11 August 2022 — 0010 mdt

The Immorality of Greg Gianforte and the “New GOP”

Guest essay by Jim Smith

Since the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in the Mississippi abortion case, Dobbs, v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Republican politicians throughout the country have moved to impose whatever abortion restrictions their legislatures can come up with. The Republican dominated 2021 Montana Legislature passed a bundle of laws aimed at restricting access to abortion. Three of those laws are blocked for now by a lawsuit challenging their legality.

Now, the Republican Governor of Montana, Greg Gianforte, is asking the state’s high court to consider his arguments that the Justices should reverse a previous decision upholding the right to an abortion (Armstrong v. the State of Montana) and instead put the matter in state legislators’ hands. Gianforte wrote in a tweet “It’s the Legislature’s prerogative to set policy regarding life, as it was for over a century until 1999.” Do Montanans really agree that the Legislature is the final word on who lives and who dies? These are deeply moral decisions and, frankly, beyond the scope of a group people elected to run the state, not to make personal moral decisions which intervene in citizens personal lives.

This is especially true when the case involves a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body and her private reproductive choices, free from government interference. Morality is the differentiation of decisions, intentions, and actions between those that are proper (right) and those that are improper (wrong). Immorality is the active opposition to what is good or right. Morality, in short, is the set of principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior. It is the basis of the Golden Rule, which states “One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.”

Gianforte, and many other acolytes of the “New GOP”, who claim they are for “limited and smaller government” apparently have no problem in inserting their personal religious beliefs into the lives of everyone else. What these Republicans are asking the Montana Supreme Court to do is neither good nor right. It is time to get very frank with these people about what their positions mean.

Across the land Republicans are passing laws which would make no allowance for abortions in the case of incest or rape, or for medical conditions which threaten the health or life of the mother, or the viability of the fetus if it should come to full term because of genetic or non-genetic based maladies. If you are a boy or a girl, teenager or adult, a man, or a woman, and you have been the victim of a rape your life is changed forever. The trauma experienced will have lasting consequences on your physical health, psyche, self-image, and personal feeling of self-worth.

The physical injuries may be life-long, along with the possible consequences of sexually transmitted disease. You may forever be warped in your trust of other people, and may have post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, sleep and eating disorders, along with deeper psychological issues such as borderline personality disorder and dissociative identity disorder. In short, your future life will be a mess. It is a life changing event.

Having to decide to have an abortion is a decision that only a woman will have to make, because it is a unique aspect of the fact that only women can become pregnant. To even suggest that the victim of rape or incest (which in all cases involving sexual intercourse is rape) should be forced to carry this pregnancy to term is outrageous and immoral. It is codifying the state as a supreme power to intervene and determine the most intimate personal moral and physical decision a person can make, taking away the person’s right to self-determination in making their own decisions. It is an affront to the basic human rights of freedom, privacy, recognition as a person before the law and freedom from degrading treatment. However, regardless of the situation that created a pregnancy, each and every women should be the only person to make the decision to have an abortion, or not. It is their right alone.

The position of the Governor and the “New GOP” is not only immoral, it is wrong. They have no business interfering in citizens’ private moral decisions.

Jim Smith lives in Helena, Montana.