A Crime-Spree of Judicial Activism:
With Guns Ablazin’ & Separation of Church & State Eroding, Rogue Supreme Court is Destroying Women’s Rights, Sending Doctors & Patients Scrambling, & Disfiguring The Nation’s Identity At Home & Abroad, Part One
The news that Roe vs Wade had been fully overturned could not have come at a worse time, on the Friday before the Santa Fe Pride Parade the following morning. June was spent moving and getting an offiice together after nearly six months of living on my mother’s couch in a one-bedroom apartment in Santa Fe, and nine months after a life-upending deportation from the Kingdom of Thailand, where I had fled to in February of 2020 in a cheap bid to escape the Seat of Empire, hide from COVID-19, and find a sanctuary to start over and resume my writing life, a process now repeated here in the USA.
And just as I was gaining a bit of personal momentum, the decision came, but the language in the opinions by the majority were so chilling, that I realized that like the January 6 insurrection, we suddenly had an elephant on our hands. And that in order to eat an elephant, according to human rights champion Desmond Tutu, it’s important to take it one bite at a time.
That it may soon be illegal in perhaps as many as 26 states for a woman to make her own decisions regarding her reproductive issues was an issue that struck at the heart of what most Americans had always taken for granted, and that’s personal autonomy — in other words, freedom. Freedom was once a revolutionary idea held synonymous with our country, but it may now be out of fashion in the United States of America, not just for a fertilized woman who wishes not to be pregnant, but for whole loads of other people — and possibly every American citizen.
Senior Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his personal opinion of the ruling that the same justification for going after a women’s right to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy could, and likely would in the near future, be applied to Marriage Equality, the ability for same-sex persons to marry, undermining a now mainstream right of the LGBTQ community, and perhaps might also be applied to the right to access to contraceptives, signalling that the Christian idea that there should be “no sex before marriage” was soon going to be the law of the land.
And not for the first time, but now perhaps forever, social media was flooded with memes attacking Justice Clarence Thomas, referring to him as Uncle Clarence, an allusion to Uncle Tom, the protagonist of the novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” written in 1852 by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and whose meaning is “a black man considered to be especially obedient or servile to white people.”
For what Thomas left out of his opinion regarding possible cases he might go after in the future was the Loving v. Virginia case of 1967, which determined the federal right for an integrated marriage between races, a right he enjoys with a white wife and therefore is prone to leave untouched, but he was called out on this by African American actor Samuel L. Jackson with this line now bouncing all over social media, but particularly Twitter.
How’s Uncle Clarence feeling about Overturning Loving v Virginia??!!
– Samuel L. Jackson
But like anyone who blindly crusades against the rights of others, Justice Thomas may soon see the very white supremacist forces with whom he has aligned himself with turn on him now that he’s so generously helped them to achieve their aims by shifting the law on personal freedoms for women on Friday, but perhaps also for LGBTQs & sex positives in the future.
Today, it’s about a woman’s right to choose whether or not to carry a pregnancy to full term, but if we are to take Thomas’ opinion as a road map, it could be the right of same-sex couples to marry, and the right of adults to use contraceptives. This pick-and-choose aspect of Thomas’ opinion can and likely will lead to interesting ramifications for all Americans, unless this Rogue Supreme Court as evidenced by its unrestrained Judicial Activism agenda isn’t somehow reined in — or destroyed. And while that might seem impossible now, two years ago, it may have seemed impossible to overturn Roe v Wade. And what many people don’t yet realize, is that when you take away freedoms, anything can happen.
A woman’s ability to make a decision as to whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is known as “Pro-Choice,” and it is ridiculed by the opposition, known as “Pro-Life” by the phrase, often chanted, “it’s not a choice — it’s a child.” They argue that once fertilization of a fetus within a woman’s body has occurred in the tango between a penis and a vagina leading to the male orgasm phenomena known as ejaculation, miraculous life has begun for the fetus. In a strange twist of the Biblical proverb whereby “the sins of the fathers shall be delivered upon the sons,” anti-abortionists instead have determined that “the sexuality of the man shall be delivered upon the woman.”
In this twisted scenario, the fetus, unable to speak for itself about its own rights to live, should take precedence over the woman charged with bearing the child, even if — currently in five states — the woman has been raped or was the victim of incest by a father, uncle, brother or cousin who took illicit ownership of an underage female relative and impregnated her for his own pleasure and, in the terminology of livestock, to increase the numbers in his own herd.
If the above terminology seems like a Gothic melodrama, consider that nearly one-third of Americans have been victims of incest, something that Mississippi governor Tate Reeves evades in defending his state’s trigger that would ban all abortion, including for rape & incest, since, after, “Well, that’s gonna be the law because in 2007 the Mississippi legislature passed it.”
But Gothic horror stories aside, for those in the Pro-Life movement who may be having victory parties over this decision — when you deliver decisions as sweeping as this one, you’re going to end up with some unconsidered ramifications. On my personal Facebook wall in the immediate hour after learning the news, l posted that any state imposing a ban would invariably experience “brain drain,” focusing on how knowledge workers of all kinds, including tech workers certainly, who through the ability to work remotely, would simply leave states with anti-abortion agendas and move towards solid blue states.
This picture of a mass exodus of individuals or couples with high-earning knowledge jobs and their families just pulling up stakes and heading for bluer states was soon drastically eclipsed by the news late Friday and over the weekend that companies like Amazon, Citibank, Starbucks, Tesla, Yelp, PayPal, and even Disney announced they would pay travel expenses for people who needed to travel out of state for “reproductive issues,” while Google led the field by announcing that “anyone in the company can relocate, no justification necessary.”
And while others may have been discussing the shifts on Wall Street regarding the rise in prices on the stocks of gun manufacturers, I also mused on Facebook that perhaps we should keep a tally of those companies offering out of state travel expenses to their employees see if social capitalist individuals or investment funds would be rewarding these companies with increased capital investments and stock purchases come Monday morning and throughout the weeks after the decision.
As of this morning, June 28, 2022, seven states have become Ban-States; in South Dakota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arkansas, & Alabama, abortion is now completely illegal, even in cases of incest and rape. Score seven for Pro-Life, right? Well, maybe. Because Ban States now have an issue on their hands that Texas has only just begun to recognize, based on its Ban after six weeks of gestation, which started in September of 2021:
“In Texas, where abortion after six weeks gestation has been effectively banned since September, according to a report in The New England Journal of Medicine, the law has “taken a toll on clinicians’ mental health; some physicians report feeling like ‘worse doctors,’ and some are leaving the state. As a result, clinicians worry that pregnant Texans are being left without options for care and without doctors capable of providing it.”
- from the Poynter Institute in an article entitled, “Five Things to Know Now That the Supreme Court Has Overturned Roe v Wade,”
Where are these doctors, including obstetricians, gynecologists, ER nurses and other personnel going who aren’t interested in being prosecuted for the practice of medicine? Well, some are the ones from Texas are coming to the state of New Mexico where I live, where NM Governor Michelle Lujan-Grisham signed an executive order over the weekend that will protect medical personnel from prosecution and also ignore attempts at extradition for providers with abortion-related issues from other states.
But the situation in just Texas alone has left state health officials there wondering how much this will affect the care of pregnant women who very much planned their pregnancies and intended to carry them to term. This would include all the Pro-Lifers out there celebrating since Friday about how the gift of life that they wish to force on those who aren’t prepared to accept it, may end up affecting the health of themselves, their wives, and their families in their zeal to protect others who really rather wish that they would “keep your bans off our bodies.”
And this is where the chaos comes in — we have not one, but three new rulings that are quickly and drastically changing what it means to live an American life. And for those thinking these rulings mean the control of others, what it really points to is a hornet’s nest that no one can predict or control, changing daily as the ripples in the pond of these decisions become tidal waves of unforeseen consequences…
