Both Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh testified at their Senate hearings that they considered Roe v. Wade to be an established precedent.
Now, it appears that they will join with three other extremist justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, which has been in effect for half a century.
They both lied.
Is that perjury?
The Intercept published a stunning confession by a young man about his “grooming” by an elementary school teacher.
Jon Schwarz writes:
Anyone following the news knows the U.S. right is now obsessively accusing public school teachers, especially ones who are LGBTQ+, of being “groomers” — i.e., pedophiles. It’s both astonishingly vile and horrifyingly cynical.
This kind of propaganda — that some minority group is plotting to harm our children — has always been the specialty of history’s most vicious political movements. Today’s version is just one step away from the Taliban’s violent loathing of education, and two steps from declaring that teachers are using the blood of children to make their unleavened bread. Ignorant audiences have always been vulnerable to these fairy tales, which is why the abuse of children is a popular theme of literal fairy tales.
At the same time, the right-wing figures who spew out this sewage are absolutely indifferent to the actual sexual abuse of children. For instance, one of the most hateful proponents of the groomer narrative is Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at a conservative think tank called the Manhattan Institute. Rufo recently proclaimed on Twitter: “The public school system has a child sex abuse problem.”
That’s all you need to know about Rufo. He has no interest in the sexual abuse of children in private or charter schools. Nor did he mention churches. For that matter, he has nothing to say about the Republican Party: Its longest-serving speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, was a child molester, and the next GOP Speaker of the House may be Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who has been accused by eight former studentsof helping cover up the sexual abuse of wrestlers at Ohio State University.
That’s because, for Rufo and his compatriots — such as the playwright David Mamet; Christina Pushaw, the press secretary for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; andDonald Trump Jr. — the victims of genuine sexual abuse don’t matter at all. They and the lifelong pain many experience are simply useful tools in the right’s centurylong attack on public education. Rufo and company understand that democracy is impossible without public education and so are willing to do anything to destroy it.
We know where this path leads, and we must step off it immediately. The people doing this are cruel and sadistic, but they’re also mewling cowards — and with pushback now, they will slink back into the holes from which they emerged.
At the same time, we should be telling the full truth about public school teachers. The one good thing I can say about this awful current phenomenon is that it’s made me remember all the beautiful teachers I’ve had, and how much better they made my life. Here’s my story of how my elementary school teacher.
Please read his memories of teachers who taught him to love learning.
He says:
From encouraging me to read and write, to nudging me to think for myself, their pernicious influence burdens me to this day.
Christopher de Vinck taught English in New Jersey for many years and lives there now.
The following lovely piece appeared in The Dallas Morning News today:
Time ran out. My mother was ravished with arthritis, often tired, but always filled with optimism and joy.
She read The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times. She was an author of many books. (Her next collection of poems Journey to the Morning Light will be published by Paraclete Press in September.)
My mother continued to write every day. She had just finished reading Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, the extraordinary novel written by Jung Chang.
Time ran out. My mother was 99 years old and said one afternoon a few months ago “Always keep in mind the secret name of beauty.”
My mother remembered that a few hours before I was born she was baking a peach pie. She was my first teacher: introducing me to the color of the autumn leaves, and reading aloud Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit. We collected wild flowers together in the spring. In grade school my mother gave me Kenneth Grahame’s book The Wind in the Willows. In middle school my mother placed on my pillow Sterling North’s book, Rascal. In high school she introduced me to the books of Loren Eiseley and William Carlos Williams. When I met a girl, my mother gave me her engagement ring to pass along to my wife of 45 years.
My mother endured Nazi occupation in Belgium for four years, nearly died in Dunkirk bombing raids, raised six children here in American…including my brother Oliver who was born with no intellect, was blind, mute, unable to chew.
Time ran out.
“Day by day, we cross over into the future,” my mother wrote in a poem. My mother is buried beside my father in a small Benedictine cemetery in Weston, Vermont.
When I visited my mother at the house where I grew up we sometimes sat on the terrace just outside her bedroom. In spring the wisteria dripped those beautiful purple flowers. In the fall the green leaves protect us. Often a chipmunk joined us on the terrace as my mother and I reminisced about weddings, vacations and peach pie.
“This terrace is a fragment of paradise,” my mother said as the brave chipmunk scurried up beside her chair. As she leaned over, the chipmunk sat up and gently took the peanut from my mother’s hand. A blue jay swooped down from the pine tree and grabbed a peanut that my mother had tossed onto the terrace floor.
We laughed at the quick chipmunk. We talked about the sorrows in the news and about the deer she saw sleeping in the yard at the edge of the woods. We even spoke about God.
“Isn’t it lovely that we are here, at ease, loving the world?”
We are living in a world that is being ravished with war, fires, and hurricanes, political upheavals, hunger, violence that is loose upon the world. It has always been so. But these things are news because they are stains that attempt to mar the beauty of our souls my mother would say. Goodness isn’t news because it is so common.
On the terrace, as my mother fed her chipmunk, she looked up at me and said “You don’t think of it, Christopher, but far ahead yet closer than a heartbeat something immense, wild, holy grabs you and won’t let go.”
Yes, time ran out. My mother’s heart gave up in December. Flowers perish, trees shed their leaves, and fields shrivel into brown stalks and frozen earth.
As my mother and I slowly walked back into her bedroom, as we took our last steps off the terrace arm in arm she looked up and said, “We can always return to a life of simplicity and peace.”
My mother was 99 years old and time ran out. She saw my sadness and then with a sigh and smile as she struggled back onto her bedroom chair she whispered “Christopher, we do not die forever.”
Happy Mother’s Day.
Christopher de Vinck’s latest novels are “Ashes,” (HarperCollins) and “Mr. Nicholas” (Paraclete Press).
I am not a racing fan. I can’t get engaged in a sport whose major competition is completed in two minutes.
But, whoa! These may be the two greatest minutes of horse-racing history!
On Friday morning, the horse Rich Strike was not in the starting line-up. When another horse dropped out, Rich Strike was a last-minute addition. The odds against him were 80-1.
He was supposed to trail the field.
I’ve watched three times and may see it a few more times.
Meet his owner and jockey here.
Judge Samuel Alito went out of his way to say that the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade would not affect other decisions, like contraception and gay marriage. But in the same decision, he asserted that the Constitution contains no “right to privacy,” on which these cases were built.
The Miami Herald interviews Jim Obergefell, the lead plaintiff in the gay marriage, who expressed his fear that the Court meant to strike down all rights based on the right to privacy.
In his draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito tries to limit the blast radius of his ruling by writing that abortion is fundamentally different from other privacy matters — like contraception and marriage equality — that have historically challenged the court. “The abortion right,” Alito writes, is “critically different from any other right that this Court has held fall within the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of ‘liberty.’” Overturning one, he says, would not necessarily undermine the others. Jim Obergefell doesn’t believe him.
The plaintiff in the landmark 2015 case before the Supreme Court that established same-sex marriage as a constitutional right now says he is tired, disheartened and terrified of what may come after reading Alito’s sweeping rationale in the draft decision published Monday by Politico. “I’ve been asked if I believe what he says in that decision — that this is specific to a woman’s right to an abortion, and really should not be used on marriage equality,” Obergefell told McClatchy in an interview. “I don’t believe that whatsoever, because so many of the things he says in that decision open the door to using those arguments against marriage equality. And where does it stop?”
“I’m terrified. I really can’t put it any more simply than that. I am terrified,” he continued. “Marriage equality, while we had it for seven years, clearly will not pass his definition of tradition or history.”
Obergefell v. Hodges was a landmark civil rights case that culminated after years of litigation in a 5-4 decision at the high court, requiring all 50 states and U.S. territories to perform and recognize same-sex marriages the same as opposite-sex marriages.
Alito dissented from that decision, and in a speech to the Federalist Society in 2020 criticized it once again. “You can’t say marriage is a union between one man and one woman,” he told the conservative organization. “Until very recently, that’s what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now it’s considered bigotry.”
At that time, Alito found himself in the minority. But the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy — who wrote the Obergefell decision and several other key gay rights decisions that preceded it — provided then-President Donald Trump with an opening to nominate a conservative replacement.
Trump chose Brett Kavanaugh, who currently supports the decision to overturn Roe that Obergefell now fears.
“All I have to say is, they said in their confirmation hearings that they considered Roe v. Wade settled law,” Obergefell said. “Clearly they were misleading the Senate — not being truthful — so regardless of what they said during their confirmation hearings about marriage equality.”
“Losing Justice Kennedy was a loss to the LGBTQ+ community because he was so instrumental in decisions bringing us forward as a nation and toward a more perfect union,” he added. Gay rights organizations told McClatchy they have been preparing for a decision ending Roe v. Wade for months, but were nevertheless stunned by the sheer sweep of Alito’s written opinion.
Top officials and attorneys at the Human Rights Campaign held an emergency huddle on Monday night when the leaked draft published, and both HRC and GLAAD leaders are working to mobilize support for protests around the country with pro-choice groups. “The fact that Alito in this decision takes the track that, if these fundamental rights that we enjoy in our nation are not specifically enumerated in our constitution, then they’re questionable and should only be based on our nation’s history and traditions – to me that is one of the scariest things to hear a Supreme Court justice say,” Obergefell said.
“The history and tradition in North America, in the land now known as the United States of America, was for white people to own black people. There’s a longer tradition there than there is of freedom,” he added. “So it’s just a terrifying thing.”
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/article261132807.html#storylink=cpy
Bret Stephens is a conservative columnist for the New York Times. Although he did not support Trump, he steadfastly represents a conservative point of view. However, he dissented mightily from the draft decision overturning Roe,written by Justice Alito. It is a radical decision, he writes not a conservative decision.
He wrote:
Dear Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas:
As you’ll no doubt agree, Roe v. Wade was an ill-judged decision when it was handed down on Jan. 22, 1973.
It stood on the legal principle of a right to privacy found, at the time, mainly in the penumbras of the Constitution. It arrogated to the least democratic branch of government the power to settle a question that would have been better decided by Congress or state legislatures. It set off a culture war that polarized the country, radicalized its edges and made compromise more difficult. It helped turn confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court into the unholy death matches they are now. It diminished the standing of the court by turning it into an ever-more political branch of government.
But a half-century is a long time. America is a different place, with most of its population born after Roe was decided. And a decision to overturn Roe — which the court seems poised to do, according to the leak of a draft of a majority opinion from Justice Samuel Alito — would do more to replicate Roe’s damage than to reverse it.
It would be a radical, not conservative, choice.
What is conservative? It is, above all, the conviction that abrupt and profound changes to established laws and common expectations are utterly destructive to respect for the law and the institutions established to uphold it — especially when those changes are instigated from above, with neither democratic consent nor broad consensus.
This is partly a matter of stare decisis, but not just that. As conservatives, you are philosophically bound to give considerable weight to judicial precedents, particularly when they have been ratified and refined — as Roe was by the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision — over a long period. The fact that Casey somewhat altered the original scheme of Roe, a point Justice Alito makes much of in his draft opinion, doesn’t change the fact that the court broadly upheld the right to an abortion. “Casey is precedent on precedent,” as Justice Kavanaugh aptly put it in his confirmation hearing.
It’s also a matter of originalism. “To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the courts,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78, “it is indispensable that they” — the judges — “should be bound down by strict rules and precedents, which serve to define and point out their duty in every particular case that comes before them.” Hamilton understood then what many of today’s originalists ignore, which is that the core purpose of the courts isn’t to engage in (unavoidably selective) textual exegetics to arrive at preferred conclusions. It’s to avoid an arbitrary discretion — to resist the temptation to seek to reshape the entire moral landscape of a vast society based on the preferences of two or three people at a single moment.
Just what does the court suppose will happen if it votes to overturn Roe? Ending legalized abortions nationwide would not happen, so pro-lifers would have little to cheer in terms of the total number of unterminated pregnancies, which has declined steadily, for a host of reasons, with Roe and Casey still the law of the land.
But the pro-lifers would soon rediscover the meaning of another conservative truism: Beware of unintended consequences. Those include the return of the old, often unsafe, illegal abortion (or abortions in Mexico), the entrenchment of pro-choice majorities in blue states and the likely consolidation of pro-choice majorities in many purple states, driven by voters newly anxious over their reproductive rights. Americans are almost evenly divided on their personal views of abortion, according to years of Gallup polling, but only 19 percent think abortion should be illegal under all circumstances.
It shouldn’t be hard to imagine how Americans will react to the court conspicuously providing aid and comfort to the 19 percent. You may reason, justices, that by joining Justice Alito’s opinion, you will merely be changing the terms on which abortion issues get decided in the United States. In reality, you will be lighting another cultural fire — one that took decades to get under control — in a country already ablaze over racial issues, school curriculums, criminal justice, election laws, sundry conspiracy theories and so on.
And what will the effect be on the court itself? Here, again, you may be tempted to think that overturning Roe is an act of judicial modesty that puts abortion disputes in the hands of legislatures. Maybe — after 30 years of division and mayhem.
Yet the decision will also discredit the court as a steward of whatever is left of American steadiness and sanity, and as a bulwark against our fast-depleting respect for institutions and tradition. The fact that the draft of Justice Alito’s decision was leaked — which Chief Justice Roberts rightly described as an “egregious breach” of trust — is a foretaste of the kind of guerrilla warfare the court should expect going forward. And not just on abortion: A court that betrays the trust of Americans on an issue that affects so many, so personally, will lose their trust on every other issue as well.
The word “conservative” encompasses many ideas and habits, none more important than prudence. Justices: Be prudent.
The Intercept contains an article that is worth your time about the leaked Alito decision that overturns Roe v. Wade.
Jordan Smith writes:
AS A MATTER of fact, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is wrong.
In a leaked draft of the court’s majority opinion in the Mississippi case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Alito writes that Roe v. Wade and its successor Planned Parenthood v. Casey must be overturned — an extraordinary move that would topple precedent in order to constrict, rather than expand, constitutional rights.
The missive is aggressive and self-righteous and reads like the greatest hits of those who disfavor the right to bodily autonomy. There’s the linking of abortion to eugenics, for example. “Some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population,” Alito writes. “It is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect.” The ahistorical comparison misses the fact that an individual choosing to abort their own pregnancy is not analogous to forced sterilization by the state to alter the American gene pool.
And there’s the claim that because the word “abortion” isn’t found in the Constitution, the right to it doesn’t exist. “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” Alito writes. This completely ignores the historical significance of the 14th Amendment, a Reconstruction-era addition meant to ensure individual liberty, including the right to decide whether and with whom to form a family. “Most Americans understand the plain truth reflected in these protections,” Elizabeth Wydra, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, said in a statement. “A person cannot truly be free, and is not truly an equal member of society, if they do not get to decide for themselves this most basic question of bodily autonomy.” Alito’s opinion, she said, “frighteningly bulldozes past the Constitution.”
Alito also dismisses the notion that there are any clearly identifiable reliance issues at stake in discarding abortion rights. In this context, the concept of reliance posits that when expectations have been built around the stability of a particular law or judicial pronouncement, those interests should be protected and the precedent underpinning them upheld. In addressing the issue, Alito comes off as if perplexed: The court knows how to evaluate “concrete” reliance issues like those implicated in “property and contract rights,” Alito writes, but assessing an “intangible” reliance is a whole other story. “That form of reliance depends on an empirical question that is hard for anyone — and in particular, for a court — to assess, namely, the effect of the abortion right on society and in particular on the lives of women.”
Yet again, Alito is wrong — and there’s plenty of research to prove it.
In an amicus brief filed in the Dobbs case, 154 economists and researchers took direct aim at the how-could-we-possibly-know-what-abortion-has-done-for-society nonsense. The brief details a substantial body of research demonstrating that access to legal abortion has had significant social and economic impacts, increasing education and job opportunities for women and reducing childhood poverty.
The expansion of abortion access after Roe reduced the overall birthrate by up to 11 percent. For teens, the drop was 34 percent; teen marriage was reduced 20 percent. Research has revealed that young women who used abortion to delay parenthood by just a year saw an 11 percent increase in hourly wages later in their careers. Access to abortion for young women increased the likelihood of finishing college by nearly 20 percentage points; the probability that they would go on to a professional career jumped by nearly 40 percentage points. All these effects, the economists noted, were even greater among Black women.
“Abortion legalization has shaped families and the circumstances into which children are born,” the economists wrote. Abortion legalization reduced the number of children living in poverty as well as the number of cases of child neglect and abuse. “Yet other studies have explored long-run downstream effects as the children of the Roe era grew into adulthood,” reads the brief. “One such study showed that as these children became adults, they had higher rates of college graduation, lower rates of single parenthood, and lower rates of welfare receipt.”
In other words, the effect of the abortion right on society is not remotely “intangible.” There is decades’ worth of evidence showing that abortion access has positively impacted women and their families. “But those changes are neither sufficient nor permanent: abortion access is still relevant and necessary to women’s equal and full participation in society,” the economists wrote, challenging Mississippi’s argument in the Dobbs case that contraception and employment policies like parental leave have essentially made abortion unnecessary. Indeed, nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended and nearly half of those pregnancies end in abortion. “These statistics alone lead to the inevitable (and obvious) conclusion that contraception and existing policies are not perfect substitutes for abortion access.”
Jordan goes on to write about her own experience. As a sophomore in college, she got pregnant. Her mother immediately sent the money for an abortion. This was the right decision for her, allowing her to finish college, go to graduate school, and pursue a career.
Pastors for Children made a short video to show in direct terms why people should beware of the “school choice” claims. Most people love their local schools and their teachers. “Friday Night Lights” are the lights on the high school football field. There are many more reasons to protect what belongs to the community, the public schools that welcome all children.
Watch it.
The stores in small towns and rural areas across America have been devastated by the arrival of Walmarts, whose low prices and foreign imports drive the small stores out of business. Main streets across the nation are marked by empty stores.
This is a story of a near century-old store in Moundsville, West Virginia, that managed to survive. The story explains how Ruttenberg’s has withstood the competition.
It is a reminder that competition can make you stronger, or, if the competition is a mega-giant, it can kill you and wipe out your town’s Main Street.
