His therapist once asked him: “Was there anything specific that helped alleviate the depression and self-loathing?”

“Yes.” My friend didn’t hesitate. “It was when I realized God didn’t hate me because he wasn’t real.”

“Can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that,” she replied.

It remains confounding to me that the same folks who taught me about Jesus –who proclaimed that Christianity was unique amongst religions because of its emphasis on grace– could embrace a socio-political program so broadly and consistently devoid of mercy.

It seems the great evangelical fear is not that life is too hard, but that it is too easy.

Mercy, indeed. Uncle, even.

***

I turned 40 last year. The same year my joints stopped working and I found out I might need immuno-therapy for the rest of my life. I’ve spent most of those years on one side or the other of the culture war. And I am tired.

I don’t want to fight anymore. I don’t want to develop an unassailable “apologetic” or “thick skin” or “grit.” I don’t want to have to “earn” or “deserve” the healthcare that makes my days bearable. I want to be open and soft. I want a life of relative ease and comfort, a baseline absence of suffering for everybody: from my Christian friends all around the country to my unhoused neighbors on Skid Row. Like youtube rockstar Pat Finnerty, I simply want everyone to have a little dignity; a roof over their heads and a nice, comfortable couch. Someplace they can rest and recover when life gets hard.

When life got hard for me last spring, my community in LA rallied around me. My queer, immigrant friend cooked me a delicious soup. My LGBTQ pals coaxed me out of depression with invites to their stand-up sets and dance shows. My bi and non-binary housemates, after testing positive for Covid, isolated in their rooms and wore masks whenever they were in shared spaces. They didn’t accuse me of “living in fear” or brandish dubious studies about transmission rates. They didn’t say “but I barely even have symptoms” or “my body, my choice!” They knew it would make me feel better if they masked up while they were sick, and so they did.

I met most of these folks doing mutual aid at a vegan food bank in Silver Lake. They have spent the pandemic era schlepping groceries to immuno-compromised and/or elderly people, stocking community fridges, sharing burritos with their unhoused neighbors, and blockading illegal evictions. They taught me how to cook a stew for 200 people and how to change a bike tire; how to protest and party in equal measure. 

My evangelical parents and mentors certainly deserve credit for shaping my interpersonal ethic and private character; I am grateful to them. But it was the anarchists, bike punks and “blue-haired genderqueers” who showed me what “solidarity with your neighbor” really looks like.

This is my community, and I love them dearly. They are not hypothetical or abstract. The idea that the civil rights and material well-being of LGBTQ folks could be weighed against an evangelical’s aversion to seeing two boys kiss on TV is noxious and absurd to me. Being forced to carry and birth a child against your will is not morally equivalent to being forced to take a gay couple’s money in exchange for a wedding cake.*** That is relativism.

The dignity and autonomy of my friends cannot be reduced to a “W” or an “L” in a culture war column.

When White Christians cry persecution, they are not just engaging in hyperbole or distortion; they are inverting the actual history.**** The rest of us are not demanding that you relinquish your bodily autonomy or religious freedom. You are not being pushed out of the public square. We’re just asking you to scoot over, make a little bit of room. We are inviting you to –as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it– listen to your “brother.”

Many people are looking for an ear that will listen. They do not find it among Christians, because these Christians are talking where they should be listening. But he who can no longer listen to his brother will soon be no longer listening to God either; he will be doing nothing but prattle in the presence of God too.

An old “evangelical kid” friend of mine sent me a long email after Trump got elected. She gave me permission to share this excerpt:

I think Christians voted in respect to their consciences, rights, and freedoms, to the detriment of their credibility.  To put it cynically – they might have preserved the right to worship as they like, but no one’s going to want to join them.

These are the culture warriors who mock trans people in the name of Jesus, who respond to the anguish and brutalization of their African-American neighbors by brandishing black-on-black crime statistics. They have spent the last three decades yelling about abortions yet somehow remain shockingly ignorant about the people who actually get abortion care, and why.

They are free to share their opinion, but I am not obliged to respect it. Life is indeed too precious to extend good faith to folks who can only feel big when they make others small. Leave them to their envy and their bile and their sick burns. Let them “prattle.” NBA superstar Charles Barkley stone drunk understands more about solidarity than they ever will.

To the rest of you: welcome. There is no shame in arriving at a truth late or updating your priors based on new information. That’s being human. That’s revelation. It’s the story of my life, and probably yours, too. I know many of you find the brittle comfort of ideological certainty a thin substitute for being “in relationship.” But right now the Christian chauvinists are very loud and you are pretty quiet. If you don’t want them speaking for your God, it might be time to join the conversation.

We don’t have to let these jowly, old puritans circumscribe our autonomy and dictate the shape of our public ethic. The theocrats have the courts, but we have the people. Most Americans believe in pluralism and democracy. They are not Christian nationalists. They do not want to take life-saving drugs away from LGBTQ folks or play King Solomon with the lives of pregnant people. They want to be able to make rent in the city they live in. They want healthcare when their bodies don’t work right. And enough time and goodwill left over to be decent neighbors.

Entropy is the rule. It’s the sick, the poor and the vulnerable who are in the majority. The Tucker Carlsons, Donald Trumps, and Peter Thiels (Bill Gateses, too!) of the world can buy security and comfort for their families and friends. They pay for their power. The rest of us have to build it, through the patient work of relationship and care.

Perhaps I’m naive, but I really believe we can make a better world together. We can learn to respond to difference with curiosity instead of fear and reaction; to make generous space for “the other” without losing ourselves. To seek justice and walk humbly. To be kind.

Let’s create a society that rewards compassion instead of thoughtless certainty and the relentless pursuit of profit. Systems that ease the burdens of existence, not add to their weight. Public transportation, free healthcare for all, and block parties. Dignity and reciprocity and trust. Black and queer and trans joy on our TVs and in our communities of faith. Gardens. Cookouts. Healing and restoration and community.

We all deserve more than arbitrary, individual courtesy; our goal should be public mercy. Not just a tally mark on an ideological spreadsheet. Not just existence; but life, abundant.

That’s my pitch!

Down with the crusty theocrats, authoritarian bullies, and oligarchs. Love your neighbor. Solidarity forever.

***

*undocumented folks are more lawful and less violent than both legal immigrants and native-born Americans

**less than 1% of abortions happen “late-term;” 97% of abortions take place before week 13; 99% of abortions occur before week 21

***Y’all even won that one, remember?

****Americans have complicated opinions about abortion, but have consistently opposed criminalization ever since Roe became law; five of the seven justices in the Roe majority were appointed by Republican presidents; when Obergefell was decided in 2015, 60% of Americans supported gay marriage; 37 states had already legalized it; Bork was a bad nominee; culture warriors can yell about persecution and “judicial activism” all they want, but their feelings do not change the facts