Yesterday, my mind went to Roe  V. Wade while I sat in silence in my Quaker meeting. It was the right place to think in solitude.

I’ve witnessed arguments all my life in one way or another, and I learned early on that there are no winners when there is a deep conflict like this and one side so crudely imposes its will on the other.

The principals don’t speak to one another, listen to one another, or negotiate and compromise with one another. One side boasts about their victory, the other side prepares to fight.

This is why the Russians will never conquer Ukraine. This is why the movement that calls itself pro-life can never force women to shape their lives around the religious beliefs of other people.

This is why George Washington felt so strongly about the separation of church and state.

The people who worked so long and hard to ban abortion are celebrating a victory that is pyrrhic at its best and is already short-lived. They won’t be celebrating for long. They haven’t won a thing, other than the right to enrage millions of empowered women who are preparing to fight.

Women’s lives in America have advanced far beyond the ability of one religion or human species to take away their freedom to live freely and fully. The battle is hardly over, it will now just move from one place to another, as actions do, and more and more people will be disappointed, frightened, and hurt along the way.

This is a very big and diverse country. It has lots of borders, different jurisdictions, and diverse people.

The Supreme Court forgot or doesn’t care that most Americans no longer agree with their decisions. They don’t have a million soldiers – or one –  to enforce their increasingly extremist Christian fundamentalist declarations.

That’s what they would need to ban abortion in America, maybe twice as many.

But that doesn’t mean they can’t cause a lot of suffering. They already have.

White Christian men will never be able to force their medieval will on women who are drinking the sweet wine of freedom and equality.

There is no turning back that clock, no matter what a bunch of old white men and one woman in robes in Washington decide behind their closed and cloistered and now guarded doors. Justice Thomas is eager to take away even more freedoms, and I give him credit for honesty.

Thanks for the warning.

These warriors for life are caught in a medieval mindset, a horrific time machine that can only go one way – backward. There’s no forward switch.

I can’t help but think of those old bishops and cardinals who holed up in their palaces and cathedrals, giving orders about how people should live and torturing and punishing those who defied them.

Mainly, and over time, they failed. They just triggered wars, suffering, death, and violence. No one listens to them now.

People will always fight to figure out how they want to live and to keep their right to live the way they wish.

Old white men have the worst record in history for imposing their will on people they thought were helpless and defenseless. In America, young white Christian men are taking up the mantle. They won’t succeed either.

It is possible to subjugate people, but if you read your history, you will know that it is impossible to keep them down forever. The remarkable history of human beings is littered with the stories of people losing their freedom and giving up their lives to get it back.  For a while, we thought we were winning this battle here.

Not so fast.

People will fight against tyranny, in all of its forms.

Women know this, black people know this, gay people know this, and the people who wrote that Constitution knew this. Even I know this, the ward of persecuted people who risked their lives so I could be free.

I owe them; I empathize closely with people whose freedom is taken away by arrogant and cold men.

There is no such thing as a winner in a social and moral conflict as deep as this. Just blood and pain and fear and rebellion.

Just as the anti-abortion movement did, countless women everywhere are organizing, plotting, researching, donating, and communicating; I’ve already seen a hundred ways in which abortion can be continued via pills, travel, mobile medical centers, donations, secret networks in states who choose to live in modern times.

Yes, I believe their cause is just. But every woman or man who fights to take reproductive rights away or who fights to keep them will in their own way undermine and erode our democracy: all these years, we have obeyed the law because we wanted to, and now the Supreme Court is forcing countless women to break the law because they have to.

This is no victory for the Constitution.

One movement begets another, each one angrier and more strident than the first. If there’s a devil, he’s the only winner; there will be many victims in many places, and hatred and grievance everywhere.

While this decades-long plot to destroy Roe V. Wade was underway, women all across America were creating their own revolution. They are unimaginably more powerful than they were even a couple of decades ago. For generations, men abused and harassed and raped women almost with impunity.

Now, they are actually going to jail for those crimes. My first wife couldn’t even apply to the college my daughter went to, and other are now more women lawyers and doctors getting college degrees than men.

I’ve witnessed this revolution all my life, it has left most men behind.

Women are creative and determined and powerful, speaking to one another for the first time in history. That is very different, as those judges will soon learn.

Millions of women will never submit to this; even I, an older man, see this very clearly.

Instead of eliminating the right to decide their own lives, these “victors” are just setting both sides up for protracted conflict, rage, disappointment, repression, and division.

These are the things honest judges are supposed to know and consider – how much damage even the best-intentioned people cause if they impose their will on others without concern or regard for their feelings.

And how much chaos that can cause.

For millions of women, the anti-abortion movement is now the most hated and feared social movement in America, which does them and their cause no good and obscures whatever good arguments they have.

Along their way to “victory,”, we forget that we need to talk, reason, and listen to one another; bloodshed and brute force can’t work here. Victories can’t really be all one way if they are to succeed and endure. Everyone has to win something and lose something. These victors could use some lessons in grace, which is also a seminal Christian idea.

Don’t gloat or you will just embolden your enemies to fight harder.

Cruelty and medieval justice can’t work either. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so disturbing.

The movement that killed Roe V. Wade succeeded in the creation of hardened enemies, each calling the other names, each demonizing the other, each battling without end or closure.

The poor and the weak will suffer the most, that is also history. And that is not justice.

Is that really what this movement for life intended and wanted? If so, they are sadder and blinder than I imagined.

We no longer live in a world where men can tell women what to do, even if it is the right thing, which is not. Our world is porous and interconnected. Technology connects us. Women have tasted equality and freedom. They like it and will do anything to keep it. If the Salem witches had access to the Internet, they would never have been jailed, tortured, or drowned.

The only way to really and totally ban abortion in America is to create a China-style Orwellian state. Is that really what our Constitution wanted? Is victory a world filled with rage and hatred in the name of life?

It didn’t have to happen this way. It should never have happened this way.

And the honest and conscientious people who oppose abortion and see it as murder – and there are many of those people – will now be cast as devils, demons, and fascists, and the people they are trying to control will hate and never listen to them.

Free people are disinclined to listen to people who take their freedoms away without consent.

There are real issues to discuss regarding an issue like abortion. Neither the justices nor the supporters of this ruling are talking about them or thinking about them.

Who knows what the Constitution intended? In a democracy, government exists to carry out the will of the people. The court is now off the rails.

I’m sure John Adams and Thomas Jefferson would be devastated if they followed these arguments and saw this judicial brutality. What they intended was a system that dealt rationally and peacefully with conflict; they knew better than anyone what happens when you impose your will on so many people and take what they believe is their freedom away.

They believed in compromise and negotiation – that was the whole idea of the Constitution.

Nobody could just come and take our freedom away.

In my Quaker Meetings, I learned to listen to other people, to leave some space for thought between statements and arguments, and to talk and listen rather than fight or dominate. I haven’t always been able to practice this in my own life, but I sometimes succeed, and I know this is the only way such bitter and deep conflict can be peacefully resolved.

There are no winners in this dreadful argument, only sufferers, losers, and people facing disappointment and challenge after disappointment and challenge. This conflict is not resolvable by cowardly judges hiding behind their robes in heavily guarded offices with riot fences around them.

Women’s choices are spare now – talk to each other or fight endlessly.

And this new chapter of struggle is underway.

Women across America are now working day and night to ensure the right to control their reproductive lives will continue. They can talk to each other now. And they are.

There are not enough police or white Evangelical Christians to stop or put them all in jail. They haven’t won a thing, really, just the right to start a whole new, bitter and unreasonable conflict. This “victory” has already achieved one goal – tearing apart our country.

This is not Argentina or Russia. We take our freedoms seriously, just think of the entrenched and dangerous resistance to the very idea of vaccinations, something Americans have been getting for centuries. Even our powerful government couldn’t budge them or force them to get their shots.

Do these judges really think American women, some of the proudest and fiercest freedom fighters on the planet, will just bow down and melt away in the face of this assault on their freedom?

I think not. Putin didn’t have the slightest doubt that he would win a great victory in hours when he attacked Ukraine. He isn’t celebrating now, just killing and killing.

Women are getting angrier by the day, especially when people gloat over the freedom they believe they are in danger of losing. Be careful what you wish for.

If there is a Messiah and they come, perhaps human beings will be forced to talk and listen to one another and make compassionate, wise, and empathetic decisions about freedom and power, not just issue cruel, angry, and doomed decisions.

Our system has always depended on citizens obeying laws and rulings.

The  Supreme Court has no police force; the degree to which people obey them depends on the degree to which people accept and trust their fairness and wisdom. They are throwing that away.

Nobody won in this awful spectacle,  certainly not the young, poor, and frightened women who are now fighting for their lives, and surely not the Supreme Court.

To me, the greatest irony is that the biggest loser of all may be the movement that has been fighting so long and hard on behalf of what they call ” life”.

Unless you count hatred and defiance as a win, I can’t really see that they have won anything at all.