Right-wing hate in America now has official sponsors.
They wear black robes, have lifetime appointments and they rule joylessly and against all popular opinion against all kinds of issues that would benefit the majority of Americans. They don’t think about the ramifications present (against abortion or gun regulation) or future (climate change) of their decisions or of how many people are going to be hurt in the process just as long as their dubious judicial philosophy rules the day.
They are going to make a lot of us suffer for a long time and may preside over the destruction of American democracy before they are done.
They are the right-wing of the US Supreme Court.
A DISAGREEABLE MEAL
Case in point, you have to really admire the recent chutzpah of the Supreme Court Marshal, who asked officials in Virginia and Maryland to enforce state and county laws prohibiting the picketing of homes of right-wing justices after weeks of protest following the court’s full on assault on public safety and civil liberty.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t condone this, I don’t like it. Judges of all rank need to be free of intimidation and fear if we are to have a civil society.
But at this point of American history, you have to ask Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, et al, if they really want a civil and just society?
Because on the surface, it appears that they don’t.
No, they don’t appear to want a civilized and just society because time and again these ungodly powerful people are throwing their lot in with a minority of this country’s population, almost entirely conservative, religious, bigoted and Republican who want the rest of us to live small, miserable lives.
They and the Court want us to look out out windows to see who we can spy on and turn in for a bounty for the crime of simply living their lives. They also don’t want us to go to the park or a parade or the grocery store or school without fear of being shot by all the heavily armed morons they have allowed to walk around with guns without permits or psychiatric exams. They also don’t want us to address the biggest existential threat facing the world, climate change, in any meaningful way either.
I think they just want the rest of us to hide from the world, to not engage and just let white straight Christian conservatives destroy what is left of democracy, freedom and decency in this country.
Yes, it’s not that they that need protection from the rest of us while they eat their privileged, protected meals, it is we who need protection from these intellectually-stunted, emotionally empty jurists, because the Roberts’ court (it’s his court in name only these days) seems hell-bent on rolling back freedoms for women, gays, trans people, blacks, Latinos, and people who want to vote freely and fairly. In short, they want to revoke the entire civil rights era as well as the sexual revolution.
I am may be engaging in some hyperbole here, but I think, and I’m not alone in this thought, that if they have their way, it will be a mighty thin gruel of freedom that America will have to sup on in the future.
NO MIDDLE GROUND
To be perfectly clear, Alito has often been unctuous and downright cruel in the way he has ruled and written decisions, but it is Thomas who may truly be the hell-bringer. Thomas, who has never met a right he hasn’t wanted to strip from someone, may simply hate the whole world for the vale of tears he wants to drown us in.
More on them later.
They are leading the rebellion against freedom and while Roberts fiddles and tries in futility to rule from a center-right perspective, Thomas and Alito and the three sheep-like painfully young trump appointees are taking America straight down the road to authoritarian, white-Christian hell!
They have been deemed by many the most conservative court in 90 years with no middle ground whatsoever to temper their extreme and harmful behavior, which seems to be designed to take America back to the not so-good-old days of the 1950s, pre-Brown vs. Board of Education, pre-Rosa Parks, pre-Martin Luther King, pre-The Pill, pre-The Stonewall Riots, pre-Roe vs. Wade.
The tragic thing is, is that this court is now the brick wall to so much important progress to many things that would make America truly better, more equal, more prosperous, eminently happier and freer.
Truly a world leader in terms of freedom, safety and public health.
But no, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, Mitch McConnell, and the great traitorous orange a-hole former president manipulated the court into the hateful, vindictive thing it has become today. A decaying institution bent on turning America from being THE standard for democracy and hope in the world to the equivalent of an oversized third-tier authoritarian backwater, where racists, misogynists, religious purists and gun-mad emotional cripples tell the rest of us what our rights are.
So much for the pursuit of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” if you don’t think the right way, if you aren’t the right color or if you’re the wrong sex.
OPINION OF THE COURT PLUMMETS
I just wonder, what it is like for the Court to have gone from being a revered body, understood to be the backstop for American justice to being held in no greater esteem, than your average, miserable horribly gerrymandered state legislature.
The right wing of the court is so out of touch with the majority of Americans on so many issues. I think Stephen Colbert‘s recent “This Land is My Land” parody of them nailed it perfectly. It has caricatures of the five grinning fools (Roberts omitted) singing “This land is my land, this land is my land… this land was made for me and me” with the not so subtle implication that these narrow-minded strict constructionist, absolute literalist simply do not give a damn how real people think and live!
I’m not alone in thinking that parody was dead-on reality!
GUNS ARE THE LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH FOR AMERICAN CHILDREN!
Let me make this clear, as of 2020, the Centers for Disease Control (the CDC) says guns are the leading cause of death for American children. In that year, over 3,200 were killed by guns violence with probably countless more traumatized or injured by being exposed to them.
This is stupid, senseless, unnecessary, repulsive and far, far beneath America’s so-called status as “the greatest country on earth” which the right likes to trumpet every time another country does something wrong.
It is also 100 million light years from being “Pro-Life!”
Statistics like this have caused many, many Americans (like me) to scream for far more strenuous gun laws (both tears and sympathy for those suffering in Highland Park this past week). It is abundantly clear to me and many others that most of America’s 400 million guns (fully 40 percent of the world’s supply), particularly the assault rifle types, need to be tossed into the sun immediately!
But no, we can’t do that because the right wing loves its guns more than it does American kids.
See the court’s highly illogical reasoning in overturning New York’s 100-plus year old concealed carry law for that particular assault on public safety. One that will make a city of 8 million, crowded tightly together, all the more unsafe.
It seems like the court feels that the 250-plus mass shootings the country has endured so far this year are not nearly enough! That is also not a very “Pro-life” stance at all, it rather strikes me as a pro-NRA, pro-gun lobby, pro-paranoia decision, designed to make people more frightened, more trigger-happy, ultimately leaving more dead bodies and more wounded, embittered souls in its wake.
Maybe they’ll be happy when we hit 50,000-60,000 gun deaths a year in this country (we are currently north of 40,000). Maybe Justice Alioto can tell the terrified kids who are hiding underneath their desks hoping not to be blown to pieces like those in Uvalde what a good and useful invention the AR-15 is (sic).
According to the Brady Campaign, 321 people in America are shot each day, and 111 die.
Everyday!
In 2019, America had the second highest number of gun deaths worldwide at 37,000-plus and we had the second highest gun suicide rate in the world too per 100,000 people. We were also 10th in number of murders per 100,000 people. In comparison, fellow liberal democracies were far below us, representing a far saner attitude towards guns. They include France in 26th, Canada 32nd, Australia 52nd, Germany 55th, Spain 59th, the United Kingdom 66th and Japan 72nd.
The American right and the court’s cynical philosophy is leaving a generation of kids terrified of going into public places because of its stupid, death-filled love affair with guns. Kids who survive mass shootings are feeling the same “survivor’s guilt” that invaded the the sleep and the waking dreams of those European Jews who somehow made it out of the Holocaust alive.
There are signs that America may be waking up from its gun nightmare. The tepid, recently approved gun bill, grudgingly supported by just enough republican senators for it to pass, is a first step but far more needs to be done, such as banning the useless, body-destroying AR-15 style rifles for all-time!
Because to do so is the only really “Pro-Life” thing a rational, compassionate society and its courts should do!
CLIMATE CHANGE
Let’s also take a look at the warped view the six conservatives on the court have of how the government really works and how their balmy reasoning will make the government’s work of addressing climate change and many other problems all that much harder.
The conservative justices recognize climate change as an existential threat to the planet, but remember they are strict constructionists meaning that the court will NOT let US governmental agencies like the EPA, which are specifically designed to DEAL with climate change, roll out rules and guidelines to curtail it, unless specifically told so by the terminally malfunctioning Congress.
Every word, every sentence, every comma needs to be in the legislation according to them.
No room allowed for initiative or interpretation or being able to turn on a dime and address a critical emergency in prompt and needed fashion.
And remember, many Republicans don’t even believe in climate change. They have their heads fully in the sand with their brains replaced by coal and their blood by oil, even as they roast in 100-plus degree heat summer after summer, endure dangerous wildfires that chase them out of their homes or are flooded by torrential storms season after season.
The odds of Congress doing anything meaningful to address climate change in the face of such ignorance is akin to the idea of trump becoming a priest!
Yes, that’s another “real” pro-life gesture by the right and its idiot court. So glad you people are so looking out for those youngsters who as adults are going to have to live with rising sea levels with their concurrent flooding (icebergs melting); longer, more crippling droughts; and ever more people fighting over less and less fresh water (sic).
This ruling will make governing so much harder for ALL critical issues if Congress has to literally dictate every damn word of what a particular agency can do, which is what the court seems to be saying.
In fact, it will make it downright impossible, making this unholy mess of a country all the more ungovernable!
ABORTION
And then we can take a look at the court’s centerpiece, the decision striking down Roe vs. Wade and returning abortion to the states. It is the ground-zero of zero-sum, misogynistic right-wing judicial activism that is at the center of its war to drag America and women back to the so-called “Pro-life” 1950s.
Look, we can debate the ethics of abortion until hell freezes over, but the simple matter is, is that even though the decision technically outlaws it, (and 26 states have or will be doing so shortly), abortion will continue to go on, only with more women dying and more decent, compassionate doctors going to jail for making decisions that save women’s lives.
Simply put, there have always been abortions in American history with far too many women’s deaths to count.
Roe just made the process safer and easier. Now the small-minded and tragic (I don’t use that word lightly) Dobbs decision will likely result in the number of deaths going back up.
Taking it a step further, a 2021 University of Colorado Boulder study looking at a theoretical nationwide ban on abortion, states that maternal deaths would go up 21 percent in general and 33 percent among black women.
Author and respected science writer Lisa Marshall noted in the aforementioned piece the following, chilling facts:
“Published Oct. 25 in the journal Demography, the study estimates only the portion of increased deaths that would be due to complications of being pregnant and of delivering a baby.
“Any increased death due to unsafe abortions or attempted abortions would be in addition to these estimates.”
That means more fear, more pain, more poverty, more misery for women all across the country.
10-YEAR OLDS HAVE NO RIGHT TO ABORTION IN OHIO
Don’t think these alleged “Right to Lifers” are serious in their pure gleeful hatred of taking away a woman’s choice in America?
Anybody for a raped 10-year old girl being forced to give birth: a process which would likely kill both the girl and the fetus?
How does that square with being truly “Right to Life?”
Not very well, it turns out.
That wretched thing almost happened in Ohio recently. Fortunately, her guardians were able to get her an abortion in Indiana of all things (likely the last one ever done there). Yes, the rapist needs to go away for a long, long time (forever would be best with hell to follow), but there is a stinking piece of purgatory set aside for the miserable, anti-abortion purist politicians who refuse to say that an exemption to any abortion ban would have been granted for that child.
In fact, I would put those hypocrites very close to hell if I were God!
And Ohio is just one state with such a malignant law. Of those 26 states that have passed or will pass draconian, misogynistic anti-abortion laws, very few will have exemptions.
Take Wisconsin’s ludicrous 173-year old abortion law, which has only an exemption for the mother’s life, but nothing for rape or incest. Do you think the churlish, safely gerrymandered and less than insightful state GOP would update it, look out for the rights of the potential mother a little more?
Absolutely not!
BOUNTY HUNTERS CHASING DOWN DOCTORS AND POOR WOMEN
And the Supreme Court, in its precursor to the Roe overturn, upheld Texas’ wretched SB 8 abortion ban, which is a form of anti-democratic hell that even Dante could not have imagined. This unholy piece of legislative rat feces set in motion a “bounty hunting” system for people to turn in and sue their neighbor. Give them a chance to collect a bounty if they find their neighbor trying to get an abortion or if they are providing others with information on how to safely do so.
In other words, the Court is encouraging people to spy on one another, make them even more mistrustful in an ever more polarized and paranoid country. In that decision, Roberts had the good sense to vote with the dissenting left, but the full on crazies led by Alioto and Thomas essentially said “What the hell, anybody for anarchy and a little more pain?!?”
Delightful (sic)!!!
Other states like Oklahoma, Idaho and Missouri have copy-catted that law, which is designed to evade judicial overview because it leaves the defendants no state agency to sue. Other small-minded toadies across the red-state miasma are sure to ape this hellish theory.
“PRO-LIFERS” ARE HYPOCRITES
And though I could not find any hard data on this, I’m just betting that the majority of alleged “Right to Lifers” do not vote for school referendums, do not want an increase in the minimum wage, do not support programs like Head Start and SNAP, do not support fair housing initiatives, etc. , etc., etc.
All of which would improve the lives of the kids the cuddly little babies on their billboards invariably grow into.
Their hypocrisy is boundless and all of it is backstopped by this hateful right-wing of the Supreme Court.
I’m hoping the Democrats are ready to stuff the right’s hollow “holier-than-thou” attitude towards kids right up their Dickensian work-house postured butts! Backing better parental leave, better health care for mothers and children and living wages will do so much to lift kids out of poverty.
Which is what the GOP wants, right?
I’m not so sure, because indicators from the Supreme Court and red state legislatures lean towards adding more suffering onto the lives of the common American, especially if they are a woman, queer or a minority or they are especially fond of democracy.
Because this broadside against abortion is hardly the end of it with the demagoguing, hypocritical right. They want that nationwide abortion ban, and they’ll do anything to convince the Supreme Court to make it happen.
And if that happens, I’ll join the full-on exodus to Canada, because America won’t be America anymore!
CLARENCE THOMAS “KING OF HATE”
But of course, I and many others might do that even earlier because of Clarence Thomas.
As noted, Thomas, the self-appointed “King of Hate” on the court, has rarely had anything positive to say about anything in his sullen, out-of-tune, spiteful 30-plus years on the bench. Like I said, if there was a right to be taken away, he usually voted to do it.
And oh boy, does Thomas want to take a meat cleaver to American civil rights.
As is well-known by now, he issued a concurring opinion to the Roe overturn where he almost gleefully declared war on the “substantive due process” clause which was the basis for decisions that allowed for abortion, legalized contraception, same-sex marriage and rid the country of miserable sodomy laws.
Simply put, Thomas, a black man, who grew up in the time of Jim Crow Laws, no doubt benefitted from laws created by “substantive due process,” but wants to deny all others going forward the same rights and opportunities that he had!
Ungrateful wretch!
At this point, he would happily do away with all those decisions based on the clause, including those that freed people from the fear of unwanted pregnancy, allowed gay men and lesbians to have relations with one another freely and then allowed them to love who they wanted and then marry them legally thereby creating a freer, fuller, more diverse country.
But no, we can’t have that, that would be too American, too much of looking out for one another, too much of obeying the “golden rule” and simply too much freedom period, which Republicans in general don’t seem to have much care for these days.
Just too damn “Pro-Life!”
TEXAS IS BATSH__ CRAZY!
One look at the crazy town that was the recent Texas Republican convention will convince you that Thomas is not alone in his thinking of flushing the American concept of “liberty and justice for all” down the toliet.
In its new platform, where it also declared its full-on lunacy by stating Joe Biden was only elected president because he Democrats cheated, the Texas GOP called gays “abnormal” and rejected any rights whatsoever for trans people.
A WARPED VIEW OF FREEDOM
It’s a damaged view of freedom.
The GOP screams that word “freedom” for anti-vaxxers and for whiny white parents who don’t want their kids told that there were a lot of white people who were very, very racist and mean towards non-whites for a very long time.
But they don’t want to extend that concept of “freedom” to many others outside their small, in-bred circle.
Gee, I wonder if Thomas will also go after the unanimous 1967 Loving decision which struck down all bans on inter-racial marriage? No, likely not, as he wants to stay married to his seditionist white wife Ginni, who threw her lot in with the Jan. 6 rioters.
He may let that one stand.
Hypocritical A-hole!
DEMOCRACY MAY SOON BE DEAD
And I haven’t even touched upon the worst of what this idiotic court could do to America.
There is a fringe theory, called the “Independent State Legislature Doctrine,” coming out of of North Carolina, which the court will take up in the near future.
It is a case so radical in its bent that it would likely make all those other horrors this horrendous court has visited upon us look like a cup of spilled milk.
And it would likely destroy democracy itself if approved by these morons!
This theory, simply put, would essentially legalize what the treasonous rioters were trying to do on Jan. 6, 2021. Giving free rein to highly partisan state legislatures to do whatever they want to screw with elections, writing state courts completely out of the picture in the process.
A June 30, 2022 article in the Charlotte Observer explains the theory’s authoritarian bent far better than I ever could:
“If the court rules in the GOP’s favor, lawmakers will have free rein to hijack our elections and dismantle democracy. Voter suppression laws might not be subject to a governor’s veto, and gerrymandered maps couldn’t be struck down by state courts. State legislatures would be able to enact laws that violate their state constitutions, which typically have broader voting rights protections than what the U.S. Constitution provides. And, in a nightmare scenario, those in the majority might even be able to simply throw out election results that don’t go their way.”
Not only Americans, but the world in general should fear this case because America’s standing as the leader of the free world would be gone if it is passed. We would hardly be any better than Vladmir Putin‘s Russia or Viktor Orban‘s Hungary, where lip-service is paid to democracy and don’t you dare question the government.
And oh yes, just to cheer you up, Roberts also hates voting!
Curiously, if the Court approves this theory, they may have just about voted themselves out of a job, because democracy won’t exist anymore in America and there will be no more need for judges.
VOTE DEMOCRATIC UP AND DOWN THE LINE (or move to Canada)
So, you can see why I and many others are not sleeping well these days. We’re depressed and looking for any ray of hope for democracy and fairness, but apparently the right-wing of the Supreme Court loves chaos, racism, sexism, and authoritarianism too much.
They are channeling the hate of every right-wing, conspiracy-theory-loving racist and sexist loon in the country and if they get their way, a lot of us will be moving to Canada.
And I am not joking.
But there are signs that abortion and the potential loss of other rights has woken up the general public. In what was supposed to be a tsunami of success for the GOP this mid-terms due to inflation and Biden’s relative unpopularity, trends are starting to move in the Democrats’ direction. It will still be a poor year overall for Democrats but the Republicans own extremism and the fear of trumpism will hopefully blunt the worst effects of it.
Signs now point towards the Republicans gaining control of the house, but the Democrats have a better than even chance of holding onto the senate, which would mean more rational judges, judges who actually look out for people in a real world way and not just money, religion and ideology.
They are our chance to reclaim the country from the right-wing crazies who think that Putin is cool!
You know, real Americans!
Steven L. Tietz 