As always, you can find the Dobbs v. Jackson decision here.
Dobbs Part II A 1
Paragraph 4 of 5
Sentence 4 of 6
The fourth sentence of this paragraph looks like a single claim, but it’s actually two claims:
“And as the Court has stated, the ‘goal of preventing abortion’ does not constitute ‘invidiously discriminatory animus’ against women. Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic, 506 U. S. 263, 273–274 (1993) (internal quotation marks omitted).”
One of the claims is obvious. It’s reporting what the Court has claimed before:
“[T]he Court has stated [that] the ‘goal of preventing abortion’ does not constitute ‘invidiously discriminatory animus’ against women.”
The second claim is subtler and exists within the beginning phrase, “[A]s the Court has stated,” which implies that the claim made by the earlier Court is either objectively true or has been demonstrated to be true somehow but might not rise to objective truth. So the second claim could be stated as simply:
“[T]he ‘goal of preventing abortion’ does not constitute ‘invidiously discriminatory animus’ against women.”
As always, I’ll take them one at a time. The first claim is pretty easy:
“[T]he Court has stated [that] the ‘goal of preventing abortion’ does not constitute ‘invidiously discriminatory animus’ against women.”
The indicated passage in Bray reads:
“In any event, the characteristic that formed the basis of the targeting here was not womanhood, but the seeking of abortion-so that the class the dissenters identify is the one we have rejected earlier: women seeking abortion. The approach of equating opposition to an activity (abortion) that can be engaged in only by a certain class (women) with opposition to that class leads to absurd conclusions. On that analysis, men and women who regard rape with revulsion harbor an invidious antimale animus. Thus, if state law should provide that convicted rapists must be paroled so long as they attend weekly counseling sessions; and if persons opposed to such lenient treatment should demonstrate their opposition by impeding access to the counseling centers; those protesters would, on the dissenters’ approach, be liable under § 1985(3) because of their antimale animus.
Okay, I need to pause between paragraphs to note how clumsy and stupid that rape analogy is. Bray was written by Justice Antonin Scalia, who was for all his faults generally seen as a solid writer. That bit of reasoning is amazing, and not in a good way. Anyway, the second paragraph continues the thought:
“The nature of the “invidiously discriminatory animus” Griffin had in mind is suggested both by the language used in that phrase (“invidious … [t]ending to excite odium, ill will, or envy; likely to give offense; esp., unjustly and irritatingly discriminating,” Webster’s Second International Dictionary 1306 (1954)) and by the company in which the phrase is found (“there must be some racial, or perhaps otherwise class-based, invidiously discriminatory animus,” Griffin, 403 U. S., at 102 (emphasis added)). Whether one agrees or disagrees with the goal of preventing abortion, that goal in itself (apart from the use of unlawful means to achieve it, which is not relevant to our discussion of animus) does not remotely qualify for such harsh description, and for such derogatory association with racism. To the contrary, we have said that “a value judgment favoring childbirth over abortion” is proper and reasonable enough to be implemented by the allocation of public funds, see Maher, supra, at 474, and Congress itself has, with our approval, discriminated against abortion in its provision of financial support for medical procedures, see Harris, supra, at 325. This is not the stuff out of which a § 1985(3) “invidiously discriminatory animus” is created.
The claim in Dobbs is easily confirmed to be true, but the claim the Court made in Bray and reinforced here, which is our second claim in this sentence, will take a lot of work to examine. If it’s true, it’s going to take more than this first pass to establish that, so this claim will have to wait.
We’re left with is one true claim
and one undetermined claim:
Cynical Jason 