Why the US worried more about trans people's marriages than their driver's licenses

From the article by Paisley Currah in the New York Review of Books! "What Sex Does" (May 27, 2022):

"...one might think that trans advocates and the city spent five decades arguing over the most accurate definition of sex. During my time on the advisory committee in 2005, that’s what I thought was going on."

Trans people, anyway, were arguing in good faith:

"Trans advocates made their claims in the register of expertise and truth, working from the assumption that sex reclassification policies should be based on the correct definition of sex (whether that definition indexes common sense or contemporary medical knowledge)."

But the state was more pragmatic:

"...the city bureaucrats were the real Foucauldians: they understood that sex was not a thing in itself but something instrumentalized differently by different agencies."

As it turns out:

"For transgender people in the United States, the sheer number of state institutions with discrete authority to define sex ensnares us in Kafkaesque contradictions."

Currah notes that the document for everyday identification in the United States, the driver's license, has been relatively easy to change in many states, since the government wants a person's document to describe how that person appears. "Their function is to watch over individuals and track their movements across the state’s territory. An F on the driver’s license of a balding, bearded man like myself hinders the public and private protectors of the security state." However: "Marriage is different. Decisions about marriage concern the state’s interest not in identification (fixing who one is) but of distribution (deciding what one gets)." Before marriage became gender-neutral, trans people's marriages were concerning to the government "less because they feared that a handful of people would enjoy certain rights," but more so because "such marriages challenged the entire rationale for who could get married to whom."

In other words: If trans people can update their documents to match the way they dress, act, and live their lives, you can surveil them more easily. But if trans people can update their birth certificate, they can marry whoever they like, and this behavior supports the idea that anyone can marry whoever they like, which weakens patriarchy.

This article is adapted from his book, Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity, which will be out in two days.

July 2023 addendum

M? F? X? Typewriter by Gerhard Bögner from Pixabay

They also want to get rid of no-fault divorce

It is not an accident that this is happening alongside efforts to kill no fault divorce.

[image or embed]

— Alyssa Harad (@alyssaharad.bsky.social) Jun 29, 2024 at 1:15 AM

Incredible the the argument here is "Even monstrous Stalin believed in pro-family policies, that proves how good they are!" and not "Hm, who advocated the same policies that I do? Stalin? *Josef* Stalin? Uh, maybe we should have another look at these."

[image or embed]

— braak (@braak.bsky.social) Jul 30, 2024 at 7:40 AM

Calculating the financial value of a habitable planet

The Biden administration calculates the monetary cost of greenhouse gas emissions when it considers regulations. Some Republican-led states tried to block this, but the Supreme Court ruled on May 26 that the Biden administration could continue to do so.

Because I'm a subscriber, here's a gift link to read the article for free:

"Supreme Court Allows Greenhouse Gas Cost Estimates." Adam Liptak. New York Times. May 26, 2022.

This is different: "If the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority rules for the dirty coal companies in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, it could gut the Clean Air Act and weaken the EPA's ability to stop power plants and other corporate polluters from emitting deadly, climate-wrecking pollution into our air."

Watch NRDC's 3-minute video — NRDC email, May 31, 2022

Related, and also with my free NYT pass:

"How Much Will the Wildfires Cost?" Jill Cowan. New York Times. September 16, 2020.

"As Wildfires Burn Out of Control, the West Coast Faces the Unimaginable." Thomas Fuller and Jack Healy. New York Times. September 13, 2020.

Read: "California plans big insurance shifts as climate change hits home" [subscriber gift link]: The actions of the nation’s biggest insurance market could have implications for U.S. consumers, as more carriers leave disaster-prone states. Brianna Sacks. Washington Post. September 21, 2023.

And as a throwback

"The value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital." Costanza et al. Nature. May 15, 1997.

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Regarding this study: "Researchers estimate that, thanks to the carbon we have already emitted, global income will be reduced by 19 percent. This is primarily due to falling agricultural yields, labor productivity, and harm to existing infrastructure." Katharine Hayhoe, LinkedIn, July 9, 2024

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To read more: "Yes, Climate Change is Expensive". It's a 9-minute read on Medium. Medium lets you read a certain number of stories for free every month. You may also consider a paid membership on the platform.

Calculator by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

In Florida alone (Tampa Bay, Sarasota and Fort Myers):

$1 trillion worth of commercial properties are directly in Hurricane Milton’s path, Matt Egan, CNN, October 8, 2024

Anti-transgender lie spreads after school shooting

After the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Odette Yousef wrote for NPR:

Users also quickly mislabeled the shooter as transgender – even going so far as to misidentify him with photos of another transgender individual who was completely unconnected to the events.

"[That] false claim... it really had legs, like [it] really spread around in the far right," said Alex Kaplan, a senior researcher at Media Matters. "You had Alex Jones sharing it, you had Andrew Torba [sharing it]. It reached Congressman Paul Gosar."

Gosar, who faced backlash for spreading the false information, later deleted his tweet.

There is no evidence that the shooter was transgender, but even the unfounded claim itself prompted alarm that the claim would ignite further violence against LGBTQ individuals.

"This comes as there has been this... anti LGBTQ campaign to basically claim that... gay people or teachers are 'grooming' children, or that transgender people are targeting children," Kaplan noted.

The individual who was incorrectly identified posted on their Reddit profile page: "It's not me, I don't even live in Texas."

It's important to think about why this particular bit of disinformation would be generated and spread, as well as why anyone reading it would be inclined to believe it. If you aren't aware of how transphobia works, I invite you to take a look at my writings about anti-LGBTQ disinformation.

Source

"The Uvalde shooting conspiracies show how far-right misinformation is evolving." Odette Yousef. NPR. May 26, 2022.

Is it 'too soon' to discuss gun control laws in the US?

Bullets by MasterTux from Pixabay

When the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School was plastered all over the news — two high school students murdered 12 other students and a teacher — the rest of the world assumed "that gun-loving America would draw a line when it came to mass murders in schools," Nick Bilton wrote for Vanity Fair in 2018. But the right wing said: it was too soon.

In 2012, at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, a 20-year-old murdered twenty young schoolchildren and six adult staff.

In 2017, a reporter for The Guardian noted:

"Even on Capitol Hill, the outcry with each shooting appears increasingly muted as a familiar pattern takes hold: Republicans offer 'thoughts and prayers', insisting it is too soon to politicize the tragedy by discussing gun control, while Democrats issue statements calling for action."

After the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018 — where a 19-year-old shot 34 people, half of whom died — Emily Witt wrote in the New Yorker:

"On social media, and on live television, the victims were not playing their parts. They were not asking for privacy in their time of grief. They did not think it was “too soon” to bring up the issue of gun control—in fact, several students would start shouting “gun control” within the very sanctum of the candlelight vigil. What was already becoming clear that night, less than thirty-six hours after the shootings, was that the students were going to shame us, all of us, with so much articulacy and moral righteousness that you willed the news anchors to hang their heads in national solidarity."

Here's one excuse they give. A few hours after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, a reporter asked Sen. Marco Rubio

"if he thought it was appropriate to talk about gun control reform after the attack.

"It’s not, only because people don’t know how this happened... who this person is, what motivated them, how did they get a hold of the weapon that they used for this attack," Rubio told Fox News.

"I think it’s important to know all of that before you jump to conclusions that there’s some law we could have passed that could have prevented it."

As also noted in that article, the governor of Florida, Rick Scott, said "'there's a time' to talk about changes in the wake of horrible events but did not say specifically when that time was."

This week, in 2022, there was another school shooting, where an 18-year-old gunman murdered 19 elementary school students and two teachers. The National Rifle Association is prepared to "reflect" on it.

Perhaps we, who are not members of the NRA, could do more than reflect.

With reference to school shootings, USAmericans have wanted to discuss reforming gun control laws since at least Columbine. That was 23 years ago. I wonder if it is time?

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In the category of "wait why," guns are not allowed at the NRA convention:

The NRA explained, according to HuffPost, "that Secret Service barred carrying firearms into the convention because several prominent Republicans ― including former President Donald Trump ― will speak there....But attendees wouldn’t be able to bring their guns even if no politicians spoke at the event because the George R. Brown Convention Center itself doesn’t allow weapons of any kind..."

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To learn more history

How do dogs experience language and communication?

A 2012 news brief in The Week:

"When you say "ball," your dog likely has a different category of objects in mind than you do. Researchers taught a border collie named Gable made-up words to denote certain objects, including a horseshoe-shaped toy they called a "dax." When human babies learn to link a word like "ball" to a tennis ball, they're most likely thinking that "ball" means objects with a similar shape — like a basketball or a golf ball. But when researchers asked Gable to get another "dax," he picked out an object of a similar size or texture to the original horseshoe toy, ignoring larger or smaller toys of the same shape. Dogs, it seems, don't share our "shape bias," study author Emile van der Zee, a psychologist at the University of Lincoln in England, tells LiveScience.com. He thinks humans may have evolved to prioritize shapes when learning language because for us, "vision takes priority over the other sensory systems." Dogs handle objects with their mouths, so size and texture provide more relevant information."

Barry Holstun Lopez (1978):

"Dogs suffer from a wide variety of emotional disorders, many of them brought on by the sort of selective breeding that destroys or radically alters their systems of communication. Tail docking (boxers), excessive facial hair (sheep dogs), ear cropping (Doberman pinschers), pendulous ears (bloodhounds), and uniform coloration (Weimaraners) all have forced dogs to seek other means of communication. Often the behavior that we see in them — scent-marking a fire hydrant, for example — is an example of frustrated communication.
* * *
"What happens when a wolf wanders into a flock of sheep and kills twenty or thirty of them in apparent compulsion is perhaps not so much slaughter as a failure on the part of the sheep to communicate anything at all — resistance, mutual respect, appropriateness — to the wolf. The wolf has initiated a sacred ritual and met with ignorance.

We employ a "collective suspension of disbelief" when we have academic conversations that "assume that language determines thought." Steven Pinker wrote in 1994: "A dog, Bertrand Russell noted, may not be able to tell you that its parents were honest though poor, but can anyone really conclude from this that the dog is unconscious? (Out cold? A zombie?)"

Sources

"How dogs picture words." The Week, December 14, 2012. p. 19.
Barry Holstun Lopez. Of Wolves and Men. New York, Simon and Shuster, 1978; first Touchstone edition, 1995. pp. 52, 95.
Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. (1994) New York: HarperPerennial, 1995. pp. 57–58.

See also

"Thinking Without Words". It's a 4-minute read on Medium. Medium lets you read a certain number of stories for free every month. You may also consider a paid membership on the platform.

Photo by Moshe Harosh from Pixabay

The end of "Freak Out!" (1966) sounds like Mario going down a pipe

The last minute of "The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet" on Freak Out!, the 1966 album by The Mothers Of Invention, sounds like the 1983 soundtrack to the original Super Mario Bros., specifically when Mario goes down a pipe.

Climate solution: Mangroves and salt marshes

Water covers most of the planet. The ocean regulates the air we breathe and affects the weather. Yet sea levels are "predicted to increase more in the next thirty years than they have in the previous century," the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change notes.

In a May 10, 2022 blog post, they quote Loreley Picourt, secretary general of the Ocean & Climate Platform and the co-focal point for Ocean and Coastal Zones for the Marrakech Partnership-Global Climate Action Agenda at UN Climate Change, as saying that "the speed of this [irreversible sea level rise] and its associated risks (such as erosion and submersion, loss of coastal habitats and ecosystems, salinization of land and groundwater) will be considerably slowed down [if] warming levels are kept below 1.5°C.”

This is important: sea level rise is happening, and once it happens it is generally irreversible, but it can be slowed.

The article goes on to say:

"There are solutions available today, including Nature-based Solutions (NbS), such as planting mangroves and salt marshes, which not only contribute to carbon sequestration but have huge biodiversity benefits."

It adds:

"The Sea’ties Declaration was launched during the One Ocean Summit earlier this year, and has so far been signed by 40 mayors, governors and city networks across the world. It calls for an acceleration in the transformation of cities and their territories, highlighting four priorities: the mobilisation of science and observation systems; the integration of societal issues within adaptation plans; the fostering of adaptive and hybrid solutions; and the increase of public funding and private investments for adaptation to sea level rise."

Those four priorities, in other words:

• scientists keeping track of changes in the physical environment, as that is the problem that needs to be fixed
• addressing social issues that people care about, or else they won't get on board with adaptation plans that affect them in ways they care about
• actually coming up with climate solutions
• adapting to all the changes we can't stop, which will require money

However

Ben See posted Twitter threads with these articles:

International Day for the Conservation of the Mangrove Ecosystem, UNESCO, 26 July

Drowned? Existing mangroves could fall to sea level rise by 2050 by Michael Taylor, Thomson Reuters Foundation. 5 June 2020

Shocked scientists find 400km of dead and damaged mangroves in Gulf of Carpentaria, Graham Readfearn, Guardian, Oct 3 2019

IUCN advises “in danger” status for three World Heritage sites, IUCN, 7 Jun 2019

Sarker, S., Reeve, R., Thompson, J. et al. Are we failing to protect threatened mangroves in the Sundarbans world heritage ecosystem?. Sci Rep 6, 21234 (2016).

Avoiding mangrove destruction by avoiding carbon dioxide emissions. Ken Caldeira. August 27, 2012. 109 (36) 14287-14288

Mangrove-dependent Animals Globally Threatened, American Institute of Biological Sciences, July 7, 2009

A half-million dollars won't beat back climate change

$500K Sand Dune Designed to Protect Coastal Homes Washes Away in Just 3 Days, Dan Ladden-Hall, Daily Beast, Mar. 11, 2024

Rising sea level

Why seas are surging, Washington Post, gift link

See also

"Re-envisioning Environment". It's an 8-minute read on Medium. Medium lets you read a certain number of stories for free every month. You may also consider a paid membership on the platform.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Thoughts on the SCOTUS draft opinion on Roe

Last night, POLITICO reported on a draft SCOTUS opinion written in February that someone leaked. SCOTUS confirmed that it is a real draft, although they say they did not mean for it to be leaked and that they do not know who did it. SCOTUS may have already revised this draft since then or may plan to revise it, but if it were to be issued as-is, the opinion would essentially overturn Roe v. Wade.

Alito's draft declares that, inter alia, the right to marry a person of a different race, the right to contraception, and the right not to be forcibly sterilized, all lack "any claim to being deeply rooted in history" – which is the same reason he overrules the right to abortion. pic.twitter.com/NJZS8sWJMo

— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) May 3, 2022

After casting some drive-by shade on the existence of these other fundamental rights, Alito then says: don't worry, all of these other rights are different, they don't involve the "critical moral question" like abortion does, so just relax about the others, they're fine. pic.twitter.com/NGeuARk3ZC

— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) May 3, 2022

In the discussion on Twitter, you can see people making points like this (as I paraphrase and expand upon them):

• Justice Alito knows perfectly well that the other rights are also moral issues. (Otherwise, why mention them?) In 2020, he (along with Justice Thomas) wrote that Obergefell (the 2015 decision that guarantees the right to same-sex marriage in every state) "will continue to have ruinous consequences for religious liberty" until the court reverses its decision, as "the court has created a problem that only it can fix." Here, in the 2022 draft opinion that would overturn Roe, when he says he doesn't believe it's a moral issue at all, obviously he's dissimulating. He's giving a heads-up to everyone who will celebrate the loss of those rights and taunting everyone else who will be hurt by it.
• U.S. Constitutional "originalism," overall, is nonsense. First, there is no reason — not a coherent one, and not a livable one — to privilege history from a couple hundred years ago as being the right and true answer to all legal questions and thereby to ignore all history that has happened since. Lots of legal ideas from our collective history were extremely terrible both in principle and in implementation. Second, for the Supreme Court to be willing to ignore all its own precedents is itself weird. It'd have to consider and decide all cases de novo, from scratch. It's making a heck of a lot more work for itself. It is not actually going to do that work. The court will claim either "originalism" or "court precedent" when it is advantageous and convenient for it to do so.
• They have to resort to originalism because they have no proof that guaranteeing rights to traditionally minoritized/marginalized/oppressed people causes any social harm. Since they can't claim that people living their lives is demonstrably bad (because it demonstrably is not), they have to resort to the claim that the Founders wouldn't have liked it or recognized it. This is ethical deontology rather than consequentialism, and this slides conceptually into a matter of religious belief. Religiously, he believes that a human embryo must be respected as a full human person beginning at conception, perhaps even sometimes taking precedent over the life or health of the person in whose uterus it is growing. He appeals to the Founders as quasi-religious authorities who, he thinks, would have agreed with him or who at least would not have said otherwise.
• This is connected to current attempts by conservatives to control the content in history, science, and social studies textbooks. They have certain predetermined ideas of what the answers are, and those are the answers that would have been given in the 1700s, at least as they imagine the answers would have been given then, or at least for whichever questions they choose to prioritize.
• Conservatives have no claim to support "limited government." If they truly cared about limiting the scope of government reach and intrusion, they wouldn't be forever trying to regulate gender, sexuality, and reproduction, so let's dispense with that bogus idea.

See also: "Choosing Pragmatism Over Textualism," A method of judicial interpretation that looks only to the original meaning of legal texts risks producing a Constitution and laws that no one would want. Stephen Breyer, NY Review of Books, May 23, 2024

Also:

Alito's draft opinion explicitly criticizes Lawrence v. Texas (legalizing sodomy) and Obergefell v. Hodges (legalizing same-sex marriage). He says that, like abortion, these decisions protect phony rights that are not "deeply rooted in history." https://t.co/4690k0KG1F pic.twitter.com/urF7A02INU

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) May 3, 2022

Per this thread by A.H. (please follow her, too, on Twitter!), these U.S. precedents are threatened:

• Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) — protects your right to teach your kids languages other than English
• Skinner v Oklahoma (1942) — says no one can forcibly sterilize you
• Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) — protects married couples' right to buy contraceptives
• Loving v. Virginia (1968) — lets you marry a person of another race
• Stanley v. Georgia (1969) — allows you to watch porn
• Roe v. Wade (1973) — allows you to have an abortion without excessive restriction
• Lawrence v. Texas (2003) — struck down sodomy laws
• Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) — lets you marry a person of the same sex/gender

Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) too? I am tossing up an idea. Right now, I don't know exactly how they'll get rid of that one, but of course they will.

Relatedly, as someone pointed out, Buck v. Bell (1927) is still around. It allows states to sterilize people who are in public institutions.

Also, the potential (and likely) SCOTUS overturning of Roe is not the sole threat, because:

If you are out here saying “marriage equality is next” please do keep in mind that at least one state has made care for trans youth a felony right now and is currently in court defending that law. There is no “next” - the horror is NOW.

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) May 3, 2022

And the horror is also in the future, because (prediction):

We will see Obergefell die in 2024. The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has been planning this ever since it became apparent that Roe v. Wade was going down. Most conservative state AGs have relationships with the organization. 5/n

— Brynn Tannehill (@BrynnTannehill) May 3, 2022

Most states are gerrymandered to the point where changing the state legislature is impossible. Those same states generally prohibit voter initiated ballot initiatives. The notion that they can be brought back at the state level is a fantasy that only SCOTUS believes.

— Brynn Tannehill (@BrynnTannehill) May 3, 2022

It's also worth mentioning that Alito's arguments clearly open the doors to the return of sumptuary and cross dressing laws. Given the death of privacy rights, and Lawrence, the end state is that it will become illegal to be trans in your own home.

— Brynn Tannehill (@BrynnTannehill) May 3, 2022

Also, FYI:

Alito’s draft heavily references English legal precedent, including that of famed jurist Sir Matthew Hale who, it should be noted, had at least two women executed for witchcraft and wrote a treatise supporting marital rape pic.twitter.com/YijPlbkcq3

— emily bell (@emilybell) May 3, 2022

https://t.co/uQY4KnNsKo for those interested in why Sir Matthew Hale’s views on abortion are suddenly relevant pic.twitter.com/ZX5HhrJvfs

— emily bell (@emilybell) May 3, 2022

Amounts to:

Love the argument that we can’t have rights because we have a deeply rooted history of not having rights.

— Robyn (@hmntre) May 3, 2022

In late April 2023, Alito claims to have an idea, but not proof, of who leaked the draft. Hmm.

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Also, check out today's article by Jude Ellison Doyle, "We Have Entered the 'Anti-Gender' Endgame":

"There is no cavalry coming over the hill, no Hail Mary play, no impending wave of pro-choice activism that’s going to save us. There simply are not enough pro-choice justices on SCOTUS to save abortion. ... For there to be a massive feminist uprising in defense of Roe, there would need to be a functional feminist movement in the United States. There isn’t one. Since approximately 2016, a misogynist backlash has almost completely dismantled it. ... Gay marriage, gay sex, youth transition, any transition, interracial marriage, domestic partnership without marriage, abortion. contraception, or simply not being forcibly sterilized and/or detransitioned by the state — none of this is safe. None of this is “traditional.” All of it is on the line."

See this October 2021 article from the Guttmacher Institute: "26 States Are Certain or Likely to Ban Abortion Without Roe: Here’s Which Ones and Why"

See this June 2022 article from HuffPost: "These States Will Ban Abortion If Roe Is Overturned" (Subtitle: "Trigger bans, pre-Roe restrictions and fetal heartbeat laws will automatically activate in 22 states if the Supreme Court overrules Roe v. Wade.")

Josh Marshall argues in the New York Times in June 2022:

"...you can’t make an election into a referendum on an issue if you can’t point to anything winning the election would accomplish. To make the 2022 elections a referendum on Roe, Democrats have to put protecting Roe and abortion rights on the table.

Here’s one way to do that: get clear public commitments from every Senate Democrat (and candidate for Senate) not only to vote for the Roe bill in January 2023 but also to change the filibuster rules to ensure that a majority vote would actually pass the bill and send it to the White House for the president’s signature.

* * *

If my math is right and there are 48 Senate Democrats ready to make that pledge, they need two additional Democratic senators in the next Congress. And that is the party’s message that makes the 2022 midterms a referendum on Roe: 'Give us the House and two more senators, and we will make Roe law in January 2023.'"

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It is important to remember (stats about anti-abortion violence, provided by this HuffPost article):

"From 1977 to 2020 in America, anti-abortion activists committed at least 11 murders, 26 attempted murders, 956 threats of harm or death, 624 stalking incidents and four kidnappings, according to data collected by the National Abortion Federation. They have bombed 42 abortion clinics, set 194 on fire, attempted to bomb or burn an additional 104 and made 667 bomb threats."

When it's illegal for someone to get an abortion pill, her husband can threaten to "report" her for the abortion and meanwhile extort sex and other services from her.

Texas Man Allegedly Used Abortion Suit To Blackmail Ex-Wife For Sex Marcus Silva apparently thought suing his ex-wife's friends would help his cause, according to a new filing. Sara Boboltz, HuffPost, Oct 4, 2023

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Another HuffPost article:

"Globally, abortion rights and access have broadly expanded in the 50 years since the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade made the practice legal in the United States. But a small number of countries have moved in the opposite direction, especially in the last decade, seeking to outlaw abortions, harden existing bans, or enacting new restrictions.

These nations ― countries like Brazil, El Salvador, Hungary, India, Nicaragua and Poland ― share one major commonality: They are almost exclusively countries that experts consider 'backsliding democracies,' in which abortion access is one of many rights under threat.

Now, the United States ― itself now widely considered a democracy in decline ― is about to join them."

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Reminder: When Alito claims that the rt to abortion is not "deeply rooted history or tradition" because "28 out of 37 states" banned it throughout pregnancy when the 14A was ratified, he is either being ignorant or willfully deceitful. His own appendix gives him away! A thread:

— Aaron Tang (@AaronTangLaw) May 3, 2022

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Update, February 25, 2023:

"Now 45 and a federal judge, Kacsmaryk (kaz-MARE-ik) has the opportunity to impose the most far-reaching limit on abortion access since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June [2022].

The judge, nominated by President Trump and confirmed in 2019, will soon rule on a lawsuit seeking to revoke U.S. government approval of mifepristone, a key abortion medication. That outcome could, at least temporarily, halt over half the legal abortions carried out across the country, including in states led by Democrats where abortion rights are protected."

— "The Texas judge who could take down the abortion pill," Caroline Kitchener and Ann E. Marimow, Washington Post, February 25, 2023.

Holy shit. The Trump judge who is set to outlaw the abortion pill in all 50 states as early as this week previously said gay people are “disordered” and being transgender is a “mental disorder.”

Republicans confirmed him to a lifetime on the federal bench.https://t.co/4aM0sGl8XS

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) March 14, 2023

A man can now mess with your birth control, get you pregnant in order to be connected to you for life in order to keep abusing you, and then sue you or get you jailed if you have an abortion. Executed, even, if South Carolina’s abortion bill has its way. https://t.co/2pAP6AEL2s

— A. H. (@a_h_reaume) March 15, 2023

Lawmakers in Arkansas were scheduled to discuss a bill today that would make it possible to charge women with murder if the state thinks they 'caused' their miscarriages https://t.co/fYkhM2X7Iv

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) March 14, 2023

Arkansas plans to memorialize the end of legal abortion in the state (3-min listen) JANUARY 3, 2024

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Update: On April 3, 2023, Florida's senate passed a 6-week abortion ban.

On April 7:

BREAKING: Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk halts FDA’s approval of mifepristone, the a medication abortion drug. He has put his opinion on hold for 7 days to allow the government to appeal. More to come: https://t.co/oFbD0ZqTha pic.twitter.com/dz47h8Vsfu

— Chris “Subscribe to Law Dork!” Geidner (@chrisgeidner) April 7, 2023

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OH WAIT

Justice Samuel Alito Took Luxury Fishing Vacation With GOP Billionaire Who Later Had Cases Before the Court In the years after the undisclosed trip to Alaska, Republican megadonor Paul Singer’s hedge fund has repeatedly had business before the Supreme Court. Alito has never recused himself.
Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, Alex Mierjeski. ProPublica. Jun 20, 2023

See also: "This Novel Imagines Fascism in the 1930s USA". It's a 4-minute read on Medium. Medium lets you read a certain number of stories for free every month. You may also consider a paid membership on the platform.

Asking for activists in the climate emergency

Margaret Klein Salamon, executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund and author of Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself With Climate Truth, wrote "If You’re Anxious About the Climate, Try This" (New York Times, May 1, 2022). In that essay, she says:

I resolved to use my psychological expertise to help Americans wake up from the delusion of normalcy, and treat climate like an emergency...In these “climate emotions conversations,” participants often speak of their grief, terror, rage, shock, betrayal, guilt and alienation.

Recognizing and expressing feelings is just the beginning. Once someone awakens to problems and feels motivated, they take action.

...in 2019, after weeks of protests that shut down parts of London led by the climate activist group Extinction Rebellion, Britain declared a climate emergency and became the first major economy to legally commit to reaching “net zero” emissions by 2050.

Climate Emergency Fund supports...

...Scientist Rebellion, a group of over 1,000 scientists around the world. They are angry and fearful of climate change, and have engaged in various forms of civil disobedience including chaining themselves to the White House fence, and covering the Spanish Parliament building with paint the color of blood.

To stop human-caused climate change, the planet needs activists.

For more information, read Margaret Klein Salamon's book:

See also: "‘This Is The Team’: Collective Change on Climate". It's a 7-minute read on Medium. Medium lets you read a certain number of stories for free every month. You may also consider a paid membership on the platform.

By the way, Joe Walsh said in July 2022:

"Republicans have been obsessed for the last 30 to 40 years in fighting the fight at the state and local level. That's where they've been waging war. Democrats have been focusing on the national level and thinking every solution has to come out of Washington, D.C. The Democrats are getting their clocks cleaned at the state and local level because of that obsession."

Nothing reveals the failure of our political, cultural, legal, education, and media systems more clearly than their collective yawn over the day by day sliding toward losing essentially the whole fucking planet

— Peter Kalmus (@ClimateHuman) July 17, 2022

A common assumption about public opinion and climate change is weather events will wake skeptics up to threats of a warming planet. This paper suggests an alternative scenario, affected voters turn *away* from green parties. Perhaps weather shocks are experienced by many first as economic shocks.

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— Omar Wasow (@owasow.bsky.social) November 29, 2024 at 11:49 AM

Why do people tell religious stories they don't believe in?

From an essay by Scott Hershovitz, "How to Pray to a God You Don’t Believe In," New York Times, May 2, 2022:

"'I think that for real God is pretend and for pretend God is real,' Rex announced.

I was stunned. That’s a big thought for a 4-year-old. It’s a big thought for a 40-year-old. I asked Rex to explain what he meant.

'God isn’t real,' he said. 'But when we pretend, he is.'

Philosophers have a name for this sort of view. They call it 'fictionalism.'

* * *

Some philosophers are fictionalists about morality; they think rights aren’t real except in stories that we tell. Others are fictionalists about numbers; they think that math is made up. I think both views are mistaken; I believe in morality and math.

But I think Rex was right...I am a fictionalist about God.

* * *

I just don’t believe the stories that we tell. And hearing them in English forces me to confront that, over and over again.

Still, I pretend. And I don’t plan to stop. Because pretending makes the world a better place. I learned that from my kids too — Rex and his younger brother, Hank.

Pretending blurs the boundaries between this world and the ones we imagine. It breathes life into stories, letting them shape the world we live in. Just think of the delight kids take in Santa Claus, even those who know, deep down, that he’s not real. Or the way they lose themselves in play. Pretending makes the world more magical and meaningful."

How does it do so? The pretend stories can remind us "that people persevere, survive and even thrive" although "the world has been falling apart from the start" in part because "there’s beauty in trying to put it back together."

If you want more, Scott Hershovitz has written this book on philosophy and children:

See also my article: "What Can Jews Do When They Don’t Believe in God?". It's a 5-minute read on Medium. Medium lets you read a certain number of stories for free every month. You may also consider a paid membership on the platform.