In THIS Moment…

An unqualified, self-hating, racist was just confirmed to the court.

But what business have nine people deciding the rights of humanity for anyone, much less 350,000,000 Americans?

I used to think SCOTUS was really the branch of government that counted. It is, as The West Wing taught me, the place where, when injustice prevailed, even the losing side had power. Where “the extraordinary dissent.… The one-man minority opinion whose time hasn’t come, but 20 years later some circuit-court clerk digs it up at 3 in the morning” would become the precedent establishing rights in some blooming future from seeds planted long ago.

Whatever sentimental feelings I have held onto about SCOTUS died long ago, but I waited to bury her. I know they will call my leftism into question, but RBG meant something to me. Going to school with a toddler, working at weird times, working too hard for too little to contribute to the world that would feel too small. But she made her contribution and then some, both shining and horrific. I won’t make excuses. I believe… I know that all is political. Genetics, paleontology, economics, art, computer science, and sociology. So, there are no apolitical decisions and her majority opinions reflect that as much as her dissents.

I don’t know how to explain my feelings in this moment. I just opened my computer and started writing. Seduced in the background. The Starz documentary about NXIVM. A cult that combined MLM techniques with those of mediocre, insecure white men, despot leaders, and military war lords in order to torture and seduce women…

And get those women to seduce, torture, and control one another.

The connection is not lost on me.

Within moments of the swearing in, in the middle of the goddamned night, this court denied the right that is the most sacred of all for many Americans, the right to vote. Many votes from Wisconsinites will not have their votes counted or will have their ballots rendered invalid as a partisan Postmaster General has intentionally mismanaged one of the least partisan of institutions that their mail-in ballots will arrive after November 3, regardless of the postmark.

There are no apolitical disciplines. There are no apolitical institutions.

There are no apolitical people. Only those comfortable with the status quo or disenfranchised to the point of apathy.

I wanna cry. I wanna light a fire. I despair.

I have committed myself to justice and kept that commitment for many years. I have driven teenagers to their judicial bypass hearings because young people are objects, property, of their parents, regardless of neglect or dysfunction, and therefor have no bodily autonomy. Pregnancy is 14 times more likely to kill the person carrying a fetus than a legal, safe abortion.

I have taken myself to a clinic where mutilated miscarried fetuses were on display, a lie all on their own, as if pro-birth torture porn was going to help my situation or in any way change my mind.

Roe is not safe. Obergefell is not safe. The right to vote is not safe. Forget the ERA. Forget the right to safe existence for our trans siblings. Black lives will not matter to this court… if they ever mattered at all to this shithole country’s institutions or its people. But this court…

Nine people.

350,000,000 people.

What are we going to do about it? What will we sacrifice to get free?

Ol’ TJ was a slaver and no liberationist, but he got one thing right…

‘whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it,’

So what are we going to do about it?

#abolishSCOTUS

#abolishCongress

#abolishthewholegoddamnedthing