REVISITING GILEAD AND THE HANDMAIDS

By Ruth A. Sheets

Recently, I read a good, but disturbing piece by Joyce Vance who operates a thread on Substack.  She is a legal expert and was looking at the way our courts and state legislatures are working to take away women’s rights, first to abortion, then to birth control, then to . . ..  There is no honest reason women should be losing our rights now that there are safe medical practices that can make life far less dangerous for women regarding reproduction.  The problem, the white men who are the majority in the legislatures and on the courts moving to limit women’s rights seem to have a need to demonstrate their power and women are their victims, particularly poor white women and women of color.

Vance presents Margaret Atwood’s 1985 book “The Handmaid’s Tale” as the dystopia that does not seem as far off as it did nearly 40 years ago.  In the story, a virus is making many women infertile, so those women who can give birth are prisoners of the state and auctioned off to the guys in charge as fetus incubators for their infertile wives.  They are called “handmaids,” men pretending they are serving the Lord as well as their masters. It is an appalling system in which women are enslaved and older women are employed to discipline the handmaids if they try to escape or refuse their masters’ rapes.  In short, the men demand and command and the women carry out the orders and don’t care who suffers, not too different from the way many women were treated in Nazi Germany.

Revisiting "The Handmaid's Tale" made me really angry all over again.  When I read the book back in the 1980s, I was angry that men thought using and abusing women for their own fake religious purposes was OK.  Now, my anger is different.  It says, "Women are the majority in this nation yet we keep letting certain men rule our lives, determine our reproduction, commit violence against us almost at will, and insult, belittle, and harass us nearly everywhere.  It is just wrong! 

As short as a century ago, many women died in pregnancy and childbirth as did their children.  Some medical advancements had been made from Medieval times but not as many as one might think.  Male doctors had taken over the pregnancy care and the birthing process for women instead of the midwives who had done the work previously and the guys often were just not as caring or competent.  There was basic birth control, but women were not permitted to use it in most places, even though it would have saved a lot of lives.  Those who had access to it were often saved from a pregnancy that could have killed them.  Unfortunately, a mentally disturbed man had gotten power he didn’t deserve back in the 1870s and forced through laws that criminalized sending information about birth control through the mail.  He didn’t like sending pornography through the mail either and of course had to carefully check it out before deciding whether something was porn or not.  His name, Anthony Comstock.  Somehow, he got to run the US Post Office and became its dictator.  He had no experience that should have qualified him for the position, but clearly his weird warped religious ideas were sufficient in the 19^th century for the job.

Right now, there are a cadre of white male Republicans with their female surrogates trying to revive the 1873 Comstock Act, originally forced through to control people’s lives according to Comstock’s sick religious standards.  It is still on the books!  Men in power just couldn’t let it go when attempts were made over time to drop it.  Now that abortion, in their view, is on the way to being banned, Republicans need another issue to target.  They landed on birth control; they want to ban it too.  Those rich white men want women to be pregnant whenever men choose to donate sperm, forced or otherwise and women should have no say, a lot like the handmaids in Atwood’s book.

The reality is, as the majority in America, women should have more say than the minority rich, white men and their female sycophants who are making and reviving these archaic laws.  Why do we women and our non-female allies permit them to deny us health care because they claim their warped religious and/or gender beliefs don't like it?  Why has our president not sent the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to be certified since all the states needed for ratification have been collected and placing a time limit on its passage is not in our Constitution?  That could nullify some of their sex-related banning efforts.

As we can see as one right is taken away the takers’ sights are on the next one.  Those folks have a lot of power, and are evil, calling embryos and fetuses children with the same rights as the woman who “houses” them.  We need to act very soon to avoid becoming further victims of conservative Republican white male frustration.  Those guys have money and power; we have numbers.  That should be more powerful, but we women are not used to having and using power.  We usually go along to get along as a survival mechanism.  Well, that needs to change if we are to avoid entering Gilead.

To get things going right now, we women need a national underground network to procure the “morning after pill” and abortion medication and distribute it to every community and every woman who might need or want it.  When the network is set, sympathetic doctors, trained midwives, nurses, and other medical personnel who are willing to take risks and work in reproductive health must be recruited and funding sources must be located.  These health caregivers must be practicing in settings all over the country, be well-trained in dealing with abortions after 11 weeks, pregnancy complications, and 3^rd trimester abortions if the fetus or mother is at risk.  They will also need expertise in the many forms of birth control.  There will need to be a chain of hidden clinics for providing such care in red states where legislators want to drive women back to the dark ages of dangerous pregnancies and forced birth.  The clinics could even look like the fake pregnancy centers but actually provide real care.  This could be similar to the Janes of Chicago who provided abortions for thousands of women when abortion was illegal in the late 1960s.  Some “clinics” at the beginning could be set up right across the border in next-door states that still believe in freedom, and on public lands and military bases.   In addition, airlines and railroads could be recruited covertly to, at very low cost, transport women to abortion/pregnancy centers.  Traveling with a uterus should never be a crime. 

There is an effort in some of the warped red states to essentially make women prisoners once they become pregnant, using apps to monitor girls/women’s menstrual cycles and communications so they can’t leave the state and can be imprisoned if they have an abortion or even a miscarriage.  Tech savvy women need to carefully and secretly sabotage any network that tries to gather incriminating information.  Warnings to women not to use online services to track their periods would be a good first step.  Abortion providers in states where abortion is legal must not keep records with names of out-of-state patients in case the Supreme Court should rule that like with the fugitive slave law of the 1850s, all states will have to provide abortion information for fugitives from the states where abortion is illegal.  Alas, this is definitely possible with the right-wing ideologues/misogynists on the SC now.

Women and allies should consider researching and boycotting businesses of any legislators, their families, and people known to donate to candidates and organizations that stand against women’s right to choose.  When asked, they can say, “Oh, I don’t do business with folks who don’t respect women’s personhood.” 

To get things rolling, we need a national "Lysistrata” event.”   Lysistrata was a Greek character and heroine in a play by Aristophanes.  She got all the women of the city to stop sleeping with their husbands and other men until they stopped the war they were fighting.  It worked!  This time, it would involve women and men not having sex with anyone opposed to women’s right to decide about her own reproduction.  It could start out with a well-publicized 3-day trial run, then resume at least until the ERA is certified, and some movement is made to drop anti-abortion laws in the red states where abortion is currently illegal.   

To help things along, Doctors, except in cases of real emergency, should quietly refuse to treat the legislators who voted to ban abortion and birth control, and the judges who permitted such anti-femaleactions, and their family members (with no explanation, of course).  They could go to other countries for care just as they expect women to go to other states when they have taken away women's rights to medical care.  They’re rich and could afford it, but it would be inconvenient.

We could try to fix this by an act of Congress like dumping the time limit on the ERA which was unconstitutional to begin with, but those white male legislators, can’t do it.  After all, they will have to find another way to curb women’s advancement; that’s too much work for them. 

So, it's time we women and our non-female allies (and there are a lot of us), the majority in America, stand up and finally say "No, we're not going to take it anymore!" We must act before the Gilead male minority have undermined all avenues women have to live a life of choice, relegated to being their handmaids. Voting for Republicans, male or female is dangerous for women, pregnant or not, and we need to get that message out as often as possible before November. 

BIDEN VS. TRUMP, NOT A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD

By Ruth A. Sheets

This morning, Robert Reich wrote a piece “What Do Americans Know About Trump and Biden?”  That is a great question and I guess the answer depends in which part of the country the people live, what they watch or listen to, how tech-savvy they are, their gender, and their age. It also depends on how much they let fear, anger, resentment, and hatred (to me, the new 4 horsemen of the apocalypse) rule their lives.  In short, He says we as a people know very little about them, or at least most of us do.  I think Prof. Reich is correct.

Our media has portrayed Biden as that boring old man who can't do anything and just wanders around with no direction.   Trump has been portrayed as the fiery orator who will stand up for the working people and fix everything (although he has never really fixed anything to benefit anyone but himself). Those who have propagated the images of Biden and Trump knew what they were doing, lying to and cheating the American people and it was done by the same guys, the ones who own our media and need the fiery rhetoric of Donald Trump to spice things up for them.  The media certainly have kept the social media “likes” coming and the TVs of too many Americans tuned permanently to Fox “News,” which employs pundits trained well in audience manipulation, lying, and presenting half-truths.  Then, there’s the social media platforms that are now mostly OK with the lying, denigrating, and hateful speech Trump fans are spewing regularly.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore was portrayed by our media as boring even though he had a lot of experience, understood many of the challenges our nation would be facing, and had an awareness of how we could get through them together. Boring was the only thing people thought about and being boring was the worst thing a person could be, even worse than inexperience, ineptness, and leaning heavily on a family name as with George Bush.

That pathetic attitude about “boring” has persisted and Biden is now the victim of its ridiculousness. In reality, boring often means someone who actually knows their job, does it well, and does not feel the need to yell and scream about something while insulting and blaming others if things don’t work out perfectly.  “Boring” people often know how to find experts in their fields who can figure out how to make things happen, to get work done.

Trump on the other hand wouldn’t be called “boring.”  He is pure entertainment!  He has proven over and over he is incompetent, a terrible businessman as well as a bad actor, a serial liar (lying more than 30,000 times in public during the 4 years he was in office, something his cult must value highly), a sex-offender, and an indicted fraudster and insurrectionist. He tosses out phrases that mean nothing, does live test-ballooning to see the kinds of lies and insults his cult members like or at least don't mind, and whines constantly like a toddler. None of that matters if he is portrayed by the media the cult watches as a strong leader who will "fight for them." It matters little that he doesn’t know and does not want to know anything about his cult members beyond that they can be easily manipulated. He even speaks treason in public at his rallies and tells us how he is going to destroy our democracy and the cult is on board, or at least cheer as though they are.  The problem, despite all of that, Trump is supposedly leading in most polls. Something is very wrong with this picture?

Biden is a proven competent president with a staff that gets positive things done for this nation, definitely not perfect, and a bit “old-school,” but doing the job pretty well.  Trump was a lazy president (he often had empty folders around pretending to be working), ignorant (he knows very little about anything beyond the few business “rules” he follows and how to commit fraud), and a toddler-man (whining about everything and everyone that displeases him,  lying with a straight face, and not particularly wanting anything to improve for anyone, well, maybe just himself).  Trump surrounds himself with sycophants who will do what he orders when he is not being manipulated by them to do their bidding.

Looking at the two men, it is hard to see that they can be tied in the polls or rather Trump being ahead in many states.  Something is clearly wrong with the Democratic message.  Maybe the problem is that Democrats don’t believe in our own candidate.  Now, why would that be.  Biden has been enormously successful this past 3+ years in moving our nation forward.  He helped us get through a devastating pandemic.  There are a lot of revisionist history guys trying to claim the pandemic really wasn’t so bad and that we really didn’t lose over a million Americans to it and well, those who died were old and would have died anyway even if COVID had not gotten them.  It is clear those revisionists did not lose loved ones to the disease or pretended it was not really  COVID.  Several people I knew died of COVID and not all of them over 60.  My students lost family members and had to experience the grief nearly alone since being together in school was dangerous for households with 3+ generations living together in the same home.  Trump’s policies up to and including the actual pandemic hindered care and put a lot of health workers and others at risk.  He did push a vaccine, which was great, but he pretended it came from nowhere and it was he that got it made (the vaccine had been in the works for more than 15 years).  Then, when Trump got sick with COVID, he received the benefits of his position and was given all the latest treatments even though he had pushed garbage treatments on his followers, and maligned those health care leaders who did try to keep people safe.    

One difficulty we face is that people have very short memories.  Many now claim they were better off four years ago under Trump than now, under Biden.  That may be true for a tiny fraction of the population, but not for the vast majority of Americans.  Short memories let people believe the fantasy they are being fed, just as they believe so many lies about Trump and Biden. 

We are also not a people that likes to examine our beliefs and convictions very deeply.  If we did, it would be easier for people to see the truth more often.  It does not mean we wouldn’t be bamboozled now and then because con artists are quite skilled, but we would not be constantly vulnerable to the Donald Trumps of the world who plan to use us for their own power and to gain as much money and prestige at our expense as possible.  We wouldn’t let those con artists rise to high office in our nation.

This is going to be a hard 5 months ahead and if Toddler Trump wins, a terrible future for all but the very richest, white men. We who care need to work together to stop the Trump steal of our American democracy.  And, it is going to take all of us to do it!

REPUBLICANS AND CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM

By Ruth A. Sheets

As a Christian minister, I am appalled so many people in this country are trying to force Christianity and supposed "christian" beliefs on the people of this nation. Each time I hear Republicans whining that this nation isn't christian enough, I groan because those hypocrites do not in any way embody or care about what I would consider Christian precepts, and they are fine with the hypocrisy, perhaps even revel in it. They lie, approve cheating/fraud if it gets them what they want while claiming it isn't cheating/fraud, and choose leaders who have questionable backgrounds and intentions (Jordan, Gates, Greene, Johnson, Trump, the judges in Alabama, the ones who push the 10 Commandments while they choose not to live by them), and those who regularly spew hate of everyone who is not them.  They want the government up in everyone's business but theirs. 

NOTE:  The lower-case “c” used in Christian indicates non-Christian behavior and CNs is Christian Nationalists.

The CNs have tried to shape Christianity to reflect their own personal biases, behaviors, comforts, fears, and hatreds. Lying has become their coin of the realm and they do it so often there is little sense of what is true for them. They themselves, may not even know.

There is nothing in Jesus's teachings that supports their attitudes, behavior, lying, faith being forced on others, and the rest of their Republican/CN agenda. If Jesus had been so opposed to homosexuality, for example, he would have said so since it was present within the Greek/Roman world of which Jesus was part. The same can be said of abortion.  However, the CNs have put these issues at the center of their campaigns against the American people, claiming they are “pro-life” so God must be against both LGBTQ persons and abortion because they are.

The scriptures do say Jesus told folks:  love one another, love your neighbor as yourself (and everyone is our neighbor), welcome the stranger, blessed are the peacemakers, forgive 70 times 7 times, care for poor and sick folks, visit those in prison, do unto others what you would have done to yourself.  I see none of these critical Christian precepts in anything CNs are pushing.  When Republican CNs notice the national debt is really high, to fix it, they propose that cuts be made to the programs that support the people who are most vulnerable, actions that are antithetical to what the Jesus of the gospels would have stood for and with. 

I have noticed over the years that conservatives grab onto an issue they feel will get them attention, then wield it as a weapon supposedly of God, to get others to give them power, money, or something else they want. Right now, it’s controlling women’s lives, in particular, abortion rights, and giving their faithful minions, folks to hate (LGBTQ persons and immigrants).  We all should know what Republicans are up to by now, but these fools keep winning elections, claiming to be soooo christian, having the “true faith” or something like that.  That’s a message people have spewed throughout history to force others to do their bidding.  Republicans keep coming up with warped "ideas" trying to make this a Christian nation despite the fact that the United States was never intended to be a Christian state no matter what Republicans believe about our founders.  I think I have the actual translation for what Republicans are really saying when they claim this as a christian country; “we want to be able to do whatever we want with impunity and claim  that what we are doing and proposing is Christian, thus from god.”  They expect/require everyone to go along with it.”  Sounds a lot like Republicans wish to go back to being toddlers with bad parents, whining and tantruming as they try to get whatever they want.  Clearly, Republican leadership right now does not care about any honest traditional form of Christianity because it does not speak to their childish need to get power and money no matter who is hurt.  Conservative christianity has become the Republican weapon of choice to gain undeserved power, to continue to live their distorted beliefs, and to do as much harm as possible to anyone who does not go along with their nonsense.  There are probably “true believers,” but I suspect those “believers” are not among the leadership.  The leaders know what they are doing and have been carefully crafting their attack on our democracy to be sure it has a “christian” ring to it designed to hook people who have been groomed to fear, resent, even hate those who do not see the world as they do.  “Those people are just so different, they’re trying to convert you to wokeness (or something); so they must be stopped.”  That is a powerful message for those who know nothing of our Constitution, little of our history or rights as citizens, and that they are being used by conservative religious leaders and politicians for their own gains, not to improve the lives of their congregants and constituents.  They are reviving the old mollifying line used during slavery days, you may suffer now while on Earth, but god will bless you and you will face eternity in Heaven if you do what we say.”

That seems legitimate to Americans who are actually looking for some kind of approval for their racism, misogyny, homo/transphobia, xenophobia, and the rest.  Republicans in power hold that their voters really are useful and “it is our duty as good christians to ‘guide’ them in the right direction because they aren’t dependable enough to buy our lies without help.”  The leadership wants the sheep to say, with a straight face, “since god is OK with what my leaders in god’s party are doing, I must be right.  Those other horrible people are trying to force us to mix together with sinners and we won’t have it!” 

We the People and our media should not tolerate this false christianity without rebuttal. Republicans can worship in any way they choose.  What they can’t do is foist their brand of religion on anyone else; it’s in our Constitution.  That can be a problem, though because our Supreme Court has drunk the Republican Kool-Ade, so are regularly ruling in favor of the Christian Nationalists, even when they don’t have standing before the court or even an actual case.  We may have to go around the Supreme Court somewhat, as Gov. Abbott of Texas has lately to do as much harm to immigrants as he can get away with.  In this case, it will be to defend our rights and liberties from people for whom the Constitution is just a suggestion and swearing an oath to “protect and defend” it is pretty much irrelevant because they have their fingers crossed, at least mentally, so whatever they swear or affirm means little or nothing to them.  In addition, they get The Federalist Society and other rich guys to buy and supply members of our courts.  The judges and justices can then push for the oppression of people not like themselves.  They will rule in favor of pseudo-christian practices, against our Constitution, while quoting pre-18^th Century bullies as proof they are right.  The opinion of the judges and justices has more weight than the Constitution, the law, or common sense, which of course, is just wrong. 

Six of the Supreme Court justices are Roman Catholic and a seventh nearly so (Gorsuch was raised Catholic but is now Episcopalian).  That is definitely not representative of the American people, and many of their recent decisions related to religion are not either.    

An additional factor in Christian Nationalism is that the vast majority of its practitioners are white Evangelicals and Roman Catholics, leaving out a whole lot of Christians who don’t go along with their racism, misogyny, homo/transphobia, xenophobia, and the rest.  Among the rights the CNs wish to eliminate is voting rights for the people they don’t see as worthy.  Black Americans have been specifically targeted in “red” states as have young people and people with disabilities, clearly in opposition to the  Constitution which gives the right to vote to every American citizen age 18 and older.  How this fits with Christianity is not entirely clear.  Perhaps it is that CNs are truly dictators (for god of course).

We need to get the word out more forcefully that the Germans who conducted the Holocaust were Christians who used their faith as a weapon against millions ultimately murdering millions.  It was Christians who operated the slave trade enslaving tens of millions of people.  It was Christians who lynched Black Americans and people who supported them.  It was Christians who marched with the KKK yelling stupid phrases like “Jews won’t replace us” while now claiming to be so pro-Israel.  I guess they hate Muslims/Palestinians more than Jews.

Donald Trump is a Christian Nationalist as are Mike Johnson and numerous other members of our legislative bodies.  Trump claims the Bible is his favorite book, and is selling his own version to raise money for his cause, himself.  We should not try to trip him up with verses to see if he knows them because he does not.  He has never read the Bible and never will.  It is his fave book because he can use it to stir up the people who value it, those who have been raised to question nothing their masters tell them, and it is always their masters because women are lesser beings.  So, if Trump says it’s a favorite and he is selling it, he is speaking just to them and his words go straight to their heart, and the lie sticks with them and they stick with Trump. 

There is nothing positive about Christian Nationalism for anyone but its practitioners in leadership roles, and it is up to us, those of many different faiths or none to stand up to them and challenge them at every opportunity.  One way is to vote them out of office.  Another is to insist that our media call the CNs out on their bad behavior and call their lies, lies.  We are not a theocracy no matter what the CNs want. 

The question is, will we let ourselves be ruled by people who have so little regard for the truth or Truths.  For me, the answer is NO!

THE ROGUE SUPREMES, PART A LOT

By Ruth A. Sheets

I hope everyone was as embarrassed as I was last week when our Supreme Court heard two cases, neither of which should have even come to them.  The first about whether Idaho can refuse medical help to women whose pregnancies are in trouble, and the second, whether Donald Trump has immunity for the crimes he committed while president and after. 

I was shocked as well as embarrassed by the conservatives' disregard for the truth, dismissal of reality, ignorance of women's rights to life, and pretending Donald Trump needed immunity to carry out his duties as president.  The six conservatives are all supposed to be lawyers who know our Constitution, all of it, including the amendments, as well as the laws of our nation.  If I were one of their law school professors, I would have been appalled and frustrated at how little they had learned or how badly they had been corrupted over the years. 

There have been clues all along that these 5 men and one woman are not worthy of being on our highest court and were only nominated and passed because of their ideological stances or to meet particular political needs of the president in office at the time of the nomination.  They regularly rule in favor of very rich individuals and corporations.  They have undermined the rights of people of color and women as often as they thought they could get away with it, and they have employed neither a moral compass or any kind of ethics code in their rulings.  I hold Chief Justice John Roberts responsible for most of it, but the others jump right in working to dismantle our democracy.  When they were being vetted, no discernable effort was made to determine whether each functioned with a moral compass or could discern truth from lies, and reality from rich guy fantasyland, and any Senator who voted for them is also to blame. 

Clarence Thomas was credibly accused of sexual harassment but the woman who was his target was maligned rather than holding responsible the man who would be given a life term on our highest court. 

Samuel Alito had racist and misogynistic tendencies in previous jobs, but somehow, George W. Bush picked him and set him loose on Americans, just waiting to put women under male control has he saw as the reality back in the 17^th century or earlier. 

John Roberts had a strong racist position against the Voting Rights Act which he was rather open about, a Voting Rights Act passed several times, mostly unanimously.  That Act made it necessary for the states that had done the most to limit voting for people of color required to get permission to make any voting changes.  Roberts got the chance to ditch the most important parts of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and whenever a gerrymandering case comes up that would correct inequities in voting, he will nix it, with rare exceptions.  He’s not fond of women’s rights either and proves that regularly too.

Brett Kavanaugh was credibly accused of sexual assault, but somehow, Republicans didn’t see that as a problem at all, even the women on the Judiciary Committee. 

Amy Coney Barrett had so little experience as a judge it is clear she got to join the Supremes because she was biddable, willing to go along with whatever Trump and his Justice “friends” commanded.  Her cultlike upbringing in a super conservative religious group primed her to be that kind of submissive gal and she rarely steps out of line.  She’s also a Christian nationalist which is completely against the Constitution, of course. 

In addition to all that, the most recent three Trump justices lied in their Senate hearings.  They all said precedent was critical and it would take a lot for them to overturn precedent.  Well, actually, not that much, just an Alito manifesto that cited a 17^th Century witch-hunter to take away women’s right to choose, leaving it to the states and in nearly half the states, abortion is illegal or severely restricted, supposedly for religious reasons, of course.   And you thought we had freedom of religion.  So did I. 

In the first hearing last week, the state of Idaho claimed that it should not have to treat pregnant women who claimed to need an abortion, until they were near death (or some such nonsense, their argument was really not clear, but it didn’t matter to the conservatives).  It was clear to me that the woman’s life, in the conservatives’ eyes would/should be irrelevant.  It was not possible to figure out what the justices wanted or what the  state’s lawyer in the court wanted either, but one can guess.  What will be the next target for further harming women?  It is guaranteed there will be one because people who get off on cruelty have to keep going, and these guys will.  

When the “Trump immunity hearing” opened, it was clear at least most of the conservative justices were entertaining giving immunity to Donald Trump, whining that if they didn’t, future presidents would be hard put to do their jobs (it’s unclear what they thought those future presidents’ duties would involve that would require immunity).  Should one be immune from leading a coup, from stealing documents and sharing them with unauthorized people, imprisoning or even killing an opponent?   Would presidential immunity cover putting people in concentration camps, deporting 11 million people who have lived here for decades, calling out the National Guard to attack protesters, undermining our democracy, destroying our foreign relations including letting Israel do whatever it wants to the Palestinians and Putin to do whatever he wants to Ukraine?  The last set is not hypothetical because those are things along with a whole lot more, that Donald Trump, candidate has said he plans to do on his first day in office as dictator. 

It is hard to believe the conservative justices are not aware of the rantings of Donald Trump, a man with no ideas, and even less of a moral compass than they have.  Then, there’s Trump’s dementia and delusions of grandeur.  He needs his handlers just to function at all.  I admit I was surprised when Justice Barrett spoke up slightly challenging the lawyers who were asking essentially for freedom to let women die rather than let them have a needed abortion.  She did ask a mild question about a problem with giving  Trump immunity.  Being female, her questions were essentially ignored as were those of the other female justices who had far better questions and comments than the men. 

The Idaho and Trump lawyers’ presentations were pathetic and just plain wrong-headed, but the points made by the male justices were inept as were their  questions.  The hearings were very hard  to listen to.  I kept thinking “this is the 21^st century, how are either of these cases being argued now?”  We have a 40-year law on the books called EMTALA (the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act).   However, politicians in Idaho and other states are arguing that their strict anti-abortion laws and in whatever way they choose to prosecute them supersede federal law.  If the Supremes agree with that insanity, it would mean hospitals would be forced to turn away pregnant patients, denying them crucial, life-saving care.  Too bad, gals, a bunch of old white “Christian” men don’t care if you live or die, just that you keep that fetus inside your body for the right length of time, you know, the time those ignorant men decide for you.  After that, you’re on your own until you get pregnant again.  Oh yes, don’t ask for any help raising that baby even if it has extreme disabilities because it must be your fault.

Our congress needs to wake up and begin serious SC reforms before they drag us out of our democracy into something none of us should want to contemplate.  They are working on it.  Their delaying tactics to keep Donald Trump from being tried for inciting insurrection and stealing documents proves they care nothing for this nation and keeping us safe from a power-crazy sociopathic liar, cheat, and dictator wannabee.  I have to wonder, what do they get from it those rogue justices?