December 6, 2021
Baby-faced killers, banned books and forced birth. As the news of the last week makes clear, this is the future that awaits if we don’t remove extremists from power. Last Tuesday there was another harrowing school shooting in Oxford, Michigan. The initial facts were devastating enough— a 15 year old armed with a Sig Sauer 9mm handgun, spraying 15 shots in five minutes, killing four beloved young people, injuring seven others and traumatizing countless more, (Source: “Key moments surrounding Michigan high school shooting,” by the Associated Press, APnews.com, 12/5/21).
As the week wore on, the story only became more bizarre. We learned that the killer’s parents had purchased the murder weapon for him as an early Christmas gift at a Black Friday sale (Source: ibid). America has become a place where merchants of death tempt the violent with discounts on instruments of mass murder; where some parents’ twisted idea of love is to gift those guns to a child.
When a visibly angry prosecutor announced that she planned not only to treat Ethan Crumbley like a Black child and charge him as an adult, but to charge his parents as well, the parents drained their bank account and skipped town. They fled to Detroit, no doubt imagining either that they could sneak across the river to Canada, or that the Black city was such a hotbed of criminality that no one would find them. Instead they were captured late Friday night cowering in an empty commercial building (Source: “Dramatic Day Reveals Details About the Parents of a School Shooting Suspect,” by Sophie Kasakove and Susan Cooper Eastman, The New York Times, 12/5/21). From our country’s steadfast refusal to regulate civilian ownership of weapons of war to the spectacle of parents who gleefully arm their troubled children and then abandon those children at the first whiff of accountability, the stench of American rot is inescapable.
Stench, as Justice Sotomayor noted, was the only way to describe the odor from the contemptuous sophistry displayed by the six conservative Justices during Wednesday’s oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Justice Kavanaugh cynically cited landmark civil rights cases like Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefells v. Hodges to disingenuously dismiss the argument that the Court should be bound by a precedent that has guaranteed women bodily autonomy for 50 years (Source: “Majority of the court appears poised to roll back abortion rights,” by Amy Howe, Scotusblog.com,12/1/21).
Amy Coney “Aunt Lydia” Barrett blithely ignored the fact that pregnancy itself carries serious medical risks and that the maternal mortality rate of Black women is 2.5 times that of white women, asking whether the “‘safe haven’ laws which allow parents to give up their newborns at designated safe places,” could serve as a substitute for women’s right to control their own bodies, (ibid).
Chief Justice John Roberts, whose radicalism is tempered by his concern for the Court’s legitimacy, zeroed in on the viability standard in Roe v. Wade, asking why 15 weeks was not a sufficient amount of time for women to exercise reproductive choice, (ibid).
While the high court’s conservatives were salivating over the prospect of giving the government control over the bodies of America’s women, in state after state Republicans were working feverishly to gain control of the minds of America’s kids. From Texas to Virginia to Pennsylvania, rabid conservatives seek to ban authors from Toni Morrison to Alison Bechdel. Radical conservatives are calling for the offending books to be burned and seek nothing less than the erasure of any knowledge of racism, Black history or the existence of LGBTQ people, (Source: “U.S. libraries report spike in organized attempt to ban books in schools,” by Allison Flood, the guardian.com, 11/25/21).
This is the current state of our country— awash in violence, ignorance and cruelty, full of people who seek to extinguish or erase anyone who is “different.” Yet, like stubborn surfers, we mistake the preternatural calm before a tsunami for a permanent state. We stand still at our own peril, thinking we won’t be drowned by the wave.
#PasstheWomen’sHealthProtectionAct
#Eliminatethefilibuster
#PasstheFreedomtoVoteAct
As I listened to the arguments , I was revolted by Justice Kavanaugh’s recitation of cases that expanded freedom, liberty and human rights as a justification for destroying freedom, liberty and human rights by overruling Roe v Wade. Aside from the evil comments of late Justice Scalia in the University of Texas affirmative action case, I have never heard such naked deceit coming from such a high ranking Judge.
I completely agree.