Last night’s cold open delivered a barrage of punch lines about how principles from the middle ages are serving as the legal precedent for contemporary life.
In seeking historical precedence for the upcoming Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito stretched far beyond the ideology of originalism —the guiding precept among a certain conservative faction that constitutional law should not stray far from the Constitution. His leaked 98-page opinion, intent on revoking, at the federal level, women’s rights to privacy and bodily autonomy by denying access to abortion reached all the way back to 13th- and 17th-century England, when new laws gave men greater control over pregnancy and, by extension, women’s bodies. Last night’s Saturday Night Live exploded Alito’s notion of tradition by venturing back to the medieval period and delivering a searing rejoinder. During the cold open, the host, Benedict Cumberbatch, and the cast members James Austin Johnson and Andrew Dismukes played 13th-century men who discussed the need to ban abortion. The sketch underscored the monumental gap between then and now in order to attack the restrictive beliefs informing the conservative justice’s opinion. In the bit, Cumberbatch stumbled upon the idea of outlawing abortion while cleaning out “the hole… where we poop.” The idea initially befuddled his compatriots. “You mean like the law we have against pointy shoes?” Johnson asked.
