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The Supreme Court Is Making Gilead Real

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides in relevant part  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, . . . "  Despite this clear dictate against an established religion, the leaked Alito opinion overturning Roe v. Wade purports to be based on the U.S. Constitution, but in reality is well on the way to establishing a state religion based on the beliefs of a minority of far right Christofascists and evangelicals.   Moreover, it seeks to impose a mind set where women are chattel and have no control over their own bodies.  The implications and consequence of this agenda are terrifying and pose a threat to the religious freedoms of the majority of Americans.  Margaret Atwood, the author of the book the "Handmaidens' Tale" on which the television series was based has a piece in The Atlantic that sends a warning of what the Christofascists and extemist on the Supreme Court are seeking to do the nation.  Here are excerpts:

In the early years of the 1980s, I was fooling around with a novel that explored a future in which the United States had become disunited. Part of it had turned into a theocratic dictatorship based on 17th-century New England Puritan religious tenets and jurisprudence. I set this novel in and around Harvard University—an institution that in the 1980s was renowned for its liberalism, but that had begun three centuries earlier chiefly as a training college for Puritan clergy.

In the fictional theocracy of Gilead, women had very few rights, as in 17th-century New England. The Bible was cherry-picked, with the cherries being interpreted literally. Based on the reproductive arrangements in Genesis—specifically, those of the family of Jacob—the wives of high-ranking patriarchs could have female slaves, or “handmaids,” and those wives could tell their husbands to have children by the handmaids and then claim the children as theirs.

Although I eventually completed this novel and called it The Handmaid’s Tale, I stopped writing it several times, because I considered it too far-fetched. Silly me. Theocratic dictatorships do not lie only in the distant past: There are a number of them on the planet today. What is to prevent the United States from becoming one of them?

For instance: It is now the middle of 2022, and we have just been shown a leaked opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States that would overthrow settled law of 50 years on the grounds that abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution, and is not “deeply rooted” in our “history and tradition.” True enough. The Constitution has nothing to say about women’s reproductive health. But the original document does not mention women at all.

Women could neither consent nor withhold consent, because they could not vote. That remained the case until 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, an amendment that many strongly opposed as being against the original Constitution. As it was.

Women were nonpersons in U.S. law for a lot longer than they have been persons. If we start overthrowing settled law using Justice Samuel Alito’s justifications, why not repeal votes for women?

Reproductive rights have been the focus of the recent fracas, but only one side of the coin has been visible: the right to abstain from giving birth. The other side of that coin is the power of the state to prevent you from reproducing. The Supreme Court’s 1927 Buck v. Bell decision held that the state may sterilize people without their consent. . . . Buck v. Bell is still on the books. This kind of eugenicist thinking was once regarded as “progressive,” and some 70,000 sterilizations—of both males and females, but mostly of females—took place in the United States. Thus a “deeply rooted” tradition is that women’s reproductive organs do not belong to the women who possess them. They belong only to the state.

Wait, you say: It’s not about the organs; it’s about the babies. Which raises some questions. Is an acorn an oak tree? Is a hen’s egg a chicken? When does a fertilized human egg become a full human being or person? “Our” traditions—let’s say those of the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the early Christians—have vacillated on this subject. . . . any such judgment depends on a religious belief—namely, the belief in souls. Not everyone shares such a belief. But all, it appears, now risk being subjected to laws formulated by those who do. That which is a sin within a certain set of religious beliefs is to be made a crime for all.

Let’s look at the First Amendment. It reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The writers of the Constitution, being well aware of the murderous religious wars that had torn Europe apart ever since the rise of Protestantism, wished to avoid that particular death trap. There was to be no state religion. Nor was anyone to be prevented by the state from practicing his or her chosen religion.

It ought to be simple: If you believe in “ensoulment” at conception, you should not get an abortion, because to do so is a sin within your religion. If you do not so believe, you should not—under the Constitution—be bound by the religious beliefs of others. But should the Alito opinion become the newly settled law, the United States looks to be well on the way to establishing a state religion. Massachusetts had an official religion in the 17th century. In adherence to it, the Puritans hanged Quakers.

The Alito opinion purports to be based on America’s Constitution. But it relies on English jurisprudence from the 17th century, a time when a belief in witchcraft caused the death of many innocent people. The Salem witchcraft trials were trials—they had judges and juries—but they accepted “spectral evidence,” in the belief that a witch could send her double, or specter, out into the world to do mischief. Thus, if you were sound asleep in bed, with many witnesses, but someone reported you supposedly doing sinister things to a cow several miles away, you were guilty of witchcraft. You had no way of proving otherwise.

Similarly, it will be very difficult to disprove a false accusation of abortion. The mere fact of a miscarriage, or a claim by a disgruntled former partner, will easily brand you a murderer. Revenge and spite charges will proliferate, as did arraignments for witchcraft 500 years ago.

If Justice Alito wants you to be governed by the laws of the 17th century, you should take a close look at that century. Is that when you want to live?

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Putin is Trapped in a Quagmire of His Own Creation

With Vladimir Putin's war of choice against Ukraine going badly and Findland on the doorstep of joining NATO - with Sweden seemingly right behind it - everything Putin claimed the war was meant to prevent has gone in the opposite direction.  It is impossible to know how it will all end, but Russia appears in a quagmire without any easy or face-saving exit.  Its shades of America's disasters in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan on steroids.  Short of nuclear war - which would be catostrophic for Russia as well as the West - Putin seems to have little option but to try to slog on and meanwhile try to repackage myths surrounding Russia's defeat of Germany in WWII.  Even this latter effort seems somewhat lackluster and one has to wonder what every day Riussians think, not that they would dare express their views publicly for risk of imprisionment.  Meanwhile innocent Ukrainians are dying and young Russian conscripts are little more than canon fodder.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Putin's self-inflicted wounds.  Here are highlights:

Always grandiose and fascistic, the Victory Day celebrations in Moscow were more restrained than usual on Monday, with the normal aerial display canceled on account of the “weather,” even though the skies were clear. Some experts had worried that Russian President Vladimir Putin would declare war on Ukraine and a total mobilization of Russian society while threatening the West with nuclear weapons. There was even speculation that he might parade Ukrainian prisoners through Red Square as in a Roman triumph. None of that came to pass. Putin was defiant but subdued, trying to portray Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine as a preemptive response to a looming Ukrainian invasion of Russia.

It was ludicrous and pathetic — but also strangely reassuring. There has been much discussion about whether Putin is rational, because attacking Ukraine with such a small army was an act of lunacy. The evidence suggests that, while Putin is isolated and prone to miscalculation, he is not insane.

Putin seems to understand when the war is not going his way — hence his withdrawal from the environs of Kyiv at the beginning of April rather than risk the complete destruction of his forces. He gambled on winning a more limited victory in Donbas in eastern Ukraine, but that’s not happening, either.

Russia has paid a fearsome price for meager gains. Kyiv claims that more than 25,000 Russian soldiers have been killed; that figure might be exaggerated but probably not by much. Open-source reporting confirms that Russia has lost more than 3,500 vehicles (including more than 600 tanks), 121 aircraft and nine naval vessels, including the flagship of the Black Sea fleet. Those are the worst losses Russia has suffered since World War II.

While Russia gets weaker, Ukraine gets stronger: It now has more tanks than at the start of the war, much better artillery and far more weapons systems of all kinds. Russian morale is poor, with officers reportedly disobeying orders; Ukrainian morale is sky-high.

Far from striking a blow against the West, Putin has united the West against him, and his actions have led to a surge of NATO military activity in Eastern Europe. If Finland and Sweden join the Atlantic alliance, as seems likely, that will bring even more NATO troops to Russia’s doorstep.

Putin is now in a strategic quandary that should be familiar to Americans after our misbegotten wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq — only many times worse. Russia has launched a “war of choice” based on bad intelligence (such as the assumption that Ukrainians would welcome the Russians as liberators). The war is going badly, but once troops are committed, emotions run high and national prestige is on the line. Both escalation and withdrawal are too painful to contemplate. The easiest thing to do is to continue doing what you’ve been doing, even if there is scant hope that the results will get any better.

As for Putin's effort to invoke "the great patriotic war" as WWII is called, that seems to be falling somewhat flat and fear is keeping any would be dissidents silent as note in a piece in The Atlantic:

In Soviet films, on Soviet posters, in Soviet poetry and songs, the typical Red Army soldier was hale and hearty, simple and straightforward, untroubled by trauma or fear. He cheerfully marched all day, slept on the ground at night, never complained, and never even used swear words.

In the official accounts, the Red Army soldier did not brutalize civilians, rape women, or loot property either. Famously, a staged photograph of soldiers waving a Soviet flag on top of the Reichstag in May of 1945 had to be doctored, because one of them was wearing two wristwatches (they were stolen from Germans; Soviet soldiers typically did not own several wristwatches). Many years later, when another British historian, Antony Beevor, published archival evidence of looting—children as young as 12 traveled to Berlin for that purpose—and the mass rape of 2 million German women, the Russian ambassador to the U.K. accused him of “lies, slander, and blasphemy.”

But plenty of Russians already knew the truth. Stories of the horrors of the war, experienced by veterans as well as those who stayed at home, were passed down within families.

Neither Solzhenitsyn nor Beevor nor Merridale described these things in order to minimize the heroism of the Soviet soldiers who fought Hitler’s armies from the depths of Russia all the way to the center of Berlin. The historical record of the damage the U.S.S.R. did to Central Europe in the postwar era does not negate the horrors that German soldiers inflicted on the citizens of the territories that they occupied earlier on. But that record does form part of the real story of the war, a story far more nuanced than the cartoon version of the Great Fatherland War that the Russians are now presented with every year during the May 9 victory parade.

That cartoon was on display once again this week. This year’s war commemoration even had a rote, empty quality, as if the Russian state is no longer capable of offering its citizens anything more than cardboard nostalgia—but also as if it assumes those citizens need little else. President Vladimir Putin made a short, dishonest speech about his invasion of Ukraine, just barely alluding to the costs and casualties. . . . Even as Russia carries out a brutal war of aggression, one in which Russian soldiers are once again committing terrible crimes against a civilian population, the whole occasion was permeated with a sense of grievance, as if Russia were the only real victim of both conflicts.

This particular World War II cult was not inevitable; it is the result of a set of decisions, a deliberate effort to change the course of what had been an open conversation, starting in the late 1980s. In 1992, President Boris Yeltsin even informed Russians that the conflict did not begin, as their textbooks had long told them, on June 22, 1941, when Hitler’s Germany invaded the Soviet Union. In fact it began earlier, in September 1939, when Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union simultaneously invaded Poland. Yeltsin published the secret clauses of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed in August 1939, in which the two dictatorships divided Central Europe between them. He also handed the Polish government copies of the documents ordering the massacre of thousands of Polish officers near the Katyn Forest.

Gestures like that are now unimaginable in Putin’s Russia, where any discussion of the 22-month Soviet-Nazi alliance is not only difficult, but possibly illegal. . . . . In 2019, Putin himself launched a strange campaign to blame Poland, not the U.S.S.R. and Germany, for the start of the war, as if Poland had invaded itself. Myths about the war are now backed up by politicians, by judges, by the force of law. . . . But this simplification is necessary, because there just isn’t anything else to legitimize Putin’s regime, let alone its brand-new war.

In practice, Putinism is a powerful but ultimately empty ideology. Its propaganda divides people from one another, creates suspicion, and promotes apathy. State media put forth multiple nonsensical explanations for reality, including multiple nonsensical reasons for the invasion of Ukraine. In different tellings, Ukraine, a democratic state led by a Jewish president, is “Nazi,” is Russian, is a Western puppet, is nonexistent. Alongside these stories, Russians are spoon-fed cynicism, mockery, and nihilism. They are told endless tales about the glorious past, but given hardly anything to hope for in the terrifying future. They have no idea who or what could follow the Putin regime, or what that would mean for them. They support him because nothing else is on offer.

Perhaps that was why Putin chose to mark May 9 perfunctorily. He did not, as some expected, declare victory in Ukraine. Nor did he call for an all-out mobilization. He did not issue a call to arms or speak at length about a glorious invasion either. Instead, he repeated, again, that the Russians had no choice but to launch their special military operation in Ukraine, as if some law of history had ordered it.

If he wants to expand the current conflict—if he wants to persuade millions of people to sacrifice their lives and their fortunes to fight across Europe once again—he will need to provide a far more powerful motivation, a far deeper reason to fight, something other than this war’s alleged resemblance to a past tragedy. But he doesn’t have that kind of motivation to offer, or at least not yet.

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It’s All About Women and Sex

Having been raised Catholic in the late 1950's and 1960's the church fathers - bitter supposedly celebite men - were obsessed with sex and women being temptresses waiting to lead men to perdition.  While the Virgin Mary was venerated, the rest of womankind was best viewed as a threat to mens' afterlife. All sex was bad unless aimed at procreation and heaven forbid it be enjoyable.  Much of the Catholic heirarchy remains sex obsessed. Ditto for the Christofascists and evangelicals pushing for the overturning of Roe v. Wade who meanwhile have the highest dovorce rate of any religious group and, at least in the South, have the highest online porn usage.  Overlooking the rank hypocrisy of these folks - and the fact that they support GOP policies that seek to give no funding to care for children once they are born - it all comes down to seeking to subordinate women and to control their sex lives while invoking 12th century knowledge of sex and sexuality (and sexual orientation, of course).  Given this obsession with sex and controlling women, it's only a matter of time before contraception and gay sex are targeted by America's Christian Taliban.  They truly are just as extreme on sexual matters as the Islamic extremists they otherwise condemn.   And it all boils down to forcing one set of religious beliefs on all Americans.  A column in the New York Times looks at this reality:

When I was back in high school — a Catholic girls’ school in Cincinnati at the beginning of the sexual revolution — our religion class covered the abortion issue in approximately 45 seconds.

“Abortion is murder,” said the priest who was giving the lesson, before moving on to more controversial topics, like necking and heavy petting. I still have a vivid memory of being marched into the auditorium for a lecture from a visiting cleric who assured us that when Jesus was dying on the cross, he was tortured by a vision of the sins of mankind — notably adolescent girls “making out with boys in the back seat of a car.”

Now, that was a long time ago . . . . . You don’t hear that specific message too much in today’s political debates about reproduction, but as a way of thinking, it’s most definitely still there.

On Wednesday the Senate failed to pass a Democratic bill supporting women’s right to choose in anticipation of a Supreme Court decision going in the other direction.

It’s pretty clear where we’re going. The Supreme Court’s Trump-constructed majority will reject the by-now-longstanding understanding that a woman has the constitutional right to decide whether she wants to end a pregnancy. In at least 13 states, laws banning abortion could kick into place almost immediately.

Welcome to the land of my high school religion classes, people. The governor of Mississippi, when asked whether the state would move on to a ban on contraception, said, rather unnervingly, that it’s “not what we’re focused on at this time.” And the dreaded Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn has denounced the Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which covers the use of contraceptives for married couples under the constitutional right to privacy.

Blackburn says Griswold is “constitutionally unsound.” . . . the question is whether states that are able to ban abortion will march further into anti-birth-control territory. There’s bound to be a next step. The many, many activists who have focused their political careers on constraining women’s sexual activity aren’t going to just declare victory and go home.

All this is basically about punishing women who want to have sex for pleasure. It’s a concept with a long tradition in American history. Back in 1873, Congress began to pass a series of laws prohibiting dissemination through the mail of birth control literature, drugs or devices. Later, when a journalist asked Anthony Comstock, founder of the New York Commission on the Suppression of Vice, whether it would be all right for a woman to use contraceptives if pregnancy would endanger her life, Comstock snapped: “Can they not use self-control? Or must they sink to the level of beasts?”

[I]t’s important to note that the policies we’re talking about here are basically a matter of legislating the religious beliefs of just one segment of the public.

The goal of the Democratic Senate bill was mainly to get the public focused on the reproductive rights issue before the fall elections. And that certainly couldn’t hurt. There have to be voters out there who aren’t all that geared up about going to the polls but who might be moved if they got to hear the speech by Republican Steve Daines of Montana that praised anti-abortion laws as being similar to ones “that protect the eggs of a sea turtle or the eggs of eagles.”

Those sea turtles have been coming up a lot in this debate. Republican James Lankford of Oklahoma, in a long, emotional speech, recounted a confrontation with abortion rights demonstrators who pointed out there was a difference between laws protecting a woman’s right to choose and laws protecting endangered species.

“And I’m called the extremist,” Lankford declared. He added, “If people call me a radical for believing children are valuable — so be it.”

Actually, people call Lankford a radical for believing that the reproductive experiences of female water-dwelling reptiles are comparable to the experiences of human beings whose offspring will need and deserve many years of constant care and concern in order to prosper.

Years of care and support who the same anti-abortionists don't want to spend a penny on. 

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J.D. Vance: A Dangerous Politician

Having once been a Republican back in the days when truth mattered and Christofascists and overt racists were not welcome,  it is beyond disturbing to witness the lengths higly educated individuals will go to prostitute themselves to Donald Trump and the MAGA base solely for perceived political advantage.  A poster boy of this phenomenon is Trump backed J.D. Vance who is now the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Ohio.  Of course, Vance has fellow Ivy League educated Republicans who have thrown truth and morality to the wind - think Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton for but two examples and then there is Princeton and Yale educated Justice Alito who wants to exault 13th century legal theories - as they brazenly seek to promote themselves with the MAGA base of religious extremistsand white supremacists.  Indeed, it's enough to make one wonder what is being taught at the Ivy League schools that they are turning out such morally deficient or religiously extreme individuals.  But back to Vance who has gone from being a Trump critic to giving Trump daily political fellatio.  A piece in Politico looks at Vance and the danger he poses if elected to the U.S. Senate.  Here are excerpts:

Hillbilly Elegy was published in the summer of 2016. It became a New York Times bestseller and a cultural sensation — and it made a celebrity of sorts out of J.D. Vance. He was for a time one of the main explainers to those on the left of what was to them the inexplicably successful presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. In the last six years, though, the title has turned into but a piece of Vance’s resume, a part of a quick clause that says who he is — Yale Law, venture capitalist, author of …

In the wake, though, of Vance’s victory this week in the wild and tightly contested Republican Senate primary in Ohio — one that makes him a favorite to get elected to the U.S. Senate come November — Hillbilly Elegy is newly relevant. And while legions of pundits and commentators focused the last few days on Trump’s role in boosting Vance, Silas House went back to the book.

House, the Appalachian Studies chair at Berea College in Kentucky, one of the premier thinkers in and about the South and a bestselling writer in his own right, considers Hillbilly Elegy offensive and inauthentic. He sees it, and saw it from the start, as not a memoir but a treatise that traffics in ugly stereotypes and tropes, less a way to explain the political rise of Trump than the actual start of the political rise of Vance. And it’s as meaningful now as it was when it first came out, House believes, because it helps show what kind of candidate Vance has been and what kind of senator he might be.

He’s dangerous. So is his book,” House said about Vance in a Tuesday night tweet.

“When I criticize it, sometimes conservatives accuse me of wanting to keep it out of readers’ hands,” he told me Thursday. . . . I am saying that I hope people who read it seek historical and cultural context. Every family story has value, but I wish he’d told that story without generalizing an entire place and people to fit his agenda.”

It’s a dangerous book because it’s a treatise in disguise. Lots of times when I would voice my opposition to the book, well-intentioned people, often liberal people, would say, “But it’s a memoir, it’s his family story — how can you negate his own story?” . . . But the problem is it is woven through with dog whistles about class and race, gender. And if your ears are attuned to those dog whistles, you know exactly what he’s saying. If you’re not, then it can read like a heartwarming rags-to-riches story. And everything that we’ve learned since the book came out sort of proves that it was just laying the groundwork for this political career.

One of the most troubling things to me about the book is that it talks a lot about unemployment and poverty, domestic violence, the opioid crisis, but it never gives you context for why those things exist the way they do in Appalachia. For anybody who really knows the region, it’s a deeply troubling book because it’s so misleading, and it lacks so much context, and he knew exactly what he was doing.

[T]he whole thing’s political in every way. The whole reason so many people responded to that book to help them understand the rise of Trump is because in a way it gave them exactly what they were looking for: easy answers instead of really complicated historical answers. And that’s why I think it’s so disingenuous and dangerous because it’s not true. It’s full of untruths, intentionally manipulative stories.

The first time I read it, it read like the launching of a political campaign to me. As someone who has read a lot of political memoirs, it felt that way. It’s an origin story, and to some degree it’s a superhero origin story that’s terribly condescending to the rest of his family. The gist of it is, “Well, I’m the one who made it out, I’m the one who’s successful. I had the same sort of opportunities they did, but I did it, and they didn’t.”

I think a lot of conservative people read that book and they really responded to the rags-to-riches aspect of it. I think a lot of liberal people read it and had a lot of their suspicions confirmed. Lots of times a book is what readers bring to it themselves.

Let’s say somebody’s on the fence about voting for Vance. I would hope they would read that book and see the dog whistles and see the lack of complexity, see the generalizations, see the outright falsehoods that are throughout the book. I mean, lots of times in the book when he’s talking about Appalachia, it’s almost like he’s never been to Appalachia.

And I think it’s so telling that this book was pushed as an Appalachian narrative when this man is two generations removed from Appalachia. . . . . there’s a market there, in a different way, for the idea of the hillbilly, more than there is for the idea of the Rust Belt. So that alone is manipulative in that it’s sold as an Appalachian story or a hillbilly story, and if you read the book, you realize that hardly any of it is set in Appalachia. He’s saying, I guess, that generationally you can’t escape Appalachia, because here he is, his grandparents left there when they were very young, his mother never lived there, he never lived there, and suddenly, after the book came out, he’s on every news show as the representative of a region that he barely knows.

The first thing of course is it made him kind of a household name for a whole lot of people. It’s a very popular book, and it put him on practically every news show, and at the time he became the representative for quote-unquote Trump country. He was the expert on Trump country. He was hoping to explain why this was happening for people who have no understanding of rural America, but think they do, who have no context for it. And when he wrote the book, he didn’t know he was going to need that Trump tap, but he did know that he would need this origin story. He did know that we love a rags-to-riches story. . . . but to me it just reads like a political launching pad book, and it’s certainly a treatise more than it is a memoir.

It’s dangerous because there’s such a lack of complexity in the book in a time when the national conversation lacks more and more nuance. There’s no nuance in the book. There’s a lot that’s false and intentionally misleading, and I always think that’s really dangerous when there’s intentional misinformation being shared. And I think he’s dangerous because he embodies all of that. And it seems to me that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to rise. And I can think of nothing more dangerous in a politician than that.