Into the lion's den

Republican operative John Faso seemed revelatory as he joined WAMC's Roundtable panel on Monday. Alan Chartok, the more liberal host, showered the conservative former representative with praise for taking up airspace in the studio. He likened this bravery to sticking one's head in the proverbial "lion's den."

They were going to talk about the end of Roe, and Faso was the only person in the room who approved of the decision.

For women like me listening at home, the previous weekend had been spent in a strange state of disbelief. Yes, we knew it was coming. But just after 10 on the morning of June 24th, we learned the Supreme Court had overturned the landmark decision that had protected a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy for half a century.

Faso's side had won. And, depending on how one explains it, the court's conservative members had either saved the potential for human life, or they had ripped away a basic constitutional protection from millions of people who can become pregnant: The right to make essential healthcare choices for themselves.

I felt revulsion just listening to Faso spin truth into lies: Turning the fact that majority of Americans would put some restrictions on abortions into a a misguided mandate to prevent most abortions from being legal.

It doesn't surprise me.

He is not of the people. He has always set himself apart. Even in his early days as an assemblyman, he had a constituent arrested when the man called his listed home number and became impolite. As a member of Congress, he pushed many duplicitous falsehoods intended to divide and conquer: linking food stamps to crime; fighting worker protections; to the final blow of voting down healthcare after assuting a cancer patient he wouldn't take it away.

Faso, the polite and presentable Trump ally, even said the quiet parts aloud as he argued "States' Rights" to decide which women and which religions will get the permission to express themselves freely while our medical systems become incapable of doing less harm. 

The point was honed when a fellow panelist, Libby Post, asked him to explain why, in the matter of body autonomy, his faith could trump hers? Why, she had asked, should she be thwarted from following her Jewish faith, which holds that human life begins at first breath, not at conception and further requires abortion to viewed as a life-saving option.

Faso, on air, called Post's beliefs an "outlier," and then tried to backtrack when she rightly called him on the implicit bias of his comment - that the Jewish law was, by definition, a thing differing vastly from all other groups or sets.

He left the studio soon after that, citing an appointment he had elsewhere.

If he regretted his choice of words, I didn't hear him say it.

Not that it matters. As a Trump supporter who claimed he found the former president's crassness distasteful, Faso was happy to accept the spoils in the interests of Conservative goals.

Though Faso denies it, we should know what's next.

With precedent dead, the questions of who you can marry, who will be allowed to discriminate against you, what you can say and where you can travel in your own country will be revisited. And they're not done with women yet either: Not having the right to choose doesn't mean termination exclusively. The right to protect ourselves with birth control or from spousal rape, even the ability to try and become a parent using the miracle of science, will all find unsympathetic jurists on this court.

Faso is a harbinger not a hero.

We are all heading into the lion's den.