While some Religious Right leaders have begun to publicly soft-peddle their expectation that the Supreme Court justice soon to be nominated by President Trump will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer was adamant this week that “Roe is the issue,” adding for emphasis, “There is no other issue.” Fischer reminded readers that the AFA is recommending that Trump nominate Amy Coney Barrett.
Fischer devoted his column to the topic on Tuesday:
Abortion is the only issue on the table. Everybody - including the nominee himself (used generically) - might say otherwise, but they won’t fool anybody. The question that is at the front of everyone’s mind is whether the nominee will reverse Roe v. Wade if given the chance.
And in reality, this is the only issue that matters. For if a justice gets it right on Roe, he’ll get it right on everything else. If he gets it wrong on Roe, he’ll get it wrong on most everything else.
The United States is running out of time to deal with our second major national sin, after slavery. If we do not fix this while we have the opportunity, we will fall under the judgment of God, and He will not be kind to us. We have the blood of 60 million innocent babies on our hands, and that’s all that God sees when we lift our hands to him in prayer. “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood” (Isaiah 1:15).
If we continue to legalize this butchery, the land will soon vomit us out, as it vomited out the ancient Canaanites. “You shall keep my statutes and my rules...lest the land vomit you out when you make it unclean, as it vomited out the nation that was before you” (Leviticus 18:26-28).
In his column, Fischer said overturning Roe will leave the issue in the hands of state lawmakers and governors. “Those states which choose life will receive the blessing of heaven—‘glory, honor, and peace,’” he wrote. “States that value death and bloodshed won’t.”
If the president keeps his promise to choose a justice from the list provided by the Federalist Society (the AFA recommends Amy Coney Barrett) he will almost certainly pick a judge who believes Roe was wrongly decided as a matter of constitutional law. If the new justice honors constitutional principle, in time a new day of life will dawn in America. May it be, Lord.
Fischer dismissed “bloviating bilge about stare decisis, the notion that prior precedents established by the Supreme Court must be observed,” noting that the Court’s conservatives just overturned a 1977 precedent to rule against unions. And he noted that the Court’s 2003 ruling against state laws criminalizing homosexuality overturned a 1986 decision in which, he said, “the Court correctly ruled that homosexual conduct can be made a crime.”
Fischer talked about his column on his radio show, in which he said it might be “good politics” for Trump to say that he won’t ask potential nominees about their position on Roe, and that it’s valid for nominees to decline to answer questions about overturning Roe as long as he knew “where they were coming from.” But, he said, “the only issue that matters is getting a candidate on the Supreme Court that believes that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided.”
