The union of the 50 States has been frayed rather badly over the last 20-25 years, as the Leftists have become more open in their disdain for conservatives, Christians, etc., in Red States and counties/parishes. Developments post-Roe are only accelerating the fraying.
A New Jersey State senator has taken it upon himself to warn women living there about the supposed dangers lurking in the wicked pro-life States:
‘TRENTON (LifeSiteNews) — New Jersey Democrats want to establish a system of travel advisories warning residents about their prospects for aborting their children while visiting other states based on their pro-life laws. ‘The New York Post reports that Democrat state Sen. John Burzichelli has introduced legislation creating the “Reproductive Health Travel Advisory,” which would mark pro-abortion states blue, states with some restrictions yellow, and states where abortion is largely or fully prohibited red. ‘“If you’re an individual, a woman, traveling across this country for business — or if you’re thinking about going to school in Mississippi — it will help you to know what kind of medical services are available to you should you need emergency care of some kind,” Burzichelli said, falsely suggesting that states with abortion restrictions do not allow necessary medical care for women – a common Democrat talking point. Direct abortion – the destruction of an innocent unborn baby – is always gravely immoral and never needed nor justifiable for alleged “health” reasons’ (Calvin Freiburger, ‘New Jersey Democrat proposes ‘travel advisories’ against pro-life states’, lifesitenews.com).
Any kind of union assumes a modicum of mutual respect among those entering into it. Bitter foes would hardly be expected to form one. But that is more or less what we have today in the US, where staunchly pro-death States like New Jersey are joined in the same federation with radically pro-life States like Arkansas and Mississippi. This is why every federal election is now so angrily contested: The Blue States don’t want to be governed by representatives of the Red States, and vice-versa.
Regarding abortion, this is how far New Jersey has gone in the last couple of years:
‘Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, allowing the elected branches of government to decide abortion policy, New Jersey has worked to become one of the most pro-abortion states in the Union. In anticipation of that ruling, Democrat Gov. Phil Murphy signed a law proclaiming a “fundamental right” to so-called “freedom of reproductive choice,” including to obtain contraception and abortions, effectively protecting abortions up to birth. ‘The following year, the state announced it was giving Planned Parenthood and other abortion centers $15 million in taxpayer funds for facility upgrades and pushed a rule mandating state-overseen insurance plans cover abortion. For years, New Jersey Democrat Attorney General Matt Platkin has been attempting to tag life-affirming pregnancy centers with “consumer alerts” to undermine their work to offer abortion alternatives.’
Several other States have joined her in this macabre dance of death:
‘Pro-life laws have substantially reduced the number of surgical abortions in the two years since Roe was overturned, but the abortion lobby has also been working feverishly to cancel out those deterrent effects through a variety of strategies. Among them are the distribution of abortion pills across state lines, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, placing abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and embedding abortion “rights” in state constitutions.’ Those who have a naïve notion of ‘America’ as one nation with one culture are not living in reality. The US have always been the home of several unique cultures (read more about that in Albion’s Seed or The Nine Nations of North America, amongst others). As the States have matured and their cultures have further crystallized, those differences have only grown sharper.
And they will likely continue to do so (there is another possibility, which will be discussed below).
An appeal to the founding texts to form a single culture hasn’t worked and won’t work. They have in fact helped bring us to the present moment of disunity.
Problem 1: The deity presented in the master text, the Declaration of Independence, is a meaningless, undefined being. It is called a ‘Creator’, ‘divine Providence’, ‘Nature’s God’. But to which of the world’s religions does it belong? Islam? Christianity? Judaism? Hinduism? Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration, did not believe in the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ; he thought of Him only as a good teacher of morality and rejected many other tenets of traditional Christianity. Thus, ‘God’, from the very birth of the colonies as independent nations, became an empty vessel that can be filled with any meaning whatsoever. And so it has come to pass, to the point that no small number of politicians and others claim that this ‘divine being’ blesses transgender mutilations, abortions, etc.
Problem 2: Individual liberty without any underlying religious telos or goal to guide and restrain it results in a degradation and fragmentation of society. Living in such a system, one does not generally wind up with a society of wise, philosophically minded citizens, but rather with the perpetual juveniles seen in Idiocracy and Beavis and Butthead.
Making the pursuit of money and material things a substitute religion exacerbates the problem, causing the proliferation of things like gangbangers, drug-users, obesity, and gambling addiction.
Unexpectedly, Saturday Night Live in two of its sketches (‘Washington’s Dream’ and ‘Washington’s Dream 2’, aired in 2023 and 2024, respectively, and still available on YouTube) showed an extraordinary amount of insight about the ultimate fate of this kind of Americanism. In them, General Washington is discoursing about the glorious future that awaits the States now that they are free from Great Britain, and what he lists as the coming great achievements are some of most banal things one can imagine: The freedom to create sports like football that only have ‘a little kicking’ and arbitrarily conceived scoring systems! The freedom to give names to foods that make no sense (a hamburger isn’t made of ham, but beef)! And so on.
This is unexpected wisdom from the writers of SNL! They have seen the end wrapped up in the beginning: The banality of the idolatry of individual rights and consumerism proclaimed at the birth of the United States by one of their greatest heroes.
The paths we’ve been charting here in the US lead to dead ends. If the Right-leaning and Left-leaning States remain in a single union, they will continue to unmercifully devour one another. Or they will all ultimately become tamed by and subjugated to the shallow, materialistic, immoral culture that has already engulfed a large swath of the peoples of the States.
The better option is for there to be a separation of the States into new, smaller, culturally cohesive confederations, where the acrimony would be far less and where Christianity could once again be the cornerstone of society in those places like the South, parts of the Great Plains and Rust Belt, etc., that wanted to do so (while also keeping intact all the good things from the current union, like government power distributed across different branches and levels and institutions, the protection of age-old customs like trial by jury, the ownership of firearms, etc.). Without such a separation from implacable enemies and false ideologies and time to regroup and gain new strength from the partaking of God’s Grace in the Church, the future of Christianity looks grim in the States.
By doing this, we can put the mutual antagonism between the States that we have experienced for so long now where it properly belongs – deep into a grave.