We are coming for your daughters
The Texas ban has energized rapists.
Literally and figuratively has the sanctity of a woman’s body become fair game for abusers. My “skin in the game,” which I gratefully claim, are three granddaughters, ages 3, 9 and 11.
And numerous others. Because after September 2nd’s abdication by the Supreme Court of “equal protection,” America has become a different place, a nation of abusers.
Through the smoke of “technicalese” and “shadow dockets,” the Supreme Court has pulled off the inconceivable. By a 5–4 “non-decision” the Supreme Court has let stand a Texas law, which forbids abortions after 6 weeks pregnancy, a violation of the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe vs. Wade. In so stripping public access to medical care, the Texas law has created an army of private abusers.
The public outcry is palpable from TikTok mavens crashing anti-abortion sites to US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowing to “codify Roe-Wade.” The havoc TikTokers have incited may be more successful at deterring a nation-wide abortion advocate purge than Pelosi’s gambit which has been attempted five times before with no result.
To give a perspective on where Pelosi’s political moxie lies, consider that if the Democrats had the votes in the Senate to recall Justice Kavanaugh, we wouldn’t be here. But we are and without the Senate votes, Pelosi and Schumer are flailing. The White House statement, rhetorically positioned as. “Statement by Vice President Kamala Harris on Supreme Court Ruling on Texas Law SB8,” provides little of a political agenda to right this outrageous wrong.
Seventy per cent of Americans — including me— favor upholding “Roe-Wade,” so the question is, how did we get here?
Or could the question be, “Why did we abdicate?”
If there was something to abdicate, namely, our democracy, why are we doing it? Conspirators are prepared to intimidate election officials and women seeking safety from abuse. Our judicial elite on the Supreme Court have joined the conspirators and provided legal cover.
Democracy, which fragility is being interpreted by paper clutching scholars and media apologists, is not the only institutional force whose viability is at stake here. The “American Empire” is at stake.
So we hear the conspirators shout, “Make America Great Again.”
From the left come the alarms that Democracy is at risk; that the “American Dream” has become the “American Imperative.” And those answering these alarms so, wade into the waters of conspiracy.
Could the question be, “Why did we abdicate?”
We say publicly one thing, we profess to “know better,” while suspicious of changing the status quo. We are reluctant to admit to whom we really are: preservationists of a failed resistance to social change and progress. Arguing that the Supreme Court is “turning back the clock,” we offer little solace. (“Drowning Our Future in the Past,” Maureen Dowd, Sept. 6, NYTimes)
We have hatched a generation of abusers.
So conflated, how could we choose between sustaining democracy and our imperative obsession? Because this is the conflict before the nation. We are in the thralls — a mental civil war of sorts — between those voices who support the “American Empire,” and those who don’t.
And one voice is “coming for our daughters.”
September 6
Update: September 7, Austin, Texas
At Tuesday’s bill signing, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, when asked, claimed that Texas will (continue to) be going after rapists. Of course. Who said the Texas abortion ban prevented Texas law enforcement from arresting rapists? What Abbott didn’t reveal is that Texans will be going after abortion providers who until now were operating legally in support of women’s rights to reproductive care.
