Posted on March 20, 2026
Any Witch Way They Can
Indiana ruling is a godless fantasy
by
Daniel Clark
It has
gotten so that activist judges hardly even pretend to believe their own
opinions anymore. Indiana judge
Christina Klineman, for example, issued a flippant ruling that deliberately
undermines her state's anti-abortion law, by characterizing the killing of a
tiny, innocent human being as an exercise of religious freedom.
Judge
Klineman obviously does not care for her state's Religious Freedom Restoration
Act, which was signed into law by Gov. Mike Pence in 2015, so she has smugly
turned it against Christian conservatives by arguing that the state cannot
forbid an abortion in any case in which a woman's religion requires it. Of course, that's an entirely fictitious
scenario, as we can tell by the absence of any religious support for the
plaintiffs' case, which was brought by the ACLU on behalf of two anonymous
women, and a not-really-Jewish abortion advocacy group that unconvincingly
calls itself Hoosier Jews for Choice.
One of the two anonymous plaintiffs
"does not belong to a specific religious tradition but has personal religious
and spiritual beliefs that guide her life, including her moral and ethical
practices. She does not believe in a
single, theistic god, but believes that there is within the universe a
supernatural force or power that connects all humans and is larger than any
individual person. She believes this
could be described as a universal consciousness, and that because of this
connectedness through a supernatural force, she believes all humans are
directed to act in a manner that promotes and does not harm other humans or
this community of humanity." Except for
the other human she wants dead, of course.
"One of her central spiritual beliefs is that people are endowed with
bodily autonomy that should not be infringed upon." Except for the person being dismembered and
killed, that is.
Klineman
presents the words "religious" and "spiritual" here as if they were
synonymous. We know that they're not,
because the people who hold these beliefs tell us emphatically, "I'm not religiouth;
I'm thpiritual!" There's a word
for people who embrace the kind of spirituality described here. They call themselves witches. The word "religion" implies worship, which
implies a supreme being. Claiming
membership in a loosely affiliated, psychic sisterhood of candle hoarders is
hardly the same thing.
The other
plaintiff is a nominally Jewish woman who claims, absurdly, that her faith
compels her to have an otherwise elective abortion for the sake of her mental
health, because we all know how mentally medicinal abortion can be. Klineman notes that this woman "has already
been required to engage in this exercise, having terminated a prior pregnancy
in accordance with her religious belief that the abortion was required to
protect her physical and mental health."
Got that? The abortion was
"required." No less an authority than
Hoosier Jews for Choice says so. Or the
Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes. Or
somebody.
On this
basis, the judge complains that the state law allows abortion in certain
exceptional cases, "but not if it were mandated by her religious beliefs." While there is considerable disagreement
within Judaism about whether abortion is permissible, there is no argument that
it is ever compulsory, and Klineman surely knows this. Unless one of the plaintiffs belongs to a
religion that involves ritual human sacrifice, there is no instance in which an
abortion is done as an exercise of one's religion. Even if there were, however, the RFRA would
not apply in that case.
That law does not allow the
religious freedom of the individual to prevail above all else. Rather, it says, "a government entity may
substantially burden a person's exercise of religion only if the governmental
entity demonstrates that application of the burden to the person ... is in
furtherance of a compelling governmental interest." This clause makes all the difference between
what the law really means and what Klineman would prefer that it did. The obvious intention of Indiana's
anti-abortion law is to protect innocent human lives. If that's not a compelling interest, then no
such thing exists. The same cannot be
said about forcing a Christian baker to make a wedding cake with two little
grooms on top.
The
purpose of the RFRA is to shield individuals from bureaucratic bullying, not to
make each person a theocracy unto himself.
By claiming a religious freedom to kill someone, Klineman might as well
be advocating Sharia law. Her ruling is
less like a serious legal argument than it is like a sarcastic social media
post meant to troll the opposition. The
substance of it is pure, undiluted snot.
The only
true thing about Klineman's ruling is that it validates many things that
conservatives have been saying about pro-abortion feminists for decades, such
as that they belong to a death cult that treats abortion as a sacrament. They flatter themselves as "strong women,"
while pathetically deriving the illusion of empowerment from the slaughter of
defenseless innocents. They are
pathologically selfish, a condition that renders them impervious to facts and
logic, and anything else that might otherwise refute their pre-established
conclusions.
For this
reason, they reject the concept of objective truth, but instead present
differing points-of-view as if they were equally worthy of consideration. So, maybe you believe a new,
genetically distinct human being is created at the instant of fertilization,
but Group A believes that this new creature is an evolutionary ancestor of ours
like a fish or a lizard, and will only finish evolving into a person as it
passes through the birth canal. Group B
believes it is a part of the woman's body and is making her ill, like an
inflamed appendix. Who's to say what's right?
A judge, that's who.
In a world
without truth, there can be no law, but only raw assertions of judicial
arrogance like we see here. The meaning
of the language in the bills that have been passed by the legislature and
signed by the governor is meaningless, now that a clever liberal judge has
arrived. Faced with two different laws
she doesn't like, she deliberately misinterprets one of them in an attempt to
use it to destroy the other.
... which
brings us to one other criticism of pro-abortion feminists that Klineman has
illustrated to be true. As much as they
liked to play the "law of the land" card during the Roe era, they've
never really shown any more respect for the law than they have for the value of
human life.
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