The Surprising Twist in the Georgia Abortion Law Story
You may have heard that a brain-dead woman in Georgia is being kept on life support because she is pregnant. After receiving significant pushback from the public over this outrageous situation, the Republican Attorney General issued an opinion that taking her off life support would not be a violation of the law since the action would not specifically be designed to end the pregnancy. So many people might think that this would be the end of the story, right?
Well, hospitals have legions of lawyers and if a hospital breaks the law in one case it could have far-reaching consequences for the entire hospital, its entire staff, and thus all the people it treats. In other words, hospitals will not willingly break the law. And those legions of lawyers have decided that the Attorney General is a terrible lawyer who doesn't understand his own law (or so I assume, publicly they’re more polite than I am). According to the hospital, the Georgia's abortion law is clear that the life of the fetus matters above everything since it is legally a person, and there is no legal way to shut off the machines.
How is it that the hospital and the Georgian Attorney General have such a different understanding of the same law? Is it just that the hospital's lawyers are that much smarter than the Republican lawmakers? Since I don't know the lawyers personally I can't say, but there's another explanation that's even more obvious:
Republicans simply don't care about rule of law. What they're currently promoting is much closer to theocracy than democracy, and in a theocracy the words and systems of logic they build are subject to ever-changing interpretation by the priests and bishops, or in this case the governors and attorneys general. They aren't erecting a legal system, but a quasi-religious one that is steered by the leaders of this endeavor, not by a system of legal precedence.
Nearly all religion has a cleric class. Prophets and popes, grand shamans and chief priests who create doctrine, and the ranks of bishops and priests, monks and scholars who disseminate and reinterpret their teachings, and the congregations that follow them, often without even understanding or reading the original texts. Is this really so different than what we see happening in Georgia and in every corner of this country?
