{"id":83011,"date":"2022-08-03T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-08-03T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=83011"},"modified":"2022-08-03T09:31:59","modified_gmt":"2022-08-03T14:31:59","slug":"were-not-in-kansas-anymore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=83011","title":{"rendered":"We’re Not In Kansas Anymore"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Now, last month I was reliably informed that an “activist” Supreme Court had banned abortion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So this just can not be: a referendum to repeal Kansas’s constitutional protection of abortion failed, and failed hard, yesterday<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why, it’s almost as if all the Dobbs <\/em>decision does it require pro-choicers to do what us Second Amendment activists have been doing for fifty years; go out and convince voters, and elect legislators, create a cultural push in favor of, uh, killing babies throughout all nine months of gestation and beyond. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which, to some extent, is what happened in Kansas. Sort of:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The result is bad news, but supporters of the abortion license are giddily overreading it. The instant line is that the result shows that a backlash to Dobbs<\/em> will be powerful this November. And it\u2019s true that the referendum appears to have driven turnout in the state. This suggests to me a few potential advantages for pro-abortion Democrats this fall. They can do very well in places where a pro-life referendum is on the ballot, especially one that can be presented as effectively banning abortion without exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape; and maybe also in some places where legislators are on the verge of enacting such bans (or can be presented as being on the verge of it).<\/p>

Will they be as successful in turning out their vote in the many places where those conditions are not present? Tuesday night\u2019s result in Kansas will yield Democratic confidence about the answer to that question. It could turn out to be overconfidence.<\/p>

And even in Kansas, I think pro-lifers ought to come back in a few years with another ballot initiative, this one establishing a gestational limit on abortion: at fifteen weeks, for example. There is no reason pro-lifers should take this deeply disappointing vote as the last word anywhere.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I said “sort of”:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nhttps:\/\/twitter.com\/robdoar\/status\/1554799759273123843\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

There are two takeaways from this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Pro-lifers, after operating for fifty years with the paper ceiling of a “constitutional right” to abortion emanating from a penumbra, suddenly have to do the same thing pro-infantiders and <\/em>2nd Amendment people do; convince voters. There appear to be a fair number of Republicans in Kansas who fall somewhere in the middle, and need to be convinced. <\/li>
  2. That’s a lot of Republican turnout, isn’t it? Looks like the Democrats are going to need <\/em>abortion to turn out the base. <\/li><\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Now, last month I was reliably informed that an “activist” Supreme Court had banned abortion. So this just can not be: a referendum to repeal Kansas’s constitutional protection of abortion failed, and failed hard, yesterday. Why, it’s almost as if all the Dobbs decision does it require pro-choicers to do what us Second Amendment activists […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83011"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83012,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83011\/revisions\/83012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}