Wouldn't it be more of a 14th Amendment thing? I'm ok with fed.gov saying "No states can decide black folk/retards/the unborn aren't really people."
That's the equal protection angle, but what about the privileges & immunities angle? If a state refuses to criminalize murder, isn't that a P&I issue? And going further, the Declaration of Independence states specifically that LIFE is an inalienable right.
Which is also why animal rights activists get a lot of sympathy from me, as long as they're not blowing stuff up, because who's ultimately to say whether my life is intrinsically worth more than the life of a chimpanzee or other animal who's subjected to research. But I also think in order to maintain human social cohesion there has to be a hierarchy, and in that hierarchy the rights of a human come before the rights of a non-human, and rights of a human mother come before the rights of an unborn child. After all, rights are a social construction (at least for me, as a non-theist), so there's no universally accepted authority to tell us what's worth more; we have to decide. I'm also comforted on a scientific basis that unborn children have less intellectual capacity (not future capacity, of course, but current capacity) than various adult non-human animals.
In a similar vein, I am also highly ambivalent about Sharia, for instance; I have a sympathetic view of the right of cultures to try out various hierarchies of rights even if I vehemently disagree, while at the same time I'm appalled by some of the consequences of those choices. (treatment of women in many cultures, for instance).
It's not at all clear to me that it's a States' Rights issue, which is just another reason why States' Rights are dead. When a cornerstone of state criminal law (criminality of murder) is potentially enforceable by the feds if the States fail to enforce it (and justifiably enforceable, just by reading the plain language of the Declaration and the 1st clause of the 14th)... how can anyone claim states have ANY separate realm of sovereignty?
This has been a pet peeve of mine for years. I do not see any way to escape the conclusion that States' Rights as it is claimed today is logically incompatible with the 14th Amendment.
