Follow this authorKate Cohen's opinions

For instance, seven state constitutions bar atheists from holding public office, although the Supreme Court struck down those provisions in 1961’s Torcaso v. Watkins. Roy Torcaso was a Maryland atheist whose refusal to declare a belief in God cost him a government appointment. He sued and won at the highest level. But because the state never changed its constitution, Maryland still technically discriminates.

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The word “technically” surfaces often in reference to zombie laws — also “arcane,” “relic” “antiquated” and “obsolete.” These laws have been left for dead under the assumption, I suppose, that the future is a road that leads toward social progress.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine anyone actually trying to bar an atheist from office — or arrest someone for adultery in any of the 16 states with anti-adultery statutes. After all, as Lavine said, “America is changing.”

But, if Dobbs v. Jackson taught us anything, it’s that America could change back.

The future might lead us backward, where the zombies can attack.

When Roe v. Wade was overturned, Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban, some 50 years moribund, sprung back to life, shutting down Planned Parenthood’s clinics for more than a year. Arizona’s 1864 ban similarly wrought horror-movie havoc after Dobbs; no one knew whether it or a more recent, less restrictive ban took precedence. As the Arizona Supreme Court just decided: the zombie lives.

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Picture two menacing creatures in tattered 19th-century garb sending abortion providers scattering. Also picture women with scheduled abortions being turned away from clinic doors, sobbing.

Zombie lore is unclear about the mechanism by which the dead come back to life. Is it black magic? Weird science? Radiation from a space probe? A reconsideration of previously settled law by an activist right-wing majority on the Supreme Court?

In his concurrence on Dobbs v. Jackson, Justice Clarence Thomas called for overruling the “demonstrably erroneous decisions” of Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas and Obergefell v. Hodges — the court cases that made contraception, homosexual sex, and same-sex marriage (respectively) legal all across the country, no matter what state laws said.

Some states repealed the unconstitutional laws in question. But some let........

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