Tag: Abortion

12 “memorable” quotes from Antonin Scalia

Published on by khalper1 Comment

Antonin_Scalia_Official_SCOTUS_Portrait (2)

Originally posted February 14, 2016 on RawStory

Conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, who spent decades warning the nation about the flagpole-sitting nature of homosexuality, died of natural causes on Friday at a luxury resort in Texas. He was 79.

Death is always sad. I feel bad for his family. And it’s not time to talk about politics. (Unless you’re a Republican who really wants to honor Scalia’s memory by using his death to push for a totally unheard of postponement of his replacement so it happens after Obama leaves office.)

But it might be time to memorialize the man through rounding up some of the most memorable things he ever said or wrote.

1.Homosexuality: It’s a lot like murder!  Romer v. Evans challenged a Colorado amendment which banned outlawing anti-gay discrimination (I know, I have a headache, too) in 1993. Justice Scalia expressed his sympathy for the people of Colorado, who wanted nothing more than to protect themselves from gay sex like they would from murder:

The Court’s opinion contains… hints that Coloradans have been guilty of ‘animus’ or ‘animosity’ toward homosexuality, as though that has been established as Unamerican. . . . I had thought that one could consider certain conduct reprehensible–murder, for example, or polygamy, or cruelty to animals–and could exhibit even ‘animus’ toward such conduct.

2. Homosexuality: it’s a lot  like incest! The Supreme Court struck down a Texas ban on sodomy in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas. Amazingly, Scalia’s murder comparison had not convinced his colleagues of the danger posed by the gays. So he tried again. Only this time, with a different analogy.

States continue to prosecute all sorts of crimes by adults “in matters pertaining to sex”: prostitution, adult incest, adultery, obscenity, and child pornography

3. Homosexuality: it’s a lot like flagpole sitting! To his credit, Scalia would try, time and time again, to use the power of simile to enlighten his colleagues. Within the same dissent, he pointed out that not everything was a right just because it had once been illegal. The act he chose to use to demonstrate is a great American pastime:

Suppose that all the states had laws against flagpole sitting at one time [which they then overturned].Does that make flagpole sitting a fundamental right?

4. Legalizing same-sex marriage: nothing more than ‘fortune cookie justice.’  When the Court legalized same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, Scalia lamented that,

The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.

5. Legalizing same-sex marriage: nothing more than pretentious, egomaniacal ‘fortune cookie justice.’ In the same dissent, he described the majority opinion as being,

couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic.

6. ladies: not protected by the Constitution. Scalia didn’t limit himself to reactionary ideologies based on sexual orientation. Ironically, his bigotry embraced the diversity and equality that, he claimed, the Constitution lacked. During a 2011 interview with California Lawyer, Scalia said,

Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws.

Continue Reading…

The Notorious RBG talks ‘unconscious bias,’ abortion, and push-ups

Published on by khalperLeave a comment
Image via Wikipedia
Image via Wikipedia
Originally posted on Feministing

In an exclusive interview that appeared on The Rachel Maddow show on Monday, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, feminist hero, and Tumblr sensation Ruth Bader Ginsburg talked to MSNBC’s Irin Carmon, sharing her thoughts on abortion, her push-up routine, and how she describes President in Obama in one word.

See the video here…
Here are some of the greatest moments from their discussion…

On unconscious bias:

…what’s still with us and harder to deal with is what I call unconscious bias. And my best example is the symphony orchestra. When I was growing up, one never saw a woman in the symphony orchestra, except perhaps playing the harp. People who should have known better like The New York Times critic, Howard Taubman said, “You could put a blindfold on him and he could tell you whether it’s a woman playing the piano or a man.”

Someone had the simple idea, “Let’s drop a curtain. Let’s drop a curtain between the people who are auditioning and the people who are judging.” And almost overnight, there was a sea change. Once the curtain was dropped, the testers couldn’t tell whether it was a man – or a woman. And they made their judgments based on the quality of the performance.

Some years ago, when I was telling this story, a young violinist told me, “You left out something.” “Well, what? What did I leave out?” “You left out that we auditioned shoeless, so they won’t hear a woman’s heels behind the curtain.” That device of the dropped curtain isn’t so easy to duplicate in other areas.

On abortion access:

It’s not true that it’s [abortion] inaccessible to women of means. And that’s the crying shame. We will never see a day when women of means are not able to get a safe abortion in this country…. It hurts women who lack the means to go someplace else… all the restrictions, they operate against the woman who doesn’t have freedom to move, to go where she is able to get safely what she wants.

On how she does 20 pushups: “We do ten at a time. And then I breathe for a bit and do the second set.”

On what she hopes young women take away from her work:

I would like them to have the enthusiasm that we had in the ’70s – determining that the law should catch up to the changes that have occurred in society, changes in the way people whatever, the realization that no one should be held back, boy or girl – because of gender, artificial gender barriers. That everyone should be – in the words of a wonderful song that Ms. Magazine popularized, everyone should be free to be you and me.

On the one word that comes to mind when she hears the name President Obama: “Sympathy. That’s a French word. It means more than sympathetic. It means who cares about other people.”

Read the rest of the interview here.

New study shows that sharing abortion stories changes people’s minds

Published on by khalperLeave a comment

Screen Shot 2014-12-23 at 1.36.40 PM

A new study shows that when anti-choice people hear in person accounts from women who have had abortions, they are more likely to start supporting reproductive freedom. 

A public opinion research team led by UCLA doctoral candidate Michael LaCour has already demonstrated how door-to-door canvassing can change people’s opinions on LGBT issues. A study from earlier this month, for instance, determined that when conservatives talked to an LGBT canvasser for 20 minutes, they became more supportive of LGBT rights and remained supportive even nine months later.

Now, the same research team has started working with Planned Parenthood and is looking at the effect of talking to canvassers who have had abortions and those who haven’t. The preliminary results show that in-person conversations with both groups of volunteers lead to increased support of legalizing abortion. In initial surveys, 39 percent of voters said they supported legal abortion access but after talking with the volunteers support reached almost 50 percent.

Ant the effect of speaking with the volunteers who had had abortions was even stronger. For instance, people who spoke to that group were more likely to tell other members of their households about their conversations. In addition, after the Supreme Court struck down Massachusetts’ buffer zone around abortion clinics, anti-abortion attitudes were strengthened among most participants except for those who had spoken to a volunteer who had discussed her own abortion. As LaCour explains, “This finding suggests that discussion at the doorstep affected the way in which people subsequently received and interpreted the news.”

Just a reminder that the personal is very much political, and telling abortion stories can be powerful.

Originally posted on Feministing

National Review hack wants to hang women who abort because sanctity of life

Published on by khalperLeave a comment

Screen Shot 2014-09-30 at 3.27.25 AM

It’s not every day that you see such a moving and consistent plea to respect the sanctity of life. But Sunday was one of those days. Because that’s when National Review “writer” Kevin Williamson stated that women who have abortions should be hanged. It all started when Williamson wrote a screed against Lena Dunham which was so catty that I’m forced to deduce that he holds her responsible for getting his show Boys, about a group of men who write for The National Review, bumped off of HBO. He both critiqued Dunham for being self-obsessed and assuming that people cared about her sex life while, at the very same time, proving her point that he does indeed obsess about her sex life.

Williamson started out his hysterical diary entry by calling Dunham “distinctly unappealing” and dismissing her recent article which is unabashedly pro-voting and pro-women’s rights (two things that Williamson can’t, apparently, stand) as “a half-assed listicle penned by a half-bright celebrity and published by a gang of abortion profiteers.”

Miss Dunham’s “all about me!” attitude toward the process of voting inevitably extends to the content of what she votes for, which is, in her telling, mostly about her sex life. Hammering down hard on the Caps Lock key, she writes: “The crazy and depressing truth is that there are people running for office right now who could actually affect your life. PARTICULARLY your sex life. PARTICULARLY if you’re a woman. Yup.”

Yup? Nope.

But, like Dan Savage himself says, it gets better. What happened next was that a very logical person on twitter, @LeveyIsLaw, pointed out the contradiction between Williamson’s whole “only someone who suffers from ‘all about me’ disease would think I care at all about your sex life. P.S. I care about your sex life, like, a lot,” argument:

This is strange: “We do not wish to be involved in your sex life” and a rant against abortion in the same article?

He then asked Williamson to flesh out his moral argument against abortion, tweeting, “Do you think it’s morally acceptable to kill doctors who are about to perform abortions? Should women who have abortions get life without parole? If your answer to either question is no, you don’t think abortion is murder.”

To this, Williamson responded “I have hanging more in mind.”

Screen Shot 2014-09-30 at 2.48.20 AM

And it just got better from there. Continue reading “National Review hack wants to hang women who abort because sanctity of life” →