In an alternate timeline, our Supreme Court wins would have been bigger

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Jun 28, 2025

I’m predisposed against theories claiming that alternate universes exist because they often come from scientists who want to avoid the evidence that God exists. Positing the possibility of alternate universes is how they get around the fact that our universe seems perfectly calibrated for humanity’s existence. It wasn’t because we have a loving Creator, you see, it’s just that we happened to luck out by being in the one-in-a-gazillion universes where the conditions are right for us to exist. Never mind that there is far less evidence for this theory than there is for the existence of God.

But if you like science fiction or fantasy, and you don’t take it too seriously, this kind of speculation can be fun. I felt some sympathy for Ross Douthat when, in an interview with CatholicVote’s Erika Ahern, he joked that Pope Benedict’s 2013 resignation was the moment we jumped to an alternate timeline. Think of all the crazy unprecedented things we have lived through, in the Church and in civil society, ever since that announcement. Who knows? Maybe it was the moment on that day when the lightning hit St. Peter’s Basilica.

If my grandparents used this sort of language, they would have said JFK’s assassination in 1963 was the moment when we jumped timelines. I knew they viewed it as the day something changed in America, the day something good about our country was lost, never to be fully recovered. If you are a child of the 1970s and ‘80s, it was a vibe you often picked up from the adults and that you could feel in pop culture and in the portrayal of post-war American history. That there was a before-and-after, a moment of great promise that got sidetracked by JFK’s assassination and was then lost to us.

I don’t share that view. I have another “jump the timeline” moment that I believe altered American history for the rest of my life. It’s not as widespread as that JFK-assassination-feeling held by so many of my grandparents’ generation. In fact, as far as I know, it’s unique to me. I don’t know anyone who feels this way or who even remembers the event much. My jump-the-timeline moment, my “this is where it all went bad” feeling (the way my grandparents felt about the effect of JFK’s assassination on subsequent American history) was the 1986 midterm elections.

I know, crazy, right? Who even remembers it now? But hear me out.

Ronald Reagan’s 1980 landslide victory had coattails, giving Republicans control of the U.S. Senate for the first time in 28 years. The GOP majority was later defeated in the 1986 midterms. When asked what the 1986 results meant, Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill said, “It means the Reagan Revolution is over.” I remember reading that line the next day in the newspaper, when I was 16 years old. In so far as pro-life hopes for the Reagan Revolution were concerned, Tip O’Neill was right.

It’s common for pro-lifers today to note that Trump accomplished for us what Reagan and the Bushes could not or would not. Trump put the Justices on the bench who overturned Roe v. Wade. Reagan and Bush 41, by contrast, gave us the three Justices who upheld Roe v. Wade in the 1992 Casey vs. Planned Parenthood ruling, which even admonished pro-lifers to stop fighting to overturn Roe.

But that’s not the whole story. Justice Anthony Kennedy is key here. He was not Reagan’s first (or even second) choice in 1987. Reagan’s first choice was Robert Bork. You know what happened to Bork in his confirmation hearings. It was so bad that his name became a verb (“to Bork” someone). But it happened because Reagan had lost the Senate a year earlier.

Imagine if, instead, the Republicans had kept the Senate in 1986. Instead of Anthony Kennedy, it would have been Robert Bork who was confirmed in 1987. What would this have meant?

For starters, Roe v. Wade would have been overturned decades earlier than when it finally occurred. Millions of lives would have been saved. The profound moral, spiritual, psychological, legal and political damage to the American body politic would have been greatly lessened. Kennedy’s infamous “sweet mystery of life” passage in the 1992 Casey ruling, as perfect a description of everything that’s wrong with modern misunderstandings of the American way of life as any that has ever been written, would never have been written.

But just as significant, the LGBT theocracy that America was becoming under Obama and then under Biden, and that they tried to impose on the rest of the world, would never have come into existence. It was Kennedy’s Lawrence v. Texas ruling that in 2003 discovered a right to homosexual sodomy in the U.S. Constitution that the Court had, as recently as 1986 in Bowers v. Hardwick, said did not exist. It was a straight line from Lawrence to Obergefell, the same-sex marriage ruling that has put religious liberty and parental rights under threat ever since.

Catholics and other social conservatives are rightly celebrating some big wins at the Supreme Court this month. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court ruled that parents may opt-out their elementary-school children from classroom instruction promoting homosexual relationships, transgender ideology, same-sex marriage, and similar LGBT themes. In U.S. v. Skrmetti, the Court upheld the right of states to ban puberty blockers and hormone interventions for minors who identify as transgender. In Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, the Court allowed for states to strip Planned Parenthood of their state Medicaid funding.

The striking thing about these rulings, as with the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade a few years ago, is how mild they are. All they do is return certain matters to the democratic process, allowing the public’s elected representatives to have their say. And yet the folks who claim to defend “our democracy” are screaming bloody murder over them. Everything the Left believes in, every time, has to be treated as extra-political, as somehow beyond the realm of the normal give-and-take of politics. Where does that get us? Only ten years after Obergefell, we needed a Supreme Court ruling just to tell us that parents get to decide what their kids will be taught about human sexuality.

That’s insane. And we got to this insane place because of one moment in time, the 1986 midterm elections. Had a different Senate confirmed Robert Bork a year later, the worst damage wrought by Justice Kennedy would never have occurred. We would be living in a much different, much better, America right now.

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own. See full bio.

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