May 6, 2022
Dear interested Readers,
Surprised and Disappointed Again in Strange Times
It’s been another tough week in Ukraine, especially in Mariupol, and not so pleasant here. It has been a week with at least one huge surprise. I can remember halcyon days when a surprise was usually something positive. Maybe I am misremembering the past, but over the last several years I can remember several surprises that were very disappointing. Perhaps it all started on election night in 2016 when I was surprised by Hillary Clinton’s loss. In May of 2017, I was surprised when Trump fired Jim Comey. Come to think of it the only positive surprise I can remember between 2017 and Joe Biden’s election in November 2020 was that dramatic moment late in the evening on July 27, 2017, when John McCain sunk the Republican attempts to repeal the ACA with the downturn of his thumb.
Shall I run a list of surprises for you? We certainly were surprised by Trump’s Access Hollywood interview with Billy Bush, not that it made any difference. We were surprised by Trump’s strange conversation with Putin in Finland in 2018. I would still love to know what they talked about, but afterward, Trump said that he believed Putin and he was sure that the Russians had not interfered with our 2016 election.
There were so many surprises during Trump’s four years in office. One big surprise for me was that he survived two impeachments. Another was that he was able to tell 30,573 lies over four years and then expected that we would believe him when he said the election was stolen and he really won. No surprise was bigger than the attack on the Capital on January 6, 2021. There have been many surprises in the aftermath of January 6, 2021, not the least of which has been the recent revelation of the self-serving behavior of Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell.
In retrospect, Trump was not the only origin of negative surprises in recent memory. Who would have imagined that after two years we would still suffer from and be divided by an aggressive pathogen and a confusing pandemic? In the last month, I have had one granddaughter, two sons, and a daughter-in-law contract COVID infections despite being fully vaccinated and boosted. Worse than my family’s experience is that it is estimated that vaccine reluctance/disinformation may be the cause of almost a quarter of a million of the million deaths in America caused so far by the pandemic. What a strange and disappointing surprise.
I am not sure if we can call Putin’s invasion of Ukraine a surprise. He did invade and steal Crimea in 2014. He did make many speeches and wrote a long paper about how Ukraine was really a part of Russia. He spent several weeks massing his forces on the northern border of Ukraine. Yet most of us were really surprised when he did pull the trigger. There have been some other strange but positive surprises since Thursday, February 24. We have been surprised by the bravery and effectiveness of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian Army. We have been surprised by the huge displacements in Ukraine. At least ten million Ukrainians have been driven from their homes and over five million are now refugees in other countries. Back in early February would you ever have imagined that possibility? We have been surprised by the cohesion of NATO and the willingness of eastern European countries to accept refugees. On the downside, we have been horrified and surprised by Russian war crimes.
Obviously, this week’s big surprise was the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion apparently supported by Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, that Roe is unconstitutional. It is amazing that we have the capacity to be amazed by what we should obviously expect. Back in 2017, I asked a close family member to explain voting for Trump despite his obvious character flaws. I got the answer in a split second without an apology, “He will appoint conservative judges.” That he did. The federal bench is now stocked with incompetent conservative judges like the one who banned mandated masks on public transportation. The biggest surprise was that Trump ended up with three opportunities to make appointments to the Supreme Court. We all know that his first appointment rightly belonged to President Obama, and based on that reasoning his third appointment belonged to President Biden. The crime that allowed Justice Gorsuch to be on the Supreme Court belongs to Mitch McConnell. The confirmation of Justice Barrett was also an act of political thievery by McConnell. He reversed the “rule” that he proclaimed when he denied the confirmation of Merrick Garland and shamelessly pushed through the nomination of Justice Barrett in the fading hours of a soon to be defeated president. In between those slick moves, Brett Kavanaugh got a seat on the Supreme Court by convincing Senator Susan Collins that Roe v. Wade was “settled law.” This week Senator Collins whined:
“When I met with Justice Kavanaugh before his confirmation hearings, he looked me in the eye and said that he considered Roe v. Wade the law of the land,” she said. “Nothing in his confirmation hearings suggested that he would ever be less than trustworthy with a woman.”
I am pretty sure that Senator Collins was paying some attention to the issues discussed in Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, where the most significant concern was whether or not in a drunken state as a young man he had molested a young woman at a party. In the end, his defense was “I like beer.” It may be true that on reflection Senator Collins will admit that the only completely honest thing Kavanaugh said at his confirmation hearing was that he liked beer.
She was surprised! Only the most naive individual would have not suspected that these three justices were carefully picked with the expectation that they would be willing to vote to undo almost 50 years of settled law. Once again, some surprises should have been expectations. The only surprises this time around were the fact that the draft was leaked, and that the legal reasoning was so disputable.
If you would like to read the opinion for yourself, here is the link to the Politico article that exposed the draft last Monday evening. There are plenty of scholarly comments about the holes in Justice Alito’s analysis, but I favor Jill Lapore’s comments in The New Yorker about his historical argument.
In the draft, Justice Samuel Alito repeatedly cites the Fourteenth Amendment, which specifies that any right conferred by its due-process clause must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” The right to an abortion—which Roe v. Wade and its successor, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, ascribed to the due-process clause—has no such roots, Alito argues. “Until the latter part of the 20th century,” he writes, “there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Zero. None.” Alito is entirely correct that, in 1973, the Supreme Court was somewhat out of step with its time in codifying women’s rights. When Roe was decided, a married woman in the United States needed her husband’s permission to get a credit card, something that did not change until 1974. No state outlawed marital rape until 1975. No man was found liable for sexual harassment until 1977. Pregnancy was a fireable offense until 1978. Alito does not itemize forms of gender-based subjugation that persisted after Roe, many of which might be persuasively argued as “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” But the history of such discrimination offers helpful context for why some conservatives might have seen the legalization of abortion—and the freedom that it conferred on women—as so radical, so potentially destructive to the social order, that they would spend nearly fifty years working toward its reversal.
Professor Lapore has been my favorite historian since I read her amazing 2018 presentation of American history, These Truths. She continues to respond to Justice Alito’s cramped view of history and his tortured conclusions to support his bias.
Other, more recent Supreme Court decisions have rested on the presumption of a right to privacy in the due-process clause—Lawrence v. Texas, for example, which struck down so-called sodomy laws across the country, or Obergefell v. Hodges, which enshrined the right to same-sex marriage. Some conservatives viewed these progressive victories in the same apocalyptic terms as they did Roe, and some progressive activists are legitimately concerned that, if finalized, the decision in Dobbs will open the door to dismantling L.G.B.T.Q. rights.
She states my argument much better than I do:
If a majority of the Supreme Court decrees that Roe is, at its core, a subversion of American democracy, then there is some symmetry in the fact that four of the five Justices voting to end it were appointed by men who won the Presidency despite losing the popular vote, that three of them were appointed by a man who was twice impeached, and that one was appointed to an essentially stolen seat.
The overriding reality is that Roe may have been decided in 1973 before a lot of issues that we now accept and that the Supreme Court has confirmed were settled. What is also true is that over almost fifty years Roe has gained significant majority support in this country. Abortion, gay marriage, and interracial marriage may still be abhorrent to a minority of Americans, but over the intervening years, a significant majority of Americans have developed the expectation and belief that there are some very personal decisions that belong to the individual and not the government. We now see that a very committed minority can patiently and skillfully use the courts in conjunction with the electoral college to usurp the individual rights of the majority. You are probably in for another “strange surprise” sometime in the future if you think that the reproductive rights of women are the only possible target of this minority.
The downstream pain and suffering of Alito’s decision are hard to fully imagine. We can expect that the poor of both genders will suffer. Poor children will suffer. Women with resources will still get abortions until the foes of abortion figure out how to make their objections apply to all states. If that ever happens some will have the resources to go abroad. It is expected that there will be difficulties with access to care in the states where abortion will still be an option because of the demand from the states where abortion is banned. Kaiser Health News gives us a dark view of the post-Roe world.
If abortion is criminalized across the U.S., “it will not stop women from having abortions,” she added. “Before abortion was legal, women went through extreme means, often risking their life and fertility to get abortions. We have other options now, but it’s not going to dissuade women from seeking abortions.”
Anti-abortion lawmakers and activists have vowed to go further than state-level bans, including barring women from traveling out of state for abortions. Anti-abortion and religious groups have embarked on a full-throttle push for Congress to enact a federal ban that would outlaw the procedure in all 50 states.
This year has been a retreat from reason on many fronts. It amazes me that during the pandemic the child tax credit lifted 3.7 million children, 30% of the children in poverty, out of poverty. Then on December 31, 2021, they dropped like a stone back into poverty when President Biden’s American Families Plan ran into the twisted reasoning of Joe Manchin. Through my own work with two charitable non-profits in my community, I saw the benefit that was gained and then lost with the child tax credit.
Almost three years ago, I presented the message and enthusiasm of a militant Catholic nun, Sister Joan Chittister in a discussion of the social determinants of health. I lifted a quote from her at that time. Read her comment which I have copied below with the idea of poor women and children as the object of her concern:
God’s passionate love for those victimized by the systems of “this world” is the foundation of “the law and the prophets,”…prophets as radical critics of the economic exploitation and systemic violence of the domination systems of their time proclaimed God’s passion, God’s dream, for a world of justice and peace in which everybody had enough, war was no more, and nobody needed to be afraid.
In the aftermath of the leak of Justice Alito’s draft opinion, there has been no shortage of outrage documented in all forms of media. My wife has long contended that the pro-lifers were not really interested in life, they were interested in birth. Most of the same conservative voices who demand that every fetus have a chance to be poor have no interest in making sure that those babies, their mothers, their families, and their communities benefit equally in the opportunities that should be available to all in our society. I think that it is likely that many of our states that are eager to force women to have babies they can’t support don’t offer equivalent benefits to most families in poverty that match the generosity that Poland is offering Ukrainian refugees.
This week my wife discovered a mime on Facebook that underlined the reality that “pro-life” really meant “pro-birth.” When I asked my wife to show me the post I realized that Sister Chittister was the person being quoted. In a 2004 interview with Bill Moyers (you should see it) she said:
“I do not believe that just because you are opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, a child educated, a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.”
I have been reading Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s last book which he wrote in 1967, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? By 1967, Dr.King was already feeling the backlash from white Americans to the Civil Rights Movement from the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voter Rights Act of 1965. Those acts were passed by Congress and then signed by President Johnson. By 1967, even Dr. King’s progressive white supporters were signaling that they thought the fight was over and they had other things to do. Justice Alito might acknowledge that civil rights for African Americans and women were not accepted at the time the Constitution was written and have been under attack ever since just like abortion rights which were created by the Supreme Court. What is now obviously justice and productive social change should not need to depend on what most Americans were thinking in the late seventeen hundreds.
I do not know if this moment of outrage will result in some miracle that changes the votes of a couple of the justices who had signaled that they would vote to reverse Roe. I do believe that in time women will gain their uncontested reproductive rights. I hope that in time we will achieve all the forms of social equity after birth that Dr. King died trying to make possible and that Sister Chittister advocates. We still have a very long way to travel, and the road will be even longer if we keep getting surprised by wrong turns that we should have seen coming.
Putting On Spring Slowly While Thinking About Mothers
Last Sunday was a gorgeous spring day without a cloud in the sky. My wife and I enjoyed a ride across Vermont to a “vintage market” that was laid out on the grounds of the state fair in Rutland. There wasn’t much to see, but we had a good hot dog and creamy soft-serve ice cream that was made with rich cream from a Vermont dairy. Between the eats and the drive over, it was a day well spent.
The trip is quite scenic. It’s about thirty miles north up Interstate 89 from my house to the Connecticut River. Once you cross the Connecticut River between Lebanon, New Hampshire, and White River Junction, Vermont it is just a few miles further north to Route 4 where you turn west toward Woodstock, Killington, and Rutland. Route 4 is a nice drive. In just a few more miles you pass over Vermont’s “Little Grand Canyon,” the Queeche Gorge. The gorge was carved by the Ottauquechee River and from the gorge, you follow the river through Woodstock toward Killington and Pico Peak. The skiers are gone now. The resorts look like ghost towns. From the empty ski lifts, it is a short ride down the mountain to Rutland. Sunday felt like spring. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were dreary, dark, and damp. One nice day out of four is about par for the course in early spring for our weather and for this year’s version of the Red Sox.
One good thing to do on a spring day that is a little too damp and chilly to be out on the water is to take a good long walk. A good friend and I got in almost six miles on Monday walking around Pleasant Lake, the other lake in my town. I briefly considered a walk in the woods on Tuesday which was a chilly overcast day without rain. There is a great trail near where I live that follows Kidder Brook which is the main source of water for my lake. Along the course of the brook which flows from a pond in the hills in a desolate area about three miles above our lake, there is a series of gorgeous little waterfalls. The trail begins at the last two falls on the brook near its inflow to the lake.
The header for this post shows those last two falls. I decided that I would save the walk in the woods for a few weeks until I had a nicer day, but I drove to the trailhead to take a picture of the falls for this letter. When I arrived I was surprised to find a large log blocking the trail. There was a sign that said that regrettably the trial was closed because of “damage from overuse.” Strange? How can a trail be overused? It seems that this week has had a variety of strange surprises.
Mother’s Day is Sunday. I lost my mother in January 2013. I can add to the list of what is strange the sense that I have thought more about her since she has been gone than ever before. She comes to me in some fashion every day. My feelings are a mixture of regret that I did not spend more time with her when I could have, thankfulness for all that she did for me, and a continuing feeling that she is still with me. My last hours with her were at a lovely hospice facility that is in a wooded parklike setting at the base of Kennesaw Mountain just north of Atlanta. Our family had been sitting around her bed for days. She was essentially aphasic. For several hours before she died the only thing she could say was, “I will see you in heaven.” That kind of vigil can be tiring, and one’s mind wanders. At one moment I looked out the window and started daydreaming about going for a walk up the mountain as I had done the day before with my brother. When I turned back to her, she was gone.
Since the war in Ukraine began almost every evening on the news we have seen mothers and mothers-to-be struggling to protect their children. Those scenes are a dramatic reminder of the reality that mothers are always ready to give everything, even their lives, to give their children a better chance to thrive. Mothers are the most essential providers of healthcare. There is nothing more important or more inspiring than motherhood.
I hope that the sun will shine on you this weekend and that you might enjoy some moments with your mother whether or not she is still with you. I know that I will.
Be well,
Gene
