hanks to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals down in New Orleans, we now know what percentage of an affected population can have its constitutionally protected rights curtailed before that percentage can be considered "significant" enough to have those rights protected from meddling by the government.

The percentage is one-in-six.

The three-judge panel agreed with the state's lawyers that there was insufficient evidence that a "large fraction" of women seeking abortions would face an unconstitutional burden because of the surgical-center requirements and clinic closings. They wrote that the data provided by one of the plaintiffs' experts, Dr. Daniel Grossman, suggested that about one out of six Texas women seeking an abortion would live more than 150 miles from the nearest clinic if the surgical-center rules went into effect. "This is nowhere near a ‘large fraction,' " the panel wrote.

All right, so if one-in-six gun owners have their firearms confiscated, that is not an "undue burden" on gun owners. If one-in-six private homes are entered without a warrant, that is not an "undue burden" on home owners. If one-in-six criminal defendants are forced to testify against themselves, or denied counsel, or a trial by jury, that is not an "undue burden" on defendants. If one-in-six families are required to quarter troops in their dens, that is not an "undue burden" on the family divan. I would like to thank the Fifth Circuit for clearing that up.

Of course, to defend this ruling, you have to pretend that a) the law in question was passed to "protect women's health" and not to curtail a constitutionally protected right that many people find icky, and b) that the judges care enough about women, particularly poor women, not to make themselves part of this ongoing charade. At the district court level, Judge Lee Yeakel declined to join the puppet show.

In an unusual move, the judge granted the abortion providers who sued the state broader relief than they had requested. Lawyers for abortion facilities had asked him to strike down the requirement as it applied to two clinics, in El Paso and McAllen. But Judge Yeakel ruled the admitting-privileges requirement and the surgical-center standards, operating together, put undue burdens on women statewide, and created "a brutally effective system of abortion regulation that reduces access to abortion clinics."

This is, of course, the obvious intent of the law, despite the remarkable efforts to defend it put forward by Governor Goodhair from behind the Spectacles Of Wisdom. (Goodhair argued that, if Joan Rivers had been treated under requirements Texas has placed on its women's health clinics, she'd be alive today. Joan Rivers remains dead. Goodhair remains a dunce.) The law has required like-minded judges to pretend that its obvious purpose is irrelevant to their decisions. It places the courts -- and the like-minded judges salted throughout them over the past three decades -- in the position of ruling in favor of pretense and fraud, of passing judgment on misdirection and legalistic sleight-of-hand. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals did precisely that. They accepted as precedent the legal status of Texas law as a long con, and the women that are its only subjects as marks who deserve what they get. Caveat emptor. Move to a different state.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/26225-focus-the-siege-of-the-ladyparts-goes-on