#The First Four Women Supreme Court Justices

[xtruss]

The First Four Women Supreme Court Justices: Sandra Day O'Connor, Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elena Kagan, October 1, 2010. photographer Steve Petteway, the Supreme Court of the United States

On Being the First Woman on the Supreme Court of The United States

A friend and former law clerk of Sandra Day O’Connor reflects on her pioneering career.

— September 10, 2021 | Ruth McGregor

The Nomination

I was driving to work. On my car radio I heard President Reagan, and he’s saying, “She is truly a person for all seasons.” But I had missed the first part of it where he said the name of the person he was nominating, and he didn’t say her name again throughout his remarks. So after he finished this short statement, somebody came on, one of the commentators, and said who he had nominated.

And I just burst into tears. I pulled my car off to a side street and just sat there and cried for a while until I could get back under control and drive to work.

I think the women hoped that she would be a voice for women’s rights, that she would be a voice against discrimination against women and other protected groups. I think women expected that she would be supportive of women’s groups and issues. And she was.

She was always, in my experience, very much in favor of women being given equal opportunities. She was always very much in favor of the laws that gave women equal employment opportunities, equal credit opportunities. She was very supportive of women’s bar associations and the National Association of Women Judges. She was always willing to lend her time and her name and support for those things.

Discrimination and Access

She liked to say that she didn’t feel she had been discriminated against, and yet, when you hear her tell her stories about the way she was treated by fellow state senators, it’s obvious that she was. [It] was obvious to her. Her classmate Bill Rehnquist is clerking for the United States Supreme Court, and she’s working initially for no money for a county attorney’s office.

People wouldn’t interview her and hire her. So on some level, she expected to be treated fairly with the men, but she got a real education in that she would not be pretty early on. So it seems clear to me that she was discriminated against. It’s not really surprising, when you think about how she was raised, that she came with the expectation that hard work and ability would overcome any other potential problems.

Growing up on [a] ranch she was treated equally. She was expected to do the same things that the men on the ranch did. She was expected to be able to hold up her end of the bargain. She was expected to be able to help with roundups and whatever it was that needed to be done.

She grew up in Eastern Arizona, went to school in Texas, and the West was different in its view of women and the value of women than some parts of the country. Arizona was a community property state, women had some property rights that people in common law states didn’t have, and it was much more an even playing field. So she grew up in an atmosphere where she was expected to do the same and was treated much the same.

Sandra Day O'Connor, 1982. Credit: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Michael Arthur Worden Evans.

Commitment to Fairness

She did so much for so many people to help them along the way, to encourage them, to push them, to make opportunities where she could, to remind people that there needed to be women on commissions and committees. A lot of what she did probably no one saw, because it was when she was meeting with people and saying, “I don’t see any women in this room,” and then they would go find some women to be part of the group.

She of course didn’t like to call herself a feminist, although in my view, she clearly was. There’s no question. She believed women should be able to be on an equal footing with men. The most basic tenant of feminism. I think the reason she didn’t say she was a feminist was because her view of a feminist was somebody who was demonstrating in the streets.

If you take away that kind of stereotype of feminists in the 1970s, then you look to see what was the role of the women’s movement? It was to remove barriers to women so that they were able to do what they wanted to do. It was to remove barriers within employment, within education, and all of those things were things that she had found a way around without the benefit of the laws that helped women later. Nothing would frustrate her more than to suggest a woman wasn’t able to do a job, because that’s not the way she was raised. It’s not the way she lived her life. It’s not the way she acted.

She did become noted for the diversity of her law clerks, and this obviously was a very deliberate act on her part. She noted—and it’s pretty obvious—that almost all the law clerks come from just a few law schools. Almost all the law clerks come from just a few circuit court judges. And she knew there were a lot of other people out there who were qualified to work as a clerk at the Supreme Court.

So she broadened the law schools that she hired law clerks from. She brought in more women as law clerks. More diversity in terms of physical ability. I think this is something that people don’t understand totally about her when they ask about her views toward discrimination. Her view simply was that nobody should be prevented ever from doing something they’re qualified to do. Whether it was women, whether it was African-Americans, whether it was Hispanics, nobody should be disqualified from doing something because of a particular characteristic. And that was just as clear to her as anything ever could be.

So it’s not surprising that she found a way to add more diversity to her law clerks, because she was in a unique position to give people an opportunity that really would help them in their later career. Being a Supreme Court law clerk is a big advantage to people, and I really always thought she just couldn’t bear the notion that some people couldn’t reach their full ability. And so if she could do something to move it along, she would.

From her opinions and what she wrote, you can see her attempt to come to a standard that she thought was both applicable and protective of all the parties involved in that decision. Her opinions were for the most part limited to the issues that came to the Court. She regarded that as the appropriate approach for the Court to take, not to make broad, sweeping generalizations, but to decide the case before them.

— Our interview with Ruth McGregor has been edited for clarity. McGregor was Justice O'Connor's former clerk at the Supreme Court in 1981 and a longtime friend.

#The First Four Women Supreme Court Justices #Sandra Day O'Connor | Sonia Sotomayor | Ruth Bader Ginsburg | Elena Kagan #The Supreme Court of the United States 🇺🇸 #NOVA | PBS

[truth-has-a-liberal-bias]

But once the babies are here, the state provides little help.

When she got pregnant, Mayron Michelle Hollis was clinging to stability.

At 31, she was three years sober, after first getting introduced to drugs at 12. She had just had a baby three months earlier and was working to repair the damage that her addiction had caused her family.

The state of Tennessee had taken away three of her children, and she was fighting to keep her infant daughter, Zooey. Department of Children’s Services investigators had accused Mayron of endangering Zooey when she visited a vape store and left the baby in a car.

Her husband, Chris Hollis, was also in recovery.

The two worked in physically demanding jobs that paid just enough to cover rent, food and lawyers’ fees to fight the state for custody of Mayron’s children.

In the midst of the turmoil in July 2022, they learned Mayron was pregnant again. But this time, doctors warned she and her fetus might not survive.

The embryo had been implanted in scar tissue from her recent cesarean section. There was a high chance that the embryo could rupture, blowing open her uterus and killing her, or that she could bleed to death during delivery. The baby could come months early and face serious medical risks, or even die.

But the Supreme Court had just overturned Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed the right to abortion across the United States. By the time Mayron decided to end her pregnancy, Tennessee’s abortion ban — one of the nation’s strictest — had gone into effect.

The total ban made no explicit exceptions — not even to save the life of a pregnant patient. Any doctor who violated the ban could be charged with a felony.

Women with means could leave the state. But those like Mayron, with limited resources or lives entangled with the child welfare and criminal justice systems, would be the most likely to face caring for a child they weren’t prepared for.

And so, the same state that questioned Mayron’s fitness to care for her four children forced her to continue a pregnancy that risked her life to have a fifth, one that would require more intensive care than any of the others.

Tennessee already had some of the worst outcomes in the nation when measuring maternal health, infant mortality and child poverty. Lawmakers who paved the way for a new generation of post-Roe births did little to bolster the state’s meager safety net to support these babies and their families.

In December 2022, when Mayron was 26 weeks and two days pregnant, she was rushed to the hospital after she began bleeding so heavily that her husband slipped in her blood. An emergency surgery saved her life. Her daughter, Elayna, was born three months early.

Afterward, photographer Stacy Kranitz and reporter Kavitha Surana followed Mayron and her family for a year to chronicle what life truly looked like in a state whose political leaders say they are pro-life. [...]

#abortion #Tennessee #pregnancy #forced-birth #Roe v Wade

[funkopersonal]

Here's your daily reminder that...

Jews are only 0.2% of the worlds population but...

Jews make up 14% of the World Total and 38% of the United States of America total winners for the Nobel Prize for Literature (source).

Jews make up 14% of the total winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 18% of the total winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; 53% of the total winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction (source).

Jews make up 39% of the total winners of the Antoinette Perry (Tony) Award for Best Play; 54% of the total winners of the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical (with 62% of all Composers and 66% of all Lyricists of Best Musical-winning productions being Jewish) (source).

Jews make up 40% of the total winners of the Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Original Screenplay; and 34% of the total winners of the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay (source).

Although Jews constitute only 3% of the U.S. population...

80% of the nation’s professional comedians are Jewish (source).

90% of American comic book creators are jewish (source)

38% of the recipients of the United States National Medal of Science are Jewish (Source).

Jews are very successful, with educational levels higher than all other U.S. ethnic groups with the exception of Asian Americans, and income levels the highest of all groups. Six out of ten Jewish adults have college degrees, and 41% of Jewish families report a household income of $75,000 or more” (source)

Jews are a minority across the globe. We've been historically opressed and hated. But these key figures from history are all Jewish and loved, yet many don't even know they're jewish (or they don't know these people in the first place!):

Stan Lee (birth name: Stanley Martin Lieber) - An American comic book writer and editor, Former executive vice president and publisher of marvel Comics, creator of iron-man, spider-man, and more.

Albert Einstein - a Theoretical physicist, Received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, developed the theory of relativity and the "worlds most famous equation"  (E = mc^2), and more.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg - Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, co-authored the initial law school casebook on sex discrimination, co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU in 1972, and more.

Jack Kirby (birth name: Jacob Kurtzberg) - an American comic book artist, co-creator of Captain America, one of the most influential comic book artists

Harry Houdini (birth name: Erich Weisz) - a Hungarian-American escape artist, illusionist, and stunt performer, noted for his escape acts.

Emma Lazarus - An American author remembered for her sonnet "The New Colossus," Inspired by The Statue of Liberty and inscribed on its pedestal as of 1903.

Julius Rosenthal, Lillian Wald, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, Stephen Wise, and Henry Moskowitz - Jewish activists that helped form the NAACP along with W.E.B. Dubois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell.

Mark Zuckerberg - Founder and CEO of Meta, a businessman who co-founded the social media service Facebook, and within four years became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire Harvard alumni.

Joseph Pulitzer - a politician and newspaper publisher, his endowment to the Columbia University established the Pulitzer Prizes in 1917, he founded the Columbia School of Journalism which opened in 1912.

Jacob William Davis - a Latvian tailor who is credited with inventing modern jeans and who worked with Levi Strauss to patent and mass-produce them, died.

Irving Berlin - drafted at age 30 to write morale-boosting songs for military revues (including “God Bless America”). Many Berlin songs remained popular for decades, including “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better),” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” and two celebrating Christian holidays: “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade.”

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel - received his doctorate in Berlin. He was arrested by the Nazis in 1938, moved to the U.S. in 1940, and became an influential figure in the 1960s, marching with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama, and speaking out against the Vietnam War.

Elie Wiesel - Romanian-American writer and professor, holocaust survivor, nobel laureate, political activist. Authored 57 books including Night, a work based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps

Bob Dylan - an icon of folk, rock and protest music, won the Nobel Prize in literature for his complex and poetic lyrics.

J. Robert Oppenheimer - ran the Manhattan Project, considered the "father of the atomic Bomb," presented with the Enrico Fermi Award by President Lyndon Johnson.

Betty Friedan - co-founded the National Organization of Women and became its first president, wrote The Feminine Mystique (1963) and helped spark the second wave of feminism.

Gloria Steinem - one of the most prominent feminists of all time, launched Ms. Magazine and co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus with Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan and Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of Medgar Evers.

Sergey Brin - an American businessman best known for co-founding Google with Larry Page, president of Alphabet Inc.

Judith Heumann - a founder of the disability rights movement, led a 26-day sit-in at a federal building in San Francisco. The protest spurred implementation of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, a precursor to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Larry Kramer - co-founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis in response to the AIDS epidemic but was soon ousted over his confrontational activism. He went on to help launch a more strident group, ACT UP, and wrote a critically acclaimed play, The Normal Heart, about the early AIDS years in New York City.

Steven Spielberg - released his critically acclaimed epic film Schindler’s List, based on the true story of a German industrialist who saved Jews during the Holocaust. The movie won seven Oscars and led Spielberg to launch the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California, which filmed interviews with 52,000 survivors of the Holocaust and genocides in Nanjing and Rwanda.

Calvin Klein - made designer jeans and the infamous ad starring Brooke Shields revolutionized the fashion industry, sold his company to Phillips-Van Heusen (now PVH) for $430 million. Klein was the first designer to win three consecutive Coty Awards for womenswear.

Daveed Diggs - an American actor, rapper, and singer-songwriter. he originated the dual roles of Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in the musical Hamilton, for which he won a 2016 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical. Along with the main cast of Hamilton, he was awarded a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album in the same year.

And so much more. (a pretty decent list is available here)

Not only that, but the following are all Jewish inventions...

The Teddy Bear - made by Morris and Rose Michtom in honor of Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt.

The Ballpoint Pen - *the first commercially sucessfull ballpoint pen was made by Lazlo Biro, a Hungarian-Jew, and his brother.

Mobile Phones - made by Martin Cooper, nicknamed the "father of the cellphone", and was born in Chicago to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants.

The Barbie - made by Ruth Marianna Handler, born to Polish-Jewish immigrants.

Power Rangers - made by Haim Saban, a Jewish-Egyptian

Video Games - made by Ralph Baer, a German-Jew

Peeps - made by Sam Born, a Russian-Jewish immigrants who came to the United States in 1909.

Cards Against Humanity - created by a group of Jewish boys from the same high school

Many Superheroes including Superman, Ironman, spider-man, batman, and more!

and more! (an illustrated list available here.)

Conclusion: If you're Jewish, be proud. You come from a long line of successful people. No matter what happened to them, Jews persevered, and they strived for sucess. Be proud of your culture, your history, these are your people. You're Jewish.

(feel free to reblog and add more, or just comment and i'll add it!)

Last Updated: May 31, 5:30 PM EST

#funkowrites #jumblr #jewblr #jewish tumblr #israel solidarity #judaism #jewish #antisemitism #stop antisemitism #op is a proud jew #proud to be jewish #jewish joy #jewish positivity #jew #proud jew #we will persevere

[contemplatingoutlander]

This is a gift🎁link so anyone can read the entire NY Times article, even if they don' subscribe to the Times.

Jamelle Bouie does another excellent job of looking at current events through the perspective of American history. In this column, he compares the current Roberts Court with the infamous late 1850s/ early 1860s Taney Court--the Court that lost all credibility with its Dred Scott decision. Below are a few excerpts.

If the chief currency of the Supreme Court is its legitimacy as an institution, then you can say with confidence that its account is as close to empty as it has been for a very long time. Since the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization nearly two years ago, its general approval with the public has taken a plunge. [...] In the latest 538 average, just over 52 percent of Americans disapproved of the Supreme Court, and around 40 percent approved. [...] At the risk of sounding a little dramatic, you can draw a useful comparison between the Supreme Court’s current political position and the one it held on the eve of the 1860 presidential election. [color emphasis added]

[See more below the cut.]

NOTE: Remember that back in the 1850s/1860s the Democrats were the party that supported slavery. The Democrats and Republicans switched positions on civil rights in the late 20th century.

It was not just the ruling itself that drove the ferocious opposition to the [Taney] Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which overturned the Missouri Compromise and wrote Black Americans out of the national community; it was the political entanglement of the Taney court with the slaveholding interests of the antebellum Democratic Party. [...] Five of the justices were appointed by slave owners. At the time of the ruling, four of the justices were slave owners. And the chief justice, Roger Taney, was a strong Democratic partisan who was in close communication with James Buchanan, the incoming Democratic president, in the weeks before he issued the court’s ruling in 1857. Buchanan, in fact, had written to some of the justices urging them to issue a broad and comprehensive ruling that would settle the legal status of all Black Americans. The Supreme Court, critics of the ruling said, was not trying to faithfully interpret the Constitution as much as it was acting on behalf of the so-called Slave Power, an alleged conspiracy of interests determined to take slavery national. The court, wrote a committee of the New York State Assembly in its report on the Dred Scott decision, was determined to “bring slavery within our borders, against our will, with all its unhallowed, demoralizing and blighted influences.” The Supreme Court did not have the political legitimacy to issue a ruling as broad and potentially far-reaching as Dred Scott, and the result was to mobilize a large segment of the public against the court. Abraham Lincoln spoke for many in his first inaugural address when he took aim at the pretense of the Taney court to decide for the nation: “The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties, in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.” [color/ emphasis added]

[formatting edited]

#scotus #roberts court #dobbs v. jackson women's health organization #taney court #dred scott #legitimacy of the supreme court #jamelle bouie #the new york times #gift link

[trivalentlinks]

quora (a q&a social media site, like yahoo answers, but higher quality) used to have a lot of questions of the form "how would you explain X to your grandmother?" Where X was usually some mathematics or physics concept. Things like:

How would you explain quantum mechanics to your grandma?

Category theory?

General relativity/space-time?

Bayesian statistics?

(this was before quora made it so that you got paid for asking questions that generated engagement, thus inundating the site with troll questions; back then quora had decent questions)

One of my friends, who had a fairly large following on quora, had two grandmothers (out of four, including step-grandmas) who had PhDs in mathematics. He used to love answering these questions like,

"I would say [extremely abstract explanation with analogies to far more esoteric concepts than the question was asking],

But my grandma's an algebraic topologist, so your mileage may vary."

One time some fellow quora users we knew irl asked him about this, since he's generally very sweet and opposed to trolling/being needlessly rude to people online, and someone asked him why he didn't feel bad about ignoring the spirit of the questions, and essentially poking fun at them in front of his large following,

And he said, "well the thing is that these questions are actually kind of rude to grandmas. they act like all grandmas are the same, just some blank slate for you to explain things to, when in fact grandmas can have quite varied interests and knowledge. I'm just responding to the questions' offensiveness in kind"

And then he mentioned how nobody asks "how would you explain [science concept] to your dad?", right?

Because society thinks of fathers as diverse and varied, so why aren't grandmas viewed as a similarly diverse group, when they actually are, and as someone with four grandmas (through divorce and remarriage), he would know (even though two of his grandmas apparently had very similar interests to each other, lol)

.

And I just. Those questions always left a bad taste in my mouth, too, but I had never thought to explain it this way (which I guess is why he was a quora influencer and I wasn't, lol)

I also had more than the normal number of grandmas (grandpa was double married (poly marriage was legal back then)) and like, yeah, each of my three grandmas had a very unique and interesting story.

Two of my grandmas ran away from home to go to university when their families didn't approve of women getting educations. One of these became an electrical engineer.

The other studied law (fully funded on government merit scholarship) and became an understudy to the equivalent of a justice of the supreme court (under the nationalist government, which unfortunately led to her being subject to denunciation rallies later on). She was also into martial arts and knew some gorgeous forms with a sword. (She was the grandma I was closest to because she raised me for a few years when I was a kid)

The other grandma (the one who didn't go to university, grandpa's first wife) was an avid storyteller who could keep all the neighbourhood kids entertained for hours from stories told from memory (her language had no writing system), and also a master at embroidery. She also easily won over my mother and my aunt's love even though they only met her in their early teens (my grandpa had hidden her from their mom, his second wife) and she didn't speak any Chinese, and my mom and aunt only spoke Chinese.

Like, yeah, grandmas are a diverse group and it does suck that society generally doesn't regard them as such

#grandmothers #grandmas #long post #math #physics #diversity of grandmas #for some reason readmore/the keep reading thing isn't working for me atm

[ms-cellanies]

ALITO, GORSUCH, KAVANAUGH & CONEY BARRETT MUST BE REMOVED FROM THE SUPREME COURT.  They owe their positions to The Federalist Society but they are supposed to uphold the U.S. Constitution.

#politics

[sixminutestoriesblog]

ides of march

well, its tumblr's favorite holiday and who can blame us? The assassination of Julius Caesar is probably one of the only group projects that ever went down the way it was supposed to with, well, not complete group participation (there were said to be upward of 60 people involved but only 23 stab wounds - obviously someone was not carrying their weight) but at least a good effort was made at it. But lets take a moment, between our jokes about salad and Animal Crossing butterfly nets to look at what else has happened in history on the Ides of March. For instance, did you know, on March 15th:

1493 - Columbus returned to Spain after 'discovering' the new world.

1580 - Phillip II of Spain put a bounty on the head of Prince William I of Orange for 25,000 gold coins for leading the Dutch revolt against the Spanish Hamburgs

1744 - King Louis XV of France declares war on Britain

1767 - Andrew Jackson, who would go on to be the seventh president of the US, was born.

1820 - Maine became the 23rd state in the US

1864 - the Red River Campaign, called 'One damn blunder from beginning to end' started for the Union Forces in the American Civil War

1889 - a typhoon in Apia Harbor, Samoa sinks 6 US and German warships, killing 200

1917 - Czar Nicholas II abdicated the Russian throne, bringing an end to the Romanov dynasty

1955 - the first self-guided missile is introduced by the US Air Force

1965 - TGI Friday's opens its first restaurant in New York City

1991 - in LA, four police officers are brought up on charges for the beating of Rodney King

2018 - Toys R Us announces it will be closing all its stores

2019 - a terrorist attacks two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51, and wounding 50 others

Oof! Pretty bleak, isn't it? It would almost make you think that the day is just bad luck, start to finish and its probably just as well, we're all focusing on assassination instead of other horrors. But wait - its not all bad news! The Ides of March has some tricks up its sleeve yet (joke intended). I'd be telling you only half the story if I didn't add:

1854 - Emil von Behring is born and will eventually become the first to receive the Nobel Prize in medicine for his discovery of a diphtheria antitoxin, being called 'the children's savoir' for the lives it saves

1867 - Michigan is the first state to use property tax to support a university

1868 - the Cincinnati Red Stockings have ten salaried players, making them the first professional baseball team in the US

1887 - Michigan has the first salaried fish and game warden

1892 - the first automatic ballot voting machine is unveiled in New York City

1907 - Finland gives women the right to vote, becoming the first to do so in Europe

1933 - Ruth Bader Ginsberg is born and will go on to become a US Supreme Court justice

1934 - the 5$ a day wage was introduced by Henry Ford, forcing other companies to raise their wages as well or lose their workers

1937 - the first state sponsored contraceptive clinic in the US opens in Raleigh, North Carolina

1946 - the British Prime minister recognizes India's independence

1947 - the US Navy has its first black commissioned officer, John Lee

1949 - clothes rationing ends in Britain, four years after the end of WWII

1960 - ten nations meet in Geneva for disarmament talks

1968 - the Dioceses of Rome says it will not ban 'rock and roll' from being played during mass but that it deplores the practice - also in 1968, LIFE magazine titles Jimi Hendrix 'the most spectacular guitarist in the world'

1971 - ARPANET, the precursor of the modern day internet, sees its first forum

1984 - Tanzanian adopts a constitution

1985 - symbolics.com, the first internet domain name, is registered

The Ides of March turns out to just be a day, like any other day in history.

Unless you're us. In which case -

#ides of march #happy ides of march #julius caesar #today in history #please take some of my 'bad' dates as tongue in cheek #we love you maine #and a few of my dates fit both the good and bad side of the things so I just went with whichever I was on at the time #feel free to wiggle them around to a more appropriate column

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Alice Miranda Ollstein and Megan Messerly at Politico:

Donald Trump says he won’t ban birth control if he returns to the White House. But he could make it a lot harder to get. As president, Trump enacted several policies that made it more difficult for people, particularly the working class and the poor, to obtain contraception — from allowing more employers to opt out of birth control coverage in their workers’ health insurance to imposing restrictions on the Title X family planning program that triggered a mass exodus of clinics.

Conservative allies want to reimpose those policies and go further if he wins in November. Their “Project 2025” blueprint includes proposals to require coverage of natural family planning methods and remove requirements that insurance cover certain emergency contraception. Taken together, the policies highlight the many ways a second Trump administration could hamper access to contraception, short of a blanket ban. The impact would also be much greater now that roughly one-third of states prohibit nearly all abortions. In the wake of the Dobbs decision, to the consternation of some conservatives, the Biden administration has worked to make contraception more accessible, approving the first birth control pill available over-the-counter and requiring more types of contraception be covered by insurance. [...]

Roger Severino, a former Trump administration official who drafted the health care section of the Project 2025 blueprint, argued that the restrictions proposed in the document are a “far cry” from pulling contraceptives off the market or criminalizing their use — actions some Democrats have warned conservatives plan to implement. “The notion that there’s a formal organized movement to ban contraception across America is downright silly. I don’t know how that idea came about. But it strikes me as political posturing in the wake of the Dobbs decision to try to mislead people into thinking everything is up for grabs having to do with sex,” Severino said. “It’s fearmongering.” The Biden campaign said last week that Trump’s contraception remarks are the latest example of the chaos he has wrought for women’s reproductive rights, particularly by appointing three conservative justices to the Supreme Court.

[...]

As part of their 2025 wish list, conservatives want to overhaul which forms of birth control insurance companies must cover for patients at no cost under the Affordable Care Act. For instance, they have drafted plans to allow insurers to drop coverage of the emergency contraceptive pill Ella, which some on the right believe is an abortifacient.

“Instead of a mandate of a particular potentially abortifacient drug, it should be opt-in instead of opt-out,” Severino said. “Mandates are a difficult thing to impose on the American people, especially when you have something as fraught as issues of potential loss of life.” Conservatives also call for a requirement to cover “fertility awareness-based methods” of family planning, such as apps to track menstruation. Waters said she would also like to see the National Institutes of Health or another entity study the long-term effects of birth control. Trump allies also hope he will bring back a number of policies from his administration. During Trump’s four years in office, his administration slashed hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program and sought to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which has allowed at least 58 million women to access birth control with no out-of-pocket costs.

Federal health officials in Trump’s administration also issued rules allowing virtually any employer to refuse to cover contraception in their health plans, a policy supporters of the former president hope will be restored in 2025. The administration’s biggest impact on contraception access came from its overhaul of the federal Title X program, which provides free and subsidized birth control, STD screenings and other services to millions of low-income people. Trump’s health officials first cut the length of grants to clinics in that program from three years to eight months, creating more uncertainty and paperwork burdens for already strapped clinics. They then issued rules that banned providers from referring patients for an abortion or discussing it as an option and required clinics to construct fully separate facilities for the procedure and other services. Proponents argued the policies would ensure taxpayer dollars didn’t inadvertently support abortion, but many critics considered it a “gag rule” that prevented open communication between doctor and patient.

Politico is reporting that Donald Trump may be open to heavily restricting access to contraception and birth control instead of an outright ban. This is yet another example of the morally bankrupt Project 2025 agenda that the GOP wants to enact.

#Birth Control #Abortion #Project 2025 #Roger Severino #Contraception #Title X #Donald Trump

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 29, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAY 30, 2024

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned today in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They spoke at Girard College, a school where Black Americans make up most of the student body, where they emphasized the importance of Black voters to the Democratic coalition and the ways in which the administration’s actions have delivered on its promises to the Black community. 

“Because Black Americans voted, Kamala and I are President and Vice President of the United States,” Biden said. “That’s not hyperbole. Because you voted, Donald Trump is a defeated former president.”

Harris noted that Black Americans are 60% more likely than white Americans to be diagnosed with diabetes, and called out the administration’s capping of insulin at $35 a month, along with the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that permit Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies. She called out the administration’s relief of more than $165 billion in student loan debt for more than 5 million Americans, as well as the first major bipartisan gun safety law in 30 years. 

What has guided them, Harris said to applause, is the “fundamental belief” that “[w]e work for you, the American people, not the special interests, not the billionaires or the big corporations, but the people.” 

She contrasted their record with that of former president Trump, who tried to get rid of the Affordable Care Act that puts healthcare within reach for millions of Black Americans, proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and handpicked Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. “And as he intended, they did,” she said. “[T]oday, one in three women and more than half of Black women of reproductive age live in a state with an abortion ban.”

Then Biden took the stage to chants of “Four more years!” He added to Harris’s list of ways in which the administration has worked for racial equality: reconnecting the Black and brown and poor neighborhoods that were cut apart by highways in the 1960s and addressing the decades of disinvestment that happened as a consequence of the carving up of those neighborhoods (this cutting apart of neighborhoods is a really big deal in urban history, by the way); getting rid of the lead pipes that still contaminate water, especially in minority neighborhoods; making high-speed internet widely available and affordable; investing in historically Black colleges and universities; appointing more Black women to federal circuit courts than all other U.S. presidents combined. 

Under the Biden administration, he noted, Black unemployment is at a record low and Black small businesses are starting at the fastest rate in 30 years. The wealth gap between Black Americans and white Americans is the lowest it’s been in 20 years. “We’re opening more doors for economic opportunity, including access to capital, entrepreneurship, workforce training so you can build a life of financial freedom and create generational wealth...all while being the providers and leaders of your families and community,” the president said.

Biden drew a contrast between his administration and Trump, saying, “I’ve shown you who I am, and Trump has shown you who he is. And today, Donald Trump is pandering and peddling lies and stereotypes for your votes so he can win for himself, not for you.” “[W]e’re not going to let Donald Trump turn America into a place that doesn’t believe in honesty, decency, and treating people with respect,” he said, “and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let Donald Trump turn America into a place filled with anger and resentment and hate.” 

According to Myah Ward and Brakkton Booker of Politico, this was Biden’s fifth trip to the Philadelphia area and his seventh to Pennsylvania this year. As he tries to win the state in 2024, the campaign has opened 24 field offices and outspent Trump there by a ratio of more than 4 to 1.   

Harris and Biden’s appearance in Philadelphia looked pretty much like a normal day in a normal presidential campaign season.

The same was not true of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who was in a courtroom in Manhattan as Judge Juan Merchan instructed the jury in the criminal case  against Trump for falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, to stop her account of their sexual encounter from becoming public in the days before the 2016 election.  

Legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained that to find Trump guilty, “[t]he jury must find unanimously that Trump created fraudulent business records and that he did it with the intent to influence an election through unlawful means.”

Trump and his supporters immediately took to the media to misrepresent the court system. Trump appeared to sleep through the jury instructions but later posted on social media: “I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE CHARGES ARE IN THIS RIGGED CASE…. THERE IS NO CRIME.” (He had told the judge on April 4, 2023, that he understood the charges against him.) Trump insisted that he had been railroaded by the fact that “a lot of key witnesses were not called,” although his own defense did not call them and he declined to testify himself. He called the judge “conflicted” and “corrupt,” and said “Mother Teresa could not beat these charges,” a reference to the Albanian-Indian Catholic nun canonized by the Catholic Church in 2016. 

Fox News host John Roberts misrepresented the judge’s instructions, launching a wave of fury on right-wing media stations and prompting Florida senator Marco Rubio to write: “This is exactly the kind of sham trial used against political opponents of the regime in the old Soviet Union.” Utah senator Mike Lee chimed in with his own attacks on Judge Merchan. Roberts later corrected his tweet, but it was too late to change the narrative.

Tonight, those two themes reappeared again and again on social media in both Trump’s feed and those of his supporters. Their frenzy suggested they are concerned about the jury’s verdict. Newsmax host Todd Starnes tweeted: “President Trump needs to get out of New York City RIGHT NOW! Fly back to Mar-a-Lago or another state that will provide him safe harbor.”

Indeed, it seems we are seeing the fear of accountability that has been missing from the top levels of American politics since President Gerald Ford pardoned President Richard M. Nixon in 1974. While Ford believed Nixon’s accepting the pardon was an admission of guilt for his participation in the coverup of the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel before the 1972 election and anything else he might have done, Nixon never admitted such guilt. 

In the fifty years since then, certain powerful people seem to have concluded that they cannot be held accountable to laws or rules. The MAGA Republicans are illustrating that disrespect for the rule of law on a daily basis as they work to undermine the courts and the Department of Justice. 

Yesterday, Jodi Kantor of the New York Times reported that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s story that his wife flew the upside down flag of distress favored by the January 6th rioters as a response to a hostile neighbor did not line up with accounts given by neighbors and a police report. 

Because of that distress flag, as well as the “Appeal to Heaven” flag that flew over his beach house, Alito is under increasing pressure to recuse himself from considering cases related to the events of January 6, including whether Trump is immune from prosecution for his actions surrounding the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Today Alito refused to recuse himself, blaming his wife for flying the flags—“My wife is fond of flying flags. I am not,” he wrote—and suggesting that anyone who thinks he should recuse himself is “motivated by political or ideological considerations.” 

And in what should almost certainly be read as trolling those who disagree with him, Alito, the author of the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision taking away from American women the right to make their own decisions about their healthcare, wrote: “[M]y wife is an independently minded private citizen. She makes her own decisions, and I honor her right to do so.”  

Trump promptly congratulated Alito “for showing the INTELLIGENCE, COURAGE, and ‘GUTS’ to refuse stepping aside from making a decision on anything January 6th related.” 

MAGA attacks on the rule of law affect real people’s lives. Ryan J. Reilly of NBC News reported today that after former Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone called Trump “authoritarian” with a “violence fetish” in front of the Manhattan courthouse yesterday, Fanone’s 78-year-old mother was swatted, with officers showing up at her home after reports of a murder there. Fanone protected the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and went into cardiac arrest after a rioter assaulted him with a stun gun. “This is the reality of going up against or challenging Donald Trump…. These swatting calls are incredibly f---ing dangerous, especially when the target is somebody like my mom.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#GOTV #Heather Cox Richardson #Letters From An American #voters #campaign 2024 #MAGA lies #Rule of Law #Biden Harris Accomplishments #black Americans

[beardedmrbean]

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Shayara Bano heaved a sigh of relief on Wednesday at the enactment of a law banning polygamy in her small Indian state, the culmination of a years-long effort including her own case before the nation's Supreme Court.

"I can now say that my battle against age-old Islamic rules on marriage and divorce has been won," said Bano, a Muslim woman whose husband chose to have two wives and divorced her by uttering "talaq" three times.

"Islam's allowance for men to have two or more wives at the same time had to end," she told Reuters.

But Sadaf Jafar did not cheer the new law, which abolishes practices such as polygamy and instant divorce, even though she has been waging her own court fight against her husband for marrying another woman without her consent.

"Polygamy is permissible in Islam under strict rules and regulations but it is misused, said Jafar, who is seeking alimony to support their two children. She says she did not consult Islamic scholars as she hoped Indian courts would provide justice.

The adoption of the Uniform Civil Code in the state of Uttarakhand has opened a chasm between women in India's largest religious minority, even among some whose lives were turned upside-down when their husbands entered multiple marriages.

Some, like activist Bano, 49, celebrate the new provisions as the overdue assertion of secular law over parallel sharia rulings on marriage, divorce, inheritance, adoption and succession. For others like Jafar, Muslim politicians and Islamic scholars, it is an unwelcome stunt by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist party.

Adoption of the code in Uttarakhand is expected to pave the way for other states ruled by Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to follow suit, over the angry opposition from some leaders of the 200 million Muslims who make India the world's third-biggest Muslim country.

RIGHTS IN MULTI-RELIGIOUS SOCIETY

BJP leaders said the new code is a major reform, rooted in India's 1950 constitution, that aims to modernise the country's Muslim personal laws and guarantee complete equality for women.

A 2013 survey found 91.7% of Muslim women nationwide saying a Muslim man should not be allowed to have another wife while married to the first.

Still, many Muslims accuse Modi's party of pursuing a Hindu agenda that discriminates against them and imposes laws interfering with Islam. Sharia permits Muslim men to have up to four wives and it has no stringent rules to prohibit the marriage of minors.

Jafar, who has run for office with the main opposition Congress party, calls the passage of the code a tactic of Modi's government to showcase Islam in a bad light and divert attention from pressing issues like improving the livelihood of Muslims.

The Supreme Court in 2017 found the Islamic instant divorce unconstitutional, but the order did not ban polygamy or some other practices that critics say violate equal rights for women.

In addition to the polygamy ban, the new code sets a minimum marriageable age for both genders and guarantees equal shares in ancestral property to adopted children, those born out of wedlock and those conceived through surrogate births.

While BJP leaders and women's rights activists say the code aims to end regressive practices, some Muslim politicians say it violates the fundamental right to practice religion.

The All India Muslim Personal Law Board called the code impractical and a direct threat to a multi-religious Indian society.

"Banning polygamy makes little sense because data shows very few Muslim men have more than one wife in India," said board official S.Q.R. Ilyas, adding that the government has no right to question sharia law.

Jafar, who lives with her two children in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, said, "Islam has enough provisions to provide a life of dignity. We don't need (the code) but what we need is swift justice for women fighting for their dignity."

#nunyas news

[itsmythang]

Clarence Thomas called affirmative action 'critical' before comparing it to segregation - The Washington Post

Four decades before he was among the conservative Supreme Court justices who restricted the use of affirmative action in higher education, Clarence Thomas told staffers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that “God only knows where I would be today” if not for the legal principles of equal employment opportunity measures such as affirmative action that are “critical to minorities and women in this society.”

“These laws and their proper application are all that stand between the first 17 years of my life and the second 17 years,” Thomas, then the EEOC chairman, said in 1983.

#affirmative action #Clarence Thomas #supreme court #politics

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

A group of House Democrats called for legislation on Monday that would add four seats to the Supreme Court, lamenting a “ultra right-wing” branch that just overturned the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion rights.

The eight lawmakers cited recent Supreme Court decisions that rolled back Miranda rights, threw out a New York gun control law and allowed religion to surface in schools — as well as the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision that overturned the right to abortion in Roe — in saying there was a need to add new Justices to the Court.

Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), the lead sponsor of the 2021 Judiciary Act, called the current makeup “a Supreme Court at crisis with itself and with our democracy” where “basic freedoms are under assault” from the 6-3 conservative supermajority on the bench.

The Supreme Court isn’t susceptible to the popular vote the way Congress is, Johnson said, and it has used that fact to amass power. “It’s making decisions that usurp the power of the legislative and executive branches,” he said.

Facing Republican opposition and some Democratic skepticism, the bill has little chance of becoming law, but it illustrates the deep anger among Progressive Democrats about the Court's direction under three conservative Justices nominated by former-President Trump: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Those three Justices have radically altered the direction of the Court, which now has twice as many conservative Justices as liberal ones. Kavanaugh replaced Justice Anthony Kennedy, a previous swing vote who had been nominated to the court by a Republican, while Barrett replaced liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Adding to Democratic anger, a GOP Senate blocked former-President Obama’s last nominee to the court, Merrick Garland, who is now the Attorney General. Gorsuch ended up being nominated to the court in place of Garland.

Introduced last year, the Judiciary Act has not progressed in Congress.

Some Democrats wary of the proposal are concerned that expansion would open the court up for Republicans to push more of their nominees into the openings.

“The nightmare scenario of GOP court-packing is already upon us,” said Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.). “That’s how they got this far-right 6-3 majority in the first place.”

Lawmakers at Monday’s press conference, hosted by the Take Back the Court Action Fund, blamed Trump and the conservative legal movement for enabling a partisan court.

Republican politicians made controlling the judicial branch part of their platform, said Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.), adding that the court has “gone rogue” and “become a radical institution.”

The lawmakers also emphasized that the longevity of the lifelong terms the sitting Justices are now serving makes action to expand the court more urgent.

Of 72-year-old conservative Justice Samuel Alito, Johnson said, “You can see the gleam in his eye as he thinks about what he wants to do to decimate the rights of people and put us back in the Dark Ages.”

Trump-nominated Gorsuch, Barrett and Kavanaugh, in their 50s, are “gonna be there for a while,” Johnson said.

Congress has changed the number of seats on the nation’s highest court seven times in the nation’s history. The new proposal would bring the total seat count to 13, meaning a decision from the court would need a 7-6 majority rather than the present 5-4.

Reps. Andy Levin (D-Mich.), Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) were also at the conference, along with Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who sponsored the bill in the Senate, and a handful of progressive activists.

#us politics #news #the hill #2022 #us supreme court #scotus #Vega v. Tekoh #kennedy v. bremerton school district #New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. V. Bruen #dobbs v. jackson women’s health organization #miranda rights #concealed carry #gun rights #separation of church and state #prayer in schools #Rep. Hank Johnson #2021 Judiciary Act #Judiciary Act #justice neil gorsuch #justice brett kavanaugh #justice amy coney barrett #Rep. Mondaire Jones #Take Back the Court Action Fund #Rep. Mark Takano #rep. Andy Levin #rep. Jan Schakowsky #rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman #rep. rashida tlaib #rep. Sheila Jackson Lee #Sen. Ed Markey

[deadpresidents]

[January 20th] is the second anniversary of the Biden Presidency. For the most part, up until now, he has been more unlucky than stupid, with his tenure marked by interlocking crises that would sorely test any Chief Executive -- including a lingering pandemic, highest-in-decades inflation, and a radicalized Republican Party that has refused to disavow Trump and his lies about the 2020 election. Democrats, for decades, have feared that conservative Justices on the Supreme Court would strike down Roe v. Wade, and with it the guarantee of women’s reproductive freedom. It finally happened on Biden’s watch. In Europe, Vladimir Putin has long threatened Russia’s neighbor Ukraine, but it was at the start of Biden’s second year in office that Putin unleashed the largest ground war in Europe since the Second World War.

Given such a dreary moment, the perennially upbeat Biden has come out of it not so badly. Even with a fifty-fifty Senate the last couple of years, he managed to pass an array of sweeping legislation boosting spending on infrastructure, health care, and climate-change mitigation. He assembled and held together a bipartisan coalition to send billions of dollars in military assistance to Ukraine. He’s held off, for now, the threat of a recession.

If anything, Republican overreach has offered Biden a political path out of the morass, with the 2022 midterm results far less catastrophic than expected, at least in part because of the GOP’s insistence on selecting Trump-backed extremists as nominees in battleground states. Trump himself has long been the most effective argument on Democrats’ behalf, and there is a reason this cartoonish con man became the first incumbent since Herbert Hoover to lost the House, Senate, and White House in just four years.

The past couple of weeks, though, are a reminder that Democrats cannot simply count on Republican excess in the name of Trump to carry them through. A screwup is a screwup, and this one by Biden -- whether or not it matters that much to voters, who often don’t care about the inside-the-Beltway scandals that obsess us Washingtonians -- will go down at a minimum as a self-inflicted bit of political malpractice. The big news at the midway point of his Presidency is that Biden seems determined to run again, no matter how risky it may seem to put the fate of his Party -- and the Republic -- in the hands of a gaffe-prone octogenarian. His opponents are real-life insurrectionists. What if next time his luck really does run out?”

-- Susan Glasser, The New Yorker

#President Biden #Biden Administration #Joe Biden #The New Yorker #Susan Glasser #Politics

[foreverlogical]

More than a year after the Supreme Court ended federal protection for abortion rights in the United States, disagreements over abortion bans continue to reverberate around the country. Candidates sparred over the idea of a federal abortion ban during the Aug. 23, 2023, Republican presidential debate. And abortion is likely to figure prominently in the November 2023 contest for a seat on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, removing women’s federal constitutional right to get abortions and giving states the power to pass laws about the legality of the procedure, the 6-3 vote was by a four white men, one Black man and a white woman majority.

Since that decision – Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization – more than 1,500 state legislators, who are overwhelmingly white men, have voted for full or partial abortion bans.

This is not the first period in U.S. history when white men have exercised control over women’s right to bear – or not bear – children, including during slavery. Then, it was a matter of numbers. The more people they enslaved, the more money white male enslavers could earn either from selling the enslaved or from the forced labor of the enslaved. White men controlled people’s reproductive rights during the 20th century, too, with the American eugenics movement.

From the late 1800s until the 2000s, white proponents of eugenics – the selective breeding of people – tried to determine who was fit or unfit to have children. While the American eugenics movement affected people of other races and ethnic backgrounds, as well as men, it was particularly harmful to Black women who, data from 1950 to 1966 shows, were sterilized at “three times the rate of white women and more than 12 times the rate of white men.”

During both periods, Black women and their health bore the brunt of the consequences of white men’s control.

As a researcher who specializes in the history of race and racism in the U.S., I study historical issues related to race, gender and social justice.

Enslaved women forced to reproduce

African midwives, imported and enslaved as early as the 1600s, attended to the birthing needs of the enslaved and enslavers until the beginning of the 19th century.

But, after 1808, enslavers in the United States could no longer legally import enslaved people. With this shift, enslavers stepped up the forced breeding of enslaved women. White men raped the Black women and girls they enslaved, and then enslaved the children born from those rapes. White men also forced the Black women and Black men they enslaved to have sex with one another to generate more babies, who would be born into slavery.

This was a systemic way of ensuring enslaved women bore more children, which would increase profits for their enslavers.

Because the Black midwives and enslaved women often were blamed for or suspected of using birth control and abortions to resist forced pregnancy and the enslavement of their offspring, enslavers turned increasingly away from midwives and to white male doctors to figure out why nearly half of enslaved infants were stillborn or died within their first year of life and why so many enslaved women were infertile. These doctors also helped with difficult births.

In the two decades after 1810, the population growth rate of the enslaved averaged about 30%, despite the ban on slave importation. This was just under the 1800 to 1809 average of 31.6% which was a century high.

In the 1800s, as the slave population increased, profits in cotton did too. And after the legal importation of slaves ended, the value of Black women of childbearing age increased significantly. The forced breeding of these enslaved women was linked to the profitability of southern economies.

Eugenics and control over women’s bodies

Eugenicists believed that increased breeding by white people, whom they assumed had high IQs, would benefit American society. But people who did not embody their idea of racial perfection, such as Black people, Native Americans, certain immigrants, poor white people and people with disabilities, should be sterilized – typically via tubal ligation and vasectomy.

Elaine Riddick, pictured at her home in Marietta, Ga., on July 15, 2022, was sterilized without her consent when she was 14, in North Carolina.

Tami Chappell for The Washington Post via Getty Images

In this debunked pseudo-science, eugenicists often used intelligence tests to determine who was fit or unfit to reproduce and to predict who would commit crimes, end up in poverty or have children who were mentally ill or intellectually disabled. And they worked to incorporate their ideas into state laws.

Thirty-two states, between 1907 and 1937, enacted forced sterilization mandates to prevent births by people eugenicists considered socially inadequate.

State-mandated procedures resulted in the coerced sterilization of women, particularly African American, Native American and Hispanic American women, and those from Southern and Eastern Europe.

Beginning in 1948 with President Harry Truman’s executive order to integrate the military, which extended to other areas, including education, employment and commerce, sterilization rates for Black women increased. For example, in North Carolina, which had the country’s third-highest sterilization rate, far more women than men were forcibly sterilized. And in the 1960s, Black women in the state made up 65% of the women sterilized, while only making up 25% of the population.

Abortion-rights activists counter-demonstrate as anti-abortion demonstrators gather for a rally in Federal Building Plaza on June 24, 2023, in Chicago to mark the first anniversary of the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Between 1930 and 1970, close to 33% of the women in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, were forcibly sterilized. In California, between 1997 and 2003, 1,400 female inmates, mostly Black, were forcibly sterilized.

The post-Dobbs era

White nationalists and some right-wing politicians in the U.S. see the nation’s demographic changes as dangerous. The Census Bureau projects that in the 2040s, non-Hispanic white people will no longer make up a majority of the U.S. population. The nation’s racial and ethnic makeup will then be what some call “majority-minority.” Those projections scare racists, who believe in a conspiracy about white people being destroyed, which they label the great replacement theory because they fear losing social, political and economic power.

There is no way to know if this theory factored into the majority’s votes in the Dobbs decision, but the argument that not enough white people are being born has been a common historical thread in the American anti-abortion movement.

But, while believers in the great replacement conspiracy want white women to have more babies, actual anti-abortion decisions like the Dobbs ruling harm Black women more than any other group. Black women represent 39% of the country’s abortion patients, but many live in communities that have limited access to family planning clinics. And they have disproportionately higher rates of complications during pregnancy.

As a result, Black women – who experience higher maternal complications and mortality rates – will be forced to give birth to more babies.

This is another period in the country in which the reproductive health decisions made by mostly white men will harm Black women.

Rodney Coates, Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Miami University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

[coochiequeens]

Trigger Warning: Discussion of acts against children and plots to abuse impoverished children.

A serial pedophile estimated to have committed over 1,000 sex crimes against children has had his community sentence relaxed following his transition to “female.” On November 16, a Supreme Court of Western Australia judge said that the medications taken by Robert Gordon Cummins, 56, provide “a protective factor” and that he could “successfully self-manage the risk of offending.”

Cummins has an extensive history of horrific sexual offenses, the overwhelming majority of which were against children. His first conviction took place in September of 1997, when he was found guilty of indecent assault. For this, he was fined $3,000 and did not receive a prison sentence.

In December of 1999, Cummins was convicted on three counts of indecent dealing with a child under the age of 13 years. He was sentenced to 2 years imprisonment.

Once released, Cummins immediately began to sexually abuse a girl he was related to who was between the ages of 6 and 8 at the 

time of his abuses. In June 2002, he was found guilty on four counts related to crimes against that child. Cummins was sentenced to a total effective sentence of 8 years imprisonment.

Earlier that year, at the age of 36, Cummins had married a 17-year old girl. Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Gosia Wojnarowska, a mental health consultant to the Department of Justice, described this relationship as a substitution for “a female child that he never stopped fantasizing about” in a 2008 assessment of Cummins.

In June of 2009, the serial pedophile was convicted of one count of possessing child pornography and sentenced to 12 months imprisonment. Two years later, Cummins was detained awaiting trial for conspiring to engage in sexual intercourse outside Australia with a person under the age of 16 years.

But even being in custody did not stop the disturbed predator from planning out his abuse against children.

Between July 2005 and September 2008, while incarcerated in Perth’s maximum-security Casuarina Prison for filming the abuse of his youngest victim, Cummins, along with two other men, devised a scheme to establish a child sex trafficking ring in Thailand upon their release.

The convicts intended to set up a doll-making business called “Little Angels” as a cover. Former teacher Mark Pendleton, 53, and Kenneth Bishop, 74, conspired with Cummins to employ low-income women from rural areas in order to gain access to their children.

In 2011, Cummins testified in the Perth’s Magistrate Court that he had first befriended Pendleton in a sex offender treatment program in Perth’s maximum-security Casuarina Prison. They began plotting to abuse vulnerable children after they were both relocated to Karnet Prison Farm.

“Mark told me families in Thailand were available for a price. If they were willing to send their children into minefields to look for shrapnel, they would be willing to sell their children for sex,” Cummins told the court.

After he was released on parole in 2008, Cummins became the “pipeline” for carrying out the plan, and began researching properties for sale and information about false passports while contacting Thai mothers whose children were being considered for potential abuse. Cummins also sent financial contributions to the impoverished women to build up their trust.

“The idea behind it was to assist them and become valuable to them,” Cummins told the court. “So they would allow me to do anything I wanted… Including sexual activity with the children.”

In phone recordings played during court proceedings, Cummins could be heard saying that the women he was most interested in employing would come from villages and ideally should be “more simple people.”

The recorded conversations between the men were “laden with jokes and sexual innuendo”, and referenced former pop star and pedophile Gary Glitter, according to news reports. Cummins told Pendleton that women had sent him photographs of their “lovely families,” which he explained to the court prosecutor was a reference to their children.

Cummins admitted he and Pendleton considered supervising an orphanage in order to “effectively convert it into a child brothel.” He stated, “From our point of view, we had discussed setting up an orphanage and having access to the children there for sexual purposes.”

In exchange for pleading guilty, testifying in court, and confessing to the plan, Cummins was handed a reduced sentence of two years and seven months. Despite the fact that authorities had uncovered their plot by tapping their phone lines, Supreme Court Justice John McKechnie ordered Cummins to be freed from jail on a recognizance release order, as he had spent 18 months in custody pending trial. 

He was released the day after the trial ended in September 2012, despite the court having been told that Cummins was estimated to have committed 1,000 sex crimes against children during the course of his serial abuses.

In 2014, Cummins, then 49, was spared yet another jail sentence for a historical sexual offense he admitted to committing against a 12-year-old girl. The sentencing decision was made on the basis that his use of “anti-libidinal drugs” had deprived him of his sex drive. 

Western Australia District Court Judge Michael John Bowden sentenced Cummins to 12 months in jail, suspended for 18 months, on the provision that he comply with a supervision order.

“It really is the fact that the chemical medication seems to have deprived you of any sex drive that leads me to deal with this case in the manner in which I am going to deal with it,” he said.

Judge Bowden added, “The offense is so serious that imprisonment is the only appropriate disposition but it does seem to me that I cannot say that a suspended sentence in the circumstances would be wholly inappropriate.”

In 2018, general practitioner Dr. Wynn Owen recommended that Cummins’ chemical castration treatment be halted out of concern over its side effects. Cummins had been taking cyproterone on an intermittent basis since 2004, and on a regular basis since 2012. However, medical reports revealed that once he stopped taking the antiandrogen, he experienced a “floodgate return of sexual thoughts.” The same report detailed how he feared he “would have progressed to snatching a child.”

In 2019, Cummins was diagnosed with “gender dysphoria” and began to self-identity as a woman. Court records note that he had “formed a platonic relationship with another transgender female” around this time. Additionally, Cummins’ “interest was directed to gay pornography,” which “preceded the transitioning from male to female.”

The most recent ruling was in response to an application for an extension to Cummins’ supervision order, which was filed by legal representatives for the State. Concerns were raised that he remained a “high-risk offender” and should be monitored for safeguarding purposes.

Dr. Wojnarowska told the court that pedophilia is regarded as a lifelong condition, and a 2021 assessment was presented as evidence in court. “In my opinion, if [he] were to be taken off the order, [his] risk of sexual reoffending may escalate,” Wojnarowska stated.

However, she pointed out that hormone treatments carry considerable health risks and are not recommended for long-term use due to their effect on bone density and liver function. She therefore recommended surgery.

This opinion was supported by forensic psychologist Julie Hasson. Ms. Hasson recommended an orchiectomy as a means of “living as a woman and reducing [his] libido to protect against any concerns of future sexual offending in the event that [he] did not pursue gender reassignment surgery,” according to court records.

Justice Michael Corboy ruled that a new four-year supervision order be imposed with conditions including “testosterone suppressing treatment.” He noted that the diagnosis of gender dysphoria was “obviously a very significant event,” with his “transition” being “central to the issues” in his case. The judge added that the court should keep Cummins’ gender dysphoria diagnosis and transition “in mind” while considering his risk of re-offending.

Cummins was referred to with feminine pronouns throughout court records and proceedings. Media coverage similarly utilized ‘she/her’ pronouns for Cummins, as well as did not identify him directly or give an indication of the name he is currently utilizing.

Cummins’ case recalls that of a notorious American serial pedophile who was similarly released into the communityafter the court was told his transition meant he would be “less likely” to offend.

Joseph Matthew Smith, who also goes by the name Josie Maria Dunham or Josie Smith, made international headlines in 2020 after being released from prison after beginning a gender transition. Smith had been convicted of sexually assaulting an 11-year-old resident at Midwest Christian Services (MCS), a treatment facility for juveniles. 

Due to his lengthy history of sex crimes, a pre-sentence psychological report was carried out. Smith told a state forensic psychologist he had molested as many as 15 children under the age of 13, the youngest being a 1-year-old baby. Due to his extremely high risk of re-offending, Smith was handed an indefinite prison sentence.

But after being diagnosed with gender dysphoria and beginning a hormone regimen, Smith was released, with officials claiming he was now at a lower risk of re-offending due to an altered testosterone level, and that he “no longer had the sex drive of a man.”

Smith was paroled in January of 2020 but by October of 2021, he had already violated the terms of his strict conditions by using an unauthorized electronic device and seeking out sex. Despite the violation, Smith was not remanded to custody, and was instead allowed to continue to live in the community.

Since his release, he violated the conditions of his parole twice by attempting to access child sexual abuse materials. Smith is currently incarcerated at the Newton Correctional Facility, which is a men’s institution with a special program for sex offenders in Jasper County.

By Genevieve Gluck Genevieve is the Co-Founder of Reduxx, and the outlet's Chief Investigative Journalist with a focused interest in pornography, sexual predators, and fetish subcultures. She is the creator of the podcast Women's Voices, which features news commentary and interviews regarding women's rights.

#Australia #Supreme Court of Western Australia #Over 1000 sex crimes against children #Trans identified male sex offender #Trans identified male child abuser #Men planning to abuse children in other countries #thailand #Men preying on impoverished mothers to have access to their children

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Women’s History Month: Memoir Recommendations

Both/And by Huma Abedin

The daughter of Indian and Pakistani intellectuals and advocates, Abedin grew up in the United States and Saudi Arabia and traveled widely. She launched full steam into a college internship in the office of the First Lady in 1996, never imagining that her work at the White House would blossom into a career in public service, nor that her career would become an all-consuming way of life. This volume grapples with family, legacy, identity, faith, marriage, motherhood - and work - with wisdom, sophistication, and clarity.

One Life by Megan Rapinoe

Megan Rapinoe, Olympic gold medalist and two-time Women's World Cup champion, reveals for the first time her life both on and off the field. Only four years old when she kicked her first soccer ball, she developed a love - and clear talent - for the game at a young age. But it was her parents who taught her that winning was much less important than how she lived her life. Guided by her personal journey into social justice, she urges all of us to ask ourselves, What will you do with your one life?

My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor

The first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor has become an instant American icon. Now, with a candor and intimacy never undertaken by a sitting Justice, she recounts her life from a Bronx housing project to the federal bench, a journey that offers an inspiring testament to her own extraordinary determination and the power of believing in oneself.

Here is the story of a precarious childhood, with an alcoholic father (who would die when she was nine) and a devoted but overburdened mother, and of the refuge a little girl took from the turmoil at home with her passionately spirited paternal grandmother. But it was when she was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes that the precocious Sonia recognized she must ultimately depend on herself. Along the way we see how she was shaped by her invaluable mentors, a failed marriage, and the modern version of extended family she has created from cherished friends and their children. Through her still-astonished eyes, America’s infinite possibilities are envisioned anew in this warm and honest book, destined to become a classic of self-invention and self-discovery.

My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg

The first book from Ruth Bader Ginsburg since becoming a Supreme Court Justice in 1993—a witty, engaging, serious, and playful collection of writings and speeches from the woman who has had a powerful and enduring influence on law, women’s rights, and popular culture.

My Own Words offers Justice Ginsburg on wide-ranging topics, including gender equality, the workways of the Supreme Court, being Jewish, law and lawyers in opera, and the value of looking beyond US shores when interpreting the US Constitution. Throughout her life Justice Ginsburg has been (and continues to be) a prolific writer and public speaker. This book’s sampling is selected by Justice Ginsburg and her authorized biographers Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams. Justice Ginsburg has written an introduction to the book, and Hartnett and Williams introduce each chapter, giving biographical context and quotes gleaned from hundreds of interviews they have conducted. This is a fascinating glimpse into the life of one of America’s most influential women.

#women's history month #women's history #memoir #Nonfiction Reading #nonfiction books #nonfiction reads #Nonfiction #Library Books #Book Recommendations #book recs #Reading Recs #reading recommendations #TBR pile #tbr #to read #Want To Read #Booklr #book tumblr #book blog #library blog