“Democrats seem convinced” that the overturn of Roe v. Wade gives them “a political lifeline before the November midterm elections,” observes Marc A. Thiessen at The Washington Post. They shouldn’t “be so sure”: “54% [of Americans] favor” the law at issue in the current Supreme Court case (which bans most abortions after 15 weeks) while “41% oppose” it. Roe’s demise won’t mean bans on “abortion nationwide” but “uphold[ing] the right of states to impose . . . restrictions that most [Americans] support,” which is “unlikely to spark . . . popular outrage.” Indeed, “if Democrats focus on defending abortion this November, it will backfire”: It’s “the most important issue for just 4% of voters.” Conservatives are “far closer to the sentiments of the American people than Democrats imagine.”

“American progressives, and some on the right, have convinced themselves that legal abortion will disappear the moment the Supreme Court reverses its Roe v. Wade precedent,” notes The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board. Not so: US abortion law will resemble Europe, “where abortion is legal in most countries, usually with limits that are more strict than America’s and generally as a result of democratic choice.” In fact, “European abortion policy has mostly ended up where opinion polls suggest most Americans would prefer to be: with abortion legal in the first trimester but with more restrictions later, and with some checks such as a waiting period or parental notification for minors.” Simply put: “This new abortion politics will be an adjustment for partisans.” 

“The pandemic killed dissent in Hong Kong,” laments Reason’s Liz Wolfe. The Chinese Communist Party “never liked” its agreement to “allow the territory to maintain its own government until 2047,” and COVID “provided the excuse to all but erase the ‘one country, two systems’ distinction.” “Citing public health concerns, Hong Kong postponed its Legislative Council elections for a year. In the interim, Beijing changed” the rules “to reduce the number of directly elected seats” and require candidates to pledge “loyalty to mainland China.” It also used the pandemic to suppress “pro-democracy protests,” extending social-distancing mandates in 2020 until the day after the Tiananmen Square anniversary. So “only a small vigil was held” — though its organizers were still thrown in jail, with the judge claiming they’d “belittled a genuine public health crisis.”

At Spectator World, Peter W. Wood has been “thinking about monsters” as he contemplates how diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, mandates have “swept through the nation’s schools, colleges, and businesses, and nearly every other institution of note.” Wood flips two letters to term it DIE, noting the 1965 film “Die, Monster, Die!” in which the Boris Karloff character “thinks he can harvest good from ill. He is, of course, mistaken.” “Defund DEI” campaigns “can’t hurt” — but “don’t get too confident”: “No monster is ever known to have succumbed to a budget cut.” DEI will die only “when Americans come ’round to realizing that harvesting the good of racial reconciliation from the ills of racial resentment will never happen.”

A New York Times editorial just claimed that, if the Constitution allowed, “some states probably wouldn’t” permit blacks and whites to marry. Thunders National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke, “The people who wrote these words are stupid — yes, stupid — and they should all be unsurpassingly ashamed of themselves.” In fact, while legal abortion’s been debated for decades, “Interracial marriage? Not so much.” In fact, Gallup last year found support for black-white unions hit 94%, up from 87% in 2013; there’s no gap between regions or even races. “Sometimes, I wonder if the editors of the New York Times have actually been to the United States. Now, I must conclude that they have not.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board