Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
More photos from the Women’s March yesterday!
The first two are from Kattails.
Who else went to the Women’s March yesterday? If you have pics, it’s not too late to send them in; I will post them here in the comments.
Update: photo from Laura Too:
Live Free Or Die! For Men Only? (Women’s March)Post + Comments (96)
Elizabelle sent the first three photos from the Women’s March in DC.
The photo below is from Omnes from the Madison, WI march. Be sure to click on it to see a bigger version – reading the details on the sign is a must! I love this one.
I’ll be posting lots more sign photos in the comments. All the photos in this thread are from Elizabelle. Photos thru comment #27 are from Elizabelle. Photos from Minneapolis are from Laura Too. Photos from Madison are from Omnes.
If you’re at the women’s march, please send photos if you’d like them posted.
making this sound like one man’s inspirational triumph over adversity is, um, repulsive pic.twitter.com/fzaXaDUYN7
— Elon Green (@elongreen) September 12, 2021
Nobody the NYTimes editors know will ever have trouble accessing reproductive services, so why not publish a little beat-sweetner congratulating the Federalist Society on its clever, legalistic plans?
Silly puff piece that pretends the abortion ban is the work of a tireless genius whose meticulously-crafted legislation is impervious to judicial review, rather than the inevitable result of *Republicans packing the courts with anti-abortion activists.* https://t.co/5thPIakNgR
— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) September 13, 2021
Monday Evening Open Thread: A Texas Handmaid’s Tale — <em>So *Cunning*!</em>Post + Comments (153)
The U.S. Department of Justice today issued the following statement from Attorney General Merrick B. Garland regarding Texas SB8:
“While the Justice Department urgently explores all options to challenge Texas SB8 in order to protect the constitutional rights of women and other persons, including access to an abortion, we will continue to protect those seeking to obtain or provide reproductive health services pursuant to our criminal and civil enforcement of the FACE Act, 18 U.S.C. § 248.
“The FACE Act prohibits the use or threat of force and physical obstruction that injures, intimidates, or interferes with a person seeking to obtain or provide reproductive health services. It also prohibits intentional property damage of a facility providing reproductive health services. The department has consistently obtained criminal and civil remedies for violations of the FACE Act since it was signed into law in 1994, and it will continue to do so now.
“The department will provide support from federal law enforcement when an abortion clinic or reproductive health center is under attack. We have reached out to U.S. Attorneys’ Offices and FBI field offices in Texas and across the country to discuss our enforcement authorities.
“We will not tolerate violence against those seeking to obtain or provide reproductive health services, physical obstruction or property damage in violation of the FACE Act.”
If you have an incident, concern, or questions, please contact the FBI at FBI.gov/tips or through the complaint portal civilrights.justice.gov.
Screen capture from the link above – we should be publicizing this far and wide:
h/t
The Supreme Court passively allowed the breathtakingly extremist antichoice law in Texas to go into effect at midnight, and we haven’t heard a peep out of them since as far as I know. Assuming they remain silent on the Texas Handmaiden Act, the “will they or won’t they” question now is whether SCOTUS will strike Roe down outright when they take up the Mississippi case or continue to allow wingnut-controlled states to whittle away at reproductive freedom as they have been doing for years. Katha Pollitt:
If they are shrewd, the six antichoice justices on the Supreme Court will resist the urge to overturn Roe v. Wade when they decide next term on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. At issue is a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks of gestation in explicit defiance of Roe, which protects abortion rights until around 24 weeks. Why hand the Democrats an issue that has worked well for them in purple states like Virginia? An attempt in 2012 to force women seeking abortions to have transvaginal ultrasounds backfired against Republicans so powerfully the state is now entirely under Democratic control.
So, will the extremist wing of the court be able to resist spiking the football by killing Roe? Your guess is as good as mine. But reproductive rights are already over for millions of women who don’t have the means to travel to seek care. That’s been the case for a long time.
I think Pollitt is right to say it would be smart for the religious fanatics on the court to leave Roe alone. But she expresses a doubt I share: whether striking down Roe would galvanize the prochoice majority in America in sufficient numbers to make Republicans pay politically. Again, your guess is as good as mine.
Modern oppressive societies don’t usually pass grotesque laws like the one Abbott in Texas signed, which deputizes antichoice fanatics to investigate every suspected miscarriage with the incentive of a $10,000 bounty. Today’s oppressors are typically more sophisticated than that, leaving a Potemkin democracy and hollowed-out human rights framework in place to deflect criticism and maintain the appearance of civility.
Maybe the Bony Carrot wing of the court will settle for that, just as Roberts & Co. left a shell of the Voting Rights Act in place while greenlighting racially targeted voter suppression. Overturning Roe will make abortion less safe, but as Pollitt notes, we won’t simply return to the unsafe conditions of the pre-Roe era. Now there’s an organized army of fanatics eager to enforce their extremist vision on the rest of us.
Open thread.
The price Josh Duggar paid in 2003 for sexually abusing underage girls:
Jim Bob Duggar: "I gave Josh a very stern talk about what might happen if he continued such behavior."
Trooper Hutchens: "Nothing else to do."
Hutchens is currently serving 56 years for child porn. https://t.co/8x58NpAEgo
— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) April 30, 2021
No, really: Used-car salesmen. Slap a new coat of paint on this clunker, we can still pawn it off on some rube with no better option…
Trying to figure out who #JoshDuggar is? As a scholar of religion in America and someone who has followed the Duggar extended universe since the mid-2000s, allow me to sketch a brief timeline for you. Josh is the eldest son of Arkansas couple Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar. 1/
— caroline matas (@carolinematas) April 30, 2021
I took the liberty of stripping some twitter headers:
Publishers have a lot of power. Written material shapes thinking and conversations. When they choose a book or article, they are using physical and mental space that might have gone elsewhere.
For many, many years in the English-speaking countries, that space has gone to white cis men, excluding other voices. Compounding the exclusion has been misogyny in many of those men’s writing.
I gave up reading fiction a long time ago. It was all men’s viewpoints. When Henry Miller’s Tropics became legal in the US, I read them. An older male colleague asked me what I thought. I don’t recall my exact response, but it was along the lines of it being a viewpoint I didn’t recognize. And Norman Mailer and John Cheever and John Updike and Philip Roth and too many others.
The pretense was “Oh but they are such wonderful writers.” As recently as this week, I saw a woman tweeting how she loved Philip Roth’s sentences. I never could get to those sentences through the subject matter, which either didn’t interest me (men’s masturbatory fantasies) or was actively misogynist. Later fiction presented men’s fantasies about what people of color or women really thought. Women fiction writers too often picked up too much of the men’s influence. I tossed it all in the trash.
I’m encouraged by W. W. Norton’s decision to scrap Roth’s biography, written by his hand-picked biographer, who is now accused of inappropriate behavior toward his students and rape. Yes, I want to shout, of course the person Roth chose to represent him would be that way.
Ron Charles, in the Washington Post, points out that diversity at a publishing firm opens a route for non-cis-white-male viewpoints to go into those decisions about how that valuable print space will be allocated. The staff at Simon and Schuster has lodged an objection to the company’s signing a contract for a book by former Vice President Mike Pence. Supporting Nazis, it turns out, isn’t to everyone’s taste.
I suspect some major publishers still don’t understand what having a diverse workforce entails. It was never just about making your office look like a Benetton ad. The real goal behind a diverse workforce is a wide range of experiences and ideas — and people empowered to act on them.
Charles sees clearly what is happening. I’m pleased that my judgments are finally being validated.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner
