Digging into the Depths of Patriarchal Dictatorship.
'Women and Children First' Takes on a Whole New Meaning
Step one in restoring the supremacy of white males in our society was the anti-abortion movement, which began as a shadow issue taken up by right wingers opposed to civil rights. Those leading the pursuit of this legal strategy had little-to-no concern about a so-called “right to life,” expectant mothers, or newly born infants.
At no point have any of these people advocated for policies assisting child rearing or maternal care. Besides the United States, the only other countries with no national paid maternity leave are the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea and Tonga.
While state legislatures, civil lawsuits, and even vigilantes consolidate the abortion ban, the next steps in the process are manifesting themselves: eliminating birth control, IVF, sex education, and ending no-fault divorce in the legislative arena, idolization of the Tradwife and school board/library coups in the social arena. Woven into both areas is the assumption that heterosexual relationships are mandatory.
Two years ago, the Supreme Court left it up to the states when it came to abortions, overruling Roe v Wade, which had governed the legality of procedures related to women’s healthcare for nearly half a century.
The national landscape emerging from this ruling is chaotic as individual states have different approaches. Criminalizing the procedure, as has been done in Texas, hasn’t decreased the overall number of abortions, but it has increased infant mortality and deaths from birth defects.
Doctors who perform abortions risk life in prison and fines of up to $100,000. Disproportionately fewer new doctors across all specialties applied to medical residency programs in states with abortion bans and restrictions for the past two years. In states with extreme laws like Idaho, obstetricians are shutting down their practices.
Research from Gallup and the Lumina Foundation, revealed that almost three-quarters of college students say laws governing reproductive health factored into their decision of whether to stay enrolled in their current campus or leave.
Last year saw an 11% increase in the number of abortions nationwide. Maternal mortality rates are in some cases twice as high in restrictive states as they are in supportive abortion states.
A host of “me, too” laws in Texas, enacted by localities, made driving through their jurisdictions en route to having an abortion a crime. Nobody’s figured out a way to enforce these rules, but knowing Texas, we can expect something horrifying.
Texas law was supposed to grant exceptions when a patient’s life is in danger, but one woman went to the state supreme court arguing for this exception (a dangerous pregnancy and infant survival unlikely) lost and was forced to leave the state.
Kate Cox was invited to the State of the Union address this year, and has been making campaign appearances with Vice President Kamala Harris. And she’s happily pregnant again.
Here’s Heather Cox Richardson at Letters from An American:
When the Texas ban went into effect, Governor Greg Abbott said there was no need to make an exception for rape, because Texas was going to “eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas.” Instead, in a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers estimated that in the 16 months after the Texas ban, 26,313 rape-related pregnancies occurred in the state.
Earlier this month, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to oppose in vitro fertilization (IVF), and today, Representative Matt Rosendale (R-MT) announced he would file an amendment to the 2025 defense appropriations bill stripping it of funding for IVF, saying “the practice of IVF is morally wrong.”
Trump advisors behind Project 2025 want to enforce the 1873 Comstock Law to ban medical abortion and contraception nationally. Yesterday the Biden-Harris campaign released a tape in which Jeff Durbin, a Trump ally who is pastor of the Apologia Church in Tempe, Arizona, and the founder and head of End Abortion Now, says that abortion is murder and those who practice it deserve execution: “You forfeit your right to live.”
Today in America, one in three women of reproductive age lives in a state with an abortion ban; many with no exception even for rape or incest.
Women’s reproductive healthcare will play a major role in 2024 elections, and abortion restrictions are just the start. Planned pregnancies are also on the table.
Here’s Kate Zernike, via The New York Times
The public conversation about abortion has grown into one about the complexities of pregnancy and reproduction, as the consequences of bans have played out in the news. The question is no longer just whether you can get an abortion, but also, Can you get one if pregnancy complications put you in septic shock? Can you find an obstetrician when so many are leaving states with bans? If you miscarry, will the hospital send you home to bleed? Can you and your partner do in vitro fertilization?
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An Guardian article says Republicans in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Texas have discussed eliminating or restricting No Fault Divorces. (I would call this the “it’s okay to beat your wife law.”)
Laws existing in all 50 US states allow ending a marriage without having to prove a spouse did something wrong, like commit adultery or domestic violence.
On the face of it, rolling back no-fault marriages (which came into acceptance during the term of already-then-divorced Gov. Ronald Reagan) seems like a big ask. But leaving enforcement of anti-abortion laws to vigilantes also used to seem impossible.
Between 1976 and 1985, states that passed the laws saw their domestic violence rates against men and women fall by about 30%; the number of women murdered by an intimate partner declined by 10%; and female suicide rates declined by 8 to 16%.
Without such laws, “it’s hard to prove anything in court relating to a family because you don’t have any witnesses”, said Kimberly Wehle, professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law. “It’s very difficult to get evidence to show abuse of children. How do you do it? Do you put your kids on the stand?”
Conservative commentators such as Matt Walsh, Steven Crowder and lawmakers such as the Republican senator JD Vance of Ohio have argued that the laws are unfair to men and hurt society because they lead to more divorces.
Once again, a Republican “fact” should be challenged. In the last 40 years the divorce rate has fallen from 22.6 per thousand among married women to 14.4 per thousand.
Project 2025, the shadow-strategy for a second Trump administration, calls for a national abortion ban. Additionally, it threatens access to contraception, IVF, overturning FDA approval of mifepristone, weaponizing a hostile federal government to track sensitive data about women seeking abortion care, and misapplying the 1873 Comstock Act in an attempt to ban the mailing of medication abortion.
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The Bigger Picture. The need for a social hierarchy built around strong father figures is a fundamental part of authoritarianism. The line up is: God-like entities, the national leader, a regional deputy, the father, and then those considered as inferiors; women, children, different races, farm animals, etc.
Authoritarians like very simple, and clear messages and want to impose simple, clear solutions to complex problems. It is more black and white thinking as opposed to treating complex problems with more depth, questioning, and understanding.
Donald Trump’s manifestation of society’s hierarchy focuses on unimpeded pursuit of self-interest—and with it, extreme limits on state power over individuals not useful in that endeavor.
People think that Make America Great Again refers to some decade in our nation’s history. The gilded era, the roaring twenties, and post-WWII (pre-civil rights) are potential examples. But when you dig waaay down into the minutiae of our nation’s founding, a key decision by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison undermined the economic foundation of patriarchal society as inherited from England.
Brenda Hafera, writing in the Summer 2023 edition of National Affairs, makes the case in How America Toppled the Patriarchy:
America inherited Britain's primogeniture and entail laws, which are tenets of a patriarchal aristocratic system. Jane Austen's novels present useful examples of how such laws operate. The Bennett sisters in Pride and Prejudice, for instance, are encouraged to marry well because the family's estate will pass on to their closest male relative (and the current heir happens to be insipid, obsequious, and unworthy). This is not due to any decision their father made: Under British primogeniture and entail laws, an estate could not be divided evenly among the sisters; it had to pass, in its entirety, to a single male heir. By concentrating wealth in select individuals due to the accident of birth, such laws inculcate an aristocratic order that promotes the fixed status and honor of certain families.
In contrast to this system, Jefferson and James Madison imagined a nation in which the majority would own land — a vision driven by republican principles and made possible by America's expansive territory. Equal citizens would have property rights in their talents and abilities, as well as a right to the property earned through their labor. Thus land ownership, as Jefferson and Madison understood it, was not just a natural right, but a means of affirming the sovereignty of the people.
Jefferson and Madison's republican vision led to the disruption of primogeniture and entail laws in America. While serving in the Virginia legislature from 1776 to 1779, Jefferson himself introduced a series of bills to usher in this new era of republicanism, including the repeal of such laws that promoted "feudal and unnatural distinctions." Once these statutes were revoked, individuals were still free to bequeath all their wealth and property to a male heir, but this option would no longer be fortified with the moral force of law.
So, what is Make America Great Again? It ultimately boils down to make America a feudal monarchy.
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Wednesday News to Peruse
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Charlie Kirk once unified conservative youth for Trump. Why are Republicans now turning on him? Via The Guardian
Kirk has come a long way since he founded Turning Point USA in 2012 as a conservative student organization. He was 18, and by his own account had “no money, no connections and no idea what I was doing”.
In little over a decade, he has transformed the group from a campus-based network of “anti-woke” teenagers into a far-right powerhouse and fundraising behemoth – able to entice Trump to headline two Turning Point events this month alone, including the Detroit “people’s convention”.
Offstage, Kirk has had a seismic impact on the Republican party at both the state and national level. Now, in the thick of a historically critical presidential election, Kirk is aspiring to go one bigger.
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A UFC takeover: Donald Trump's dreams of a migrant fighting league are no joke via Chauncey Devega at Salon
Trump’s enablers and propagandists responded to criticism of his statements about a migrant fighting league with their standard claim that he was just kidding. When asked, Dana White told reporters, "It was a joke. I saw everybody going crazy online. But yeah, he did say it.”
Of course, based on Trump’s long history of racism and bigoted behavior, this is not true. Moreover, the use of humor and diminutives are a way of legitimizing and normalizing eliminationism and other massive violence against groups deemed to be the Other.
Right-wing White Christians are among Trump’s most loyal and enthusiastic supporters because they view him as a weapon to create an American theocracy where they would have special and superior rights over other people. Trump has repeatedly claimed that he is a messiah and martyr who was chosen by “God” to lead the MAGA movement and to “make America great again” in a holy war against “evil” President Biden, the Democrats, and other elements of “the Left.” By definition, such claims are blasphemous and heretical. In keeping with that propaganda strategy, Trump told the attendees at the Faith and Freedom Coalition's "Road to Majority" conference that he could take off his shirt and show them all of the injuries that he has suffered from his imagined enemies.
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The NLRB Is Testing Out a New Tool to Stop Union Busting by Alex N Press at Jacobin
(h/t Cory Doctorow)
In its decision, the board issued Station Casinos its first-ever Cemex bargaining order, making the Las Vegas dispute the test case for a tool the board hopes will discourage employers from breaking the law; currently, there are few deterrents to such criminality on the boss’s part. The Cemex order’s name comes from a 2023 case against a building materials company, and it applies in cases where an employer’s lawbreaking during a union organizing campaign is severe enough to necessitate rerunning an NLRB election.
The process is as follows: if workers request their employer voluntarily recognize their union and the boss instead petitions the board for an election, only to then violate labor laws during the campaign, rather than rerunning the election — a protracted process that can stall a union’s momentum — a Cemex order requires the employer to recognize the union regardless of the election outcome, compelling them to begin contract negotiations.
In addition to the Cemex order, the NLRB ordered Station Casinos to remove workers’ photos from an anti-union website created by the company, as well as to reinstate with back pay a pro-union worker who had been fired, finding that the reasons given for her termination “were a pretext devised or directed by senior executives to ensure that there would be fewer union leaders in the voting unit in the event that a new election was ordered.”
Great piece, Doug.