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by dctoedt
1345 days ago
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> I don’t think any EU country legalized same-sex marriage by court order. I’m also not aware of any European country where abortion was legalized by court ruling. The US Supreme Court is unusual in running roughshod over the political process as much as it does. Any thoughts about whether, in EU countries, it might be easier for the political process to make changes via legislation and constitutional amendment --- as opposed to the U.S. system of giving minority interest groups such extensive blocking rights? (The U.S. system sometimes reminds me — and not in a good way — of the liberum veto of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in which every (noble) member of the Sejm, or parliament, could block government action. Historians seem to agree that, over the long term, this arrangement was seriously-bad news for the Polish nation; quaere whether the U.S. might go down that path itself.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto |
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And yet we have a reasonably liberal abortion regime nationwide - which is not due to the courts (we have no constitutional right to abortion), but simply the outcome of the democratic legislative process in each state. I think it never became quite the political/cultural hot potato here as it did in the US, in part because it was left up to elected officials rather than unelected judges. Even if someone doesn’t like the current situation, it is harder to object to the legitimacy of it when the people the voters voted for are responsible for it.
I think one relevant difference is that as a country with a smaller population and a shorter (post-colonisation) history, there is arguably less inter-state cultural diversity in Australia. We don’t really have “red states” and “blue states” - some states lean more one way than the other, but it is much less polarised than the US.