Welcome To Gilead. Roe Is Gone, What Now?
Monday's news about the leaked draft from SCOTUS tells a story: They're not going to stop with letting states ban abortion. They're coming for gay marriage, interracial marriage and birth control.
Welcome to Gilead, where women are forced to give birth to their rapists' children with the government's blessing.
This is the world we are about to live in, if the draft SCOTUS opinion leaked to Politico overturning Roe tonight is real, and all indications are that it is. Rape, forced birth, poverty, banned interracial marriage, banned gay marriage, more poverty, and Big Brother crawling up women's uteruses to make sure they're obeying The Man. For that matter, they'll just live in all of our bedrooms to make sure we're submitting and not committing perversions like loving someone they deem unfit.
Here is Alito's logic: Because the word "abortion" is not a word in the U.S. Constitution, and because the right to privacy is also not explicitly laid out in the Constitution, Roe is predicated on a false premise and should therefore be overturned. And if that logic stands, the Obergefell, Griswold and Loving decisions will fall too. As he sees it, women do not have the right to self-determination or any agency whatsoever. They are, much like the fictional Gilead of Margaret Atwood's imagination, mere chattel to be dealt with as men please.
This is the world Republicans have dreamed of. It's what evangelicals have hoped would happen for decades.
In Alito's world, men have every right to rape women and then demand visitation to their rape-spawn.
In Alito's world, women have nothing to offer society beyond the confines of their uterus.
You think Gilead was the product of Margaret Atwood's imagination with no basis in reality? Well here we are, and as she wrote in the chapter at the end about "historical notes": "Men highly placed in the regime were thus able to pick and choose among women who had demonstrated their reproductive fitness by having produced one or more healthy children, a desirable characteristic in an age of plummeting Caucasian birthrates, a phenomenon observable not only in Gilead but in most northern Caucasian societies of the time."
Alito may have couched his screed condemning women to second class status in terms of legalistic constitutional argle-bargle, but that is the message. White birthrates are dropping, and it's time to force them back up, by rape or by forced birth, or by both. It's racist, sexist, authoritarian bullshit and it is long past time to get in the streets.
WE TOLD YOU THIS WOULD HAPPEN AND IT DID BECAUSE NOT ENOUGH WHITE WOMEN COULD VOTE FOR A QUALIFIED WOMAN IN 2016. This is the fruit -- the poisoned, ugly, disfigured fruit -- of that decision.
I will see you in the streets. And this time, it had better not just be women in pink hats, because they're coming for all of it. Your right to marry, your right to love whom you love, your right to make your own choices in your own time -- male AND female.
The circumstances have been reduced; for those of us who still have circumstances. - Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Make our voices heard. Every last one of us. This is not justice; it's subjugation. And it will not stand.
Finally, it is past time to burn the Republican Party to the ground, forever and ever, amen.
Here are the thoughts of some others:
Note to Dan: It had damn well spur fury.
This is a good start:
As is this:
And finally, this: