

Discover more from Scranton Time - bits and pieces from Tom Flannery
We not so respectfully dissent.....
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It should not have been a surprise. I mean, the draft leaked 2 months ago. Their intentions were clear. We knew who they were, and have a pretty good idea of what they are coming for next. They have the numbers, finally. They want it all. And since Biden, even after all of this, appears unwilling to expand the court for fear republicans might be mean to him, it doesn't look like there's much anybody can do to stop them. Guns and (the right) God are safe from all harm, thanks to the robed avengers who testified, under oath, that Roe v Wade was settled law. Which is fine, as long as the rest of us can get away with lying under oath too. Otherwise.....perjury seems vaguely disqualifying, no?
Look at me, being all liberal and adorable again. I have to catch myself.
So nearly 200 million (60%) of Americans disagree with 5 Supreme Court justices. Guess who wins?
Our version of whatever type of democracy you call this is fucked up, yo.
But still, somehow it felt like a bomb fell when the word came down. It's now official. One clinic in Texas was forced to close the day of the decision, with patients in its waiting room. That this overwhelmingly affects the poor and women of color goes without saying. Congressional mistresses will surely always have a clear path to their own abortions, while women impregnated by their rapists in Mississippi will have to find bus fare to Illinois.
I'm out of shits to give. You can accuse me of hyperbole. Whatever. But I'm right and you're wrong. This is not about the "right to life". If it was these same people would not be so virulently pro-war and pro-death penalty. Forty-two “pro-life” Republicans would not have have voted against extending free school lunches for children. And all the “right to lifers” would not have made it even easier for these children to get massacred in their classrooms.
No, if they really gave a fiddler’s fart about children, they would nurture them as much as they nurture embryos.
But to the contrary, this is a Taliban-esque frenzy of misogyny and religious fanaticism, cloaked in legalese. This is about the subjugation of women, neatly assisted this time by a woman associate justice who served as a "Handmaid" in a men dominated Christian group called "People of Praise", where she had no issues being subjugated herself. The group’s fundamental principle is that the husband is the “head” and the wife must “submit in all things.” In 2006 she signed a newspaper advertisement calling for an end to “the barbaric legacy of Roe vs Wade,” information she somehow did not disclose to the Senate ahead of her confirmation hearing. Not that it would have mattered. She was chosen precisely FOR this...and the only people who were caught unaware were the dumb ones. That somebody this extreme would even be allowed to preside over traffic-court is why the rest of the world sniggers at us like we’re hypocritical dipshits.
Two more votes to overturn Roe v Wade came from the two male justices who have been credibly accused of sexual harassment and sexual assault, respectively. Their female accusers were subjected to all the vile and disgusting things that privileged men have immunity to toss into their faces, and each woman remained so stoically dignified during their hearings that Clarence Thomas and Bret Kavanaugh nearly lost their minds responding....screeching and sputtering and caterwauling until it looked like their heads might explode. So much for the "women are too emotional" stereotype. Then and there these guys would have been tossed out of a job interview to deliver pizzas. But both were allowed to wipe the spittle off of themselves and sit on the highest court in the land. You have to wonder what’s next. Kyle Rittenhouse and Brock Turner on the bench?
Alito and Gorsuch were the 2 other yes votes. The former is the poster boy for white boys who know they can get away with anything, the bro who wrote the leaked draft using the type of turgid prose cut with childish snark that reads like something out of The Daily Wire. Alito is the troll who takes over the WNEP facebook post comment section to egg on the guys still flying their Trump/Pence flags from their pick-up beds. He is the kind of relentless hater that conservatives love. An intellectual dullard with a lifetime appointment to own the libs.
Gorsuch is forever known as the dick who refused to wear a mask during oral arguments in the midst of a raging pandemic, thus compelling the immuno-compromised pro-science female justice forced to sit next to him to join arguments remotely so she didn't catch Covid and die. Other than that nobody really gives a shit about him, other than he's a rubber-stamp anytime to court decides it wants to turn the clock back further. Clarence Thomas is already on record as saying the court should "reconsider" gay marriage and contraception rulings, and once could practically see his fangs as he did so. If he's not careful, he's gonna invalidate his own interracial marriage. But such are the perils of progress in 2022.
And that leaves John Roberts. Poor guy looked like Rodney King after getting stomped, trying the "can't we all just get along" approach in his reluctant dissent, which essentially said "let's take away a woman's right to choose, but do it slooooowly so we don't look like fucking ISIS".
For this he was bludgeoned with truncheons by his republican colleagues, and cooly ignored by Team Normal of the court, as if they couldn't be arsed to deal with a boss who allowed things to spiral this far out of control.
My own state, which recently somehow managed to vote for a guy from New Jersey to be its Senate candidate, would shock exactly nobody if we managed to elect insurrectionist Doug Mastriano to be its next governor, which is how close Pennsylvania women are to having to come up with their own bus fare.
In a bit...
--tf