…how it’s going [DOT 5/5/22]

…considering I wasn’t away long, I didn’t think I’d be quite so far behind the curve when I tried to remember how to get one of these together…which in hindsight seems somewhat naïve

It’s not news that South Asia is on the front lines of climate change. For years, climate scientists and activists have warned how the region is vulnerable to the catastrophic impact of planetary warming, including longer and hotter heat waves, more erratic and dangerous storm systems slamming the coasts, and melting Himalayan glaciers stoking flash flooding. A recent report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that humanity has a “brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future.” South Asia is at the forefront of places in the world where experts believe life could literally become unbearable before the end of the century.

Over the past week, South Asia demonstrated again how our climate future is already our present. A scorching heat wave set April records for high temperatures in dozens of cities in north India and Pakistan. It followed an abnormally hot March. Temperatures in much of South Asia are customarily at their peak in May, a fiercely hot month that precedes the arrival of the monsoon season.

The most recent heat wave spurred rolling blackouts across various parts of the region as demand for electricity soared. In the Pakistani province of Balochistan, where in some places temperatures surpassed 120 degrees Fahrenheit, local residents reported not having functioning fridges or air conditioning for much of the day. Of course, only a fraction of the more than 1.5 billion people living in South Asia even have access to air conditioning. Since 2010, heat waves in India have killed more than 6,500 people.

The current extreme #heatwave in #Pakistan and #India as seen today, on the fourth intense hot day, by #Copernicus #Sentinel3 LST (Land Surface Temperature, not Air!). LST collected on April 29 shows max value exceeding 62°C/143°F. Gaps due to cloud/snow/nodata. #ClimateEmergency pic.twitter.com/0MCMkcSg0t

— ADAM Platform (@PlatformAdam) April 29, 2022

Half a year ago, the world’s governments convened at a major climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, and made various long-term commitments to transition their economies toward renewable energies and away from carbon-polluting fossil fuels. Yet in India, demand for coal — still the main energy source for the country’s electricity needs — surged, with the government even commandeering hundreds of passenger trains to transport coal to power plants.

It was only the latest example of how governments are, at least in the near term, undermining their own long-term climate goals. The effects of the pandemic and the global disruptions caused by the Ukraine war have led to many countries with far fewer constraints and challenges than India — namely, the United States and major European economies — moving to lower fuel prices and boost oil and gas supplies.

Shell profits soar to $9.1bn amid calls for windfall tax [Guardian]

All the while, climate activists say that even the ambitious commitments made by many governments are inadequate. At the current pace, following major steps taken over the past two decades, the world is still heading toward a 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.9 degrees Fahrenheit) increase in average global temperatures by the end of this century. That is significantly greater than the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold beyond which scientists warn of catastrophic, irreversible climate disasters.
[…]
And in places like India, the abstract goals and targets of climate campaigners get underscored by a far more visceral reality. “Here are 1.4 billion people who will be affected by this heat wave, the majority of whom contributed very little to global warming,” Arpita Mondal, a climate researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, told the MIT Technology Review. “This phenomenon should put an end to the question of why people should care about climate change.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/04/heat-wave-hot-pakistan-india-south-asia/

…& naturally this laptop is playing up…because why would anything work the way it’s supposed to?

Amid growing anger at what one official branded a “scattergun approach” by Scotland Yard – including different people being sent questionnaires two months apart for the same event – the Metropolitan police are expected to make an announcement soon after the local elections, with expectations of further Partygate fines.

The prime minister said on Tuesday he had not been contacted by the Met about a leaving party for his former spin doctor Lee Cain in November 2020. Sources said Met questionnaires, which can be a precursor to a fixed-penalty notice (FPN), had been sent to other people who attended.
[…]
“It feels there has been significant consideration about how to cause the least political impact – when someone is being investigated for a criminal offence,” an ex-official said. “How is this allowed to happen?”
[…]
A Whitehall source brought up how the investigation had affected others who attended gatherings, including the civil servant Kate Josephs who has taken leave from a new role at Sheffield city council after her December 2020 Cabinet Office leaving party was identified as a lockdown breach.
[…]
Johnson has been fined – along with Carrie Johnson and the chancellor, Rishi Sunak – over his birthday cake gathering. However, he does not appear to have been fined over a “bring your own booze” party in the Downing Street garden in May 2020, for which others have been fined.

In January, Johnson admitted attending the event – held during the first national lockdown when indoor and outdoor social mixing were banned – for about 25 minutes but claimed he “believed implicitly that this was a work event”. His principal private secretary at the time, Martin Reynolds, is said to have invited up to 100 people to the “socially distanced” evening drinks.

Officials involved in the gatherings under investigation believe it is likely that Johnson will get another two fines – one for Cain’s leaving do and another for the flat party on the same evening. However, Johnson is reported to be convinced he will not receive any further fines.

The Met did not respond to requests for comment.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/may/05/frustration-at-met-as-boris-johnson-not-sent-key-partygate-questionnaire

…must be nice to get to dodge the question…funny how that works, though…& not a nice kind of funny, at that

We have absolutely no idea whether abortion services have or haven’t ever been accessed by anyone connected with a draft-avoider who described avoiding STDs in the 80s as “my personal Vietnam”. “That’s an interesting question,” Trump replied to the New York Times when asked, during the 2016 campaign, if he’d ever been involved with a woman who had undergone a termination during their relationship. “What’s your next question?”

It must be nice for reproductive rights to be an “interesting question” you have absolutely no interest in answering. As ever, it feels as the levers of power are pulled by those with no skin in the game at the expense of those with an entire uterus in it. Once again, then, a huge bravo to all the extremely rational guys whose “conscience” simply declined to permit them to vote for Hillary Clinton, on the basis that she and Trump were basically “the same”. Women now facing same-old same-old prospects like forced birth and wildly increased medical risks can only thank you and your consciences for doing the hard intellectual yards so they don’t have to.

When news of the supreme court draft opinion broke last night, Clinton stated: “This decision is a direct assault on the dignity, rights, & lives of women, not to mention decades of settled law. It will kill and subjugate women even as a vast majority of Americans think abortion should be legal. What an utter disgrace.” We’ve yet to hear Trump’s response – very, very samey, I imagine – so let’s use as placeholder his 2011 statement on the subject: “I am pro-life, and pro-life people will find out that I will be very loyal to them, just as I am loyal to other people. I would be appointing judges that feel the way I feel.” Can’t believe he ended up appointing pro-life judges. If only there’d been some clue his daffy media cheerleaders could have latched on to.
[…]
Yet, in some ways, it’s the things that actually were said during the confirmation hearings that illustrate the rot most clearly, with Trump’s new justices saying a lot of stuff that now turns out to have meant about as much as one of his promises. We’re looking at a court where justices are no longer particularly different from politicians – both will say any old shit to get elected or confirmed. In the infrequently lucid moments that peppered his truly deranged performance during his confirmation hearings, Brett Kavanaugh suggested Roe v Wade was settled law, that has been affirmed down the decades by “precedent on precedent”. And now look. I wonder what else in his confirmation hearings he might not have been being entirely candid about.

For her part, Coney Barrett assured senators her own personal beliefs were absolutely irrelevant, and in no way likely to lead to the undoing of laws, joking: “It’s not the law of Amy. It’s the law of the American people.” It’s looking quite like the law of Amy today, all things considered. As the highly predictable majority opinion on Roe v Wade makes landfall, then, spare a thought for supposedly pro-choice Republican senator Susan Collins, who held the deciding vote on Kavanaugh, and who was apparently absolutely satisfied after two long private meetings with him back in 2018 that Roe was safe in his hands. “I’m not naive,” she explained. Susan: it seems like you’re sensationally, historically, implausibly naive.
[…]
Far from being “liberated”, American women are in an abusive relationship with partisan lawmakers in which no sense of security is even close to permanent, and nothing is given that cannot be taken away at any point. Abortion rights have never been allowed to feel like a life goal achieved. Instead, defending them has remained a hugely consuming way of life for a huge number of women. What a vast, intensely limiting drain on their energy and human potential, which is presumably the attraction for those who seek to keep them down. You can be “pro-life”, or pro-living – but you can’t be both.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/03/abortions-us-supreme-court-leak-women-die-pro-life

…so…at the risk of sounding like I’m catastrophizing…which I believe is officially “a thing“…I regret to admit that it seems like it might even be worse than it seems to begin with…I mean…obviously in some respects it’s exactly as bad as it seems…& not even surprising…at least in terms of who seemed likely to come down on which side of the fence in the mississippi case

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/may/04/how-supreme-court-justices-voted-abortion-alito-roberts-thomas-kavanaugh

…despite their various protestations to the effect that they totally wouldn’t pull the exact shit they are in the process of pulling to the surprise of nearly nobody who’d paid even cursory attention…or its startling resemblance to this quaint notion referred to in some courtrooms as perjury

That’s despite the fact that it isn’t just a federal crime to lie to Congress while under oath — considered the “general perjury” statute — it’s also illegal to make false statements to Congress even if you’re not under oath.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/5-people-who-lied-congress-what-happened-them

…after all…we’re all equal in the eyes of the law

…so even the extent to which some of the predictable consequences are not-so-equally distributed

“We’re not talking about legal theory and political theater,” [Jamila Perritt][who became the president of Physicians for Reproductive Health in 2020] said. “We’re talking about real people who are making decisions about if, when and how to build their families, who deserve an opportunity to do so without political interference. It’s liberty. It’s justice. That’s what’s at stake here.”
[…]
Pregnancy does not come without risks, which is why we cannot talk about forcing people to remain pregnant without also talking about the country’s abysmal record on maternal mortality.

We cannot pretend that Black people and other people of color who become pregnant — and then are forced to remain so — aren’t more likely to die than White people who become pregnant.

We cannot pretend that we’re only talking about a fetus when we’re discussing access, or lack of, to reproductive health care.

The stakes are not evenly spread across people who become pregnant, and if the Supreme Court justices need a reminder of that, they don’t have to look far. In a recent report, the District’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee shared these findings: “While Black birthing people constitute roughly half of all births in DC, they account for 90% of all pregnancy-related deaths and 93% of pregnancy-associated, non-related deaths.”

The report went on to describe that number as existing in “stark contrast” with White people “who comprise about 30% of births but experienced no pregnancy-related deaths, and one pregnancy-associated, non-related death during 2014-2018.”

Let’s consider those findings for a moment. They tell us that in the city where the Supreme Court justices are going about their days, mulling over what protections pregnant people deserve, almost all the pregnant people dying are Black.

“When we look at the inequitable outcomes for Black women specifically, but lots of other communities as well, certainly Indigenous women, we see that the folks who are more likely to have complications around morbidity and mortality during a pregnancy and immediately in the postpartum period are also the same communities who are more likely to need access to abortion care,” Perritt said. “What that means is that these laws restricting access to abortions will disproportionately impact those communities. It’s the same folks. It’s people of color. It’s those living on low income. It’s undocumented communities, LGBTQ folks, young people.”

Perritt also expressed concern about how D.C. could be left uniquely vulnerable if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, which the draft opinion authored by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. suggested was likely to occur. Because D.C. is not a state, it remains subject to oversight by Congress.

The stakes are not evenly spread across people who become pregnant, and if the Supreme Court justices need a reminder of that, they don’t have to look far [WaPo]

…comes as less of a surprise than it ought to…still…I’m pretty sure it’s not just me

The draft opinion, published by Politico on Monday, indicates that at least five conservative justices are willing to cast aside long-standing precedent to achieve major objectives on the political right, these environmental lawyers said.

That does not bode well, they said, for the Supreme Court’s forthcoming decision in West Virginia v. EPA, a challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate carbon emissions from the power sector, the country’s second-largest source of planet-warming pollution.

“The court’s dismissive attitude toward precedent … is really just another signal of a conservative majority that’s eager to roll up its sleeves and fix all the issues in the law that conservatives have complained about for years,” Dan Farber, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, told The Climate 202.

“And climate regulation is seen by conservatives as a dramatic example of regulatory overreach because Congress hasn’t passed any specific laws that tell EPA to go regulate [carbon emissions],” he added.
[…]
West Virginia v. EPA was brought by coal mining companies and Republican attorneys general who say the Clean Air Act does not permit the EPA to make sweeping changes to the way the nation’s power sector produces electricity. The case comes before a Supreme Court that’s even more conservative than the one that stopped the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration’s strategy to drastically curb power plants’ carbon emissions, in 2016.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/04/supreme-court-leak-strikes-fear-among-environmental-lawyers/

…but given the context it doesn’t feel like the time for being flippant about counting chickens before they hatch…for all that it was a draft that leaked…or the unusual lack of crowing from those who’ve been championing this retrograde crusade forever & a day

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders have mostly refused to discuss the political and policy implications of Roe’s potential demise while trying to focus attention on the leak through furious condemnations, even after Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. confirmed the draft opinion’s authenticity and said the court would open an investigation to find the leaker.
[…]
The hesitancy by top GOP officials Tuesday to herald the news that what they have long sought they could soon obtain suggested a concern, or at least some initial uncertainty, about whether Roe’s demise could have some political drawbacks for the party.
[…]
Senate Democrats are planning a vote on legislation to codify Roe as early as next week, even though the vote is almost certain to fail due to Republican opposition. But the party is hoping it will keep the issue in the forefront, even if it risks showing Democrats inability to do anything about it despite controlling two branches of the government. And they want Republican vote positions on record, which will likely be used against them in campaigns.

“Now it becomes very real with the overturning of Roe v. Wade,” said Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), who heads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “People always counted on Roe v. Wade as the floor. That floor is now going to disappear.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/04/republicans-reluctant-tout-roe-decision-they-have-long-sought/

…if I’m honest a good chunk of what has me concerned has to do with the foundations of that floor…& I don’t have the time or the knowledge to sift through the whole document…but since someone else already has…well

We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Con­stitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, in­cluding the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely — the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s his­tory and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U. S. 702, 721 (1997).4
[…where the little 4 there refers to a footnote that runs thus:]
This opinion repeatedly cites the fact that the Constitution doesn’t explicitly reference a right to abortion. The counter to that, of course, is that many rights have been bestowed that aren’t explicitly mentioned. Here, Alito cites where the court has drawn the line before: between rights that are “deeply rooted” and implicitly part of the concept of “ordered liberty” — such as other unenumerated rights that Supreme Court has granted — and those that are not. He cites a 1997 Supreme Court case, which states that the court has “regularly observed that the Clause specially protects those fundamental rights and liberties which … objectively” meet those criteria. Later in the opinion, Alito elaborates on what makes a right “deeply rooted.”
[…]
Stare decisis, the doctrine on which Casey’s controlling opinion was based, does not compel unending adherence to Roe’s abuse of judicial authority. Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.6
[likewise…the annotation for that bit goes like this:]
Alito repeatedly claims that the justices in Roe and Casey weren’t making arguments rooted in principle, but rather, improperly making policy judgments about regulations, which is the domain of elected representatives.

…I’ve seen some rank hypocrisy from time to time…but the gall required to use the phrase “egregiously wrong from the start” in this particular document isn’t so much rank as reeking…& that’s before we come to the 14th

the Four­teenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Neither Roe nor Casey saw fit to invoke this theory, and it is squarely foreclosed by our precedents, which es­tablish that a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex­ based classification and is thus not subject to the “height­ened scrutiny” that applies to such classifications. The regulation of a medical procedure that only one sex can un­dergo does not trigger heightened constitutional scrutiny unless the regulation is a “mere pretext[] designed to effect an invidious discrimination against members of one sex or the other.” And, as the Court has stated, the “goal of prevent­ing abortion” does not constitute “invidiously discrimina­tory animus against women.” Accordingly, laws regulating or pro­hibiting abortion are not subject to heightened scrutiny. Rather, they are governed by the same standard of review as other health and safety measures.7

…which…apart from appearing to me to be absolute bullshit masquerading as an “argument” to somehow wrest from a question the opposite response to the one which might reasonably be supposed…is literally some shit they said over RBG’s dead body…per the footnote

This section is a bit dense, but it essentially grapples with an argument once raised by Ginsburg: that abortion could be a protected right under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, rather than other sections of the Constitution. Ginsburg felt this would have insulated Roe better from future attacks. Alito quickly dispatches the idea that an abortion ban might discriminate on the basis of sex and makes a key pronouncement when it comes to how difficult it will be to challenge future abortion bans.

…but the gall doesn’t stop there…it just keeps snowballing along…& my concerns along with it

Nor does the right to obtain an abortion have a sound ba­sis in precedent. Casey relied on cases involving the right to marry a person of a different race, Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967); the right to marry while in prison, Turner v. Safley, 482 U. S. 78 (1987); the right to obtain contracep­tives, Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), Eisen­stadt v. Baird, 405 U. S. 438 (1972), Carey v. Population Services International, 431 U.S. 678 (1977); the right to re­side with relatives, Moore v. East Cleveland, 431 U.S. 494 (1977); the right to make decisions about the education of one’s children, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925), Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923); the right not to be sterilized without consent, Skinner v. Oklahoma ex rel. Williamson, 316 U.S. 535 (1942); and the right in certain circumstances not to undergo involuntary surgery, forced administration of drugs, or other substantially simi­lar procedures, Winston v. Lee, 470 U.S. 753 (1985), Washington v. Harper, 494 U. S. 210 (1990), Rochin v. California, 342 U. S. 165 (1952). Respondents and the Solicitor Gen­eral also rely on post-Casey decisions like Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003) (right to engage in private, con­sensual sexual acts), and Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015) (right to marry a person of the same sex).

…because if this is the kind of convoluted pseudo-justification that they’re prepared to run with in this case…how many of the precedents in that collection of previously settled rulings might find themselves vulnerable to a similarly guided review?

What sharply distinguishes the abortion right from the rights recognized in the cases on which Roe and Casey rely is something that both those decisions acknowledged: Abor­tion destroys what those decisions call “potential life” and what the law at issue in this case regards as the life of an “unborn human being.” None of the other decisions cited by Roe and Casey involved the critical moral question posed by abortion. They are therefore inapposite.12 [footnote: Again, a valid question — given the moral dilemmas involved — is where the line is drawn: When does a court case, which seems to establish a right, actually involve a “critical moral question” that ought to be left to legislators? It might be true that abortion is an exceptional or even a unique case, since it deals with issues of life — but where the courts set that line will be key to other unenumerated rights, both existing and prospective.]They do not sup­port the right to obtain an abortion, and by the same token, our conclusion that the Constitution does not confer such a right does not undermine them in any way.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2022/dobbs-alito-draft-annotated/

…which I guess might be true…in the sense that seating these assholes did not undermine the legitimacy of the court…allegedly, anyway

…but one of the many things they seemed to be willing to throw out there dismissively included the implied understanding of the “right to personal privacy” which…I’m sure entirely by coincidence…plays a role in a good few of those cases mentioned in relation to Casey…it’s not as though there’s much subtlety left when it comes to the other shoe waiting to drop

But for the time being, if this is the decision that comes down in June, you’re going to see abortion banned in the 13 states that have what are called trigger laws. These are laws that basically say if-and-when Roe is overturned, abortion is illegal in this state.

There’s a bunch of other states that have, still, their pre-Roe abortion bans on the books, and those could start to be enforced. The estimates I’ve seen are that in somewhere between 24 and 26 states, abortion will be banned. So in blue states, abortion will still be available. Although what’s going to happen is, it’s going to become harder to access, just as a matter of crowding. Every state with functioning clinics is likely to be overrun.
[…]
It’s also worth talking about […] these fetal personhood laws, because these have already been enacted in many, many states. The idea is to set a precedent for fetal personhood that would make it easier to conceptualize the fetus as a distinct person in the law, in the culture. The reason I think this is really, really important is because before Roe, women by and large were not going to prison for clandestine abortions. They would sometimes be threatened with prosecution in order to get them to testify against doctors or against abortion providers, but abortion was the crime — the crime wasn’t murder. And so we now have a very different situation after 49 years of arguing about fetal personhood, of arguing that abortion is kind of a type of homicide.

[…] you constantly see people in the anti-abortion movement trying to redefine common contraceptives as abortifacients and sort of wall them off from things like condoms. And I just think that this is really important language from the ruling itself: It says laws regulating abortion “must be sustained if there is a rational basis on which the legislature could have thought that it would serve legitimate state interests.”

And those interests includes, it continues, “respect for and preservation of prenatal life at all stages of development.” So it definitely gives the OK for total abortion bans and could possibly be interpreted to include some sort of forms of contraception.

[…] And to be clear, that language […] just quoted, “rational basis,” is the lowest bar that the government needs to clear in order to get judicial approval of a law.

So when the court uses those magical words “rational basis,” it’s essentially a green light for governments, state or federal, to pass whatever laws they want on the subject. Only the most egregious laws that have zero basis in any conceivable legitimate objective will be struck down. But that’s generally understood as saying, go for it.

[…]I mean, this is the essence of conservative rule right now. It is a fundamentally minoritarian rule. The Democratic candidate has won more votes for president than the Republican candidate in seven of the last eight elections. And yet we have a six-to-three supermajority of conservatives on the Supreme Court.

It’s an astonishing sleight of hand. It’s how these lawmakers have gotten power and then wield power, explicitly contrary to the wishes of a majority of Americans.

Researchers of democracy and comparative democracy have found that curbs on women’s rights are correlated with democratic backsliding, and that the two move hand in hand. When women’s rights are more restricted, more reduced, you have more backsliding in democratic practices.

And we’re seeing that happen here. We’re seeing these curbs on women’s rights at the same time as we’re seeing backsliding.
[…]
I’ll tell you what has led me to feel that this is an illegitimate court is what Senate Republicans led by Mitch McConnell have done over the last six years to stack this court explicitly for the purpose of overturning Roe v. Wade. And a whole other slew of rulings that they’ve been frothing at the mouth to get through for many, many years, in some cases, decades.

And what’s happening to get to those rulings is the overturning of established precedents, as here with Roe v. Wade, a nearly 50-year-old precedent now, that nobody was having trouble implementing. There was no question the American public had changed in its feelings about whether a woman should have the right to decide what happens inside her own body. I think it’s currently around 80 percent of Americans feel that, at least in some circumstances, women should have the right to have an abortion. So overturning a precedent with no basis, no grounds along the lines of what the court generally relies on to consider overturning precedent, is a real blow to the stability of the law and the legitimacy of the body that interprets it finally.

So I think the overturning of Roe v. Wade, if it does indeed happen — and I think all signs point to that being the case — is going to be one of the most significant blows to this court’s legitimacy in the eyes of a whole swath of Americans, not just those who are openly pro-choice.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/03/opinion/reproductive-rights-roe-the-argument.html

…there’s a lot of ways to put it

We should not live in a country where bodily autonomy can be granted or taken away by nine political appointees, most of whom are men and cannot become pregnant. Any civil right contingent upon political whims is not actually a civil right.
[…]
And there are other disturbing considerations in the draft decision, written by Justice Samuel Alito. Some have expressed the concern that by extending Justice Alito’s reasoning, other hard-won rights — such as the rights to contraception and marriage equality — could be struck down too. That is to say, this decision is opening the door for social progress and civil rights to be systematically dismantled on the most absurd of pretexts.

And this is not a theoretical threat. We are already seeing how several states are trying to legislate trans people out of existence with laws banning gender-affirming health care for children, and in Missouri, a proposed law could extend that denial to adults.

I do not know where this retraction of civil rights will end, but I do know it will go down as a milestone in a decades-long conservative campaign to force a country of 330 million people to abide by a bigoted set of ideologies. This movement seeks to rule by hollow theocracy, despite our constitutional separation of church and state. The people behind this campaign do not represent the majority of this country, and they know it, so they consistently try to undermine the democratic process. They attack voting rights, gerrymander voting districts and shove unpopular legislation through so that they can live in a world of their choosing and hoard as much power and wealth as possible.
[…]
The possibility of so many civil rights being rolled back is terrifying. Millions of Americans now wonder which of our rights could be stripped away from us, our friends and family, our communities. The sky is falling, and a great many of us are desperately trying to hold it up.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/03/opinion/roxane-gay-roe-v-wade.html

…& in a saner world that would be hyperbole

…but

There is no legal safeguard in this opinion that requires the court’s overhaul of fundamental rights to stop with abortion.

[…] contrary to the First Amendment command for separation of church and state and respect for everyone’s religious practice, this decision would impose one religious morality on everyone.

…not to mention the part where some churches come to remarkably different conclusions

For Jews who can become pregnant, access to abortion services is a religious *requirement*, and has been for thousands of years. Surprised? Let's dig into some of the texts 🧵 1/

— Rabbi Daniel Bogard (@RavBogard) May 4, 2022

…& even if (in the interests of brevity) we just pick one example of the many strands of hypocrisy that run through the thing

“In interpreting what is meant by the Fourteenth Amendment’s reference to ‘liberty,’ we must guard against the natural human tendency to confuse what that Amendment protects with our own ardent views about the liberty that Americans should enjoy.” Yet that is exactly what Alito’s opinion does: It overrules decades-old precedent to impose conservative justices’ anti-abortion views because they finally have the votes to do so.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/roe-v-wade-overturned-supreme-court-abortion-draft-alitos-legal-analysis-is-bad

…so…when certain people seem to want to make this a conversation about the leak & not the substance of what was leaked…well…that seems a lot like the folks who were similarly keen to make out that the salient part of this remarkably succinct line of reasoning had to do with whether or not it reflected a proper understanding of how donor cards work

Sally Rooney writing in 2018 on the Irish abortion ban. "Consent, in the form of a donor card, is required even to remove organs from a dead body…. In the relationship between fetus and woman, the woman is granted fewer rights than a corpse." https://t.co/Z72iFfTWGT pic.twitter.com/nNmbfN9CCb

— Alexandra Schwartz (@Alex_Lily) May 3, 2022

…but…as seems to have been clear for a while now…the hypocrisy is very much the point

If it was about babies, we’d have free lactation consultants, free diapers, free formula. If it was about babies, we’d have free and excellent childcare from newborns on. If it was about babies, we’d have universal preschool and pre-k and guaranteed after school placements.

— Leila Cohan (@leilacohan) May 4, 2022

…so…good luck out there…& try to consider the source…& remember it helps to know what you’re looking at

When u do numbers but they’re not really yours🥲 https://t.co/HExseZI85P

— ian (@superneenan) May 4, 2022

…anyway…just as soon as I can get this laptop to stop pausing for for a rest between keystrokes & wasting everyone’s time I’ll go find some tunes…though I guess I’m not in a strong position when it comes to telling it to get its act together?

…also…I did mention I had some catching up to do…like this comment from @emmerdoesnotrepresentme for a start