Fallout for Tucson: The Perfect Storm of the Supreme Court Decision
At a minimum, it will lead to boycotts against my home state of Arizona and hometown of Tucson.
You aren’t interested in my opinion of the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling or whether I’m pro-life or pro-choice. Likewise, I’m not interested in telling you.
But both of us should be interested in the fact that the decision will add turbulence to the existing perfect storm of a deeply divided polity, high inflation, unsustainable deficits, underfunded entitlements, a looming energy crisis, a broken border policy, skyrocketing drug addictions and deaths, global supply shortages, heightened geopolitical tensions, and an ossified central government that has become too big, bumbling and bureaucratic to do much about any of these problems.
At a minimum, the decision will lead to counterproductive boycotts.
I’m referring to companies being pressured by angry pro-choice employees and customers not to hold conferences or establish headquarters or major facilities in states that enact additional restrictions on abortion. Similar pressure will be put on sports leagues not to hold championship games in those states.
After all, politics now permeates the workplace and the sports field.
Some rich companies have already decided to pay the travel costs of employees if they want to travel from a restrictive state to a less-restrictive state for an abortion. It is not known if companies will try to cover this under a tax-deductible employee benefit plan. Should they try, and should the IRS permit the tax deduction, it would mean that pro-life taxpayers would be subsidizing the travel costs.
If, as expected, my home state of Arizona were to enact a more restrictive abortion law, any resulting boycotts could hurt my hometown of Tucson. That would be ironic and particularly painful.
The pain would come from the fact that Tucson, which has a significant tourism industry, is a poor city with a poverty rate twice the national average. Boycotts would hurt it more than they would hurt wealthier cities.
The irony would come from the fact that Tucson is predominately Democrat and left-liberal, the very same political party/class that undoubtedly would lead a boycott effort. In that sense, the activists would be hurting their own people economically.
Complicating the politics is the fact that Latinos comprise 43% of the Tucson population. Most of them are Catholic and thus opposed to abortion, at least to the extent that they follow Church dogma. They also tend to be poorer than the general population.
It will be interesting to see how all of this shakes out politically. Even before the Supreme Court’s decision, the Tucson city council, at the urging of Tucson Mayor Regina Romero, had passed a resolution saying that the city will not make arrests at abortion clinics, even if abortion were to be declared illegal.
Three outcomes are certain: Abortion will be in the local and national news for years to come, will continue to be a fault line in American politics and will add turbulence to the perfect storm.
