Judging Freedom - Kansas votes to protect access to abortion

Episode Date: August 3, 2022

Kansas voters resoundingly protect their access to abortion https://apnews.com/article/2022-prima... #abortion #supremecourtSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, August 3, 2022. It's about 1.45 in the afternoon. Yesterday, it seems to everyone's surprise, the state of Kansas, a deep red, very conservative Republican state, had a referendum. Politicians put the referendum on the primary election day because they were hoping that most people wouldn't come out. Politicians are conservative Republican members of the Kansas legislature who want to outlaw abortion. God bless them. I'm 100% with them. But they decided instead to give themselves cover by asking for an amendment to the Constitution. So Kansas voters, not at a general election in November where most people vote, but at a primary

election in early August where fewer people vote, had the option to decide do they want abortion or don't they? And of course, the politicians in the legislature were hoping they would say yes, which would give the legislature cover to enact whatever restrictions it wanted. You all know my opinion on this. The baby in the womb is a person from the moment of conception. This is a defect in the Supreme Court opinion written by my friend and Princeton classmate, Justice Samuel Alito, the 6-3 opinion that invalidated Roe v. Wade. jobs, allows legislatures, and in this case the electorate itself, to declare a class of human beings to be without the protection of the laws. And that's what Kansas did. There should be no joy on the part of anybody in what these Kansas voters did. If you're pro-abortion, you should not be happy because you don't want voters to be able to

vote and take away natural rights, foremost among which is the right to live. If you're pro-life, you don't want voters to be able to take away the right to live from any class of persons. What's to prevent these voters from taking away the right to live from a postnatal person, a person that's already born? This is the conundrum visited upon us by a Supreme Court opinion, which is well intended. Get rid of Roe versus Wade. It was horrible logic to begin with. It remained horrible logic. It unleashed the deaths of 64 million babies in the womb, but replace it with something that will protect babies in the womb. Instead, it didn't. It replaced it with the popular will of the people. Well, the majority can be a tyrant,

like when the majority enacts legislation that declares a class of human beings to be without the protection of the law, as the majority did in the South, in the United States, in the era before the war between the states. I'm unhappy with this. It allows abortions to continue, but even worse, it puts natural rights, the right to live, subject to the will of the majority. There are many things that are outside the reach of the majority. They're called natural rights. Your right to think as you wish, to say what you think, to publish what you say. Your right to defend yourself. Your right to be left alone. All these rights are immune from governmental reach, and the greatest of them is the right to live. It, too, should be immune from governmental reach, and under this Dobbs opinion, it is not.

And Kansas showed its bloody hands in a vote yesterday. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.