Yesterday, I realized Nameless has posted Sunday evening after I sent the email – I’ll pick it up in next week’s, but for regular readers, here’s the link – https://www.7thstep.org/blog/2022/06/26/there-is-no-joy-in-mudville/ I didn’t see it immediately because I was loking for an email response to my visit-Virgil notification, and when I found it, it was a notificaion that he has been moved again. I needed to address that right away because they only have certain hours in which they read and answer emails, so I didn’t get to PP right away. And I realize this OT is pretty lightweught. Sometimes that happens. BTW, there’s another hearing today I’ll be watching it after the fact. And one final note – I’m not big on podcasts myself as a learning method (I find it difficult to sit still and listen), but this one, recommended by the editor of Mother Jones, appears to be seriously content-rich, down to earth, and something you can recommend to anyone whose shock at current events leads them to wnt to learn more. It’s called “How to Citizen.” https://www.howtocitizen.com
Robert Reich – When I was Baby Jesus
Quote – What was I to do? I did the only thing my five-year-old brain could come up with: I apologized to God. I did it quietly as I lay on the straw on the stage, under my breath so no one else would hear, and then apologized again during the prayers and Christmas carols. I whispered, “God, I didn’t have a choice. I was cast as Baby Jesus. I don’t celebrate Christmas. It’s against my religion. Please forgive me. Thank you.” Click through for his thoughts on yet another horrible SCOTUS decision.
Glenn Kirschner – Supreme Court revokes women’s constitutional rights. Congress MUST open impeachment hearings – NOW (the sound is odd, but there is CC)
Meidas Touch – Adam Kinzinger Stuns with Speech of the Year during Jan 6 Hearings
The Lincoln Project – Lady Ruby
MSNBC – Lawrence: Samuel Alito’s Lies Did Not Stop In His Confirmation Hearing
VoteVets – Pride
Beau – Let’s talk about what happens if Trump is acquitted….
Yesterday, Sunday, I hadn’t slept well.I scheduled today’s posts early so I could spend some time going throug my closets (and everywhere else I have clothing) in order to se aside clothing to give to thrift stores. It’s going to take quite a while. In the roughly 11 years that Virgil has been incarcerated, I have lost six sizes, and I have never systematicall attempted to eliminate what no longer fits – living alone and with mobility issues I just haven;’t had the impulse to tackle such a huge task which arose so gradually. But now I have a motivating factor. If I can get this done (along with some other clutter) I eventually (and I do mean eventually) may be able to coordinate with a reputable group tp offer my home to women coming here to Colorado for abortions (assuming I live long enough to get there – but I am in decent health for my age – my issues are either non-life-threatening or medically controlled. So far.) AT any rate, I’m going to try.
Cartoon (not a live link, sorry) –
Short Takes –
Letters from an American – June 24, 2022
Quote – At [Thursday’s] hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, we heard overwhelming proof that former president Trump and his congressional supporters tried to overturn the will of the voters in the 2020 presidential election and steal control of our country to keep a minority in power. [Friday], thanks to three justices nominated by Trump, the Supreme Court stripped a constitutional right from the American people, … a right they indicated they would protect because it was settled law…. For the first time in our history, rather than conveying rights, the court has explicitly taken a constitutional right away from the American people. These two extraordinary events are related. Click through for full analysis. Richardson is a historian. The period in history she sees us as losing (or having lost) is not the last fifty years, but the period from 1933 to a981. I concur. This is so much bigger than abortion (and guns).
Crooks & Liars – Hey Gang There’s A (Grifty) Credit Card For Conservatives!
Quote – “Coign is America’s first credit card built by Conservatives for Conservatives. Coign was created to advance conservative values and embrace the American spirit. We align your dollars with your values. Unlike other leading credit cards, that give millions to the Left each year, Coign is helping Conservatives to align their dollars with their values. We’re proud that the dollars you spend are invested in Conservative causes.” Click through for comic relief – although it’s also scary. If their base is dumbe enough to fall for this, they’ll fall for anything. (I assume a married woman needs her hisband’s signature to get this card.)
— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) June 26, 2022
Entertaining enough for me to make a GIF of it:
And this morning on “Meet the Press” Peggy Noonan actually got the entire panel to laugh when she said the GQP should become the party that helps women and children (because, Lord knows, they do NOT do that currently).
The entire "Meet the Press" panel laughed out loud at Peggy Noonan today when she said the GOP "should become a party that helps women" after its abortion "victory." pic.twitter.com/uSth0nkutC
Wanting to leave on a positive note, I’m sharing a Tweet I came across of a young woman who composed a post-Roe version of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”. It was posted in the response to TFG’s latest rally where MAGA Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) [she’s actually quoted Hitler in the past] thanks TFG “for the historic victory for white lifein the Supreme Court yesterday”.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
Overtrning Roe isn’t all the Supreme Court did this week which was disastrouus. It also weakened the rights of states to administer their own policies, with its decision to overtuen New York’s concealed carry law, and that opens another wholw can of worms. As well, it made the separation of church and state unconcstitutional. But what I want to address here is the overturning of Roe v Wade.
The basis for the Roe v Wade decision in the first place was the concept that, though it nowhere says so in so many words, the Constitution guarantees every American a right to privacy, including a right to make personal decisions for oneself, without interference from the government. It is that which the Court has stripped away (and pretty explicitly too.) It has been stripped from men as well sa from women, from children as well as adults, from white people as well as from black and brown people, fron straight people as well as from LGBTQIA+ people. Those who are worried about this decision have mentioned Loving and Obergefell and whichever decision it was that guaranteed access to contracepton. All these depend on the right to privacy. And now that’s gone. What now?
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Privacy isn’t in the Constitution – but it’s everywhere in constitutional law
Almost all American adults – including parents, medical patients and people who are sexually active – regularly exercise their right to privacy, even if they don’t know it.
Privacy is not specifically mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. But for half a century, the Supreme Court has recognized it as an outgrowth of protections for individual liberty. As I have studied in my research on constitutional privacy rights, this implied right to privacy is the source of many of the nation’s most cherished, contentious and commonly used rights – including the right to have an abortion – until the court’s June 24, 2022, ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson.
For instance, the First Amendment rights of speech and assembly allow people to privately decide what they’ll say, and with whom they’ll associate. The Fourth Amendment limits government intrusion into people’s private property, documents and belongings.
Relying on these explicit provisions, the court concluded in Griswold v. Connecticut that people have privacy rights preventing the government from forbidding married couples from using contraception.
In short order, the court clarified its understanding of the constitutional origins of privacy. In the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting the right to have an abortion, the court held that the right of decisional privacy is based in the Constitution’s assurance that people cannot be “deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.” That phrase, called the due process clause, appears twice in the Constitution – in the Fifth and 14th Amendments.
Decisional privacy also provided the basis for other decisions protecting many crucial, and everyday, activities.
The right to privacy is also key to a person’s ability to keep their family together without undue government interference. For example, in 1977, the court relied on the right to private family life to rule that a grandmother could move her grandchildren into her home to raise them even though it violated a local zoning ordinance.
Under a combination of privacy and liberty rights, the Supreme Court has also protected a person’s freedom in medical decision-making. For example, in 1990, the court concluded “that a competent person has a constitutionally protected liberty interest in refusing unwanted medical treatment.”
Limiting government disclosure
The right to decisional privacy is not the only constitutionally protected form of privacy. As then-Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist noted in 1977, the “concept of ‘privacy’ can be a coat of many colors, and quite differing kinds of rights to ‘privacy’ have been recognized in the law.”
This includes what is called a right to “informational privacy” – letting a person limit government disclosure of information about them.
According to some authority, the right extends even to prominent public and political figures. In one key decision, in 1977, Chief Justice Warren Burger and Rehnquist – both conservative justices – suggested in dissenting opinions that former President Richard Nixon had a privacy interest in documents made during his presidency that touched on his personal life. Lower courts have relied on the right of informational privacy to limit the government’s ability to disclose someone’s sexual orientation or HIV status.
All told, though the word isn’t in the Constitution, privacy is the foundation of many constitutional protections for our most important, sensitive and intimate activities. If the right to privacy is eroded – such as in a future Supreme Court decision – many of the rights it’s connected with may also be in danger.
This story was updated on June 24, 2022, to reflect the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.
============================================================== Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, without the right to privacy, and with this particular Court comprising these particular justices, there may be no limit to the rights which may be stripped away, from all of us. In fact, with this Court, it may not even matter if progressives achieve commanding majorities in Congress and the White House. We may already be living in a fascist country, details to be released as the fascists deem appropriate.
Yesterday, the radio opera was “The Marriage of Figaro” by Mozart. It’s been up before, so I won’t go into details. The performance was at the Paris Opera, and the cast included three pretty well-known bass baritones (one American, one Englishman, and one Italian [married to the daughter of another American one]) and pretty much no one else I had ever heard of. But no major company is ever going to put on a bad performance of this opera. It’s kind of ironic that it’s on today – something which was planned long ago – because it high;ights the position of women in a male-dominated society (that was probably unconscious) and also how class status affects everyone, but women especially (and that was definitely conscious and led to censorship.)
Of course I could not ignore SCOTUS. Both here and with the Furies I have chosen to explore “Now What?” One of today’s short takes is hopeful, but hope needs effort to come to fruition. And in one piece of good news, NATO has granted candidate status to Ukraine. President Zelenskyy thanked each nation’s leader by name and the name of the country, and also the President of the EU, on the Zoom call which notified him. Mitch (I had missed it.)
Cartoon –
Short Takes –
We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going Somewhere Worse
Quote – If a fetus is a person, then a legal framework can be invented to require someone who has one living inside her to do everything in her power to protect it, including—as happened to Savita Halappanavar, in Ireland, which operated under a fetal-personhood doctrine until 2018, and to Izabela Sajbor, in Poland, where all abortion is effectively illegal—to die. No other such obligation exists anywhere in our society, which grants cops the freedom to stand by as children are murdered behind an unlocked door. Click through for full article, including optional audio. The New Yorker is right. There has never been a time in history when women have been quite as discounted as this decision ad its eventuality imposes. And the article does not even go into other rights wich are likely to disappear – and h=not just women’s rights – as subsequent decisions come to reflect the logical consequences of this one.
POGO – Accountability: The Path to Improve Government Effectiveness and the Antidote to Authoritarianism
Quote – There are six primary mechanisms that, if working properly, serve as pillars of accountability in federal government. They are: whistleblowers, who expose wrongdoing; inspectors general, who serve as independent watchdogs at each government agency; congressional oversight, which provides a check on executive power; transparency and civil society participation, which ensure that the government answers to the people; independent journalism, which investigates and exposes wrongdoing; and the equal application of the rule of law to the highest levels of government. Click through for full analysis. Progressives’ work is never done. Of course, that is true of all whose work is or includes cleaning up the messes made by others.
So the Supreme Court has reversed Roe v Wade. They have turned the United States back into a crazy quilt of widely differing abortion and other reproductive laws. Anti-choice bums can dance and jump and guzzle champagne all they like. Guess who else was cheering: Organized crime bosses, rubbing their paws as they contemplate the back-alley “clinics” they will open or coerce into supporting the Mob.
Fortunately, there is plenty of good news. Many local and state governments began taking steps to safeguard reproductive freedom as soon as the Roe leak became national news. California lawmakers have passed legislation that protects abortion providers and patients from civil actions coming from states hostile to reproductive rights. Colorado, which has long protected abortion rights, is preparing for a tsunami of patients from other states. Numerous companies have pledged to help their employees travel to where they can get abortions. Cities have passed resolutions protecting reproductive rights, and many state DAs have declared that they will not enforce trigger laws or pre-Roe laws.
This will lead to tension with states such as Oklahoma and Texas that want to prevent people from getting abortions – by any means possible. Citizen bounty hunters hoping to collect their thirty pieces of silver will be lurking on highways and byways, and examining social media for clues to who is seeking an abortion. Defenders of reproductive rights will need to take many precautions against spying, as an innocent message that has nothing to do with abortion could easily be misinterpreted. And since we are such a heavily armed country, there almost certainly will be bloodshed. Anti-choice crusaders have proven time and again that they will use violence to further their evil ends.
If anti-choice advocates are hoping for an abortion-free America, dream on. All you have done is halt legal abortions, and only in certain states. Illegal back-alley abortions will still occur. Desperate women will resort to knitting needles and “accidental” falls. Also, what about the pills for medical abortions, easily available by mail – and almost certainly easy to smuggle? Human ingenuity found plenty of loopholes in Prohibition, and ingenuity – along with determination and desperation – will help people wiggle through or past any anti-choice laws.
This is not the end of the battle over U.S. wombs – this is only Pearl Harbor. The reversal of Roe v Wade has spurred abortion rights advocates to take to the streets and raise hell, to pester their elected officials, to support organizations like Planned Parenthood, to pledge action in defense of reproductive rights. We need to demand laws that protect reproductive freedom, and vote in candidates who will heed the voice of the people rather than a small and narrow-minded minority.
At the end of the movie Tora Tora Tora, Admiral Yamamoto says “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” There is no hard evidence he actually said this, but the quote is germane to the defenders of reproductive choice. A comfortable majority of US residents wanted Roe v Wade to stay, and that majority is now mad as hell. And that majority votes! We can make sure that “right-to-life’s” victory is Pyrrhic in the extreme.
Mitch (I had missed it.)
