A Letter To Those Who Don’t Do Politics
Since around age sixteen, I have had friends and adults in my life who have said to me more than once, ‘no, no, I don’t do politics.’ Well, to those who angrily rebuffed me—I say—you may not do politics, but politics is doing you. From local legislatures and school boards banning Pulitzer Prize-winning books to providing the right to carry concealed guns in New York subways and grocery stores to making your raped teenage daughter have his attacker’s baby, you are being done more and more by politics. The people who told us that mask mandates violated the right to free choice are now mandating women carry a child.
Either ironically or sardonically, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in the throes of her recent gubernatorial primary victory in Arkansas, said, “We will make sure that when a kid is in the womb, they’re as safe as they are in a classroom, the workplace, a nursing home—because every stage of life has value, no one greater than the other.” Her eye-popping statement came on the heels of nineteen children shot and killed in a classroom in Uvalde, Texas; ten people gunned down at a workplace in Buffalo, New York, and having worked for a president who messed up the response to a pandemic so severely that thousands of elderly patients died in nursing homes. Her statement can be interpreted in either one of two ways, evil or ignorant, neither of which is a stellar qualification for a governor.
I wonder how many pro-life women are peeing on a strip this morning and discovering they are pro-choice?
In his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas said all privacy rights, including birth control and gay marriage, are up for review.
“… in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,’… we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents…” wrote Thomas.
Thomas’ self-serving opinion was proven when he was the only Justice ruling that his wife’s insurrection-related texts to former WH Chief of Staff Mark Meadows should not be revealed. Conveniently he left out Loving v. Virginia which legalized interracial marriage, in his due process argument; could it be because it would affect him directly? Lawrence v. Texas overturned sodomy laws and Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage. Griswold v. Connecticut overturned the ban on contraceptives even for married couples.
You may be surprised to read that I supported Thomas’ loyalty to his wife, his immoral and judicial crime was his failure to recuse himself due to a clear conflict of interest. The move the United States is making toward theocracy is not only frightening but wrong. Rulings based on religious doctrine and “feelings” makes us no better than the Taliban. Constitutional-Originalism is an idea that defies logic. Republicans have long said they wanted justices who based their rulings on originalism, railing against what they labeled “legislating from the bench.” Originalists make no allowance for the unforeseen, single-shot muskets as opposed to an automatic rifle, and women –not mentioned in the Constitution—having rights. If the Constitution were not a living document subject to changing mores and circumstances, I would still be drinking from a separate water fountain, and women would have no rights; oh wait!
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