The point is that personhood doesn’t depend on state lines. Any law that defines personhood on state lines will suffer the same fate as Dred Scott.
this is why personhood as a state issue (as abortion is), isn’t going to work. At best, it’s a stopgap. You don’t stop being a person just because you crossed the mason dixon line.
The general movement seems to be this. Statists recruit liberaltarians for assault on federal law they don’t like. Liberaltarians go along telling themslves, “it should be a state issue”.
Then what statists immediately do, is push for a federal law which squares with your personal beliefs. You don’t believe that marriage ought to be a man or a woman - so it’s best to fight discrimination and support this new federal law because it squares with what you believe.
Which leads the conservatives to go, huh?
There’’s really nothing in it for us to compromise with liberaltarians on anything. It hasn’t ever worked out well.
Under our system of law, there is no question that abortion is a matter left to the states, because it is not addressed in our Constitution. It’s just not enumerated in the Constitution. 10th Amendment. That was clearly understood for nearly 200 years. We are so conditioned by the leftwing desire to federalize every issue, that it’s difficult to conceive of the states deciding those issues, but they did for decades. Important does not equal federal. Thank God, because Washington is obviously a cesspool. Alas, federalism is probably dead anyway. The alternative under our laws is to amend the constitution. I don’t have a lot of hope, but I tend towards pessimism.
As for the left recruiting libertarians to fight their battles, I have to ask for an example. Libertarians don’t make much of a voting block (like 1% or so in a strong year), and the Left hates them even more than ansell does. Given that electoral weakness, I don’t think the Left would even bother.