September 15, 2022

American kids and American guns

September 15, 2022/ Em-i-lis

What if a gunman shot up your child’s school and what you had left were text messages? Or a shoe? Or just the memory of saying goodbye that morning? Or any of a number of things parents hold onto when they’ve lost their hearts.

I have been horrified by gun violence in America for years, and my kids have both had to participate in countless drills at school over those same years. Last spring, I happened to pick Oliver up from school just before a gunman opened fire on another school nearby. On our drive home, he received a message from a friend asking if he knew what was happening at Sidwell and in the neighborhood. The school locked down (many kids still there), police cordoned off all surrounding streets, helicopters flew in, and ultimately we found that Burke was being attacked. I remember Oliver and I sitting in our backyard, listening for hours to the rotors of the circling copters (we live close to school), and me thinking “shit this was close; keep it together for Ol.”

Yesterday morning, I received the first of the above texts from Jack. Halfway through our hour of exchange, I heard helicopters fly in. Shit.

J is at any age where I rarely share anything remotely private about him, but I feel the need to publish our exchange because it is both so simple and also everything. Only later yesterday afternoon, as we rearranged his room and put out his new plants, did we acknowledge to each other how scared we’d been.

I, he, all of us are so fucking sick of this.

One parent compiled some of what they heard their kids and their friends saying once home. Their words are lacerating, and I agree with them completely.

“Even though no one was hurt, it’s not true that nothing happened. Everyone was terrified. People were crying. It was so scary. I don’t want to go back tomorrow.

Don’t pretend like nothing happened. Why is everyone so numb to this? We are so ***king scared. This wasn’t a tornado warning. It’s not fine."

"If this is so terrible, treat it like something that’s terrible."

"If you go to school in America, this is going to happen. We have been training for this since kindergarten. That doesn’t mean that today felt like nothing. I thought there was a possibility of dying."

"Do you know how long an hour is when you think you are going to die?"

Why do put our children, parents, teachers through this? Why do we accept this as ok? Guns are worth this? “Freedom” -such a bastardized word now- is worth this?

Ultimately, thankfully, there was no gun. But there could have been. And look what the threat of one did. And for good reason. The odds aren’t really in the kids’ favor.

Another day of school lost. Another hope of normalcy lost. Kids hiding in kilns (yesterday). Kids showing substitute teachers how to lower the blinds and properly lock the doors (yesterday). Kids shushing each other (yesterday; all the time). Teachers finding long poles to wield should an intruder break in (yesterday; all the time). Parents showing up at school, terrified (yesterday; all the time). Parents and kids texting, with fear slipping into the efforts to mask it with love and strength (yesterday; all the time).

Today, a long-term sub Jack has didn’t show up. He’d called a kid a hideous slur, so good riddance, but shit. Jack said, so casually it was like a sharp knife to soft butter, “yesterday I could have died, and today I have no teacher.”

What are we doing? WHAT ARE WE DOING?

May 03, 2022

Rage-mute so writing: SCOTUS and abortion

May 03, 2022/ Em-i-lis

After many years of sitting daily in a beautiful chair that is really meant to be a rarely-used accent, I finally purchased a proper desk chair for my office. Though proper, it’s very chic. All green boucle and bowtie lines and midcentury lovely. Because I’m middle-aged, I also put a stylish lumbar pillow on it. I’m very pleased. (I am not pleased that I just had to zoom my screen to 110%, but whatever.)

I share this because I’ve been sitting in said chair for hours now, propped against said pillow, sputtering with fury that is so frothy and incandescent that when I placed fingertips to keyboard, I went blank for a moment and had to ground myself by taking a deep breath and focusing on something simple, physical, and present.

Alito’s draft opinion arguing for Roe v Wade to be overturned is a gut punch that we all knew was coming. Its arrival (via leak!) makes a hideous theoretical an even more hideous reality. Every friend I’ve spoken to today is a roiling cauldron of revulsion, rage, and “I told you so, Susan Fucking Collins.”

As you may have seen, old Susan today has expressed concern that “If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision…it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office.” Lisa M also expressed shock at being misled: “My confidence in the court has been rocked.”

I’m no politician or seer, but I and everyone I know knew that Gorsuch, Calendars, and Handmaid wouldn’t give two holy crucifixes about stare decisis when it came to Roe. Nor will they when it comes to overturning gay marriage (made law in Obergefell) and all other standing rights that don’t map with their extremist white, Catholic/Christian, heteronormative worldview. In short, they lied, under oath, during their confirmations. (Also, did Susan or Lisa or anyone in their party say anything when Droopy Dog McConnell stole the SCOTUS seat from Garland during Obama’s tenure? They did not.)

Alito’s opinion says that states can criminalize abortion with NO exemption for rape or incest. And because so many lawmakers and politicians appear wholly or willfully ignorant about basic science, some want there to not even be exemptions for the health or life of the mother. Observe what this terrifying fool from Oklahoma: said just last week:

"A child who is, in fact, living out part of his or her early life as an ectopic pregnancy is still a unique human being with its own DNA. I don't understand why we allow those children to be murdered."
—Okla Sen. Warren Hamilton (R-Ignorance)

Ectopic pregnancies are NEVER viable and without intervention, they will rupture and KILL the woman.

What this all means is forced pregnancy and forced birth. Can you imagine if your father raped your sister and she HAD to carry and give birth to that baby?

Just one day after Warren Hamilton opined about murdering ectopic fetuses, Ohio state rep, Jean Schmidt (R-Gilead), in response to a Democratic colleague’s hypothetical about a 13-year-old rape victim, said:

“It is a shame that it happens, but there’s an opportunity for that woman, no matter how young or old she is, to make a determination about what she’s going to do to help that life be a productive human being.”

That is sick and perverse beyond compare.

If Roe is overturned, the 13 states with trigger laws banning abortion will immediately put those into effect. Literally overnight, what was a legal right becomes an illegal crime. Five other states will revert to the bans they had in place pre-Roe. Those 18 states do not include Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, or Ohio, all of which will almost certainly institute similarly draconian laws stripping women of reproductive rights. The Guttmacher Institute believes that Montana, Nebraska, and Indiana will join the right-wing flank, and at that point, a full HALF of the United States will, essentially, be Gilead.

The governors of California and New York have already asserted that they will remain safe havens for abortion providers and those who need their services. But what happens if the Republicans manage to pass a national abortion ban? Without a constitutional guarantee that states can write and enforce their own laws—like the one we thought we had via Roe and the right to privacy—nowhere will be safe.

What the Republicans are resigning women to, in particular poor women and women of color, is evil and cruel. It is unconscionable. It’s not like America does a great job of feeding, educating, or caring for most kids anyway. We have the highest maternal mortality rate of any developed country, we do not offer much or any paid maternity and paternity leave. We don’t have universally affordable quality childcare. We use prisons as mental health holding pens for entirely too many suffering people. The healthcare system is, by and large, a mess. Does any of that sound pro-life to you? It’s not. It is disgraceful.

The Republicans and a really gross number of Christians have spent decades putting an overturn of Roe into place. Why do you think they’ve been gutting voting rights so deeply?

I really don’t feel much hope for American democracy. I hope I’m wrong, but I just don’t see much evidence to the contrary. Off to the Supreme Court to protest. Use your voices, y’all.

September 02, 2021

Texas as Gilead; more states will follow

September 02, 2021/ Em-i-lis

I know you all know the depth of my fury and disgust right now. I am absolutely apoplectic, incandescent, shivering, and nauseous with rage. Not only are women in Texas being mistreated in hideously misogynistic, paternalistic ways, not only do most women have NO idea they’re pregnant at six weeks, Texas makes no exception for women seeking abortion after rape or incest.

The state is also offering $10,000 bounties to those who identify and turn in those who they think may have attempted to seek abortion. Not that it is anyone’s damn business, but some are seeking abortion because they have been raped by their father or brother or cousin or grandfather. Some are seeking abortion because they were raped by a stranger, a lover, or an abuser. In all cases, the woman no longer has any choice in what to do with the result of the incestuous, violent act: she must carry the baby to term unless she can figure out that she’s pregnant in the blink of an eye. What if she has a miscarriage? How does she prove she didn’t try to abort? Why should she have to? This is grotesque misogyny, y’all. Evil cruelty that is so far beyond the pale that I struggle to articulate it.

Don’t even get me started in this hideous ways this will impact poor women and women of color.

If she wants the child, if she doesn’t want the child, if the child is dying inside of her or will die soon after birth or will live a life beset by horrific medical challenges, she must carry the baby to term. If her inseminator doesn’t want the baby, won’t help care for the baby, may abuse the baby, doesn’t know about the baby, he’s off scott free, but she has to carry the baby to term. If she is poor or sick or lacks steady housing, if she knows Texas won’t help feed, educate, or care for her child AFTER it’s born, she must carry the baby to term. And if she tries to do anything, someone else gets $10,000. Who’s paying those? Taxpayers? The Kochs?

After Texas passed the law, SCOTUS declined to comment on it until the time to do so expired. Then, in a 5-4 decision, the smug fucks below shat upon their own Court’s 1973 ruling granting women a constitutional right to abortion. Though they, this same majority, had in April (yes, mere months ago) used an “indisputably clear” argument to block “California’s Covid-based restrictions on in-home gatherings based upon a ‘new’ interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause,” they turned around and under cover of darkness blatantly ignored the ‘indisputably clear’ fact of Roe. As UTexas law professor Steve Vladeck wrote, “When you put these rulings by the same 5-4 majority side-by-side, you see much of what’s wrong with the Texas decision: A Court untroubled by procedure went out of its way to expand religious liberty, but hid behind procedural questions to refuse to enforce a right already on the books.”

clockwise from top left: Beer, Handmaid, Smug Fuck, Gilead Leader, Wordless Idiot

The people who said we shouldn’t worry when McConnell stole a SCOTUS seat from Obama; when trump was elected; when Beer Kavanaugh was pushed through to a lifetime appointment after a sham hearing at which a woman was ignored, disrespected, and retraumatized for bravely sharing the story of her sexual assault by the man in question; when RBG died and Barbie Handmaid was shoved into her spot despite having a stunning lack of judicial experience…those people were so wrong and right now, they need to sit down and stay quiet unless they want to fight the fights that desperately need to be won by progressive, inclusive folks dedicated to equality and justice.

Our world is burning and dying, fools are ingesting horse dewormers, cancer patients and others who need medical attention are being shunted aside because of the immediate needs of desperately ill Covid patients, the vast majority of which have refused vaccination, and now women in Texas must live Under His Eye. Don’t kid yourself into thinking other red Christo-nationalist wannabe states aren’t working up their own such draconian laws now. SCOTUS had already agreed to hear Mississippi’s 15-week abortion plan later this fall, and you know Alabama and Florida are hot on their heels. I’d bet my ass Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Georgia won’t lag far behind those.

Oh wait, Florida has just announced its intentions:

Please read this article by Dahlia Lithwick, and do not even consider suggesting I calm down, not least if you are male and not completely on Team Women’s Rights. As Lithwick writes, “You only do the thing in the dead of night, without care or effort, because you believe women are so used to being gaslit that you expect them to just tolerate it. You only do the thing in the dead of night without care or effort because you genuinely believe that they’re only women, and they deserve what they get.”

I refuse to calm down or sit down in the face of such repulsive mistreatment. And Democrats, you need to do something you strategically-challenged….I can’t think of any sort of decent word to put there. Fill in the blank yourselves. Like Elizabeth McLoughlin, this is how I feel right now: