I Have To Write This Or I May Go Crazy
I’m not sure how much I can add about one of the most widely-covered news stories in recent memory, but I’m just going to write this because I can’t sit here and just let these thoughts fester and fade until the next mass shooting, the complete gutting of abortion rights coming next month and any other horrific thing that’s sure to be coming down the pike.
I feel like I’m going crazy and there’s almost nothing I can do. It’s even more disappointing that there’s nothing that elected officials are willing to do. In fact, the Senate is leaving town for a Memorial Day recess until Monday, June 6th. Obviously, those absolute ghouls don’t care at all about anyone but themselves and the people they work for — which are lobbyists and corporations — not people like you and me that they’re elected to represent. But, it’s nice to know that they’ll be able to take a nice little vacation from their important work of either doing nothing tangible to protect your civil rights (most Democrats) or actively working as hard as they can to take them away (most Republicans).
Abortion Will Be Gone Next Month
If you want to know how I came to that conclusion, look how little obstruction has been put in place by the Democratic Party with the undoubtedly horrible decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization coming this summer. Republicans and the conservative movement have been openly campaigning on outlawing abortion and doing everything they can to get Roe overturned, including shifting their focus to taking over state legislatures, writing insane laws that have no practical medical backing, and appointing unqualified judges that will do their bidding, for literally 50 YEARS. Democrats have had 50 years to codify Roe and expand the Supreme Court and the party has sat on their heels and raked in hundreds of millions of dollars for nothing. Over the years, their messaging on abortion even weakened to the point of Bill Clinton using the phrase “safe, legal, and rare” during his 1992 presidential campaign, which makes abortion sound pretty dangerous, right? Well, you may be surprised to learn that a study published by The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in 2012 found that the mortality rate among women who delivered “live neonates,” aka newborn children, was 8.8 deaths per 100,000 live births, while the mortality rate among those who had an abortion was 0.6 deaths per 100,000 abortions. That means that people are almost 15 times as likely to die while giving birth than having an abortion. According to the CDC, the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. in 2020 was 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births.
This, as is the case with every issue in the U.S., is also about racial justice. That same CDC study found that the maternal mortality rate for non-Hispanic Black women was 55.3 deaths per 100,000 live births, which is nearly three times as high as the rate of non-Hispanic White women (19.1 per 100,000) and over three times as high as the rate of Hispanic women (18.2 per 100,000).
Abortion is a safe procedure. It’s also one of the most important ways to keep women involved in educational attainment and economic activity. According to a brief filed in the Dobbs case by more than 150 economists and researchers, abortion has had a “significant impact on women’s wages and educational attainment, with impacts most strongly felt by black women.” They said a state-by-state approach to abortion, including the dozens of bans that would go into effect, would block 120,000 women from getting the abortion care they need in the first year.
“Ample evidence indicates that Roe is causally connected to women’s advancements in social and economic life,” wrote the authors. “…if Roe and Casey were overturned, or significantly curtailed, it would have a significant and negative impact on women’s lives.”
According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, “State-level abortion restrictions cost state economies an estimated $105 billion per year — by reducing labor force participation and earnings levels and increasing turnover and time off from work among women ages 15 to 44 years old.”
Having to listen to Nancy Pelosi say something as flippant as “We need a strong Republican party” multiple times, while simultaneously campaigning for an anti-abortion candidate, is about as big of a slap in the face to abortion advocates as possible. This is especially true, considering she and other top Democrats actively campaigned for Henry Cuellar over progressive candidate, Jessica Cisneros. Cuellar was the only Democratic member of the House to vote against the Women’s Health Protection Act, which passed by a vote of 218–211 and would “protect a person’s ability to determine whether to continue or end a pregnancy, and to protect a healthcare provider’s ability to provide abortion services.”
Right-wing lawmakers have found an easy group to tout as important, while never turning any of that talk into concrete, positive action. As pastor Dave Barnhart put it in a Facebook post in June 2018:
“‘The unborn’ are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It’s almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.
Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.”
They place more care in the unborn that they supposedly care about than the roughly 424,000 children in foster care on any given day in the US, according to childrensrights.org (https://www.childrensrights.org/newsroom/fact-sheets/foster-care/).
Blame Game
I just keep coming back to the thought that it doesn’t have to be this way. Our “lawmakers” who supposedly care so deeply have either done nothing or been hostile and aggressive in blaming everything from mental health and the supposed “transgender agenda” (aka an innocent transgender person who has nothing to do with this at all) to the defunding of the police (which never happened and played no role in this predictable, preventable tragedy) and illegal immigration. These are all distractions to deflect any possible blame away from gun manufacturers and the lawmakers that refuse to take any concrete action to prevent tragedies like this, and much like the moronic proposals to curb school shootings or explain them away, which have included the following:
- Newt Gingrich saying that every school in the country should pay every teacher and administrator who’s willing to be trained and armed to protect their schools.
- Erick Erickson tweeting that Democrats “rejecting calls for more security and single entry points for schools” and since gun control measures won’t pass (thanks to Republicans), “they want the issue, not a solution.”
- Glenn Beck saying that all of the world’s problems and all of America’s problems are connected. Which problems, you may ask? You know the ones. “Wokeness? We’re tied directly to it. Hatred? Tied directly to it. CRT, bathrooms that anybody can use, all of these things are all tied together. They are not separate. And until you’re willing to have that conversation, the rest of it is bull crap.”
- When asked what he thought the main factor that’s triggering a rise in mass shootings, especially at schools, fedora-wearing moron, Jason Whitlock, rambled through some defense of “confused” and “angry” young boys, blaming the “pansies in northern California and their social media apps” for putting masculinity and traditional male values under attack. Whitlock even offered an explanation for why the police didn’t take more aggressive action to stop the shooting, blaming America for creating a culture that doesn’t support “men doing what comes natural to them — protecting women and children” and “totally annihilate, eliminate our natural instincts and make us think, oh, the people in northern California know better than God about what a man is and what a man should do.”
It’s very convenient to blame mental health issues, but when you take even a minute to look into the work (or lack, thereof) that these representatives have put into funding mental health research and resources, you’ll find that they’re just flat-out lying to us. They don’t give a damn about mental health and it’s only ever used as a reason to stand between common sense laws and the money they stand to lose if those laws get passed.
Cop Shit
Police exist solely to protect our existing power structures and social hierarchy. They’re not there to “serve and protect” and they’re not even legally obligated to do anything to help you if you call them.
I want to take a deep dive into a 2005 case that also involved the death of young children, Castle Rock v. Gonzales, where the Supreme Court essentially ruled that police have no obligation to enforce a restraining order, even if you demonstrate that your ex-partner is such a danger to you and your kids that physical or emotional harm would result if they were not excluded from the home and you are awarded sole custody.
Just over two weeks after Jessica Gonzales’ restraining order against her estranged husband, Simon, was made permanent by the Colorado State Court, Simon kidnapped the girls from their front yard. When Jessica Gonzales realized that her daughters were missing, she made a first of many phone calls to the police at about 7:30 p.m., and the police came over to the house. She showed them the restraining order and asked that it be enforced, essentially saying, “My daughters are missing. My ex-husband is dangerous and I want my kids to be returned to me immediately.” In response, police essentially told her to wait until 10 p.m. and see if he brings the girls back by then.
So, the police left her house. Then, she got a hold of Simon on his cell phone and he said that he and the girls were at an amusement park in Denver. She called the police back, told them where they were and gave the police a description of the car. The police again said, essentially, “There is nothing we can do, ma’am. Wait and see if he comes back with them at 10 p.m.” At 10:10 p.m., she called the police for the third time. She was told that she should wait until midnight to see if he will bring them back. Since she wasn’t getting any help from the police, she went to Simon’s apartment. Unfortunately, nobody was there. So, at about midnight, she called the police station again and she’s told to wait for an officer to arrive and that an officer will be sent out to Simon’s apartment to meet her there. Nobody ever showed up. So, she drove herself to the police station, arriving there at about 12:50 a.m. and she files an incident report on the spot. The officer who took the report didn’t do anything, and in fact, went on with his regular shift, including going to get dinner.
A few hours later, at 3:20 a.m., Simon Gonzales drove to the police station and opened fire on the building and at the police with a gun he purchased earlier that evening. After a shoot-out with police, he was killed. When police went up to the car to investigate, they found the girls in the car and that they were killed earlier by Simon.
So, Jessica Gonzales sued the state under Title 42, Section 1983 of the United States Code, the statute that allows individuals to sue the states for civil rights violations. She alleges that the police’s willful failure to enforce the restraining order was a violation of her 14th Amendment right to due process. At the state level, there is a 1994 Colorado law that was designed to target domestic violence, in part by ensuring that police are compelled to enforce restraining orders.
But, in an opinion written by all-time piece of garbage, Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court ruled that Jessica Gonzales was not entitled to the enforcement of the restraining order, primarily because enforcement is generally considered to be optional for the police, and therefore, can’t be relied on as an entitlement by a citizen. The law says that police “shall use every reasonable means to enforce this restraining order,” which seems to place an obligation on the police to act. In addition, the sponsor of the bill stated that under the law, “Police must make probable cause arrests.”
To quote The Law Boy (aka Peter from 5–4 Podcast), “…unless you’re a 7-year-old who just got the first fucking classroom speech from McGruff the Crime Dog or whatever, you’d have to be an absolute fucking dipshit to believe that the goal of the police is to protect the public.”
Watching videos of police officers pinning a parent to the ground and yelling at others, while their children — elementary school kids — were inside being gunned down has made me simultaneously inconsolably angry and unbelievably hopeless. What can I personally do to change that? I can’t eliminate the filibuster, so that Democrats can use their majority to accomplish something meaningful, for once. I can’t end qualified immunity. I can’t pass legislation. But at the same time, I can’t let myself do nothing. Will writing this piece and tweeting it out bring about any tangible change? It’s incredibly unlikely, but I just want this out of my head. I can talk with my fiancée about this for days, but I knew I needed to write this long-form type of thing to try to maintain any semblance of sanity I have left.
