[Current] legislation weakens the current civil rights safeguards and allows the government to keep public transportation closed on the Sabbath and separate men and women in educational and public institutions. Not to mention that the religious parties are continuing to press for an ultra-nationalist agenda, including the building of new Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, which they want to annex to Israel…
[The] growing influence of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox and ultra-nationalists could lead at some point to the annexation of the occupied Arab territories, with Arabs constituting at least 50 percent of the population in the area between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. That raises the specter of Israel turning into a third-world Middle Eastern country, that, like Lebanon would be ravaged by ethnic and religious wars.
A recent Gallup poll gives greater detail to a back and forth UD and her buddy Rita had not long ago about whether college applicants might begin avoiding schools in states with medieval abortion laws. Looks as though they well might.
“The fact that 74% of Republican unenrolled adults say, ‘I would consider enrolling [in] a state that had greater access’ is, I think, a really impressive number,” [an official at the Lumina Foundation, which cosponsored the poll,] said.
And, you know, it ain’t just abortion. Some representatives in zero-abortion, lock ‘er up, execute her, states are now moving on to trying to ban non-standard sexual practices, contraception… And what sort of … emotional reality do you suppose pertains in campus health clinics in the nation’s Junior Anti-Sex League territories? Many students show up with an STD now and then – or maybe anxiety about an STD – and I wonder how comfy they’ll be discussing such matters with whatever medical crew hasn’t yet run off to New York? With a crew that thinks zygotes have voting rights and unmarried women who aren’t virgins are sinners? This isn’t about abortion only; it’s about sex, sexual ethics, sexual ethos, sexual conversation, sexual atmosphere. “[T]he University of Idaho [has warned] employees that promoting abortion while on the job could be viewed as a felony offense.”
“If you go to a state that doesn’t allow you to have autonomy over your body, then that is not only not appealing, that is offensive to many women,” [the Lumina official] said.
UD ain’t denying that there’s a minority of women who’d revel in the repression of their bodily autonomy, who’d get off on lectures from campus doctors about the importance of keeping their legs clenched. But she thinks it’s a very small minority.
[C]ollege applicants are looking closely at the cultural climate of places where they could spend four—or likely more—years studying and exploring their lives as young adults. Red states were already having a tough time attracting talent among students and professors alike, and veering to the right on abortion is only going to make retaining their rankings and prestige more difficult.
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[An] exodus of college students from states with abortion bans could join a string of other consequences that abortion bans have brought, amid reports the laws have also driven physicians out of states where they face the threat of felony charges for providing care, impacted recruitment and training at medical schools and caused employees to seek transfers to different states.
Lake of Kari: After WordsworthLike a breeze,
Or sunbeam, over your archive I passed
To a sanctions motion without pause; for ye have left
Your screenshot with me, an insane accord
Of paranoias - massive, and endowed
In their mad viciousness with power as will allow
A gracious, almost might I dare to say,
Virtuous, and profitable, victory.
[E]veryone thought that shifting the battle on abortion to the states would help anti-abortion groups. But in fact, what we’re seeing is that abortion rights groups are starting to rack up victories ...
[B]allot initiatives are turning out to be a real point of success for abortion rights groups...
[I]n Vermont and California, voters approved ballot initiatives that would explicitly establish a right to abortion in those state constitutions...
[Michigan] voters overwhelmingly said we want our state constitution to protect a right to abortion...
[T]here were three red states — Montana, Kansas, and Kentucky – [where] anti-abortion groups thought that voters of those red states would come out and say absolutely not. We do not want abortion. And in fact, in all three of those states those [anti-abortion] measures failed...
[B]ecause of the abortion issue, Democrats are actually making some gains in state legislatures…
Democrats now control the Pennsylvania legislature. That’s enormously important for access [to abortion], not just for Pennsylvania, but for women in West Virginia and in Ohio, where abortion is banned, because women from Ohio and West Virginia have been flooding into Pennsylvania to seek abortions...
In another example, look at Minnesota. There, the state Senate flipped the Democrats. They have control of both chambers of the legislature, plus the governor’s office, for the first time since 2013. And Democrats are really taking that as a mandate to achieve their legislative priorities. And that means they could do a mini Roe, essentially putting the protections of Roe into the state constitution...
[In Utah,] language written to defend polygamy is now language that is being used to defend abortion, and it’s working…
… I don’t think it’s what anyone expected when they wrote that constitution…
Republican legislatures may want to oppose abortion, but Republican voters, as in Wyoming, often have sort of a libertarian streak and think like, you know what? A decision to have an abortion is really up to the woman. I don’t want to interfere with that...
[W]hat we’ve seen in the last six months is that when you take abortion away or threaten to take it away, voters are going to come out to protect access to it…
[B]e careful what you wish for when you overturn Roe because [advocates] actually have something that might be even stronger up [their] sleeves...
[W]hen you put the right [to an abortion] into a state constitution, in most cases, it’s less contorted because when that right goes into the state constitution, it’s generally much more explicit than in the federal constitution. And when you put it in the constitution, you can make it much more expansive...
So take Michigan for an example. The right to abortion that was established by that ballot initiative that passed is far more expansive than anything that was in the US Constitution, far more expansive than Roe. It gives women control over the entire spectrum of choices in their reproductive health. That’s huge...
That’s not just sort of inserting the language of Roe into a state constitution. It’s not some sort of mini Roe. This is like maxi Roe. This is Roe on steroids..
Teams often act in concert, and this togetherness can be very intense. So in Iran at the moment, you have two featured teams:
Team Mullah, composed of hundreds of bullet-spraying gray-bearded men wearing gowns and turbans and granny glasses.
Team Football,composed of eleven handsome robeless turbanless non-bullet-spraying young men.
TF is on the world’s screens at the moment, arms locked, refusing to sing Iran’s We are some wild and crazy religious nutbags national anthem at the World Cup; boos can be heard throughout the stadium, where men and women wear shirts with the names of women murdered because their hijabs were askew.
Thomas L. Friedman makes me think about the limits of words in contexts of unlimited atrocity. You feel him straining, in this rather flamboyant, Faulknerian sentence, to arrive at, to be adequate to, to express verbally, the actually inexpressible horror of a man of no conscience who continues to command the loyalty of tens of millions of Americans. Up against evil embraced by millions, Friedman’s words seem weak.
Some writers resolve the inexpressibility problem by jumping over it into psychopathology. Trump is a high-functioning insane person (a contradiction in terms, no?), an hysterical narcissist, an infantile disordered etc. etc. Their writing goes toward elaborating his dangerous lunacy rather than, as with Friedman, his moral obscenity.
But approaching Trump in himself, whether your approach is ethical or clinical, seems a bit beside the point at this late date in his democracy-ravaging career. The point is not so much Trump as the capacity of so many Americans to adore him, in the way millions of Italians still adore Mussolini, and Russians Stalin. The pertinent pathology is ye olde escape from freedom.
Of course Trump helped; normal Americans finally, in the aftermath of the January 6 committee hearings, really felt, and feared, his movement’s cruelty and stupidity.
For the next several weeks, Trump’s social media statements will confirm his madness; he will almost certainly try to whip his Proud Boys up to some serious violence. So while this particular moment is about celebration, we have to start doing some cold consideration of the fact that his remnant nihilists will obey his orders to burn everything down.
But it was the Clarence Thomas brigade, with their vile denial of an important established right, that fucked up the Republican party but good. The medieval cruelty of denying raped ten year old girls abortions drew the attention of all enlightened and humane souls. UD believes the graphic barbarism of this behavior, especially in the context of ongoing highly publicized barbarism against girls and women in benighted countries like Iran and Afghanistan, has so shocked people with normal moral instincts that the abortion issue will not go away, but will continue to bedevil the Republican party as much as Le Monstre Trump has. Behind no exceptions anti-abortion lies precisely the bizarre religious fanaticism and coercion against which this country was established. I can think of nothing more anti-American. When the Supreme Court went there, it activated basic American instincts in millions of us, and now it can do little other than sit back and enjoy the fruits of its idiocy.
The country I love, the country I recognize, has spoken. I am intensely proud.
[T]he right-populist surge is retreating somewhat everywhere. Boris is gone in Britain, just a few years after a landslide win, replaced by a mainstream non-white Tory. Bolsonaro was just dispatched in Brazil (and is not protesting the results). Putin and Xi increasingly look like tin-pot tyrants, incapable of adjusting to events, adopting insane policies — invading Ukraine and imposing zero-Covid madness — and grabbing more and more power to protect them from the consequences.
As the Dems do far better than predicted, UD’s watching the very close race between Incumbent Sadist Lauren Boebert and her challenger (who as of this writing holds a narrow lead) Adam Frisch.
