Chipping away at voting rights.

Wisconsin Supreme Court outlaws ballot drop boxes for elections

A divided Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the use of ballot drop boxes, which increased substantially across the country during the COVID-19 pandemic, is illegal under state law.

In a 4-3 ruling, the court’s conservative majority also said voters cannot have other people return their completed ballots in person to a clerk’s office, though it declined to rule on whether anyone other than a voter can send in ballots by mail.

In other words the court made voting more difficult for people in Wisconsin. What does making voting more difficult accomplish? It reduces voting by poor people, non-white people, disabled people…aka people likely to vote for the not-Republicans.

Wisconsin is likely a key battleground in the 2024 presidential election. In 2016, Trump won the state by fewer than 25,000 votes out of 2.8 million cast, and in 2020, President Joe Biden, a Democrat, carried Wisconsin by fewer than 21,000 votes out of 3.2 million cast.

They need that thumb on the scale.

In dissent, Justice Ann Walsh Bradley – joined by the court’s two other liberals – said the decision erected a new barrier to voting with little justification.

“Although it pays lip service to the import of the right to vote, the majority/lead opinion has the practical effect of making it more difficult to exercise it,” she wrote.

Naturally enough, since the whole point of drop boxes is to make voting easier.

The dissent also argued that the decision to bar other people from returning ballots to clerks’ offices would primarily hurt homebound residents, including disabled and sick people.

And people with small children at home and no one else to take over the child duty. That’s a lot of people – mostly women, of course.

Her “government service” forsooth.

Also, way to make it about her.

Also, it’s not the mere death, much less the “passing,” it’s the assassination.

In happier times –

Heads of state and…Goldilocks?

No I can’t just ignore this and move on. I should but I can’t. A Washington Post article that purports to “explain” what “terfs” are as if no one had ever heard of them before. It’s painfully stupid.

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision last month to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion, many celebrities have spoken out about what they see as a loss of reproductive rights and bodily autonomy.

First paragraph and already wtf? Who cares what “celebrities” have spoken out about? The protagonists here are women, not celebrities. And “what they see as” a loss of reproductive rights and bodily autonomy? As if there’s some other way to see it? As if this is just some tendentious whim of some celebrities as opposed to women’s basic need and right to decide what they want to do with their lives? Obviously overturning Roe is the loss of reproductive rights and of bodily autonomy. If you can’t say no to someone taking up residence in your abdomen and then expanding, you don’t have bodily autonomy. That remains true even though it’s how we all got here and even though many women are overjoyed when they get to do it.

Then there’s a boring summary of the Midler and Gray tweets and the shock-horror about them blah blah.

Some on social media referred to the celebrities as “TERFs,” an acronym for “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” — and drew comparisons to author J.K. Rowling, who has come under criticism from trans advocates in the past. 

…

Many trans advocates and allies saw in Midler and Gray’s comments the kind of talking points typically associated with anti-trans feminists, who are also known as “gender critical” feminists.

But we’re not “anti-trans” feminists. That’s one of the more subtle lies about us: it implies that we’re anti trans people, when what we reject is the ideology and especially the authoritarian imposition of the ideology on all of us.

These anti-trans feminists have recently found common ground — and increasing visibility and power — with conservative evangelical Christians, a group that has been largely credited with mobilizing, politically and socially, to curtail abortion and other reproductive rights.

And that’s where the Post veers into outright lying. No we fucking haven’t. Some gender critical feminists have, but not many. Conservative evangelical Christians are anti-feminist, so the pairing would be pretty uncomfortable, before we even get to everything else wrong about conservative evangelical Christians.

Midler and Gray’s remarks are also coming at a significant time for both trans people and cisgender women, experts note: Both groups are widely seen as the most invested in — and vulnerable to — a recent rollback of reproductive rights and bodily autonomy.

We’re not cisgender women. Don’t call us that. And widely seen as or not, trans people as such are not vulnerable to the rollback; they’re vulnerable to it only if they’re women. It’s the women bit, not the trans bit. The overturn of Roe is a crime against women, not a crime against trans people. It has nothing to do with being trans.

Given the political moment, it’s no wonder the two celebrities touched off a conversation about transphobic language, defining womanhood and more. We asked advocates and experts to contextualize what’s at play.

Nonsense. This particular moment is no more a wonder-free moment to babble about trans issues than any other moment. Also it’s in play, not at play.

In the past decade, TERF has become increasingly common as a shorthand way of identifying a person who self-identifies as a feminist but is unwilling to include transgender women and girls in their advocacy — and more frequently, have actively sought to exclude trans women from women’s spaces.

What a stupid, roundabout, passive-aggressive way to put it. We’re “unwilling” to include dogs or trees or rototillers in our advocacy, too; so what? Feminist advocacy is about women, not trans people. Women who say they are trans are “included” in our advocacy, whether they like it or not, because we advocate for women. Men, trans or otherwise, are not, because they don’t need to be.

They were considered a fringe offshoot of the women’s rights movement of the 1970s and are still a relatively small group, according to Heron Greenesmith, a senior research analyst for LGBTQ justice at Political Research Associates, a left-leaning social justice research and strategy organization.

Nonsense. They weren’t considered anything of the feminism of the 70s. It wasn’t an issue.

What interests Greenesmith about this group is how it adopts feminist principles “while actually undermining bodily autonomy … one of those foundational principles of feminism,” they said.

Gotcha! Right?

No. The right to abortion is not comparable to a “right” to mutilate yourself in an attempt to resemble the other sex.

Proponents of anti-trans feminism have argued that trans women diminish the power and rights of cisgender women. Originally, “TERF” referred to a specific, radical feminist ideology, but in recent years it has become an umbrella term to describe anyone who opposes trans rights or advocacy in the name of feminism.

But how are we defining “trans rights”? Of course, like all hacks who do these pieces, she doesn’t say. How are we defining “trans advocacy”? Doesn’t say.

The fact that Midler and Gray, who both consider themselves allies of the LGBTQ community, could knowingly or unknowingly spout anti-trans rhetoric is a sign of how much that messaging has proliferated in the mainstream, experts say.

“Spout”? Letting the mask slip there, Anne Branigin.

There’s more but I’ve had enough.

H/t What a Maroon

statenews.org and Jo Ingles know who men are, but somehow have lost the word “women.”

Jo Ingles is “News Reporter/Producer at Ohio Public Radio and Television’s Statehouse News Bureau – serving all of Ohio’s NPR and PBS stations” yet apparently she doesn’t know it’s women who get pregnant. That seems embarrassing.

Starts well:

We’re in a moment of antifeminist backlash, and, increasingly, that backlash seems aimed at silencing women, or punishing the women who won’t shut up. It’s a perilous time for women’s speech – or at least, it’s a perilous time for women who speak out against sexism. Over the course of this spring and summer, threats to feminist activists and abuse survivors have multiplied and become more serious, with women who speak out against men’s violence or in favor of women’s rights increasingly targeted by abusers, vigilantes, antifeminist activists and lawmakers, and the courts.

And people who consider themselves trans-rights activists.

Defamation suits are becoming a routine tool of retaliation and revenge for men accused of sexual and domestic abuse – and a growing threat to women’s ability to safely and freely speak about their own lives. The advocacy group Know Your IX, which lobbies on behalf of student survivors of sexual violence, says that 23% of students who make Title IX complaints are threatened with defamation suits by their alleged abusers.

That stinks, as does the campaign of intimidation against gender-critical feminists.

Now the activist group National Right to Life, an anti-choice organization that has been influential in pushing state legislatures to the right on women’s rights, is proposing bans on speech about abortion. In reporting for the non-profit news outlet Prism, Ashton Lattimore writes that the model bill, which National Right to Life hopes will be adopted by state legislatures, seeks to impose both criminal and civil penalties for actions such as “aiding and abetting” abortion, terms defined so broadly as to include “hosting or maintaining a website, or providing an internet service, that encourages or facilitates efforts to obtain an illegal abortion”.

That’s horrific, but our ability to fight back against such things has been kneecapped by the insistence on silencing women who know that men are not women. Moira Donegan doesn’t mention that particular form of silencing.

Wait a second though.

If you look at the full photo of our hero you can see that he’s both huge and angry-looking. It’s nice that he’s confident in his own mind that everyone was safe, but what I want to know is, how in hell does he think he can know that everyone else could know that? In particular, how does he think he can know women could know that?

I asked him that question and then read replies and saw that so did everyone else.

Pure coincidence. Completely random. The Post:

Democrats and Republicans in Congress on Thursday expressed alarm that the IRS under President Donald Trump may have targeted two of his political enemies with tax audits, joining in rare unity to call for an investigation into the matter.

The requests came a day after reports that the IRS initiated detailed reviews into the tax records of James B. Comey, the former FBI director, and Andrew McCabe, a deputy who later took over the agency. The two officials at the time had been primary targets of Trump’s ire after they probed the president in connection with his 2016 campaign, leading Comey to raise the possibility this week that the newly revealed audits amounted to political payback.

Knowledgeable people have been saying on Twitter that it’s wildly unlikely to be Just One of Those Things.

For some, the news even invoked the specter of the disgraced Nixon administration, when the president leveraged the IRS — and its vast powers to look into Americans’ finances — to pursue his political enemies before he was forced to resign.

…

The types of IRS audits they experienced are designed to be rare and random. The likelihood that two people so loathed by the former president would get audited within the space of a few years raised concerns for Comey about possible political misuse of the IRS’s authority.

The unlikelihood, that is, or the incredibly vanishingly tiny likelihood.

“I don’t know whether anything improper happened, but after learning how unusual this audit was and how badly Trump wanted to hurt me during that time, it made sense to try to figure it out,” Comey said in a statement. “Maybe it’s a coincidence or maybe somebody misused the I.R.S. to get at a political enemy. Given the role Trump wants to continue to play in our country, we should know the answer to that question.”

We should know it even if Trump flees the country today.

Boris Johnson has given in at last.

Scandal-ridden British Prime Minister Boris Johnson capitulated to mounting pressure to step down Thursday, announcing his decision after days of high-profile government resignations and calls from fellow Conservative Party members to quit.

If only we could have said the same of scandal-ridden Donald Trump.

“In the past few weeks, I have been trying to convince my colleagues it would be eccentric to change governments when we have achieved so much,” he said in his speech outside No. 10 Downing St. amid loud booing from the crowd nearby. “I regret not to be successful in those arguments and, of course, it’s painful not to be able to see through those projects myself.”

Johnson also said he planned to remain as prime minister until a successor is chosen — a move that may face opposition from others in an increasingly hostile Parliament.

Johnson should just tell them they have to be more inclusive.

Perfect photo.

Pink News rejoices that more people are spitting venom at radical feminist women.

New Queer as Folk is a big ‘fuck you’ to transphobes and a beautiful story of trans love, stars say

Aw iddn that sweet.

Queer as Folk stars Jesse James Keitel and CG have a simple message to people who don’t think trans people should exist: “Fuck you.”

Except of course that’s not what we think. It’s not about existing, it’s about claims about what one is. It’s about self-description. It’s about the new and worthless doctrine that people can change their sex, and not only that but they can do it just by saying the words. Existence isn’t the same as self-description. Exist away, exist your socks off, but if you start up a new ideology that says you’re a Dilophosaurus then we get to say your ideology is stupid and wrong. Bonus: you still exist.

Two decades ago, Queer as Folk came along and changed the game for gay representation on television – but today, it’s glaringly obvious that it didn’t represent the breadth and depth of the LGBTQ+ experience.

In other words we hadn’t yet smeared trans all over everything but now we know better.

The ACLU is really tanking.

They seem to have a very stupid very rude very belligerent person working for them and making them look bad on Twitter.

Oh the irony – the lie is on the other foot. Pamela Paul (her op-ed is clearly the target here) didn’t say that. She said “woman” has become verboten, meaning in general, and then she quoted a comment on the Roe decision by the ACLU that carefully did not say “women.” She did not say “the ACLU forbids the use of the word ‘woman’.” The lie is hers, there is no fallacy, the purported “hate” is in her head.

Please. Language matters. Feminism has always had a lot to say about language. Of course it matters if women and girls are simply airbrushed out of much of public discourse. I’m pretty confident Rebecca McCray wouldn’t sneer so happily at the idea that we shouldn’t airbrush Black people out of public discourse by carefully never mentioning them.

Also what is this “most marginalized” shit? Who says they’re “most marginalized”? Are men who pretend to be women really more marginalized than women, people of color, disabled people, lesbians and gays, immigrants, the working class, disabled people, homeless people? Pffffffff.

Brunt? What brunt? Trans people bear the brunt of the re-criminalization of abortion more than women do? Of course they don’t. Women bear that brunt, and no one else.

Aaaand out comes the nasty childish foul-mouthed brat. Lucky ACLU, having her on the team.

Miss her? How? Are we all supposed to dash around to her place to help block all her access to the NY Times? It’s a newspaper. It publishes op-eds. It can’t “miss” individuals who don’t like a particular editorial.

Transmisogyny doesn’t exist. Misogyny is hatred of women, “full stop.”

I wonder if the less stupid people at the ACLU – if there are any left – are cringing. They should be.

It’s not ideal that six people can doom the world to runaway planet heating.

The supreme court’s ruling that the US government could not use its existing powers to phase out coal-fired power generation without “clear congressional authorization” quickly ricocheted around the world among those now accustomed to looking on in dismay at America’s seemingly endless stumbles in addressing global heating.

The decision “flies in the face of established science and will set back the US’s commitment to keep global temperature below 1.5C”, said Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, in reference to the internationally agreed goal to limit global heating before it becomes truly catastrophic, manifesting in more severe heatwaves, floods, droughts and societal unrest.

Six people – three of them given the job by a moronic deranged criminal.

Biden’s promise to end oil and gas drilling on public land has been unfulfilled, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused gasoline prices to leap, prompting the president to urge oil companies to ramp up production, to the horror of climate campaigners.

And lots of us breathers, too.

The president has vowed that the US will cut its emissions in half by 2030 but this goal, and America’s waning international credibility on climate change, will be lost without both legislation from Congress and strong executive actions.

And it’s blindingly obvious that neither of those is going to happen.

The Guardian on today’s ruling:

A researcher who lost her job at a thinktank after tweeting that transgender women could not change their biological sex has won her claim that she was unfairly discriminated against because of her gender-critical beliefs.

Maya Forstater suffered direct discrimination when the Centre for Global Development (CGD), where she was a visiting fellow, did not renew her contract or fellowship, an employment tribunal found on Wednesday.

I think some local government policies are going to be in conflict with this ruling: the ones that state flat-out You May Not Say Thats on trans issues. There was a town council that came out with one just yesterday, I think; I’ve already forgotten which town it is.

The tribunal examined a number of tweets by Forstater, including tweets in which she drew an analogy between self-identifying trans women and Rachel Dolezal, a white American woman who misrepresented herself as black, and another in which she said: “A man’s internal feeling that he is a woman has no basis in material reality.” It concluded that the tweets asserted her gender-critical beliefs.

It said the same of one that described self-identification as a woman as “a feeling in their head”, rejecting the suggestion that it equated self-identification with mental illness.

The tribunal also considered tweets in which Forstater said she was surprised people could say they believed that males could be women, and that they are “tying themselves in knots”.

It said they were “fairly mild examples” of mockery, adding: “Mocking or satirising the opposing view is part of the common currency of debate.”

And when the opposing view is as absurd as this one is…

Maya’s statement to the press:

6th July 2022: Maya Forstater, who took a claim for belief discrimination against her former employer, the Center for Global Development, has been vindicated by a ruling that she was unlawfully discriminated against by her former employer on the basis of her protected belief.

This follows a ruling at an Employment Tribunal in June 2021 when Ms Forstater successfully established a binding legal precedent that gender-critical beliefs were in principle protected by the Equality Act. Following that appeal, her case continued at the Employment Tribunal, to determine whether she was unlawfully discriminated against by her former employer on the basis of her protected belief.

And the answer is yes, she was.

“My case matters for everyone who believes in the importance of truth and free speech.

“We are all free to believe whatever we wish. What we are not free to do is compel others to believe the same thing, to silence those who disagree with us or to force others to deny reality.

“Human beings cannot change sex. It is not hateful to say that; in fact it is important in order to treat everyone fairly and safely. It shouldn’t take courage to say this, and no one should lose their job for doing so.

…

“To hear that my case has helped other people to speak up against unfair and

discriminatory practices at work makes the hardship of the last three years easier to bear. All those who are fighting similar battles — and there are many such people now — have my solidarity and support.“

Truth matters.

Hey hey hey breaking news – Maya has won her tribunal!

Originally a Facebook post by an anonymous thoughts-haver.

Something about the way Matthew 6:5-6 (the bit about going into your closet to pray) is being shared around in the wake of the school prayer ruling has been bothering me, and I finally kind of figured out what it is. First, though, a disclaimer: I am an atheist who has read the whole bible more than once. I took some comparative religion classes in college, but I have never been a Christian and anything I say is coming from a theoretical understanding, not practical.

So, here’s a thing. The term “prayer” does not mean one simple thing. It doesn’t mean the same thing in all contexts, and it doesn’t mean the same thing to all people. When I see a football coach midfield praising Jesus for the game they just played, it’s easy for me, a nonbeliever, to say “what a hypocrite, praying in public like Matthew says not to do”. But that coach might not even think of it as praying, because to him prayer is the thing he only does in private. What he’s doing in public is witnessing, which is something his holy text calls for him to do. Mark 16:15: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” Matthew 28:19: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost”

There is no conflict in his mind between the admonition to pray in private and his making a spectacle of himself in public if what he’s doing in public isn’t praying. And if you call him on it, you are only reinforcing his belief that he is doing the right thing. Matthew 5:10-12: “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.”

Does that make what he’s doing any less coercive and less of a violation of the separation of church and state? Not by any sane standard (which is to say, to anyone who isn’t in the majority on the Supreme Court right now). But it does point to a problem that I think the left has right now, which is that it thinks using tactics which would work against it are going to work against the right.

I skimmed a study recently, and I wish I could find it now. What I remember it saying, though is this: conservatives are better at modelling the thought processes of liberals than vice versa. When given a list of questions to answer twice, once as yourself and once as you imagine a person on the opposite side of the political spectrum would answer, conservatives were better at answering how they thought liberals would than the other way around. They’re better at coming up with tactics which work in the real world, because they’re better at thinking about what would work on them if they were on the other side. They can look at our arguments and say “I understand what makes you think that, but here’s why I think you’re wrong”, while we’re looking at their arguments and saying “you think that because you’re bad”.

To call someone a hypocrite, you need to understand how their actions are in conflict with their beliefs. If you don’t know what their beliefs are, how are you supposed to do that? You can only be right accidentally, and that’s no way to be.

Make your language more inclusive, or you’re a bad person.

The trouble with that is, language can’t be “inclusive.” If it’s inclusive it will stop meaning anything, and then it will be useless. We need language. It does so much work for us. Imagine being suddenly transported to a tiny distant country where you don’t know the language and the people there don’t know yours – imagine how helpless you would feel.

We need the word “women,” the actual word that means what it has meant all these centuries. We need it and we need it to go on meaning what it has meant. If we’re forced to change it to mean “and some men” we’ll just have to find a new word to mean what women meant until that day. There’s no point in telling us to make it more “inclusive” because that’s not its job.

The outrage engine is overheating.

It’s possible that people are getting tired of hearing quite so much from “transgender people and their allies.”

“A few small healthcare cases”??? Give me a break.

“They had no skeletons pre-Enlightenment” hahahahahahahahaha

By the way what was that tweet?

The Willoughby dude is as usual doing his best to punish and exclude women.

Owen Jones talks of a “reversal on LGBTQ rights,” but of course what he means is mostly the T bit, which doesn’t belong with the LGB bit in the first place. As usual this ploy enables a lot of dishonest framing.

Even more terrifying is Texas’s banning of gender-affirming healthcare for young trans people, with their parents now legally defined as child abusers if they seek it.

But of course it’s not “healthcare.” Switch the frame and it’s mutilation and/or dangerous and damaging use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. It’s not healthcare as commonly understood at all. “Gender-affirming” is not a medical term – it’s a political one. No one can change sex, and “affirming” gender is just feel-good drivel. “Young trans people” is a very squishy category, because so is “trans” itself. It’s basically just an thought-balloon. There’s an idea that there’s such a thing as “trans” and that self-reporting is 100% reliable, but both of those claims are highly debatable.

In January, the Council of Europe placed the UK in the same category as Hungary, Poland, Russia and Turkey for its position on LGBTQ rights, while for the third year running the UK has been relegated in the annual ranking of LGBTQ rights across Europe. The overriding reason is the anti-trans moral panic that grips British society, fostered by an overwhelmingly hostile media and a government that is using trans people as a prop in a “culture war” (just as Margaret Thatcher used gay people in the 1980s), and has refused to ban trans conversion practices.

Owen Jones is himself using trans people as a prop in a culture war, at the same time as he uses verbal nudges like “gender-affirming healthcare” and “trans conversion practices.” We’re supposed to think “trans conversion” is exactly comparable to gay conversion therapy, i.e. psychiatry coaxing or pushing lesbians and gays to go straight, but in fact they’re different. There’s no delusion involved in being same-sex attracted, while thinking you can become the other sex is a delusion full stop.