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I woke up this morning and set my clock back 100 years.
Like most, I was stunned when the Supreme Court majority draft opinion challenging Roe v Wade leaked last night. I probably shouldn't have been. We all knew this day was coming, but I think we expected Roe to be chipped away at the way Andy Dufresne tunneled himself out of Shawshank. Nobody expected the SCOTUS was gonna firebomb the thing before the next fucking Kentucky Derby.
("They", by the way, include 3 justices appointed by a President who still claims the last election was rigged, and who attempted a coup on live television. I point this out as a public service in case such things matter anymore, which apparently they do not.)
I immediately texted my brother in Texas for his reaction to all this. He's smarter than I am, and has a way of summing up doom in perfect little text-bites.
"The dog has finally caught the car", he said.
The ruling to overturn Roe was written by a man, of course. Surely these Neanderthals were not going to let a woman have the glory on this, even though Amy Coney Barrett went along with it....as a sort of final fuck you to half the population of the United States.
This is what happens when....
a. you don't vote
b. you throw away your vote by casting it for some fringe candidate because "they are all the same"
They are not all the same. Only one party jerks off while watching "The Handmaiden's Tale".
Once my head cleared I was floored by the media's instant fixation on the "leak". That a politically debased group of right wing judges just declared war on an entire GENDER mattered less than the decorum breach of some rogue law clerk abusing their copy machine privileges. Once again, American journalism shit the bed in real time.....and as they chased squirrels, barricades were literally being erected outside the Supreme Court. Not the fourth estate’s finest hour.
Two schools of thought on the leak. One, that it came from a conservative clerk who wanted to ensure that nobody currently in the boat was swayed by Chief Justice Roberts, who is usually only completely batshit half the time, to jump out. Once they were outted, the thinking goes, their vote was locked in. Either that or become a traitor to the cause. One of the people Trump comes up with snarky nicknames for. And nobody in the Jesus wing wants that.
The second is that a liberal clerk wanted to alert the world just how far Republican justices are willing to go to own the libs.
Either way, there it is. Endless pages of Alito's turgid caterwauling, reading like it was drafted in the midst of one of Brett Kavanaugh’s frat parties. The kind of bad college paper you'd expect the entitled white guy without a fetus to hand in at the last minute before heading to his summer vacation home. "A state's regulation of abortion is not (italics are mine) a sex-based classification", he writes, either blind to the rank hypocrisy or too fucking lazy to proof-read. Or as my friend and author Seamus McGraw put it..."how intellectually dishonest do you have to be to write that fucking line? The same guys who tell you that gender is permanently immutable and are willing to fight Mickey Mouse over it, are now telling you that pregnancy and thus the need for/right to abortion is somehow not gender specific.." Seamus is also smarter than I am.
Make no mistake. This ruling will kill women. The rich and entitled will always be able to get their abortions, so congressional mistresses have nothing to fear. Like most draconian laws, it will not affect the men actually passing it. Desperate poor women in many states, however, will be forced to make savage decisions. The number one reason women end pregnancies is because they can't afford the baby, and now they'll be forced either into backrooms, or to rely on a safety net that is being gutted by the same political party forcing them into it. Zero childcare. Zero paid parental leave. All the slavish attention republicans give to the fetus disappears the moment the baby starts to cry. He or she is instantly abandoned to the free market and told to "fuck off" before the umbilical cord is cut.
It won't stop here. Griswold v Connecticut is the first case to liberalize state contraceptive laws, and was settled on the same basis as Roe. So they'll soon come for your IUDs and the pill. (Of course they'll leave condoms alone, since they're a bro thing)
And then same-sex marriage. There is zero evidence to suggest they’ll stop now that they have the bit in their mouth.
Because it’s all the same “they”.
The one spark of hope? I was talking to my daughter’s last night about this, and my eldest, a March For Our Lives and 2017 Women’s March veteran who is currently in law school sighed and said…
“Well…..we’re just gonna have to go into the streets again..”
And with that, my friends, I urge you to vote like lives depend on it. Because they do.
In a bit..
—tf
Takes your breath away doesnt it!? Its been a crisis-a-day for 6 years and now their plans are laid bare. The abject lying has no repercussions at all! MTG 'can't remember' and Alito's statements about precedent now broadcast all day mean nothing either. I marched for science and marched in the womens march - time to fill the streets indeed! and yes i stopped dicking around pretending i was an Independant so i swapped my affiliation just last week in order to vote in the primaries!