I’ve had a blog post percolating for several weeks about the Supreme Court and what we can do to rein them in. I had not started writing it and then I came across this from YES magazine, which says most of what I would have said. So I will let Chris Winters say it for me. As he notes, nonviolent resistance including general strikes is a powerful force for change. It has brought down some pretty repressive governments (examples: Arab Spring, the overthrow of South African apartheid and , the collapse of the Soviet Union) and forced others–even Nazi Germany–to soften their stance.
Our rights are under attack! Photo by Wojciech Ner.
Ever since the upcoming decision overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked, I’ve been stewing on it. Tomorrow, I am going to my second rally to uphold women’s reproductive rights. It shouldn’t be necessary, but it is. If we can prevent Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale from moving from a dystopian novel to a description of life in 2020s America, it’s our obligation to do so. I don’t know about you, but I do not want to live in anyplace resembling the theocratic dictatorship of Gilead that she describes.
I will not address the valid question of when does a fetus’s life take precedence over the mother’s because I don’t have the medical qualifications to give an answer that is based on fact. But let me raise a personal liberty argument: I will bring up the extension of the upcoming court decision to other areas, because we know that is coming–and because it personally affects my family. One former National Review editor actually posted on social media, “Next stop Brown vs. Board!” That was the decision that outlawed segregation in 1954. Here’s a screenshot of that post (NOTE: the blog that shows the post is a foul-mouthed screed–but you can see a picture of the post and learn some useful information about the person who wrote that post).
Alito has a long history of speaking out against same-sex marriage and cannot be trusted not to use the same twisted reasoning to go after it. He also authored the Hobby Lobby case, which could be seen as a wedge decision that could eventually be used to eliminate legal contraception. In both of these probable attacks on our rights, it gets personal for me.
My younger child identifies as nonbinary, uses they-them pronouns, and is five years into a beautiful relationship with someone who has the same types of body parts and chromosomes but a very different cultural and religious upbringing. I fully support them, their choice of identity, and their wonderful life-partner.
My older one married another lovely guy from a different cultural and religious upbringing–who is the product of a White father and a Latina mom who clearly has indigenous ancestry. He is an excellent life partner for my daughter. My wife and I love both of our kids’ partners.
My mother, raised in a super-observant Orthodox Jewish family, divorced my father and married a Japanese man who was raised Buddhist. She also did some pretty intense civil rights work, including serving as a tester for the Urban League to determine if those apartments declined to Black families were really “already rented.”
I identify as bi and have had relationships before my marriage with both men and women. And I have slept with people who were not the same color as me. If I were my kids’ age, I might well have chosen to identify as nonbinary. While I am now very comfortable in my maleness, I was very UNcomfortable with it in my teens and 20s.
I am a survivor of rape by a grown male stranger who literally grabbed me off the street when I was 10 or 11. Fortunately, becoming pregnant was not an issue–but what if I’d been a 15-year-old girl, and had been forced to bear a child whose every moment would remind me of the violence done to me–a violence that was extremely traumatic even without a pregnancy?
Let’s also put this into a wider context: this is the same Supreme Court that recently decided that the Centers for Disease Control does not have the right to control disease by mandating masks in public conveyances–so you could be sitting next to a superspreader on a six-hour flight with no protection other than your own voluntary mask, and a coughing fit on a rush-hour subway car could expose dozens.
In fact, two people I’m very close to, who bought plane tickets before the mask mandate was overturned but flew later, have come down with COVID. I am flying next month, and I’m not happy about it. But my 91-year-old dad no longer travels and it’s important to see him when we can.
Even before that inane ruling, it was necessary to fight for my right to protect myself and the people I pod with. I refused to sit next to someone on a plane who would not mask (while that ruling was still in effect), and he was eventually taken off the plane. And at our official Town Meeting last week, I had to call a Point of Order to demand that the inadequate separation of masked and unmasked on opposite sides of an aisle be enforced, after asking someone to either put on a mask or go sit in the no-mask section. You would think the anti-vax crowd would actually be in favor of masks in public indoor spaces, since they would have lower risk of getting a bad case of COVID–but no. I still don’t understand the way these basic public health measures have been weaponized, even after many prominent mask critics contracted fatal cases. After all, we have seat belt laws, motorcycle helmet laws, and requirements that school children receive various other vaccines.
One one level, I’m pleased that DT has chosen a very smart guy for his first Supreme Court Justice nominee.
In this 2009 portrait of the Supreme Court, Scalia is third from the right.
But on the other hand, Neil Gorsuch is as much of a right-wing ideologue as his late mother Anne, who attempted to eviscerate the Environmental Protection Administration when she ran it for Ronald Reagan. And then there’s the little matter of timing: A nominee was already selected by President Obama when his term still had nine months left. I thought Obama was making a huge mistake in not pushing hard on this. Even if Clinton had won in November, it was a terrible precedent. Merrick Garland is every bit as smart as Neil Gorsuch, and is not an ideologue for either side. He belongs on the Court.
Thus, I wrote the following email this morning to my Democratic Senators, both of whom have already made public statements opposing this nomination—feel free to use it as the basis for a personalized letter to your own Senators:
Thanks for Opposing Gorsuch nomination–Please Organize Other Democratic Senators
Dear Senator Warren (Senator Markey):
Thank you for being such a strong advocate of justice in the opening weeks of the Trump era. As a constituent and a citizen, I’m very grateful–and I ask you to step to the plate again to lead the fight against Neil Gorsuch. I see that you’ve already said publicly that you will not support this nomination, and thank you for that as well. I urge you not only to publicly oppose this nomination, but to build opposition among your fellow Democratic and Independent Senators. This latest unacceptable nomination must be stopped. Here are two talking points that may help:
1. There is already a nomination on the table: the moderate centrist Merrick Garland. The Senate’s disgraceful failure to act on that nomination should not invalidate it, and the horrible precedent that a president in his last year isn’t entitled to nominate has to be undermined.
2. Trump did not even get a majority, or anything close to a majority. There is no mandate to install SCOTUS justices with a radical right-wing ideology such as Judge Gorsuch’s. He is obviously very smart and scholarly, but has been an adamant champion of some of the worst judicial decisions while regularly sharing his view that the courts should not be used to expand the rights of ordinary citizens. As examples, he has written decisions that favor Christianity against other religions, and has called corporate campaign contributions (presumably including those allowed under Citizens United) “fundamental right” that should be afforded the highest standard of constitutional protection. All of this is well-documented in his Wikipedia profile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Gorsuch . I repeat: there is no mandate to appoint a right-wing ideologue.
Shel Horowitz – “The Transformpreneur”(sm)
If you feel as I do, please contact your Senators. Again, I freely give permission to modify what I’ve written to send your own message.
