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Florida Treks From the Sublime to the Macabre in Fewer Than 24 Hours

AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib


Only yesterday, we were a nation united in awe over a transformational celestial episode wrought by astral mechanics: our moon passing precisely between Earth — the heart of America, actually — and the sun, giving the land of the free and the home of a brave a solar eclipse for the ages.

Take a bow, God. The precise placement of a tiny, cold satellite in such a way that it exactly masks our solar system’s massive organizational star alignment is a tribute to your limitless genius. In those precious moments when the corona revealed itself, America embraced its burning bush moment. Behold. You are here. You are that You are.

Thanks for the show. Now, run along. In Florida, at least (which got only a partial viewing), we are going from the sublime to the macabre. Yes, we have the snuffing of innocents — who carry the spark of the divine we glimpsed Monday, but never mind — to discuss.

We begin with Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Gold Coast Democrat who hopes to oust Rick Scott from the U.S. Senate. A former one-term congresswoman with roots in Ecuador, DMP’s planned statewide tour will focus on Florida’s pending ban on abortions six weeks beyond the mom’s last menstrual period.

“If Rick Scott thinks that he can push a national abortion ban in the Senate and back a near-total abortion ban in Florida without facing any consequences, then he has another thing coming to him,” Mucarsel-Powell said.

“As a Latina, I’ve seen these authoritarian attacks on our democratic rights before,” Mucarsel-Powell said. “And I won’t allow Rick Scott to take away our freedoms. I am proud to stand with the nearly 70% of Floridians who support protecting abortion access, and I’m ready to show up with them this November as we fight to protect our fundamental rights.”

Once upon a time, when states were still trying to get their arms around a post Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organizaton, Florida’s junior senator did, indeed, declare himself “unapologetically pro-life.”

That was then (Jan. 21, 2022). Once upon a time, Scott  also endorsed Gov. Rick DeSantis’ signing of the bills that banned abortions after 15 weeks (2022) and six weeks (2023). This didn’t stop him from snubbing DeSantis for Donald Trump — whose views on abortion amount to wishy and washy — for the GOP presidential nomination.

This is so very much not then, and so we have witnessed the reemergence of Rick Scott, habitual public hedger. Just last week, when asked in a live radio interview about his previous rock-ribbed positions, Mr. Unapologetically Pro-Life veered into “reasonable limitations” and “have a conversation.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with having a conversation. Up to a point. In Florida, where Scott must navigate choppy waters brought about sharing the ballot with a pro-abortion state constitutional amendment, National Review’s Henry Olsen argues pro-lifers will have to compromise their righteousness.

Pro-lifers must therefore concentrate all of their efforts on persuading the Floridians who would approve of abortions at 15 weeks but oppose them at 24 weeks to vote no. They cannot do that if they use the traditional pro-life rhetoric that calls attention to the dignity of human life at all stages of development. Those voters already have heard that argument and disagree with pro-lifers.

The “no” campaign should instead focus solely on the initiative’s excesses: on the fact that it would allow unborn children with fully formed brains, hearts, and lungs to be killed. The center of American — and likely Floridian — public opinion does not want that to happen.

Making this the debate’s focal point would require restraint. A television ad, for example, featuring a woman who openly supports abortion rights in the first trimester but believes this amendment goes too far could be a game-changer. But that would entail pro-life forces promoting a message they like built on a premise they reject. That would be very hard to swallow.

What Olsen and other well-meaning compromisers fail to acknowledge is the existence in the Florida constitution of protections for “[a]ll natural persons.” These folks, the state’s highest law guarantees, “are equal before the law and have inalienable rights, among which are the right to enjoy and defend life and liberty, to pursue happiness.”

The minority opposed to the state Supreme Court’s blessing that deemed the abortion initiative ballot-worthy see litigation ahead caused by vague mischief in the framing of the referendum. And the debate will be too delicious to be believed.

Once more, pro-abortion activists will be summoned not merely to deny the essence of humankind, but also to defend a ranking system.

Just when you thought we’d escaped 1857, it’s antebellum America all over again. Like Dred Scott and millions of other bondsmen before the Civil War got it sorted, the unborn lack personhood. Why? Because a noisy bunch of people who escaped the birth canal say so.

At the risk of laying into a herd of deceased mules, the Union of Our Bodies Our Choices echoes nothing so much as Old South plantation owners who managed to legally define an entire class of people as chattel, equal only to butter churns, anvils and plows. Anyone who argues differently is selling something.

Because this, a 10-week-past-conception not-a-tumor with distinctly human toes and eyes and ears and a massive forehead, they’ll argue, is not a “natural person.” They’ll argue straight out of Animal Farm, where Animal Farm, where all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.


And we shall see who the radicals are.

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David Strom 8:00 PM | April 29, 2024
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