A House Divided Cannot Stand

Dear Readers, Everything today happens in the blink of an eye. Correspondence is but an email or text message away. Some event happens in your life, bam, it’s on Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram. False information speeds around the world via Social Media, infecting our ability to ascertain and digest the truth. The worst aspect is that social media algorithms measure the information we thirst for, isolating and dividing us in the same narrow perspective.

The Gospel of Mark has Jesus saying to the skeptical Pharisees, after performing healing miracles, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand.”  Abraham Lincoln, ever the student of the Bible, paraphrased this in 1858, in his famed Housed Divided Stand, when he remarked on the issue of slavery, “A house divided cannot stand …” This was a central principle forging his desire to win the Civil War and reunite these United States.

History repeats itself. The war we fought over the stain of slavery, we now find ourselves divided by an array of issues. We are largely divided, by region and locale, into Red and Blue tents. Look at abortion. Across the South, from North Carolina to Texas, abortion has essentially been banned in principle, if not outright.  

Florida just joined its regional brethren when the Florida Supreme Court upheld a post 6-week pregnancy abortion ban statute, even though Florida actually has a right to privacy in its Constitution. This was the undoing of Roe v. Wade, as the United States Supreme Court had found one in the “penumbra” of the rights enshrined in the United States Constitution.

Look at a national map; virtually the legal line demarcating the Free Soil North and the Slave South States mirrors where we are at with abortion. Just as in 1860, this dangerous Maginot Line separates us along the spine of the country. Healthcare for women looks very different depending on where one lives, North or South.  

There is a fictional novel (and television series) called The Handmaid’s Tale. In a dystopian near-future, a mysterious pandemic is thought to cause women to become infertile. The ensuing panic gave rise to a segment of the United States to secede and form the Biblical nation of “Gilead.” In this new country, women are reduced to subservience, either in service to their husbands or as essentially walking slave-wombs. Those women believed fertile are repeatedly raped and, if they become pregnant, surrogate mothers for their rapists. Dark stuff!

While not a suggestion we, in the South, live in Gilead, there are parallels. Law unmoored from objective facts and personal choice and premised on religious principles describes life in Gilead. Most of us decry Sharia Law, Islamic religious law. In fact, prejudice against Muslims has its genesis in this, just like the perspective of Talmudic Law breeds anti-Semitic rhetoric.

There are similarities with cultural norms. Female genital mutilation involves pre-pubescent girls having their genitals cut (if not the vagina sewn shut) to ensure they never experience sexual arousal. 200 million girls have undergone this abusive procedure in 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Africa. In these countries, this is acceptable; in the Western World, this practice is considered misogynist butchery and a human rights violation.

As a country, we are legally fissured over abortion. In the South, abortion is banned as a crime against God; in the North, it is considered a necessary medical tool to protect a woman’s health. Making legal choices based on religious principles, not medical facts, is a road to “Gilead.” Hence, women flee to the North to make medically-based health choices.

This is what happened in The Handmaid’s Tale. Men and women living in the rump state of Gilead tried to flee to the Free regions surrounding it. Martial law was instituted to prevent it, much as Dred Scott was forced back into servitude after finding himself living as a free man in the North. Some of the justifications for slavery as a benevolent institution were biblically based, just as Gilead was constituted as a Christian nation. 

This division over abortion has the same character as what slavery did to our country. Religion seeps into the law, and bitterness bubbles up until we have a Civil War. We sort ourselves into states permitting abortion or banning it. Pray this does not lead to another confrontation over a fundamental and retractable conflict about the law.

Warner Robins attorney Jim Rockefeller is the former Chief Assistant District Attorney for Houston County and an Assistant State Attorney in Miami. He has owned the Rockefeller Law Center and has been in private practice since 2000. Email your comments or confidential legal questions to ajr@rockefellerlawcenter.com.