As I have already described in an earlier essay, Dobbs is a dangerous and purely ideological (read: not Constitutional) SCOTUS decision that removed women’s health care as a right and was made with a specific purpose and outcome in mind. To be clear, this decision was pre-judged and decided in a political fundraising backroom years, if not decades ago, not in the Supreme Court hearing recently.
You are a fool to think otherwise.
The Nationalist Right simply needed a couple of judges willing to commit perjury in a Congressional hearing. The Nationalists simply needed an idealogue right-winger to go in front of the Senate and lie their asses off. And that’s what happened when SCOTUS nominees lined up to say they believe in legal precedent. But they had already planned, and agreed, and in some cases, those involved collected graft and bribery. Then they erased precedent as they had corruptly agreed to do in exchange for the nomination to the highest court in the land …and probably as we all read, some graft and bribery. We found out that many of the members of the court were on the right-wing donor’s dole and they made fantastic excuses for their own corruption. It sounded to me like a certain justice was attempting to throw out an ethics law because it applied to him. With power comes privilege, and that privilege is being left unchecked to society’s and the court’s demise.
The increasingly radicalized far Nationalist right (that is most of the Republican party right now) wanted a decision to shift power from the Constitution and our rule of law to any right-wing ideology applied to anything we don’t like or see political power in demonizing. The daft results were immediate. Dear Leader Toadie Senator Lindsay Graham (who screamed about state’s rights for decades) immediately entered a bill for a total and nationwide ban on any abortive procedure under any circumstance. Exactly doing what the Nationalist Right said they would not do: A federal abortion ban. So much for State’s Rights, eh?
It was a set of very purposeful lies that led us all to this critical juncture where civil rights via precedents are simply disposable by ideology.
Will this theocracy (read: not medicine) harm women?? Yes. That’s the whole point, it is the rebooting of 1800s Calvinism, The Scarlet Letter come The Handmaid’s Tale all wrapped up as one. Women according to the Nationalists need to be re-subjected and should have their rights to vote, have a checking account, and to employment outside the home revoked. Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen is the common re-played trope from the drooling Nazi brat boys. Christ, even in the Mad Men era, women had office jobs. The current brats want to go much, much further back. This is so embarrassingly stupid that we have men this insecure in society. It sounds like they are afraid of competing with women at school and on the job. Manly men?? Sounds more like the prepubescent boys in the He-Man Woman Haters Club.
Right-wing controlled statehouses and governors seized on the opportunity for whatever maniac right-wing bullshit came to mind. Dogs sniffing vaginas at the airports?!? Yep, that was one of their first ideas publically vomited. They even suggested state border checks exclusively for women traveling. The Nationalists loved it. Arresting doctors, nurses, husbands, friends, brothers, and even the Uber driver for the non-crime of driving someone to a doctor’s office? Yep, they immediately cheered and fist-pumped their fever dream of mass arrests like China or the Soviet Union for any perceived thoughts or moral crimes.
The states got corruptly inventive when they passed laws that abdicated the state’s enforcement authority and capacity and then handed it to any random citizen with a grievance. The Texas dickheads, Abbott and Paxton, signed on to changes in the law that allow anyone to start suing 3rd parties to enforce a state statute the state itself was unwilling to enforce. If they were willing to enforce it, why outsource the legal filings to random citizens?!? By the way, whether someone actually files a tort is completely and utterly beside the point. This is just enforcement-by-fear by using the bounty hunter system of justice. Lame as it is foolish.
How did they all of a sudden achieve such draconian measures?? By literally lying about medical procedures and medicines and essentially redefining everything to do with being pregnant into word salad disinformation. The medical procedure called a “D&C” was propagandized into an “unnecessary medical procedure.” The rightest-of-right-wingers malevolently changed every medical term they thought sounded odd or spooky into an unholy offense against society. They conveniently left out that D&Cs are common and are performed, yes for early-term abortions, but also for a few other perfectly legit medical reasons. They don’t care about the medicine (the increasing maternal mortality rate proves that), so they passed laws to start arresting doctors and nurses for what amounts to, again, morality policing by literal disinformation. The Saudi Arabian Muṭawwaʿūn are holding on Line #1.
Now the angry far-right zealot citizens, of both the mindless Dear Leader Nationalists and the Pence-style Theocratic-Dominionists, are not happy with the weak-kneed politicians. By weak-kneed politicians I mean the far-right local yokels pissed at everyone including the far-right politicians for not going far enough with the theocratic buffoonery.
[In the same way, the far-right says they did not go far enough with the Insurrection.]
That’s right, now the local right-wingers want Saudi Arabian or Tabilian-style morality laws that literally throw out things like the right to move and travel, drive on a highway without being unduly or unlawfully detained, the right to privacy, and the black-and-white Constitutionally-protected speech between doctor and patient. It’s Constitutionally-protected speech with your doctor whether or not you have a penis. The right-wingers seem to be forgetting that part.
Today, right the hell now, there is a movement in Texas to literally make driving on a road or a highway with a girl in the vehicle a reason to be stopped, detained, interrogated, and sued. That’s right!! If a girl is in an automobile driving a particular direction (they claim “out of state,” therefore automatically you are going to do something unholy with a vagina), the local yokel zealots want you to be arrested for… wait for it…
Abortion trafficking. That’s right, that’s not the Eisenhower Interstate System, that’s an abortion highway. That’s not a road, street, or boulevard, that’s an abortion transport system. Add this nonsense to things like banning FDA-approved medications. This is all getting dystopian and then some.
Imagine in America, (read: not North Korea) fathers, brothers, and husbands can be detained, harassed, arrested, and/or sued (again, by a random asshole with the only legal standing being asinine grievance) for the non-crime of simply driving down the road and minding your own fucking business and doing your own thing. GEEZ!!! For the non-crime of having a female in the car ([over a PA system at a supermarket] Saudi Arabia, again, holding, Line 1, morons…). For the non-crime that the Supreme Court previously had deemed a right - the freedom of travel. But as George Carlin warned us several decades ago, you have no rights, only revoke-able privileges. Fast-forward to today, a certain right-wingers’ myth-based belief system is being actively used to hijack every last right Americans have been granted since the birth of this nation.
Oh, how lawless is this total East German Stasi bullshit being played out in Texas?!? Recently, a federal judge went apeshit on police in Kansas for (…wait for it…) pulling people over because there are laws in other states they do not like and that was the reason for them to attempt to enforce their prohibition on basically anyone daring to drive through their jurisdiction. See Kansas still hates the weed and the Kansas police hate that other states legalized weed. So what did the Kansas cops do?!? Declare an “unlawful” jihad (my term, not the judge’s) on every motorist who happened to drive by with plates from Colorado, Oregon, or another state that had made recreational cannabis legal. It was an unlawful and unconstitutional fishing expedition bar none. A federal judge put a quick end to the “Kansas Two-Step”, a repeated, scripted tactic to set up and force searches of vehicles based solely on out-of-state license plates. The non-crime of driving with out-of-state plates.
Now how different are the Texas tactics that a local city council, egged on by a right-wing Stasi-minded zealot, on the fact that abortion will remain legal in many other states, can stop people from using the road unless they prove they are not driving to the doctor’s office for something completely a non-crime at their destination?
Gambling in open Vegas-style casinos is illegal in California. We have only gaming rooms, that are a lot different than Vegas or Tahoe. Can the CHP pull me over and interrogate me because I am driving eastbound headed toward Nevada? Could they search my car for cash or other valuables and then arrest me for illegal gambling on an illegal gambling highway? Sounds freakin’ absurd, right?? That’s exactly what Kansas did on their issue and Texas is doing on the non-crime of medical care for women.
I did warn y’all that the Dobbs enforcement will look just like the drug war. In the end, all Nationalist policies are reactionary authoritarianism. Nothing less.
Until next time…
Think about it.
So why did Sen. Lindsay Graham suddenly introduce a federal abortion ban?? DISTRACTION.
The Fulton County grand jury recommended indicting Sen Graham in the election denier criminal scheme.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/09/08/georgia-special-grand-jury-report-trump-fulton-county-lindsey-graham/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most