If celebrities were required to understand civics -- or much of anything else -- we'd be deprived of an awful lot of head-scratching hot takes. Like this one: pop star John Legend hates the fact that Roe v. Wade could be overturned, saying that America is currently “teetering on the brink of being a full democracy.”
Because of this false belief, Legend and his wife, supermodel Chrissy Teigan (another constitutional genius), have promised to donate a hefty sum of money to support abortion charities to keep the baby-killing industry going strong.
“I can’t watch this s—t happen and not say something,” Legend said. “We’re teetering on the brink of not being a full democracy. We’re about to implement The Handmaid’s Tale into law.”
He further said that the strong conservative push for the overturn is a sign that conservatives are a bunch of heartless jerks that are “not interested in concessions or compromise. They’re interested in full power and full authoritarianism.”
Today, @chrissyteigen and I will be donating to @abortionfunds and @keepourclinics to help women afford and access the services they need in a safe and timely fashion. We will do what we can to fight for our fellow citizens and democracy. I hope you will too. pic.twitter.com/uEZwLQu5yn
— John Legend (@johnlegend) May 5, 2022
Those takes are way off on a lot of fronts.
Even if Roe is overturned, it will not ban abortion nationwide. It would strip away federal protections for abortion and leave the power to keep abortion legal or criminal up to each individual state…which is basically how democracyworks.
Stripping protections for abortion will also not make America anything like The Handmaid’s Tale. The plot of Margaret Atwood’s novel (published in 1985 and that has since been made into a show) is about a society in future, dystopian America in which women are reduced to nothing more than property to be used for whatever society deems necessary and are not even allowed to have their own bank accounts. Potentially taking abortion away does nothing to restrict women’s freedoms, and certainly not to the hyperbolic extreme Legend thinks it will.
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It’s also not authoritarian to protect some of the most vulnerable people in a society, that’s a big part of what a healthy government should be doing. For nearly 50 years, America has done the exact opposite in this area. Our government has made it legal and commonplace to to kill babies, and America has roughly 62 million dead babies on it’s hands because we embraced the lie that murder was “healthcare.” Potentially overturning Roe is a legal action that the Supreme Court should never have had to do in the first place, and one that is certainly not authoritarian by any stretch.
Legend and the growing contingent of unhinged progressives who think this is a bad idea can bemoan this likely reality all they want, but that does not make them right.
