Another win for theocracy:

The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of a former high school football coach from Washington state in a case about religious freedom and prayer in public schools. In a 6 to 3 decision delivered by Justice Gorsuch, the conservative supermajority decided in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District that coach Joseph Kennedy’s Christian prayers after the games were protected by freedom of speech and freedom of religion under the First Amendment. “The Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike,” Gorsuch wrote.

But of course an adult in authority over teenagers is not just exercising freedom of speech and religion by praying in their presence. That adult is nudging the teenagers to pray too. That’s the whole point. The coach could just pray inwardly; doing it aloud and kneeling and in their presence is a hard nudge.

In a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Breyer and Kagan, Justice Sotomayor argues the decision rejects “longstanding concerns” about government endorsement of religion and “does a disservice to schools and the young citizens they serve, as well as to our Nation’s longstanding commitment to the separation of church and state.”

During the oral arguments in April, Justice Elena Kagan noted, “The idea of why the school can discipline him is that it puts some kind of undue pressure, a kind of coercion, on students to participate in religious activities when they may not wish to, when their religion is different or when they have no religion.”

To put it mildly. I think it’s all too obvious what kind of pressure it puts on.

The tweet has since been deleted but the screenshots live on.

A former friend of Ivanka Trump has taken to social media to claim that she supported her in getting an abortion when she was younger.

In the since-deleted tweet, Lauren Santo Domingo, a high school friend of Ivanka’s, claimed to have taken Ivanka, first daughter of former President Donald Trump and former senior White House Adviser, to get the alleged abortion.

…

“Ivanka Trump you are noticeably quiet today,” Domingo’s tweet read.

“The high school friends who took you to get an abortion are not.”

Pass the brioche.

The horrors are rolling in.

Got that? In Ohio it’s now ILLEGAL to end a pregnancy that will produce a baby that can’t survive.

Women must be made to pay, is that it?

Updating to add:

Another Savita Halappanavar, although this one survived – just barely, and no thanks to the Catholic hospital that tried to kill her.

I recommend reading the whole thing. There are a lot of details, so it’s a long thread. I’ll share just some.

It’s a Catholic hospital. Way too many hospitals are Catholic: the church has been infiltrating them on purpose, to force its revolting dogma on unwilling people who need health care.

She had to go back to the Catholic hospital, because insurance.

That’s how Savita Halappanavar was murdered. They refused to treat her until there was no heartbeat, so she died.

But oh no, the church doesn’t allow that. The church does however run a great many hospitals in the US, and uses its power to murder women this way.

Game on.

Julie in The Mail:

My planned talk was cancelled on the ludicrous grounds that my views on transgender rights are ‘at odds’ with civic policy. Without speaking to me, or bothering to discover what I actually believe, the council decided to deny me the right to speak on their premises.

So I am going to sue them. On behalf of every woman who is being told to shut up and stay quiet, during the worst misogynist backlash I have witnessed in my lifetime, I’m taking the council to court.

They’ll hear very soon from my lawyers. And there are a lot of us, because from the moment news began to spread on Saturday that I was barred from addressing the sold-out meeting at Aspley Library, my email inbox was pinging with messages of support and legal advice.

The Equality Act of 2010, articles 9 to 11 of the Human Rights Act and the recent ruling in the Maya Forstater case — where a woman who lost her job after saying transgender women are ‘not women’ won her appeal against an employment tribunal — were cited.

In layman’s terms, that all means Nottingham City Council doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

What they did to her is more outrageous than I knew. She was pleased to be asked to speak at Aspley Library, because it’s in a deprived area and at risk of being closed; she thought she was doing her bit to help it stay open. There was no fee, and she was paying her own expenses, including a hotel because there was a rail strike on the day. She was on the train when the organizers phoned her with the news the council had vetoed her. It’s astoundingly rude, and just plain mean.

To abandon the talk was unthinkable. Every ticket had sold, which meant there were dozens of women eager to learn how they could get involved in campaigning to end rape and domestic abuse.

So they held the event in the car park.

The self-proclaimed ‘trans activists’ were shouting abuse before I even started to speak.

It’s almost as if that’s all there is to “trans activism” – bullying women at every opportunity.

Well I’ll be darned, here’s one that doesn’t go all coy about mentioning the W-people. Of course that could be because they’re asking for donations, so it’s not in their interest to piss off the people they’re asking to donate.

Originally a comment by Sackbut at Miscellany Room.

I attended a Rally for Reproductive Rights near the Alabama state capitol today. I missed the first part, but caught most of it. It was well attended; I’m no good at estimating crowds, but I think there were 300-400 people there.

There were lots of signs, at least 50, some of them rather clever. Lots of gender neutral language. I noticed 3-4 signs that mentioned “women”; one mentioned “female” in contrast to “men”. Maybe 3-4 signs were explicitly about trans people, including “abortion is not just a cis issue”.

There were members of a local abortion clinic escort group providing informal security. I know a number of these people, and I think quite highly of them, but I do note that the organization that provides the escorts has greatly expanded its focus to include “LGBTQ+” issues (the escort vests have rainbow designs, for instance), and they are fully onboard with gender ideology. Several of the escorts were waving enormous Pride flags. Flags related to women were non-existent.

I was enormously pleased to see my district’s Democratic nominee for Congress speak at the rally. She spoke well; she spoke forcefully; she spoke of women.

Rally participants marched from the main rally point to the capitol building, urged on by a chant leader. The chants en route said we were gathered for “reproductive rights”, “transgender rights”, “disability rights”, and “black lives matter”. No mention of women, and a 3::1 scope creep. At the capitol, the chant leader spoke of the governor’s terrible comments about the fall of Roe, and mixed in the state’s recent “anti trans” bills. I can party see that some people consider all these actions by Republican lawmakers part of the same thing, but they really aren’t, whether or not we agree they are all bad. The same lawmakers have failed to expand Medicaid, but that didn’t come up at the rally for some reason; ditto raising the minimum wage and a host of other perennial issues.

So, overall, I was pleased with the response, and displeased at the scope creep. At least people with “women” signs didn’t seem to get any grief from other attendees.

MSNBC generously gives us four men talking about abortion rights. I guess there just aren’t that many women in the world?

Sonia Sodha on the ruling:

It leaves abortion rights to the states, meaning abortion is now illegal or soon-to-be illegal in 22 states in all or most circumstances, including, in some states, in cases of rape. It comes in the wake of already reduced access to abortion in many of those states as a result of practical restrictions on the operation of abortion clinics. It is a dramatic rollback of women’s rights in one of the world’s richest countries, which prides itself on its protection of individual liberties.

Richest and in some ways most advanced…and in others most regressive, by a huge margin.

It has been estimated that maternal mortality will increase by 20% in places with a ban. It is always inhumane and degrading to force a woman to give birth against her will, but there is something particularly chilling about doing it in a country as unequal as the US, where half of women seeking an abortion live below the poverty line. The US is a terrible place to be a poor woman: exceptional among nations belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in having zero national entitlement to maternity pay, it has no universal healthcare, the highest rates of maternal mortality of any wealthy nation and barely any support with the costs of childcare.

Those are some of the Most Regressive bits.

The US – a society in which individual rights are so prized, but in which women are treated as if they are men who just happen to have wombs – offers a cautionary tale. We forget at our peril that the patriarchal oppression of women is heavily rooted in our reproductive systems and that equality cannot be achieved without recognising that women are a sex class who need specific rights, to abortion for one, quite apart from those accorded to men. Yet even as conservative justices write that banning abortion does not amount to sex discrimination, “women” has become an offensive and exclusionary word to some on the American left.

And even now they’re popping up everywhere to squeak “It’s not just women who need abortion rights!!”

Oh yes it is.

A law professor at UC Irvine contradicts Alito:

Black women’s sexual subordination and forced pregnancies were foundational to slavery. If cotton was euphemistically king, Black women’s wealth-maximizing forced reproduction was queen.

Because those forced pregnancies were worth a lot of money – money for the enslaver, of course, not for the slave.

Ending the forced sexual and reproductive servitude of Black girls and women was a critical part of the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments. The overturning of Roe v. Wade reveals the Supreme Court’s neglectful reading of the amendments that abolished slavery and guaranteed all people equal protection under the law. It means the erasure of Black women from the Constitution.

Mandated, forced or compulsory pregnancy contravene enumerated rights in the Constitution, namely the 13th Amendment’s prohibition against involuntary servitude and protection of bodily autonomy, as well as the 14th Amendment’s defense of privacy and freedom.

Women don’t have bodily autonomy if they can’t cancel unwanted pregnancies. They have even less bodily autonomy than slaves and prisoner and draftees: they are the only humans forced to have another whole entire human being inside them for three quarters of a year. (If you want that resident human it can be a meaningful experience despite the discomforts, but if you don’t want it it’s a whole other story.)

This Supreme Court demonstrates a selective and opportunistic interpretation of the Constitution and legal history, which ignores the intent of the 13th and 14th Amendments, especially as related to Black women’s bodily autonomy, liberty and privacy which extended beyond freeing them from labor in cotton fields to shielding them from rape and forced reproduction. The horrors inflicted on Black women during slavery, especially sexual violations and forced pregnancies, have been all but wiped from cultural and legal memory. Ultimately, this failure disserves all women.

Even Karens. I’ve seen sadistic men rejoicing at the victory over “Karens” on social media since the ruling came down – white men, of course.

To understand the gravity of what is at stake, one need only turn to the Supreme Court’s own recent history. In 2016, Justice Stephen Breyer noted in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, women are 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion. The United States bears the chilling distinction of being the most dangerous place in the industrialized world to give birth, ranking 55th overall in the world.

Pause to let that sink in. 55th!!! We’re one of the very richest yet that’s where we are.

[S]lavery’s vestiges persisted in Southern states, including within the domains of privacy, child rearing and marriage. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, better known as the “Freedmen’s Bureau,” founded March 1865, collected letters written by Black mothers despairing over vile “apprenticeships” whereby their children were kidnapped and returned to bondage under the guise of traineeships.

Congress followed in 1868 with the ratification of the 14th Amendment, which further secured the interests of Black women who had been subjected to cruelties inflicted on them physically, reproductively, and psychologically.

The 14th Amendment opens with the sentence, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States … are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” and as such would be protected by the laws of the United States. Such language applied to infants born to Black women, changing the provisions of law that had long denied Black children citizenship and the protection of laws. Lawmakers were understandably concerned about overturning states laws that had denied children the dignity of personhood.

Reconstruction-era lawmakers that is. There was a ferocious Reaction all too soon. We’re still living in it.

Justice Samuel Alito’s claim, that there is no enumeration and original meaning in the Constitution related to involuntary sexual subordination and reproduction, misreads and misunderstands American slavery, the social conditions of that enterprise and legal history. It misinterprets how slavery was abolished, ignores the deliberation and debates within Congress, and craftily renders Black women and their bondage invisible.

It seems like an incredibly large thing to leave out, but people have been leaving it out all this time.

The Times on Alito’s long patient campaign to make women prisoners of their own bodies again:

Mr. Alito became interested in constitutional law during college largely because he disagreed with the Supreme Court at the time on criminal procedure, the establishment clause and reapportionment, he has written. The court in the 1960s issued rulings on those topics that conservatives disliked, including protecting the rights of suspects in police custody, limiting prayer in public schools, and requiring electoral districts to have roughly equal populations.

More prayer and fewer rights for other people, that’s what he wanted, along with less ability for the fewer-rights people to fight back via the ballot box. I guess that’s “conservatism”? More power and privilege for rich [white] men and much less for everyone else?

But in 2016 and 2020, just as in 1985, a new frontal attack on abortion rights would have failed. With Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg still on the bench, there were not five votes to overturn Roe. This year, there was no longer need for a restrained, slower-burning approach.

Over the objections of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — who agreed that a Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks should be upheld, but said that the majority’s “dramatic and consequential ruling is unnecessary to decide the case before us” and violated the principle of judicial restraint — the long-envisioned time for a direct assault on Roe had come.

“Abortion presents a profound moral question,” Justice Alito wrote. “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each state from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”

Well, that is, the people carefully gerrymandered and voter-intimidationed to exercise their authority according to Alito’s lifelong wishes.

Brave new world.

They deserve it because…what? They think women get to own their own bodies just like the real people?

Seinfeld jokes fit well.

There are some oddities in the Nottingham Council axes Julie Bindel’s talk at the library story.

Council chiefs cancelled a talk by Julie Bindel, the feminist writer, on protecting women from male violence because it contradicts their position on trans rights.

The talk was scheduled at (and by) the library. Do city councils generally oversee items like what talks libraries are allowed to present? Do they generally veto decisions of that kind, on the grounds that they don’t like the speaker’s ideas?

It doesn’t sound right to me. I’m not an expert in city government but I live in a city and I did work for a city department for several years. It’s my impression that city departments do their own scheduling of talks and deciding of what talks to have. It is just an impression, I haven’t researched it, but I think it’s based on some relevant facts, like how the hell would anybody get anything done if that level of micromanagement were normal? I don’t think city councils do micromanage that way, not least because it would enrage everyone and cause endless argument and fuss and gridlock.

It seems pretty damn highhanded for a council to tell the library what kind of talks it can have. I suppose “within reason” plays its usual role here: I suppose talks by the Proud Boys would be dangerous enough that the higher ups might intervene, but short of that – I doubt this is normal.

On Saturday, Nottingham City Council said allowing Ms Bindel to speak at one of its libraries would violate its commitment to being an “inclusive city”.

But it wouldn’t. Even if you believe the insulting claim that Julie is “anti-inclusive,” it still wouldn’t. One person saying things you don’t agree with at a library branch can’t violate a whole City Council’s commitment to anything. If that were the criterion nobody could talk at all.

Citing its allegiance to the campaign group Stonewall, the council said it was preventing the event from going ahead because of Ms Bindel’s views on transgender rights and in support of the city’s LGBT community.

So because of its allegiance to the misogynistic and totalitarian pests at Stonewall, it’s high-handedly telling a library branch what guest speakers it can and can’t have.

I don’t think this is normal. I wonder if it even violates some of their own rules.

Even the National Women’s Law Center refuses to say it.

Interesting trick, being a national women’s law center while refusing to mention women.

Blah blah blah do this do that but above all DON’T MENTION WOMEN.

No sign of women in that one – you, our, we, our, our, we, we, you – but no women.

People people. Sssshhhhh don’t mention women.

One tiny stumble – they retweeted Rebecca Traister’s quotation from the dissent.

Just an aberration, that one.

You, you, you. But who are you?

Obama does it.

Someone – Americans – but no women.

People.

You you you our we you:

Planned Parenthood also not helping. Pinned tweet:

You, you, you, you. Who? Who are you?

Women. Women, of course, but it doesn’t do to say so.

ACLU not helping AS USUAL.

It’s not persons this enslavement is done to, it’s WOMEN.

The ACLU is so determinedly not an ally that it’s become an enemy. Yesterday of all days they still erased women – when talking about abortion needs!

More responses to Nottingham City Council’s libelous and misogynist actions and statement:

Reactions to Nottingham Council’s breezy libeling of Julie Bindel are harsh.