Gringo view: Entering the Age of the New Inquisition

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) There appears to be a crack in the wall of the late 18th century Inquisition Palace in the center of Cartagena, Colombia. It was the repository where people with a grudge, real, imagined, or just plain vicious, could anonymously accuse another of heresy or other crimes. Inside what is now a museum is a collection of the grisly implements favored by the inquisitors to torture the accused until they confessed.

The inquisition and that subtle message box come immediately when considering recently enacted Texas Senate Bill 8, which prohibits any abortions after a heartbeat can be heard, usually six weeks after conception, often before a woman even knows she is pregnant.

Moreover, there are no exceptions for rape or incest. That’s the outrageous and unconstitutional law one would expect to be immediately overruled by the Supreme Court, whose long-standing decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) mandates fetal viability, not heartbeat, in determining an acceptable time period for abortion.

But as columnist Michelle Goldberg writes in the New York Times: “Texas fashioned an abortion prohibition whose bizarre, crowdsourced enforcement mechanism gave conservative courts a pretext not to enjoin it despite its conflict with Roe. And the Supreme Court has, with an unsigned, one-paragraph opinion issued in the middle of the night, made Roe momentarily useless without sparking the nationwide convulsion that would have come from overturning it outright.”

Putting aside this flagrant violation of a woman’s rights over her own body, the ‘crowdsourced enforcement mechanism’ is a blatant invitation to a new inquisition.

Under this law, anyone who believes he or she knows of someone involved in obtaining an abortion after six weeks – a doctor, a relative giving financial assistance, even an Uber driver who transported the woman – can sue that person in a local court and earn a bounty of US$10,000 or more plus legal fees if he wins; meanwhile the defendant, even if found not guilty, gets nothing, even court costs.

Further, many people, not just one, could join as plaintiffes in the same lawsuit, each chasing the bounty.

Just imagine how crazed and vicious right-wing zealots, the same breed that attacked the US Capitol on January 6, will be posting accusations – no longer through the wall of the Inquisition Palace – but just as malevolently in courts across the state of Texas.

They not only have the easy power to torture their enemies through these attacks, but the US$10,000 bounty will be a significant incentive for doing so. Other states are already rolling out copies of the law, and vigilantes are salivating at the opportunities to take the law into their own hands. If it were just a minor Texas matter, it might be containable, but the appeal of vigilantism spreads fast and dangerously.

“A breathtaking act of defiance — of the Constitution, of this Court’s precedents, and the rights of women seeking abortions throughout Texas,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in dissent to the majority opinion.

She continued, “The Court should not be so content to ignore its constitutional obligations to protect not only the rights of women but also the sanctity of its precedents and the rule of law.”

Could it be that the five conservative justices of the US Supreme Court, three appointed by Donald Trump, who used the so-called “shadow docket” for their one-paragraph unargued and unsigned opinion allowing the Texas law to stand, at least for the time being, are the modern equivalent of the shadowy Grand Inquisitors? Can we expect future rulings to restrict our freedoms further?

This all feels like a decay into a medieval mode: is it our entrance into the Age of the New Inquisition?