SCOTUS and the Ghosts

 

The Colorado web designer who wanted to refuse LGBTQ customers and just won her case at the Supreme Court had claimed in court filings that a man inquired about her services for his same-sex wedding. But the man says he didn’t – and he’s straight. https://t.co/idy1Jy1VI7

— CNN (@CNN) July 1, 2023

I wonder about SCOTUS mostly because I'm a non-lawyer, but I do watch the odd law-related television and follow a bunch of lawyers on Twitter, and it really feels to me like one doesn't have standing over imaginary shit?  Like, it's bad enough that student loan forgiveness seems to have been struck down because of political beef because not even the banks were mad about it, and I'm still not sure who affirmative action hurts. (Because AA only gets someone in the door, but they have to do the coursework. Save your money. Do excellent at your B or C school and transfer in if the big ol' name brand of the school means that much to you. Or whatever. I went to the school that was only one bus route away, myself. And I am definitely a white privilege kid. I'm an English major. I lack vision and purpose. Or so I've been told.)

Anyway--this woman's case was picked up by the ADF--that is, the Alliance Defending Freedom, because of course it was. I don't know whose freedom the Alliance is about--it just looks like Christian supremacy to me.  (And homophobia, transphobia, and the denial of reproductive health freedom. They descend from Dobson and Wildmon--that's all I need to know, fam.) Deep down, I don't love the idea of people discriminating against real people because of what they want to believe their imaginary friends have to say. (I have seen gay folks. I have never seen your god. Sorry if this offends.)

But anyway, this woman was just thinking about going into web design when the horrible thought hit her--what if she was FORCED to support a gay wedding? By making a website about a "happy" same sex couple! The idea! The scary idea! Of having compelled speech in her mouth! 

Tulsi Gabbard was On Fox and Said a Thing

 

Tulsi on Diversity in The Biden Administration: They’re proud to be selecting people based on race.. It’s based on genetics.. Where do we see that connection? These are the very same core principles embodied by Nazism and Hitler. pic.twitter.com/bI2HoumYaw

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 25, 2023

I get that the Fox Mushroom Farm infotainment network has no respect whatsoever for the clickers that they mutant cordycep-pilled over the years, but having mule-faced Jesse nod while obvious op Tulsi lays the line on his viewers that the eliminationism of Hitler and the inclusivity of the Biden Administration are the exact same thing should insult the fuck out of even someone whose brain is 75% taken over by fungal rot.

But even if the fan club don't feel like what's left of their basic intelligence has been insulted, those of us who can still appreciate what's in front of us know that's straight-up Orwellian doublethink. Inclusivity and elimination are opposite things. Gathering in people so they can contribute and prosper and cutting people out in the hopes they are destroyed are obviously not the same thing. To say that--to say what she said, isn't a mistake. It's seeding the ground for resentment. What she's doing is telling straight white cis males that the inclusion of other people is their exclusion. That if people who deviate from their default humanity are featured, it's the exact same thing as one of them being annihilated. 

Competition for roles in a society is not annihilation but regular order: may the best person win. If the assumption is some people are by identity simply better suited--what are the deets on their CV? What is the real-life contribution they are making? Saying something that stupid out loud and so obviously biased would have been seen for exactly what it is if Watters said it by himself. Why Tulsi Gabbard is so willing to say it is justified by her getting to be on Fox. 

This is why exactly nothing she ever says has any value to me. Nor should it to anyone else. 

What if the Worst Case Was Real?

 

On Monday evening, Fox News host Jesse Watters suggested on his show that the case of a 10-year-old Ohio girl who was forced to travel to Indiana to get an abortion after she was raped was fabricated.

On Wednesday, that girl’s alleged rapist was arrested. https://t.co/ptdToY5L4Z

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) July 13, 2022

Jesse Watters is proof that FOX News basically vets their on-screen talent for major personality disorders and if they haven't any, dismisses them. He is following in the footsteps of mentor Bill O'Reilly, whose litany of "George Tiller, baby killer" led to the murder of a church-going man who assisted pregnant people in terminating pregnancies that for many reasons they could not complete. And while fact-checkers don't hold O'Reilly responsible, on my word, I will. He gave a name. He tried to rile up people against him on purpose. He put a target on a person, and even if the dots can't be directly connected, it's not hard to see what he was doing.

Watters and the AG of Indiana are now wanting to go after the doctor. Let me just say this: do you all not get that being pregnant is time sensitive, while a rape conviction takes all the time in the damn world?  That a 10 year old presenting with pregnancy is obviously raped whether we have a suspect or not, and a 10-year old is not the best advocate for herself? That a ten year old child, of all people, cannot wait until we have an accused and convicted rapist, and that is why no pregnant person should have to submit themselves to the entirety of the criminal justice system before they can get their immediate physical condition administered to? 

TWGB: The Criminalization of Politics?

 

One of the themes of today's 1/6 Committee hearing was "Roasting your Insurrectionist Co-Workers" because they brought the receipts that when Trump intimated to Richard Donoghue that he just wanted the DOJ to declare that the 2020 election was corrupt and he and his Republican congress people would take it from there, they really committed to "taking it from there" whether there was any proof of voter fraud or not. Those same pontificating lying "just concerned about the accuracy of the vote" people turned around and asked for pardons. 

Rep. Kinzinger, bless his normal-person heart, thinks the only reason he can think of for requesting pardons is consciousness of guilt. But there are Republicans who exist in the world who will tell you that is not the only reason. No, you have to go deeper--they say: like Mo Brooks who wore armor to the 1/6 rally at which he spoke, who sent a letter requesting pardons because the socialist leftist Dems were surely going to be out to get them.  How dare they violate the ability of folks to just hang out, and talk about--

Trying to fucking Ocean's Eleven a whole ass fucking Presidential election! Because I'm sorry, but things like criminal conspiracy aren't just basic right to assemble once you are assembling to dissemble to tell people there was voter fraud when there wasn't, to reinstall a presidential candidate that didn't win! Your Constitutional rights are totally valid up and until reasonable cause exists to think you literally engaged in acts already determined to be illegal as fuck. After which you get due process--we can happily assume you are innocent and should have a vigorous defense, but sweetums, you better have a better defense than "No fair judging!" Because you will be subject also to a rigorous examination of the facts.

The Massacre of Innocents

They never rose up. The dead of the Shoah will never rise again, and are remembered because their lives were disrupted by a great evil that cut off their existence. Their world was abruptly ended. They  at one time could not find livelihoods. They could not own property. They could live in some places--and then? They could not live at all. These people who were slowly erased from time, need to be understood as the victims of lies and propaganda that annihilated their humanity and then took their physical bodies. They were victims of lying. They were the victims of religious bigotry. Mike Pence, I believe, has a justification for why some humans should not live or be served by businesses for religious reasons. His pious claims are full of bullshit.

Zionism gave a homeland to other Jewish people--but it did not make the victims of the Shoah rise again. Nothing will. This is the wretchedness, the horror, of Vernichtung, the destruction or attempted destruction, the genocide, against the Jewish people enacted by the race-selective policies of the German nation. The dead rose from no ashes. They stayed as memories and were maybe remembered in the naming of babies, and as grainy photos, and in the stories of old people with tattoos on their arms and the dignity of remembered sorrow haunting their lives. 

The race and sexual-orientation biases of a very particular strain of conservatism remind us of how near we always are to the horrors that the Nazis promised. Pence is the wrong one to try and tell us #Neveragain when he himself is a reminder that discrimination is everywhere, and eliminationism is happening right now. 

The Leaks are Real. The News is Fake

The press conference President Trump had Thursday might has been blogged about by yours truly as a "Trump Did Not Have A Great Day" post, but I'm not sure that's exactly how I would describe what transpired. I think a pretty good analysis of the entire presser with transcript was done by NPR, and I encourage looking at what I think is a pretty even-handed review. The presser itself took place while I was at work, so my impressions of what was said largely came through checking my Twitter feed at work whilst at lunch--and you would be quite reasonable to assume my Twitter follows lean left, and the conservatives and Republicans that I do follow lean "never Trump". My impression was that the nearly 1.5 hour event was kind of a damn mess.

I guess I still consider it a damn mess, but I recognize that for people who are pro-Trump, this is not a problem. Did he say things that weren't entirely factually true--sure, but they were "truthy" in the sense of fitting in with his worldview and specific hyperbolic style. Was he basically pissing and moaning about bad press coverage? You bet--but many people are critical of and even distrust mainstream media journalism. Also, I think because what Trump does and says is so highly different from what conventional politicians do or say, a person used to covering more traditional figures is liable to read his eccentricities as more erratic or disordered or imply that he's collapsing or self-destructing or that this one news thing is going to just disable his presidency--

It doesn't work like that, though. I think in both the liberal and conservative camps, we've gotten a little bit inured to clickbait-y titles that suggest that some figure was "destroyed" or "slayed" or "totally owned" by some event. But this never the actual case. Show me a chalk outline around a greasy spot where that individual once stood and I would call that "destroyed". "Made to look uncomfortable or even a bit emotionally aroused" is not actually "destroyed". In other words, from a liberal perspective, I am inherently distrustful of people who want to positively state that this early in a presidency, any number of off-the-wall utterances taking place can mark the end of a presidency. Especially for someone whose entire candidacy, nomination, and general election tactics were predicated on--what would I even call it? "Off-the-wall-ism"?

That said, as a critic of political communications and policy, I guess there might be any number of blogposts I could spin off of any given exchange or paragraph. I mean, seriously. Even basic things like Trump's fetish for discussing his electoral win is simply peculiar. His 304 electoral vote win was not the most significant since President Reagan. He likes saying it was "306" and seems to want to imply it was a massive landslide. It just wasn't. Or citing Rasmussen's claim that he has 55% approval--which disagrees with Pew and Gallup--but still wouldn't qualify as "through the roof" relative to being in what should be the "honeymoon phase" of his presidency. Which he isn't getting because his White House is not a "finely-tuned machine" (OMG--this was a thing he said!) but more like some good old boys making their way the only way they know how, which might be a little bit more than the law will allow.

He's obsessed with "ratings", but doesn't quite correlate the concept that popularity and effectiveness are not the same thing. And he's not yet achieved effectiveness despite his claims--shit like the botched Yemen raid and his skimpy staffing are on him, not the people reporting on him. He seems dilatory about vetting people or things. His "I can't believe it's not a Muslim ban" was not properly checked out. Leadership should include sharing responsibility for failures and taking a problem-solving approach to challenges--not complaining about them. For a person with business executive experience, he does not seem to be translating any acquired skills to government executive capacity. This is worrisome, because that is the exact flexibility his voters seemed to be counting on.

What Would a "Birther" Do?

So, imagine that the idiot who sent (allegedly, since we never heard any further about it) investigators into Hawai'i after President Obama's birth certificate only to promise a truly amazing revelation that never ever came, was presented with an opponent whose family history might, just a little, have some Native American extraction, rumored, maybe--

Well, yes, he took the bait.  He decided to call her "Pocahontas" with one side of his face, and call her "very racist" with the other side. And he calls on former Senator Scott Brown (will travel for senate elections) to offer his suggestion that Warren could get a DNA test.

Uh huh. She should show her papers proving her pedigree. Neat trick, you guys.

Tell me--how well did this:

Work for the former Senator from New Hamp---shit, I meant Massachusetts? Not at all?

And yet regardless of what a DNA test would reveal, Elizabeth Warren is still a Senator and way popular with her base. I don't know who Brown is popular with. Trump from the looks of things.

Just like attacking Clinton for her religion, or Ted Cruz for his, or Obama's birth certificate, Trump goes right to that identity politics thing and attacks people for who they might be.  It's kind of weird. Is Elizabeth Warren pretending she's a tribal leader--no. She's just a Senator from Massachusetts doing a pretty good job of knocking his privileged selfish ass whenever she gets a chance.

But you can see how his attacks are just what a conspiracy theorist useless-ass birther would do. Of course. Of course!

Aspiration Nation

There's something that seems right to me about the celebration of the independence of the original thirteen colonies from the motherland as being based on the date, not of any victory in battle or even the end of the war, but with the date of the airing of the Declaration of Independence itself. The text of this most fiery "Dear George" letter, sounds off on the lack of access of American colonists to the British government they thought they should rightly have had access to, but also states a fairly quaint principle that seems utterly of the Enlightenment and remains an aspirational thought:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--

 The idea of the equality of men (implying also womankind), the idea of the basic rights of mankind, and the idea that government is a man-made machine for the benefit of people, are aspirational goals. At the time this document was written, and even in the fabric of the Constitution, chattel slavery was viewed as a fact of life. The language is centered on men--the idea that women were deserving of the right to vote or serve juries or participate in government did not come until later. We still labor to determine how we partition our voting districts and ensure who has lawful access to the voting franchise of our government to ensure that our government does represent the consent of the governed.

"The Left" is Actually Obsessed with Cake

Sen. Ted Cruz has addressed LGBT rights again, and once again the best way I can describe our differences is "cake or death."

What Cruz has to say about "the left" and our weird support of gay rights is:

"Is there something about the left — and I am going to put the media in this category — that is obsessed with sex?" Cruz asked reporters at an event in Beaumont, Texas, according to the Texas Tribune.

"ISIS is executing homosexuals — you want to talk about gay rights?" Cruz continued. "This week was a very bad week for gay rights because the expansion of ISIS, the expansion of radical, theocratic, Islamic zealots that crucify Christians, that behead children and that murder homosexuals — that ought to be concerning you far more than asking six questions all on the same topic."

Cruz railed against "mandatory same-sex marriage" and criticized a reporter for asking about his views on gay marriage, according to the Texas Tribune.

Nobody on the left gives two damns about what consenting adults (key words, "consenting" and "adults") do in their private time. What we are concerned about is a public issue--how LGBT people's rights are respected in employment, in commerce, in not being harassed in schools, workplaces, or the street, and in being able to form property contracts with the partner of their choosing. It's not the sex--after all, Lawrence v. Texas used equal treatment under the law to invalidate anti-sodomy laws that discriminated specifically against LGBT people, and the accomplished attorney Cruz should be well aware of that case. The movement for equality is about rights that extend beyond the bedroom, but do not extend beyond those that straight people already enjoy.