Does The Supreme Court Hate Women?
We were taught wrong. Lately, the Court has been awash in scandal after scandal. Justice Clarence Thomas has made out like a bandit thanks to his friendship with a right-wing billionaire; his wife Ginny is an unabashed supporter of the attempted overthrow of the government on January 6, 2020.
Justice Samuel Alito has flown flags that tacitly endorse that overthrow. Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett are guilty of lying – remember their respective confirmation hearings when they swore to uphold Roe V. Wade?
On June 24, 2022, Justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Gorsuch voted to deny women’s constitutional right to abortion. Their majority decision emboldened the zealots of the anti-abortion movement. Pro-choice laws have been under attack across the country.
Map by VOX
Recently Senate Republicans voted against the Right to Contraception Act and against protecting IVF.
Chart from VOX
Planned Parenthood succinctly described the situation as it now stands:
...one in three women now live in states where abortion is not accessible. In the first few months after Roe was overturned, 18 states banned or severely restricted abortion. Today more states are working to pass bans...The abortion bans that have taken effect since June 2022 have inflicted harm on Black, Latino, Indigenous, and other communities of color — communities where systemic racism has long blocked access to opportunity and health care.
Way to go, Supreme Court.
On the second anniversary of this heinous decision, here’s how Liberty Project covered the matter as it happened...
Original Posting: May 5th 2022
Way To Make Your Mother Proud, Supreme Court 🙄
Less than a week before Mother’s Day, Politico published a leaked draft opinion revealing that the Supreme Court's conservative majority of justices are ready to strike down two rulings on abortion rights, including Roe V. Wade the 1972 landmark decision that made abortion a federally protected right in the United States.
Since the Roe v. Wade ruling and the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey ruling that affirmed the Roe decision, the court has never allowed states to prohibit the termination of pregnancies prior to fetal viability outside the womb – that’s roughly 24 weeks.
The news sent shock waves around the world ...and with good reason. Roe guaranteed women’s right to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. Written by Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court draft majority opinion shows what could happen if the court overturns Roe v Wade.
Jesse Wegman brilliantly summed up the dire situation in a recent opinion piece in the NYTs: “If the holding in the draft opinion stands, it will mark an astonishing moment in our history: the elimination of an existing constitutional right, one that millions of American women (not to mention the men who impregnated them) have relied on for nearly half a century.”
Though the draft was leaked by a person or persons unknown, the Court has acknowledged that the leak is genuine. Not all Washington conservatives agree with what's assumed to be the Court’s position, but it fits within the Right’s larger policies attacking and penalizing women, the poor, and people of color. Should Roe be overturned, the greatest impact will be felt by minority women.
As journalist Manuella Libardi has written:
“...the reality is that abortion is only illegal for poor women. Women with resources can always interrupt their unwanted pregnancies…
Restricting access to safe abortions keeps poor women in poverty, perpetuates the cycle that prevents them from social mobility, and allows wealth to remain in the hands of the rich, particularly white men.
Deciding if and when to have a child is essential for a woman’s economic and psychological well-being: it has implications for her education and for entering the workforce.”
The consequences of overturning Roe V. Wade and letting individual states determine their stances on abortion are frightening. No matter what the Court’s decision is, women will still need to have abortions for personal, medical, and legal reasons. It’ll just be harder to arrange – and far more treacherous.
A deputy spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres stated that “reproductive health and rights are essential to achieve equality around the world. The secretary‑general has long believed that sexual and reproductive health and rights are the foundation for lives of choice, empowerment, and equality for the world’s women and girls...Without the full participation of 50% of its population, the world would be the biggest loser.”
The Leak
The drafting of Supreme Court opinions is a fluid and dynamic process, so the document is not the court's final ruling. A work-in-progress, the leaked opinion is marked "first draft" and was dated Feb. 10, 2022. That’s two months – or 8 fetal weeks – after oral arguments were heard in the Mississippi case Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.
This is a document that citizens were never supposed to have seen. Following Politico’s publication of the draft, Chief Justice Roberts announced that the Marshal of the Court – its chief operations and security officer – will investigate the source of the leak.
"Court employees have an exemplary and important tradition of respecting the confidentiality of the judicial process and upholding the trust of the Court. This was a singular and egregious breach of that trust that is an affront to the Court and the community of public servants who work here," Roberts said.
Just Who's On That Bench?
Liberal Judges: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer
Conservative Judges: Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and the three Trump-appointed justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett
The Court has a blatantly partisan crop of justices who appear prepared to overturn Roe outright. The draft opinion has the support of at least four of Chief Justice Roberts’ colleagues, according to Politico: Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett – the only woman in the majority.
It’s rumored that Roberts – ostensibly committed to the court’s reputation and established precedent – may attempt to convince one of his conservative colleagues to join him in a narrower opinion that would not completely overturn Roe v. Wade.
The State of the States
Abortion is currently legal in all 50 states, but over the past several decades many states have passed laws that limit access – most recently in Oklahoma, Florida, and Texas. Should the Supreme Court rule to overturn Roe, the power to decide abortion access would rest with each state’s elected leaders.
According to the reproductive rights organization The Guttmacher Institute, over half of the nation's 50 states are prepared to ban it. Twenty-one states already have laws on the books that would ban it immediately, with five additional states likely to.
States planning to ban abortion are clustered in specific geographic regions – including the American South – where women will have to travel hundreds of miles at a greater inconvenience and cost. Imagine you’re 15 years old, you're pregnant, and you live in Cyclone, WV, on Tribal Land in Tahlequah, OK, or Belle Glade – one of Florida's poorest cities and only an hour's drive from Mar-a-Lago. The denial of your right to health, education, and selfhood would be insurmountable.
As Langston Hughes challenges: “What happens to a dream deferred?”
Many attempts have been made on both the state and federal levels to overthrow or curtail the right to abortion. And more are sure to be made in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision. If Roe goes away, states can allow it, regulate it, or outlaw it.
And-so. Let’s get down to it – I am sick to death of these men using words as sticks to beat us with. Blithely tossing around terms like trust and betrayal of confidences: LIKE. THEY. CARE one atom about trust, confidence, betrayal.
“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Justice Alito’s draft states. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
In a statement issued Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts called the leaked draft a "singular and egregious breach" of trust.
I’m particularly struck by these two Justices' use of the word egregious so I dug into its etymological roots:
Originating in the 1530s, egregius comes from the Latin ex = ‘out of’ + grex or greg = ‘flock’ – literally ‘rising above the flock’ – illustrious, distinguished, excellent, extraordinary.
Egregious. What a precise word to define the leaker’s singular and extraordinary act of courage. To rise above the herd and step bravely in front of a butcherous, onrushing train...
Let’s call this for what it is. This is a chronic, concerted attack on gender, race, income equity, our health, and the well-being of our country. We are human beings who grew within, merged, and emerged from a body – a body that bore us in blood, torment, and pain. Once. Before we were born, we were one with our mother.
At this moment in America, our bodies (regardless of gender), our body of law, our body of government are in great peril.
We are one body – and we need to treat ourselves with the highest regard.
Let’s end this terrifying war on reproductive health, this war on all Americans.
Get up, stand up / Stand up for your rights
Get up, stand up / Don't give up the fight
Forget About Bolivia, Impeaching Trump Is the Real Coup
Don't be fooled! A coup is something bad that bad people do to take control of a democratically elected government, but there were actually irregularities in Bolivia's recent election, which means it's not democracy. Can you even imagine if there was ever any suggestion of electoral irregularities or cheating in the US? We would flip out. And yes, Evo Morales agreed to hold a second election, but that sounds boring, and it would take so much longer than just using the military to force him to leave so an opposition senator can declare herself president while wielding a giant bible and banishing indigenous belief systems from the palace.
Speaking of elections, can you believe this impeachment nonsense? That's the real coup—the kind that is laid out in the constitution as an official process and is run according to rules established by the president's political allies. They've been acting as if just because this is a completely different context and process than a criminal trial, it doesn't need to follow the same rules as a courtroom. Since when? They're making this fundamentally political process into something ugly and political. Why can't these Democrat bozos just wait a year for the next election?
The Wall Street Journal knows what's up. Their opinion page has declared Evo Morales's resignation a "Democratic Breakout" and informed us that the impeachment "Subverts the Constitution." Clearly, if the Democrats were really upset with Trump's using military aid to get a foreign government to interfere with the 2020 election, they should not have investigated. They should have waited for an independent organization to point out the issues after Trump won reelection, then wait for Trump to agree to a new election before having the military kick him out of the country and allowing Dianne Feinstein to declare herself the new president. That's democracy! Investigating the President's crimes and airing his dirty laundry in front of the whole country, then having elected representatives who are accountable to their voters decide whether he should be removed from office—that's a coup.
Of course, if you disagree with these sentiments, you may want to voice your opinion by calling your congressional representatives or signing a petition to have Congress acknowledge the Bolivian coup, so the US cannot support the new, unelected government. But that would be crazy.
How the Internet Fosters Hate Speech
Robert Bowers logged onto the platform shortly before killing 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue on Saturday to post the following.
Consequently, the site has been abandoned by payment processing firms PayPal and Stripe, as well as hosting service Joyent and domain register GoDaddy. A statement on Gab's website Monday read that the platform would be "inaccessible for a period of time" as it switches to a new web host. It said the issue was being worked on "around the clock." The statement went on to defend the website, saying, "We have been systematically no-platformed [and] smeared by the mainstream media for defending free expression and individual liberty for all people."
Regarding Bowers' use of the site, Torba said, "Because he was on Gab, law enforcement now have definitive evidence for a motive," Mr. Torba wrote. "They would not have had this evidence without Gab. We are proud to work with and support law enforcement in order to bring justice to this alleged terrorist."
But companies associated with Gab were not satisfied by the site's cooperation with law enforcement and continue to abandon the site. PayPal, the platform Gab used to manage donations from users, said in a statement, "When a site is explicitly allowing the perpetuation of hate, violence or discriminatory intolerance, we take immediate and decisive action."
A tweet from Gab on Monday morning implied that the people behind the site believe themselves to be a victim of intentional defamation.
Set aside the questionable intent of the decidedly tone-deaf tweet; and, legally, Gab did not do anything wrong. Contrary to popular belief, there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. The Supreme Court reaffirmed this in 2017 in Matal vs. Tal, deciding, "Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful...the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express 'the thought that we hate.'" Despite this, many people are calling for the permanent removal of the site, as Wired points out, "Momentary political rage can blind people into abandoning sacred values."
However, the internet inarguably contributes to the creation of extremists, as we have seen in the case of terrorists, rapists, school shooters, and now the synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh. Sites like Gab allow users to easily find other people who share their most extreme viewpoints, inevitably normalizing disturbing rhetoric the user may have otherwise suppressed or self-corrected in time. Therefore, sites like Gab become polarizing spaces that can help to sew the kinds of ideas that lead to violent acts. But, if there's no legal action to be taken against a site like Gab without damaging free speech, what can be done?
GAB Logo
Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his opinion following Matal vs. Tal, "A law that can be directed against speech found offensive to some portion of the public can be turned against minority and dissenting views to the detriment of all. The First Amendment does not entrust that power to the government's benevolence. Instead, our reliance must be on the substantial safeguards of free and open discussion in a democratic society."
While what exactly those safeguards are remains unclear, one can speculate that what Kennedy meant is exactly what Gab calling unjust now. As previously mentioned, the site has been abandoned by all of the companies whose services were needed for the site to remain online. And just as Gab has the right to allow freedom of expression on their site as they see fit, these companies are also free to express themselves in refusing to work with websites that allow hateful rhetoric.
Indeed, the conversation surrounding the fate of Gab has revealed that freedom of speech online is not decided by the government, but by social media platforms, servers, and domain registers who are free to decide with what kind of opinion their company wants to be associated. This also means that, on some level, what is seen as acceptable online is driven by consumer outrage and approval.
Daily Mirror
For example, after facing criticism for allowing users to post prejudiced content, larger social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook have been actively fighting against hateful rhetoric with varying degrees of success. In 2016, a code of conduct was established by the European Union in collaboration with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Microsoft. The code is aimed at fighting racism and xenophobia and encourages the social media companies to remove hate speech from their platforms.
So, instead of outraged Americans calling for the legal suppression of sites like Gab — an impossibility if the First Amendment is to remain intact — the real power of the individual to fight hate speech is in one's ability to support or boycott companies based on how they handle free expression.