Timmer's link, Always believe the first draft. To do it justice, a lengthy excerpt is needed, yet going to the original gives more.
The first draft of almost anything is the most pure, honest expression of an author’s intent. It’s where all the wildly inappropriate — or worse — thoughts are laid down. That’s what you will find in the leaked draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
It’s the unvarnished Justice Samuel Alito. Ninety-eight pages of bilious, misogynistic Sammy.
[...] The Roberts Court name may in decades to come be spit out like the Taney Court — an epithet, and not a positive one, either. He does well to be concerned. When a third of his court was appointed by Donald Trump and resembles bacteria cultivated in a Federalist Society petri dish, and with another couple of justices not much different, there may not be much he can do.
[...] Here’s the beginning of a Twitter thread by a law professor at Yale who clerked at the Supreme Court.
I clerked at the Supreme Court. Last night, I assumed a liberal clerk leaked the draft opinion overturning Roe. Now I think MUCH more likely it was leaked by a conservative fanatically committed to every word of Alito’s monstrous opinion. **🧵**
— Amy Kapczynski (@akapczynski) May 3, 2022
Please read the thread through; it’s worth you[r] time.
[...] Alito quotes an Englishman [...] Matthew Hale lived in a man’s world; that’s why relying on centuries of misogyny as proof of what was deeply rooted in society is so messed up. “We’ve treated women badly for centuries; we must keep it up,” says Alito.
[compare, Digby re Hale] Continuing to Timmer's ending:
Moreover, concern over abortion was not as uniform and fervent as Alito would like you to think. From an article in the Guardian, by Dartmouth theologian Randall Balmer:
Although leaders of the religious right would have us believe that the Roe decision was the catalyst for their political mobilization in the 1970s, that claim does not withstand historical scrutiny. What prompted evangelical interest in politics, in fact, was a defense of racial segregation.
Evangelicals considered abortion a “Catholic issue” through most of the 1970s, and there is little in the history of evangelicalism to suggest that abortion would become a point of interest. Even James Dobson, who later became an implacable foe of abortion, acknowledged after the Roe decision that the Bible was silent on the matter and that it was plausible for an evangelical to hold that “a developing embryo or fetus was not regarded as a full human being”.
Balmer lays out some persuasive evidence in the article. (With thanks to @DavidNeiwert for linking the article.)
Alito's reasoning is as clean and sharp as a coathanger abortion. Sans antiseptic.
The thought comes to mind in a hypothetical full term birth context - that the Alito mess of a draft opinion looks and reads as if they threw away the baby and kept the afterbirth. A big, long, ugly and disjointed afterbirth. Massive. Yet thin. Full of holes. And did I say ugly?
As to Timmer's cite to theologian Randall Balmer, the man wrote more, including a HuffPo item directly and unequivocally identifying the inveterate snake in the grass, Paul Weyrich, as the godfather of abortion-based division/diversion/nastiness done for crass political advantage. Not Fallwell. Not Pat Robinson.
Wyrich, with an intent to undo Carter and promote Reagan, did the engineer-an-issue dirty work which Alito follows - in Alito's wholly disingenuous tortured fabrication, 98 pages long; brevity being wit.