Turkey Pride crackdowns only strengthen LGBTQ+ resistance – Los Angeles Blade
By James Finn | DETROIT – Somewhere in the U.S. this morning, a young girl is pregnant because she was sexually violated by somebody she trusts — a parent, an uncle, a teacher, maybe a Southern Baptist pastor. She’s terrified, believing it’s her own fault. Her mother is doing everything in her power to help, but her position is agonizing.
Because they live in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee or Texas, her 12-year-old daughter cannot legally end her pregnancy — not even as a victim of rape or incest. If they’re poor, traveling out of state for an abortion will be difficult or impossible, especially when abortion is illegal in surrounding states.
In at least two states, that mother could face crippling financial/legal consequences if she takes a bus with her daughter out of state for an abortion, and if one of her neighbors turns them in to authorities.
Welcome to the Republic of Gilead
This is real. This is happening right now, as you read this. For 50 years, women in the U.S. have enjoyed the Constitutional right to end their pregnancies before “viability,” the point when a fetus can survive outside the uterus. This morning, I wake up in a country where a small cabal of religious extremists on the Supreme Court, in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, have overturned Roe v Wade, snatching personal liberty from women and girls.
I wake knowing those justices are gunning for other fundamental privacy rights like contraception, same-sex marriage, and even the right to have consensual sex with other adults.
How did we get to this dark corner of official religious fanaticism?
Katherine Stewart in The Guardian spells out a decades-long process, detailing “how the Christian right took over the judiciary and changed America,” despite representing only a fringe minority of Americans and a fringe minority of legal thinkers.
* If we fail to take the justices at their word about the rest of their extremist agenda, we do so at our peril as a free people. *
A super majority of Americans disagree with the high court, insisting traditional American liberty MUST include women, insisting the justices got it RIGHT 50 years ago when they recognized the Constitution implicitly guarantees to women the right to make their own reproductive choices based on their own values and religious beliefs — or lack of religious beliefs.
A super majority of Americans believe religious Jews, for example, have every bit as much right to act on their consciences, based on their faith traditions, as conservative Christians have. Traditional Jewish ethics require abortion in circumstances where the mother’s well being would be severely impacted by pregnancy — like with that 12-year-old girl above.
The extremist Christian conservatives on the Supreme Court don’t care.
They just said, in effect, we only care about what conservative Christians like us want. Welcome to the Republic of Gilead, where our religious beliefs dictate your lack of liberty.
Religious extremists on the Court take aim at LGBTQ equality
Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t shy in his concurring opinion, writing, “We should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.”
He means such “trivial” rights as using contraception to prevent pregnancy, having sex in private with a same-sex partner, or marrying a same-sex partner. He says the Constitution does not and should not prohibit the State from intruding into those extraordinarily private portions of American lives. Justice Samuel Alito is on the record agreeing with Thomas, although he wrote in yesterday’s majority opinion that Dobbs should not be read to mean an automatic end to other substantive due process rights.
Legal scholars aren’t impressed with that disclaimer, especially given Alito’s prior statements expressing hostility to such rights. They note Justice Amy Coney Barrett is equally hostile to privacy rights. They ask how Dobbs’ reasoning could fail, ultimately, in eviscerating general privacy rights for all Americans.
Writing in the LA Blade, leading LGBTQ activists express alarm over Dobbs’ reasoning, warning that unless we act decisively, we will lose many of our cherished liberty guarantees.
Human Rights Campaign Legal Director Sarah Warbelow writes, “we know that if the Court was willing to overturn 50 years of precedent with this case, that all of our constitutional rights are on the line. Lawmakers will be further emboldened to come after our progress.”
National Minority AIDS Council Executive Director Paul Kawata adds, “Justice Thomas’s chilling concurring opinion makes it very clear that the court could target other rights.”
They’re right. We already know the conservative justices want to end civil equality for LGBTQ Americans. They’ve told us so in blistering language many times. Yesterday, as the justices snatched critical liberty from women and girls, they showed us not even 50 years of entrenched legal precedent will stop them. If we fail to take the justices at their word about the rest of their extremist agenda, we do so at our peril as a free people.
We must protect women and girls
In the short to medium term, working together to help women like that hypothetical 12-year-old rape victim must be a critical priority. The governors of California, Washington, and Oregon have already announced a joint effort to offer safe haven to women and girls, saying they plan to order state law enforcement agencies not to cooperate with out-of-state agencies investigating women or abortion providers.
According to The Atlantic, outraged women are already organizing around activism and safe-haven networking, determined to make abortion available for women and girls who need it.
The federal government has announced steps to make medical abortion (by pill) more accessible, although that’s no panacea. It’s usually illegal for a physician to prescribe medication via telemedicine to a patient in a state where such medication may not be lawfully dispensed.
Our Number One priority must be Supreme Court reform
President Biden called yesterday for a massive turnout at the polls in November to elect a Congress that will pass abortion protection legislation. He’s absolutely right that we need that massive turnout, but he doesn’t go far enough.
No amount of federal legislation will stop Supreme Court religious extremists from defending state abortion bans. Congress, arguably, lacks the authority to tell states how to regulate abortion, and if you think the conservative justices will just let that slide, you aren’t paying attention.
As Stewart explains in The Guardian, the conservative justices hold fringe legal views, so don’t expect them to play by conventional rules. Senators Susan Collins and Joe Manchin learned that the hard way yesterday after Justice Brett Kavanaugh broke what they describe as his personal, private pledge not to overturn Roe.
Only Supreme Court reform will save LGBTQ equality
The extremist religious justices are on a rampage right now, tearing down traditional walls of separation between Church and State, privileging religious instructions that discriminate against LGBTQ people, even ruling last week that Maine has an affirmative legal obligation to fund religious instruction with taxpayer dollars. Legal experts threw their arms up in astonished horror.
None of this is going to go away on its own. The justices aren’t going to magically see the light and stop eviscerating liberty in favor of fringe religious views.
Yes, we need massive voter turnout in November to elect a Congress willing to save American freedom. No, passing a federal abortion law isn’t the answer, or at least not the whole answer.
We must enact fundamental judicial reform
We must expand the number of justices on the Supreme Court and give President Bident the opportunity to appoint mainstream legal thinkers who will put the religious extremists dominating the court today in a minority.
That’s perhaps a radical idea, but it’s no more radical today than when FDR did the same thing in 1937 when faced with a judiciary implacably opposed to his efforts to rescue the U.S. from the Great Depression — implacably opposed to the will of the American people and mainstream legal thinking.
The only thing more radical than taming the court would be not taming it, allowing the Republic of Gilead to emerge from the pages of dystopian fiction into cruel reality.
Doubt me? Go talk to that 12-year-old rape victim and her mother who can’t find a way to save her daughter.
In the meantime, act, organize, get out the vote. Our most cherished American liberties depends on massive turnout in November.
Get out there and make it happen!
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James Finn is a columnist for the LA Blade, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, an alumnus of Queer Nation and Act Up NY, and an “agented” but unpublished novelist. Send questions, comments, and story ideas to [email protected]
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The preceding article was previously published by Prism & Pen– Amplifying LGBTQ voices through the art of storytelling and is republished by permission.