They will take aim at additional basic human rights
Pelosi wrote a letter to the Dems today:
Dear Democratic Colleague,
Last Monday, the Nation saw a draft of a Supreme Court decision that sadly would overturn Roe v. Wade, an action which is the culmination of Republicans’ decades-long crusade against women’s fundamental freedoms.
With this draft ruling striking down the nearly fifty-year-old precedent of Roe v. Wade and undermining the Constitutional right to privacy, Republicans would rip away women’s right to make the most intimate and personal decisions. If handed down, this decision by GOP-appointed Justices would mean that, for the first time in our history, America’s daughters will have less freedom than their mothers.
Republicans have made clear that their goal will be to seek to criminalize abortion nationwide. Republican state legislators across the country are already advancing extreme new laws, seeking to arrest doctors for offering reproductive care, ban abortion entirely with no exceptions, and even charge women with murder who exercise their right to choose. These draconian measures could even criminalize contraceptive care, in vitro fertilization and post-miscarriage care, dragging our nation back to a dark time decades into the past.
Make no mistake: once Republicans have dispensed with precedent and privacy in overturning Roe, they will take aim at additional basic human rights. At this pivotal moment, the stakes for women – and every American – could not be higher.
And the prospects could not be bleaker. Well they could, but they’re more than bleak enough. It’s all too likely that the Dems will lose both the House and the Senate in just six months. Gilead is on the horizon.
“women’s” … “daughters” … “mothers” …
The dam has finally broken.
Serious question: are we supposed to refer to trans men who give birth as “mothers” or “fathers”? Or I guess that’s the dilemma that “birthing persons” is intended to avoid.
@2:
https://www.noconflicttheysaid.org/post/female-erasure
“A trans man went on to speak about their experience giving birth as a ‘father’ and completely derailed from the issue of access to safe abortions and began talking about Trans genocide-comparing it to the genocide of our Indigenous population.”
There are lessons here for liberals.
You know why the anti-choicers won? Because they’re patient, and they understand how power works.
There were times when the anti-choice movement was really pissed off and disillusioned. As of 1992, Republican presidents had made the last eleven Supreme Court appointments. But one of those appointees (Blackmun) wrote Roe v. Wade, and two others (Burger and Powell) joined it. In 1992, they thought they were finally going to overturn Roe, and apparently they were close, until three more GOP appointees (O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter) wrote the controlling opinion in Casey that altered but preserved the core of Roe, joining Blackmun and yet another GOP appointee, Stevens. I had forgotten just how lopsided the Court had become — Casey was five GOP justices outvoting three others (plus Byron White, who was a JFK appointee and Roe dissenter).
The anti-choicers bitched and moaned about how voting for Republicans didn’t seem to be doing them any good, and they put a lot of pressure on the GOP to deliver on all that pro-life rhetoric. But you know what they didn’t do? They didn’t stop voting GOP. They didn’t stay home because they weren’t getting everything they wanted. They didn’t throw away votes on hopeless third-party spoiler candidates who would just throw the election to a Dem. They knew that, from their point of view, a party that only partly delivered for them was a hell of a lot better than a party that completely opposed their agenda.
Eventually, that GOP Supreme Court majority whittled away at Roe and Casey, upholding all sorts of restrictions while still paying lip service to the right to choose. And more importantly, that Supreme Court decided the 2000 election in favor of Bush. Then O’Connor retired strategically so Bush could name her replacement.
Then GOP voters mostly held their noses and voted for Trump, a guy who they knew wasn’t really, deep down, one of them, but he had the right letter beside his name. And the rest is history. The right to choose was toast the moment Trump won in 2016, the only question was whether they’d explicitly overrule Roe like Alito wants to, or go with Roberts’ approach of smothering it in the bathtub.
That’s not the full story, of course. They also worked behind the scenes to build up organizations like the Federalist Society, so they could prepare lists of pre-approved doctrinaire judges who wouldn’t turn into “Souters.”
Meanwhile, liberals (this is not directed at anyone here) are already gearing up the circular firing squad. Why, we just elected Biden and narrow majorities in Congress, how could a Supreme Court decision possibly come out wrong for us? The answer, clearly, is to stop voting for Democrats, because they don’t deliver!
A mass move from the various competing brands of Christianity to one or two of the far less numerous brands of Islam could also be on the cards. It is a choice, for those inclined to religious belief, between the religious tradition they were born and raised in (ie homage to their ancestry) and the one that does the most towards keeping women in subjection; which has to be Islam by a country mile.
But in opting to descend into something akin to a new Dark Age, believers must also be prepared to pay a high price economically. Polytheist and multi-relgious India (much more tolerant of freethinkers) and Islamic E and W Pakistan (West-Pakistan -India- East Pakistan) sit side by side on the south coast of the Eurasian landmass as if part of a controlled experiment on the effect of Islam on peoples of a given ethnicity. India is an economic powerhouse, and Pakistan is a total basket-case.
America’s traditional economic prosperity has rested on abundant resources and a multitude of squabbling religious sects, with none having an outright dominance comparable to that of the Anglican Church in England. But its very own battle of the sexes might eventually turn out to be as important as that North-South divide which resulted in its Civil War.
Well India *wants* to be Pakistan now, regardless of what impact that’s likely to have economically. Perhaps there’s a strong parallel there.
To borrow the immortal words of Senator Pauline Hanson: Please explain.?
omar – simples. The Hindu Nationalists led by Mohdi are creating a Hindustanian theocracy. There is no room for tolerance or dissent. You will be Hindu or else. Just like Pakistan and Islam.
The BJP is all about India for Hindus and throwing out the secular democracy that made it thrive; Pakistan’s existence as a thoroughly homogeneous religious state is envied by the nationalists. Maybe they think they can have prosperity without the pluralism but that doesn’t necessarily follow.
I don’t know, it may not be so much the pluralism as the fact that the nationalist parties always have such hard-line policies and view modernism as evil, so they try to move back to the time of goat herding and weaving. Like the Amish, they have enshrined a particular time as the best of times, and today as depraved and decadent. And I see a lot of liberals agreeing with them, though I imagine they don’t believe the same things are decadent – like women being able to walk around without a bag on, or men and women working side by side to make the pizza or run the office.
Before Europe could rid itself of feudalism and unleash the forces of economic progress, it had to have its wars of religion. Then heresy-hunts became all the rage in European colonial transplants like Massachussetts. (We were fortunately spared much of that bullshit here in New South Wales.)
Then a lot of the energy that could have gone into religious wars went into world wars 1 and 2, which latter nternally united each of the individual countries participating, for a while at least, each in its own wave of patriotic fervour.
And it’s a bit hard to keep them goat herding and weaving after they’ve seen Paree.
Which is why they are desperately trying to pass draconian laws. In Muslim countries? No problem. They got in power and passed draconian laws. Here, the theocrats do have positions of power, but there is a counter power that has, at least until now, kept them from going all the way over the top.
But I suspect if these hard line laws ever took effect, their own parishioners would turn on them. While it is in the abstract, living according to church teaching sounds great. When they have to give up what they actually enjoy? Forget it. That’s for the neighbor, the sinner who goes to the wrong church.
Yes, heaven forfend their ever having to meet the standards they impose upon others.