Good (early) morning, everyone! My routine is thrown off at the moment; I would normally be leaving the gym right about now, but my husband and stepkids are out of town. My little guy is sleeping, and I am (seriously) making my own coffee instead of going to the 7-Eleven across the street from the gym.
I have also been knitting! Socks for a coworker, mostly...he has big feet, so I am throwing a different color in the heels and possibly toes just in case it looks like I will run out of yarn.
The pattern which landed in the back of my friend Allie Pleiter's book, Knit or Dye Trying, also has a Super-Secret Symmetrical Sisters Washcloth, and the three-washcloth pattern can be found on Ravelry. This is the original one, but when it was finished, I thought it was too symmetrical. It was based on the idea that the sister relationship is a bit off-center, so I went back and made an off-center version for the book. You can see it on the Ravelry page or in my previous blog post.
Anyway, being a single mom for the weekend has given me plenty of time to think, to look at my almost-four-year-old son and wonder if I am being too strong, or not strong enough, of a feminist role model for him. I have also spent plenty of time contemplating the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Disclosure to any newbies who may have wandered here: I am not an attorney, a judge, or a Supreme Court Justice. I am not a PhD in public policy. I am not anything, really. But I do spend a lot of time verifying things I read on the internet, using sources I know that still spend a great deal of time corroborating their stories' sources and checking facts. I am also a very, very vocal advocate for proper news sites, because indoctrination is a powerful media tool, and it has convinced extremists everywhere that the media can just hide big events from people. In a world where everyone at any major media event, great or small, has a video camera in their pocket. Come on, man.
Anyway, this may sound a bit tinfoil-hat-ish coming from me, but anyone who knows me can vouch for the fact that I am not a conspiracy girl.
First, there is a reason that ruling was handed down on Friday, even though opinions are typically handed down on Tuesday and Wednesday (this is per the Supreme Court's own website). In other words, I am certain I am not the only person spending the weekend thinking about the horrific ramifications of this case while the Justices are long gone from the bench, the Court, and probably even Washington, DC this weekend.
The US Constitution is a funny thing. Seriously. It actually has the phrase "white man" in it. When Roe was originally opined in 1973, it was based on the 14th Amendment, due process and privacy. When it was overturned, it was based on the 10th amendment, government overreach. The ruling, as any pretty-far-to-the-right Republican lawmaker will tell you, is based on the fact that it was ruled incorrectly in the first place, and that the federal government has no business making decisions that should be in the hands of the states. But, this is where the last decade becomes extremely important in our history.
The United States Constitution is based on white men who own property having all the rights in the world. Don't believe me? Skip over the amendments directly related to the Office of the President (and, as long as we are dreaming, the establishment of the senate). On its own, that makes sense because that's how the world was in the 1770's and 1780's. On the other hand, there have been little stakes pounded into the ground over the years to hold onto that tent, and the past decade has seen a ton of these. And it all stems on taxation without representation.
In 1929, the number of Representatives, and therefore the number of electoral college votes, was capped due to the government not wanting to do things like reconfigure office space and provide staffing for more people who would be representing their people. Since then. the population has more than tripled, but the same 435 House seats remain. This is why the census is a big deal.
In 2020, the census was a shit show (sorry, but there is no other way to word it). It was literally at the start of the pandemic, a citizen question was added (instead of asking a person's place of birth) at a time when people have had fear instilled in them over border security, people died and were made homeless in droves, and the response rate had initially been 4% lower despite people being able to respond on the internet, causing more work for the agency to verify addresses at a time where getting help in that agency was a challenge.
So we now have a census that was a shit show, and the same 435 people representing over 700,000 citizens each, instead of the just-over-200,000 per Representative that we had in 1929. We have people of "questionable citizenship" not being counted. And we have a population threshold per state for this allocation.
Side-note: there have been 1.1 million excess deaths in this country since the pandemic started. By 2020 census numbers, that is 1.5 Congressional seats in today's figures (if using the metric system isn't your thing).
Moving on, Senator McConnell has stated that, basically, his life's work has come to fruition by blanketing the country with conservative judges. How that works continues to be a mystery to me, as the courts should be a place where interpretation of the laws and statutes should not have a political lean, but be that as it may, McConnell is very proud of his record. Then, voting rights have basically been stripped of people all over the country in conservative states. Broad statement, I know, but let me explain it this way: if you live in a state where your lower-than-middle class district was gerrymandered, and you are no longer allowed to vote by mail, and you work two jobs where neither of the bosses have reminded you that you cannot be fired by going to the polls on election day during your work day, do you think you are going to vote?
Okay, so there is that as well.
Felons can't vote. But they are not exempt from paying their taxes. Taxation without representation.
Our prisons are filled with people of color who are incarcerated for things that white people get incarcerated for at a much lower percentage. No representation. Oh, and if you actually believe people of color are committing this many more crimes than white people, then do your research through academic sources, and not the talking heads on your favorite conservative cable news channel.
And now, literally more than half of women in this country, a quarter of the population, will be living in a state where they are unable to seek the healthcare they need because the providers are gone. I should note here that almost all of these laws are designed to punish the abortion provider and not the woman, but women are already being punished because...I mean...if a woman can't go to her doctor to terminate her pregnancy, then do you think she is just going to carry it to term and raise it and live happily ever after? The short answer, generally, is "of course not." And why should she?
Except now, the person aborting the fetus is the person getting punished. Which means if an unsafe abortion is performed, it can be blamed on the mother. In Texas, it is a first-degree felony if the fetus dies (side-note: laws written by non-doctors tend to involve language like this, as the fetus is not alive or dead in the same timeline or way a person is alive or dead, just like the "week-limit" abortion bans are not written in a way which conveys gestational age versus implantation).
Then, our previous president appointed three justices to the Supreme Court after the previous president was blocked from appointing one for his vacancy. The previous president told us in his campaign that he wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade. So if you are keeping track, we have a Congress that did not want to expand because it was too expensive, a population boom, people of color and poor people continuing to be incarcerated and not counted in the census, and now women being set up to be felons.
The amendments to the document, again excluding the ones specifically about the branches of government, are often to grant people rights that our founding fathers did not see necessary to grant rights (voting and citizenship, among other things). Supreme Court rulings have often granted people protections to the rights of life, liberty, and property as stated in the US Constitution, but being anything but a white man often requires that extra layer of protection. Like it or not, I should be able to own my own body as property, and that includes anything inside of it that is attached to me. If I choose to not get treated for cancer, that is a decision between me and my doctor. If I choose to terminate a pregnancy, that is a decision between me and my doctor. I should be entitled to medical privacy, and my doctor should be trusted to First, Do No Harm. Perhaps the medical doctors know more about biology than the writers and editors of the US Constitution?
If the US Constitution is not amended, then "government overreach" and that 10th amendment allows the white male land-owners in charge of us to interpret that document exactly as it was intended in the 1700's, so only the white male land-owners get everything. Seriously. If it weren't for the US Constitution being amended, black people are not full people even though biologists, medical doctors, historians, eye-witness testimonies, and common sense tells us otherwise.
Read that again.
And guess what? The same thing will be happening to women (Roe, and then possibly Griswold and Eisenstadt), non-straight people (Obergefell), and possibly interracial couples (Loving), if Clarence Thomas were to either die or divorce his spouse. The US Constitution was set up to be a frame for the country, and while I used to think we were on the right path to progress, it is clear that, in the last decade, the people of power have been masters at preserving white supremacy and misogyny. And I am not having it.
