Missouri Republicans Are Going to Absurd Lengths to Stop Voters from Having Their Say on Abortion – Mother Jones

Since then, the fiscal note has been at an impasse: Bailey won’t certify it, Fitzpatrick won’t cave, and there’s no other route for the process to move forward. “The law doesn’t even contemplate that we’d be in this situation,” says Tony Rothert, advocacy director for the ACLU of Missouri. “And what has happened is, no one has done anything.” In May, the ACLU of Missouri filed a lawsuit against Bailey, trying to get a court to force him to approve Fitzpatrick’s original estimate. Last month, a lower court agreed, ordering Bailey to certify the fiscal note. Yet when Bailey appealed, he was allowed to wait for a state Supreme Court hearing, which is set for July 18. “As long as I’m Attorney General, my office will continue to use every tool at its disposal to protect the unborn,” Bailey said in a press release earlier this month. “Our children are worth the fight.”

What caught my attention…

In Times Square and Sunset Strip, “American Gurl” Subverts Femininity… as i have stated before, i have an interest in all things feminine…

In contrast to a “singular idea,” the artists in “American Gurl” offer myriad depictions of women in America. Ayanna Dozier’s “Softer” (2020) critiques the societal demands that African-American women “soften” themselves, specifically through their appearance. Christine Yuan’s “Hoyeon as the International Woman of Mystery” (2022), originally commissioned by Vogue, casts Korean model and _Squid Game_ star Jung Ho-Yeon as an Irma Vep-style vamp who remakes herself for international (read American) consumption. “iGurl” (2022) by Sarah Nicole François is a disturbing digital vision of endless surgical enhancements in search of bodily perfection. “Can we keep up with the aesthetic pushed onto us?” questions Ahmed. “Can these surgeries actually work on us as fast as we can change ourselves online?” Other participating artists include Christelle de Castro, Kasey Elise Walker, Kitty Ca$h, and Leila Jarman.

Art Writing as an Extension of Life

As an arts writer, I am always envious when I find that someone has articulated not only art theory itself, but the way it is a natural part of life for someone who takes joy in the consideration of art. Chris Kraus did this brilliantly in _I Love Dick_(Semiotext(e), 1997); Morgan Meis does this with equal (and completely different) brilliance in _The Drunken Silenus_ (Slant Books, 2020). Randall manages this feat, as the title suggests, by contemplating 12 female artists who are important to her life.

With analysis that is either deeply intuitive or directly informed by personal experience or encounters, Randall presents the life of an artist as both subject and narrator. _Artists in My Life_dissolves the fourth wall between artist, art object, and viewer, offering a welcome approach to arts writing as an extension of how artists live.

The US Could Get Its First National LGBTQ+ History Museum… i only wonder how it will get through congress with so much anit-LGBTQ+ sentiment among conservatives…

A national museum dedicated to American LGBTQ+ history and culture could be coming to Washington, DC. United States Representative Mark Pocan introduced a bill on September 29 to establish the National Museum of American LGBTQ+ History and Culture, potentially as part of Washington, DC’s Smithsonian Institutions. Pocan is a Wisconsin Democrat who co-chairs the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus.

The bill establishes an eight-person committee to conduct research into the potential museum, including how much its collection would cost and whether it should in fact be part of the Smithsonian. If the bill passes, the committee will have 18 months before presenting their findings to the House of Representatives, who will then vote on a second bill to establish the museum.

Nevada GOP Secretary of State Candidate Promises to Make Trump President in 2024

At a rally for Nevada Republican candidates on Saturday, Republican nominee for secretary of state Jim Marchant promised that he and his fellow GOP nominees, if elected next month, would reinstall Donald Trump in the White House in 2024.

“We’re gonna fix the whole country and President Trump is gonna be president again,” Marchant promised as Trump stood beside him.

Judge Blocks State Abortion Ban As Attempt “To Completely Eliminate The Rights of Ohio Women”…

… who thought Gilead couldn’t happen…

According to affidavits submitted in the lawsuit, two additional minors who suffered sexual assault also had to leave the state for abortions. Cancer patients and other women with severe complications were also denied abortions. The Ohio Capital Journal summarized the evidence last month:

• The descriptions include those of three women who threatened suicide. They also include two women with cancer who couldn’t terminate their pregnancies and also couldn’t get cancer treatment while they were pregnant. 

• Another three examples were of women whose fetuses had severe abnormalities or other conditions that made a successful pregnancy impossible. Even so, they couldn’t get abortions in Ohio. 
• And in three cases, debilitating vomiting was caused by pregnancy—so bad in one case that a woman couldn’t get off the clinic floor. But neither could these women get abortions in Ohio, the affidavits said.

National Constitution Center Project Offers Constitutional Amendment Proposals with Broad Cross-Ideological Support

In 2020, the National Constitution Center sponsored a constitution-drafting project in which   it named three groups to produce their own revised versions of the Constitution: a conservative team, a libertarian team, and a progressive one—each composed of prominent academics and other experts on constitutional law issues. The exercised revealed some important points of agreement between the three teams (even though they also predictably  differed on other issues). This year, NCC reconvened the three teams and asked them to come up with a list of constitutional amendments they could jointly agree on.

… and these were…

• Term limits for Supreme Court justices
• Making impeachment easier (would actually make starting impeachment harder, convicting easier)
• Legislative Veto (wherein the legislature could veto executive action)
• Eliminating the requirement that the president be a natural-born citizen
• Making the Constitution easier to amend in the future

… most make sense on the face of it… the rest make sense upon reading the explanations…

… we unearthed some crab mac and cheese from the freezer last …night… so good… had seconds and did more snacking than i should have… also, a couple of vodka tonics and wine… all together, a bit calorific… more exercise yesterday than other days…

… just looked up the weather… mid 90’s through Sunday, when temps are projected to hit 100… not so unusual this time of year…

… some struggle with Lightroom yesterday… but got work done… wound up with not much to do in afternoon…

… HCR about SS deletion of texts from Jan 5 and 6… about 45 still trying to overturn election… about the election fraud investigation in Georgia… Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers being formerly censured by the Arizona Republican Party… for doing the right thing… protests in front of the Supreme Court where a number of legislators were arrested, including Carolyn Maloney, AOC… Lauren Robel filing a misconduct complaint against Todd Rosita who went on Fox News and said the doctor treating the ten year old rape victim had not done proper filings with the state when she had… the house passing a bill to protect gay marriage… will the senate follow?… 54 Republicans unwilling to go on record against gay marriage… 70% of all Americans and 55% of Republicans support gay marriage… including, i recently learned… Liz Cheney…

… then there is the Idaho Republican party which has included a plank in it’s platform that abortion is illegal in all circumstances, including those in which the mother’s life is at stake and the fetus won’t survive … Scott Herndon, running for the Idaho Senate sponsored the platform amendment saying…

“For the last 49 years we have essentially lost the argument in the culture because we have focused on abortion as the termination of a pregnancy and not the termination of a living human being,” Herndon said to fellow delegates, according to the Idaho Capital Sun. “We will never win this human rights issue, the greatest of our time, if we make allowances for the intentional killing of another human being.

… a man of course… doesn’t have to deal with the consequences… how could any woman support such a stance unless blinded by the Christian Patriarchy… this kind of stupidity makes the best case against religion of any kind… so much unnecessary suffering…

… another article reviewing the landscape of abortion battles across the nation… suggest sthat several polls show Dems picking up momentum in spite of Biden Administration poor approval ratings and a number of issues that normally drive voters away from the party in power… this all actually has the feel to me of an issue that will rapidly settle itself into national legislation as the horror stories start to proliferate… question is… who will be in control after 2024…

Among overall registered voters, 41 percent said they would prefer to see a Democrat-controlled Congress after the midterms, while 40 percent said they would opt for a Republican-controlled one. Republicans led by 1 percentage point among likely voters. The poll was based on responses from 849 registered voters in early July.

… this from an article on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and Buddhism…

Most music has a structure and purpose leading to a resolution.

… this struck me immediately as a condition of life… we want structure, purpose and resolution… so much of our entertainment industry is built on telling stories with structure, purpose and resolution… but what if such a thing is an illusion at best?… we are only passing through… there is nothing about individual lives that is a resolution to anything… we are all part of a greater flow and we do our best to swim within that flow in ways that give us hope and purpose… or at least i do… lately i have struggled with hope… struggled with purpose… in part… this is a condition of getting older… as time on earth runs short, we wonder what our purpose was?… we wonder, was there any meaning to it?… more from the article…

One can engage the sand mandala on many levels; its beauty, its precision, the mastery required to produce it, or the patterns and protection it offers towards awakening. But in the end, we cannot hold onto any of these as the mandala is destroyed and dispersed as a reminder of our own impermanence and return to our primordial source.

… i come to the end of my personal feeds so i suppose it might be time to go for a walk… make some pictures… get a coffee or hot chocolate… maybe down by the river today…

… later, after a long walk by the river… K&C… intense delicate tattooed barista at the helm this AM… she remembers me from last week… i commented on her tattoos favorably last week… still like them this week… she remembers me like we have seen each other more than once, which i don’t think we have…

… i start writing in my analog journal, then switch here… if i were to write something more penetrating, i would only need to copy it here… i don’t think the analog method offers enough perceptible benefit to make it the prevalent place to write…

… it is hot chocolate this morning… i decided the effort of the walk required it… also, needed something to feed my energy level…

… crying baby… my their voices can be so penetrating!… hard to tolerate… my immediate thought is get the baby out of here… this is peaceful morning time… why does the kid get to interrupt it that way?… it’s not a generous response… my ultimate tolerance is more generous… she walks down the aisle with her mother and gives me a charming almost smile while looking at me intently… mom takes her outside where she will be less of annoying if she cry/screams again… thank you mom…

Reading Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog, this…

Not ever hesitating, waves surge to reach human speech. They propose a truce. When we forget Ahab and converse only with Moby-Dick, the universe will manifest itself in full clarity.

… Moby Dick… one of my favorite reads… the message, forget human hubris and insanity, commune with nature, this is our salvation, or could be, if we’d dispense with appetite culture… if 45 is Ahab, are we Moby Dick?, no, we are the unwitting and unwilling among the crew… where then is Moby Dick?… the multiarchy… the misunderstood mythical beast… yes it is we who are being hunted to be extinguished…

… mother with baby, this one not a toddler, not noisy, not screaming just to hear itself scream…

… and the following paragraph from Sea and Fog…

And the sea ceased to be because it became the sea, and we stopped at the station of impermanence, and rose from our bewilderment to witness the junction of the past with the present.

… and this…

The uncontrollable desire to think the fleeting elements of the world, to fuse them into images, into words, is probably the most hypnotic of all Eros' manifestations.

… i find a Paris Review article on Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog: The Art of Etel Adnan… i read this quote…

“My writing and my paintings do not have a direct connection in my mind. But I am sure they influence each other in the measure that everything we do is linked to whatever we are, which includes whatever we have done or are doing. But in general, my writing is involved with history as it is made (but not only) and my painting is very much a reflection of my immense love for the world, the happiness to just be, for nature, and the forces that shape a landscape.”

… i think about my own practice and how i seem lost right now… i am encouraged to reengage…

Heather Cox Richardson, July 19, 2022

Idaho State GOP Says Abortion Should Be Illegal, Even When Used to Save a Woman’s Life

The abortion law fight grows in Texas and Wet Virginia. Here’s what you missed

Awakening with “A Love Supreme”

Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog

Sea and Fog: The Art of Etel Adnan

The Complicated Place of Men in the Abortion Debates

As a man who once was in a difficult marriage where a pregnancy occurred and was aborted, I found this article had some interesting things to say about the male side of things.

Forget Abortion, Democrats Should be Messaging About Birth Control

For Democrats who are passionately pro-choice, here is a hard truth: You are not going to turn the scores of millions of voters who find the topic uncomfortable into militant pro-choice activists…

Pro-Choicer, Pro-Lifer Do Lunch

…among Americans 50 and older, women outnumber men among those who identify as pro-life. It’s hard to credit that all of those American women, most of whom came of age in a feminist, post-Roe era, are motivated by a desire to subjugate themselves.

In the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade, there has, predictably, been a lot of expressive reaction on social media, especially by women. One woman proclaimed it was the “boomers” fault. Another woman suggested that if men got angry as women do about this issue, this would never have happened.

The first accusation is barely worth dealing with because it is absurd. Let’s just say that my wife and I are boomers, have been pro choice the whole way, have voted in every election, local and national, have done our share of joining protests on women’s issues and were not outliers in our generation.

The second is a common complaint that women have about the men in their lives, who don’t get how important reproductive rights are to them, and men in general, who enjoy the privileges of being male and never have to suffer the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy.

My wife replied to this woman’s post. She said she tried to explain it to me but I didn’t get it even though I am one of the “good ones.”

Subsequently my wife tried to engage me about whether men had “skin in the game” and why men were not as supportive of women as they should be on this issue. I told her I wasn’t ready to engage with her about this because, truthfully, I was parsing why I wasn’t angry and hadn’t come to a place where I was confident in my answer. This post is an attempt to understand myself on this question.

Let me begin by copping to my own anger baggage. Anger is hard for me. It is hard for me to express it. It is especially hard for me to experience it. I grew up in constant fear of the explosive, dominating and unforgiving anger of my father. Though he was never physically abusive, he certainly was emotionally abusive. I lived my whole life in fear of that anger whenever I was around him. It only ended when he died last summer. As a result, other people’s anger makes me very uncomfortable.

My first marriage was to a woman who used anger the way my father did. She became irrational and was willing to escalate any argument to whatever place it took to shut me up and shut me down. The reverberations with my father were extraordinary in retrospect.

So yes, anger is not my favorite emotion.

I was married to my first wife for about 11 years. Towards the end of our marriage we got pregnant and we chose to abort the pregnancy. It was a sad time in my life. I was glad that the option to abort was there, but sad that our relationship was in such a miserable state that the idea of introducing a child into the midst of it was inconceivable. It was the only time in my life that I fathered a child. Every now and again I wonder about the child that might have been. Yet I know we made the only choice that made sense.

So yes, I’ve had skin in the game.

My reaction to loosing the constitutionally guaranteed right to abortion is complicated by my belief that abortion is morally problematic. I don’t believe in any God. Still, I believe there is right and wrong (as well as many shades of grey between). Violence is almost never right. Certainly it’s not right when it is a choice one is not forced to make. But things get complicated when, regardless of the choice made, violence will be done.

A good friend once said to me, “I’m pretty sure abortion is violence.” My personal experience with abortion confirms that. Abortion is violence to the fetus, violence to the woman and, sometimes, violence to the man. I believe that abortion should be available as a family planning option, but I am most in tune with President Clinton’s formulation, it should be available, safe and rare.

Moving on to jurisprudence, I have read a lot of articles in the past year about the Roe v. Wade decision. I have landed on the side that it was not well founded jurisprudence. Ruth Bader Ginsberg made that point, repeatedly. She also felt it got decided too soon and in a way that cut off the national conversation that might have evolved into a more workable compromise. The abortion landscape in those days could be horrific, especially for women who lacked resources. I don’t fault the women who pushed it forward to a decision in the only way that seemed possible. But, it was a decision vulnerable to overturning because of flaws in its jurisprudence. The coming decades will be sad and unfortunate for many women in the position of wanting or needing an abortion. My hope is that we will pick up the conversation we didn’t finish having before and come out the other side with better jurisprudence all around. The current jurisprudence, founded on selective originalism as it appears to be, and issued by a court stacked with conservatives who are out of touch with what the majority of the country wants, is no less vulnerable to a future, less conservative, court.

My wife is angry with the conservative justices who maintained at their confirmation hearings that they believed in stare decisis and have turned out to be, in her opinion, liars. Committing to stare decisis as a general principle, which is what I believe they did, is not the same as committing to Roe V. Wade as law that should be viewed as settled. I was not at all surprised they overturned Roe V. Wade. I expected them to.

During the run up to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, a good friend confided to me that they despised Donald Trump, but didn’t know if they could bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton either. I looked him straight in the eye and said the only issue that should matter is the Supreme Court. The next president was likely going to replace more than one justice (who knew it would be three?). Not showing up, or making some kind of protest vote, failed to recognize the peril of the moment. To me, in that election, that was the issue worth thinking about. That was the issue that one had to vote on. It was, of course, bigger than Roe V. Wade. A conservative court could make all kinds of rulings that would undo the more liberal interpretations of the constitution that make room for the multicultural society I believe in. And that was the point of installing originalist judges on the court. I saw it then and I see it now. I tell everyone who cares to listen that the issue of gravest concern now is democracy itself. We must show up in the next two election cycles. We must vote for democracy. If we don’t, we will loose it.

So, what makes me angry to the extent I do get angry? I am angry with all the moderates and independents who failed to see that the Supreme Court was the central issue and either didn’t show up or made a protest vote in 2016. I am angry with people who allowed themselves to be deluded into voting for Donald Trump and the news outlets that deluded them or pandered to their ratings with false equivalency programming that suggested that 45 wouldn’t be so bad. I am angry with the mostly white Christian Patriarchy’s desire to push their minority viewpoint on the rest of the country. I am angry with Ruth Bader Ginsberg who wouldn’t step down during the Obama administration so that she could be replaced with a judge that would carry on her liberal jurisprudence.

And, in this moment, I am in despair, because I see the same thing lining up to happen again, only this time, democracy is at stake. The mostly white Christian Patriarchy and the wealthy white would-be-oligarchs are not interested in Democracy and are on the verge of successfully taking it down. That is what we are facing in the next two election cycles.

If anger over abortion rights is the issue that brings you to the table to fight for democracy, so be it. But please understand. It is not the central issue. The erosion of democracy is. We are in a determinative moment in history as we struggle to hold on to democracy, and with it, the multicultural rights so many fought so hard to acquire.

Of Course the Constitution Has Nothing to Say About Abortion | The New Yorker

As it happens, there is also nothing at all in that document, which sets out fundamental law, about pregnancy, uteruses, vaginas, fetuses, placentas, menstrual blood, breasts, or breast milk.

For me, this week was all about Roe V. Wade. Alito’s leaked draft memo brought forward an enormous amount of commentary across all my news feeds and, being a moderate liberal who has always believed that women should have access to abortion, I zeroed in on that commentary.

Before I get into the articles I read about Roe V. Wade and the Alito draft document, I should articulate my own stance. Abortion should be available, safe and rare and by rare I do not mean draconian restrictions. At the same time, I do not believe there should be a completely unfettered right to abortion. I do believe that there should be a gestational point beyond which an abortion can only be performed in special circumstances, where the mother’s life is threatened for example. I also believe that pregnancy resulting from rape and incest should always be an exception to whatever laws there are limiting or prohibiting abortion.

I have also had personal experience with having to make a decision on pregnancy termination. I was in a marriage that was falling apart when we discovered my then wife was pregnant. Because of the rather miserable state of our marriage we made the very difficult decision to abort the pregnancy. I don’t regret the decision, but it lingers with me as a significant and sad part of my personal history. A friend once told me that she was pretty sure that “abortion is violence.” There is no doubt about that. It’s violence to everyone involved. Yes, abortion should be as rare as we can make it without completely denying it as an option.

I first learned of the leaked draft opinion from Heather Cox Richardson in her May 02 post.

Tonight, news broke of a leaked draft of what appears to be Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s majority decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision establishing access to abortion as a constitutional right.

Then there was this admiration for the opinion post on Reason.com.

It is a tour de force. Justice Alito meticulously dissects, and forcefully responds to, every conceivable position in favor of retaining Roe and Casey. I could teach an entire law school seminar class on this opinion.

In the months leading up to the leak I began to wonder why there wasn’t more protest, more anger, more activism around what the likely outcome of the courts deliberations on Dobbs would be. Why there hadn’t been more effort to protect a woman’s right to an abortion. This Pro Publica article addresses that very issue.

I have been aware that the Roe V. Wade decision was thought by many to be on shaky ground, including Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who felt the ruling was too broad and not focused on the rights of women as it should have been.

This article in Reason.com crystalized my thinking on what the real issue is.

In it’s somewhat glib “awe, it’s not so bad approach,” the article tells us that there will only be a 10 to 15 percent decline in abortions as women will still have options. There’s the abortion pill, available on line (some states are trying to curtail this) or travel to another state where abortion is more available (some states are moving to declare abortion murder, which does not bode well for the women who leave the state with gestating fetus and return without one). But then, the author identifies a core problem with returning legal management of abortion to the states when they admit that women with means will always be able to get safe abortions if they want them while working class and working poor women will struggle to do so. This, to me, is a pivotal issue. If this opinion turns out to be essentially the ruling the court delivers, then the consequences of society’s legislation of abortion will fall unequally on the citizenry with a disproportionate bad falling on women of limited means.

With the above in mind, this article in The Atlantic about declining mobility in the United States, that is, the ability of people to vote with their feet, seemed significant.

I can’t say what my complete feelings are about this ruling should it turn out to be close in scope to the final one. It’s clear to me that a lot of women are going to suffer because of it. But it also seems that the legal arguments supporting the current situation are not solid and perhaps the silver lining of all this is to get a chance to do it over and do it in a more lasting way.

Kentuckians Left Without Abortion Access After Lawmakers Override Governor’s Veto

… wondering when women will revolt en-masse and refuse sexual relations altogether… that would correct the situation pretty quickly i suspect… i read somewhere that such denial was what ultimately “tamed” the wild west… i’d be with them…

The law—House Bill 3, passed in March—made abortion illegal after 15 weeks of pregnancy. It also instituted several new restrictions on abortion provision before this cutoff, including a ban on abortion pills being shipped in the mail or otherwise provided outside a physician’s office.

20220420.06

Reading Notes, News, Politics…

Heather Cox Richardson, December 16, 2021… a mixed bag today… Build Back Better Act has been shelved for the moment, due to the intransigence of Senator Manchin… voting rights has moved to the forefront and here again, Senator Manchin is a stumbling block… i believe Democracy is at stake and voting rights legislation is essential… there is no way to do it without amending the filibuster rule… Manchin is steadfastly against that so far… at the end, a bit about the Urghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which passed the Senate unanimously… the US pushing back on China for human rights violoations… polysilicon, used to make solar panels, will become scarcer as half the wolrd’s supply comes from Zinjiang from which the Biden administration is preventing all imports unless there is clear proof that slave labor wasn’t part of its production…

What’s Polluting the Air? Not Even the EPA Can Say… how the EPA fails to act even when receiving reports that indicate a huge toxic release problem… i wish i was not surprised…

The Most Detailed Map of Cancer-Causing Industrial Air Pollution in the US

The FDA Just Made Medication Abortions a Whole Lot Easier to Get… a step in the right direction, but, easily reversable by a future administration and:

Yet the change won’t mean a whole lot in much of the country. Nineteen states(https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/medication-abortion), including Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama (which recently introduced a “heartbeat bill” similar to Texas’) restrict the use of telemedicine for abortion. People across the South and the Midwest will have to travel to sanctuary states like California or New York for telemedicine appointments and to receive the medication. #abortion

Biden Administration Permanently Lifts Restrictions on Abortion Pills… an alternative take on the abortion pill story…

Manchin and Sinema Are Blocking Everything… it is so depressing… i am hoping that MJ is being overly dramatic, but the available evidence supports the doom and gloom scenario… Manchin and Sinema are currently blocking everything that would help most Democrats in the midterm, and, ultimately, 2024, since a disaster at midterm will prevent them from doing anything to make a case for their continuation in power in 2024…

Congressional Republicans Provide a Way Forward on Supply Chains… it takes pot shots at Democratic efforts but does offer what seem to be reasonable solutions… one thing that puzzles me is why the water transportation industry would favor regulation that makes it harder to expand port facilities and process larger ships?… this seems counterintuitive…

If We Don’t Get Inflation Under Control, It Could Unleash Some Dramatic Consequences…

What i read today…

… my reading this morning has been principally around the Supreme Court decision handed down yesterday that allowed Texas’ anti-abortion law, S.B. 8, to remain in effect…

Letters from an American, December 10, 2021, Heather Cox Richardson

This case is about far more than abortion. It is about the federal protection of civil rights in the face of discriminatory state laws. That federal protection has been the key factor in advancing equal rights in America since the 1950s.

The Texas Abortion Decision Protects the Traditional Rule of Law

Hard cases make bad law, and bad decisions make more hard cases. Roe v. Wade was a bad decision that has distorted many areas of our law. The Supreme Court created this monster with Roe, but in the Texas abortion cases decided this morning, it found itself caught between two sides trying to evade or rewrite the rules. On the one side was the Texas legislature: The new Texas abortion law, S.B. 8, is a too-clever-by-half attempt to get around Roe’s distortions by creating its own somewhat-novel enforcement mechanism. On the other side were the abortion clinics and the Justice Department’s lawsuit, both of which treated legal abortion as a constitutional interest so powerful that protecting it required the Court to bulldoze longstanding doctrines limiting the powers of federal courts.

How Narrow is the Pathway the Supreme Court Left for Suits Challenging SB 8 and Other Similar State Laws?

As noted in my last post about today’s Supreme Court ruling in in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, the key question for the future is how close a connection state officials must have to enforcement of the law in question before plaintiffs can potentially bring preenforcement challenges against those officials.

SCOTUS Says State Judges and Court Clerks Can’t Be Sued To Block Enforcement of the Texas Abortion Ban

The Supreme Court today held that Texas judges and court clerks cannot be sued to block enforcement of a state law that prohibits abortion after fetal cardiac activity can be detected. But it said the plaintiffs challenging S.B. 8, which took effect on September 1, can proceed with claims against state medical regulators.

Justice Sotomayor’s Flawed History To Promote The Myth of Judicial Supremacy

The United States did not fight a Civil War over the theory of judicial supremacy. But judicial supremacy was a contributor to the Civil War. Of course, I speak of Dred Scott v. Sandford. Chief Justice Taney recognized a new constitutional right based on substantive due process in order to resolve a controversial social debate by placing it beyond the power of the elected branches. Sound familiar? In Casey, Justice Scalia directly equated Roe and Dred Scott.

SCOTUS Rules Extreme Texas Abortion Ban Will Remain in Effect, Though Abortion Providers Can Sue

Today, in what could at best be considered a mixed ruling for abortion rights, the Supreme Court decided that abortion providers may sue some state officials in federal court over an extreme Texas abortion law. But in a huge blow, the court will also allow the law to remain in effect while the case moves forward.

The Most Blistering Lines from Sotomayor’s Extraordinary Dissent in Today’s Abortion Ruling

In an especially gripping section of the 13-page opinion, Sotomayor wrote that Texas’ brazen challenge to federal law “echoes the philosophy of John C. Calhoun, a virulent defender of the slaveholding South who insisted that States had the right to ‘veto’ or ‘nullify’ any federal law with which they disagreed.”

“The Nation fought a Civil War over that proposition,” she argued. “But Calhoun’s theories were not extinguished.”

… moving on to readings other than news…

Carl Jung on How to Live… you make the road by walking…¹

Your questions are unanswerable because you want to know how one ought to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way for the individual which is prescribed for him or would be the proper one. If that’s what you want you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what. Moreover this way fits in with the average way of mankind in general. But if you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other.²

Beginning the day…

229.0 lbs

… continuing to wake up between 2 and 3 AM, then fitful sleep until 4 AM, then up and get the day started…

… H’s doctor appointment went well, professional confirmation that they have nothing to worry about…

… watched 12 Dates of Christmas last night… pretty much the same concept as Groundhog Day, except it’s Christmas and the woman is the not very nice person who needs to learn a thing or two…

… HCR this morning is all about a Supreme Court decision handed down yesterday on Texas S. B. 8… it denied, for the most part, federal power to bring lawsuits against state-court judges and clerks… HCR makes the case that this will set federal efforts to protect civil rights back… she warns that the implications are ominous… an article in the National Review makes the case that it was a proper decision… an article in Reason Magazine, while being more neutral in it’s reporting, is in line with the National Review article… articles in Mother Jones are supportive of the dessent of Justice Sotomayor… in general, the ruling is viewed as a narrow win for right-to-an-abortion advocates, but too narrow to provide any good prospect of relief… we apparently still await a private individual to come forward and lodge a lawsuit under the S. B. 8 to get to a case that could determine the law’s constitutionality or lack thereof…

… it is ten days till we set out for Florida and Christmas with M…

… i am feeling like i have finally assembled a set of news sources that give me a balanced view of major news stories…

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization

… i read two articles this AM on this case before the Supreme Court:

• https://reason.com/volokh/2021/12/01/rehnquist-roberts-and-roe/… an unimpassioned article that makes the legal case that the constitution is essentially mum on the right to abortion…
• https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/12/supreme-court-abortion-dobbs-conservative-justices-doom/… an impassioned outcry against what is assumed will be the outcome… effective dismantling of Roe v. Wade…

… there will be many more articles written on the subject in the next few days… then we wait for three months to find out how much the court will unwind Roe v. Wade…

… having fathered a child that my then wife and i decided to abort due to the horrid state of our relationship, i can tell you that the emotional issues run deep and there is trauma no matter what you do… a pro life friend once said to me that they were pretty sure abortion was violence… so is carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term… it’s violence of a different sort… a civil society will have many options for dealing with the situation… i am pretty sure one of them should be abortion…

First Thoughts

231.2

…HCR meter, depressing… the white patriarchy is winning… what can we do about it?… voting rights legislation would help… abortion rights legislation would help… none of that seems set to happen…

… i keep thinking about M… i keep thinking that they generally only watch Fox news and that because of that they have a very narrow view of the situation… they are only being told bits and pieces of the story with an overall picture painted that just isn’t what anyone would call truth… to some degree all news outlets offer up partial truths… they may be very factual in the stories they write, but story selection is another matter… there is no way to have an intelligent conversation with anyone about social and political issues if both parties aren’t taking in multiple sources of information… and who has time?… i barely have time and i have no job in the traditional sense… i will, rather than having political conversations, challenge M to get their information more broadly… then maybe we can have a conversation…

… i resent all this crap going on at this time in my life… but who gets to choose the crap that may or may not be going on during their lifetimes… what i am tasked with coping with pales in comparison to what many around the globe cope with…

… oral arguments on a case that challenges Roe v. Wade were heard by the Supreme Court yesterday… it seems likely that the law in question will be allowed to stand and that the standard for when the right to an abortion kicks in will become “undue burden” as opposed to setting the age of viability as the current court decisions in place do… so, undue burden will become that point at which a majority of women will recognize they are pregnant and are able to abort should they choose… in the case before the court, this rolls fetal age back to fifteen weeks, a little over three months… this is the point by which most women in the state of (Mississippi?, Missouri?) obtain an abortion… honestly, if this is the compromise we reach and even this Supreme Court upholds the right to an abortion, then i think we are as well off on the issue as we will be under the current juridical situation…

… it is still possible that Roe v. Wade will be completely undone, but it doesn’t sound like it to me… and then a string of cases from states across the country will refine the new conditions and the law will be settled at this level…

First Thoughts

… R and J go back to the West Coast… just M and me for the next week… then, M will be on her own… that will be a difficult place for her i am guessing…

… went to the beach to have dinner… watched the sunset…

… weighed in, 227.0 lbs… good news… was a little worried that i have gained in the past week…

… the HCR meter pointing decidedly down… a discussion of the Texas fetal heartbeat abortion law… a discussion about how similar laws could undermine civil rights… the whole situation awful…

… J up… i thought i heard M too…

First Thoughts

… more drinking last night… not as bad as the other night…

… a dream about LS last night… a dream about toying with the idea of an affair with them… we both wanted it… i was resisting it because i was married… i was resisting it because i knew it would get complicated…

… having some political conversations with M… at least they don’t get really angry… they are firmly in the Fox silo though… i suppose i look like i am firmly in the MSNBC silo to them… important to work with facts… M is possibly fungible on their conservativism… R and J stayed largely out of it…

… hauled most of D’s stuff to Goodwill… some more today…

… R is not sure he wants the Rolex watch either…

… we uncovered another camera… a pretty fancy for its time Minolta… google searches determine that none of the equipment is particularly valuable presently and that the lenses are outperformed by today’s lenses though current lenses are not built as well… just finished reading a review that claims the Maxxum is one of the best film cameras ever made… that is not necessarily concurred with by other reviewers… of the cameras i have inherited, the two film cameras are most interesting and perhaps i will find some film and use them to whatever effect they are capable of…

… i am sitting here feeling very warm…

… HCR meeter slightly downward to slightly upward… a discussion of the history of anti-abortion politics that began when Nixon wanted the Catholic vote which normally went Democratic… abortion was made an issue to divide that constituency and win elections… she points out that the country is fairly unified on the issue and wants Roe V. Wade to stand… that it is a minority driving it as a wedge issue that wins elections… she suggests that there will be considerable blowback around the Texan anti-abortion legislation passed yesterday… let’s hope so… i, for one, will abandon any ideas i had about traveling to Texas until they undo the legislation insanity they have recently embarked on…

First Thoughts

… in bed at 9:30, up at 4:30, about 7 hours… not bad, woke up once…

… yesterday we bagged up all D’s clothing and sorted through their things… each of us taking what fit, what we wanted, which in my case is not much as little fit and D’s tastes were more conservative than mine… R got sad and had to go off by themselves for a while… i found it more interesting than sad… D had a lot of clothes… two big closets… and everything was new or showed negligible amounts of wear… i wear things pretty much till they wear out… i have two or three pairs of pants, maybe four… D had at least 20 pairs of jeans, two or three times that amount of shirts, a number of belts equal to the number of jeans… some jeans had their particular belts installed in the loops, ready to be put on… today we haul it all off to Good Will…

… lots of texting with H… big rains in Beacon… the remnants of Ida passing through… H has been experiencing many frustrations since i left and said they are depressed… they are depressed a lot lately it seems to me… i hope it lifts…

… HCR meter pointing hard down… about laws being signed into existence in Texas that will likely make it impossible for women to get an abortion and will set up “vigilante” citizens as the enforcers… what could go wrong with that?… another law legalizes concealed carry of weapons without a permit… another law limits voting rights and permits partisan patrolling of voting stations where voters can now be intimidated by gun toting zealots… what could go wrong with that?… even worse, the Supreme court has refused to knock down these strategies… has refused to even hear arguments on them… has refused even to issue justice opinions on them… they are largely being carried out on the “shadow” docket… so now we have another thing the Biden/Harris administration must deal with in the next year and two months… we are a country in decline, and radical conservatives are a circling band of hyenas… i am thinking i will boycot Texas unless sanity gets restored there…

Middlebury College economist Caitlin Knowles Myers projects that overturning Roe might reduce the annual number of abortions by about 14 percent. “A post-Roe United States isn’t one in which abortion isn’t legal at all,” Myers told The New York Times. “It’s one in which there’s tremendous inequality in abortion access.”¹

… having just been thinking about atrocities and the atrocious, i encounter this article and wonder, why are these “atrocities” so important to stop, and others not?… the same Christians so adamant about abortion are pro Israel in spite of its atrocious treatment of Palestinians… the same Christians many decades ago lynched black men and women(?)… there is something unique about the unborn child?… i suspect it is a useful political issue for rallying the faithful as well as a means of oppression of women, especially women of color…

… pro choice advocates are resigning themselves to further restriction of abortion after the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case out of Mississippi…

… we are not logical animals… we are primal and political animals… the ability to reason only means we can work out a defense for atrocities and the atrocious…