Our Theocratic Future

Linda Greenhouse: “I never thought I’d be grateful to the Alabama Supreme Court for anything, but now I am. With its decision deeming frozen embryos to be children under state law, that all-Republican court has done the impossible. It has awakened the American public, finally, to the peril of the theocratic future toward which the country has been hurtling.”

Dahlia Lithwick: “What we witnessed in Alabama wasn’t simply a continuation of a decadeslong fundamentalist religious project to conscript women into having babies, whether they wish to or not. Our imaginations must expand to see this as of a piece with an older and more pernicious American tradition in which the state decides who gets to raise your children, regardless of your preferences—because your own family is not actually in your control, but subject to the state’s seizure and redistribution to those who might raise them better than you will.”