Yeah, last Thursday one of my (Indiana) two Senators, Todd Young, showed locally for a fundraiser and was greeted by about 60 pro abortion protestors. I know it’s popular among the kewl liberal set to dismiss all this and say it won’t matter in November. I think they’re wrong.
We had a decent sized one in Rochester, NY. Good high energy and in-your-face speakers, heavy on the intersectionality. Lots of reminders that poor and POC and LGBTQ+ will be affected the most, as they always are. Our (white, male, middle aged) congressman was there, not a firebrand but a decent Dem. They only let him have the mike to lead a MY BODY MY CHOICE chant. Wide age spectrum, and quite a few men (mine came with me, and ran into a guy from his band). Saw a dad who brought his two young teen girls, and when we were walking in, we heard a young twenty-something say to her sister "Look -- there's Grandma." About a dozen anti-choice protesters stood across the street, saying the rosary or whatever. They had signs like IF YOU'RE PREGNANT WE WILL HELP YOU. Oh yeah? For 18 years?
I agree that the biggest tell showing conservatives realize this could bite them in the ass is the fact the smarter, smoother ones aren't taking a victory lap but are trying to downplay the significance.
And it's absolutely vital we don't let them get away with that. Roe and women's bodily autonomy are vital in and of themselves, but Roe will also be just the first domino to fall. They are planning to come for everything.
My guess is in the red states they think they've got such a lock on power that they can't be dislodged, and in other states women won't care because it's not happening to them, because most Republicans can't even conceive of being motivated out of concern for others. I think both of those things are miscalculations on the order of "Ukraine will be a pushover", but we'll see.
I'm sure they'd like to think that, but every time some place like Louisiana votes on some law that would imprison women for ectopic pregnancy or some such shit, it's going to be a headline. Of course our Dem reps probably won't try and make an issue of it for "civility".
Turning down the volume is irrelevant since it’s what their voters want and have wanted for years. It’s just the volume; there’ll be no meaningful disavowal.
The famously nonverbal Clarence Thomas airing his infinite sense of victimhood to torture-defender John Yoo at length is Günter Grass level symbolism. Thomas’ defensiveness is impenetrable - can one imagine him ever connecting his deletion of “militia” from the Second Amendment with the slaughter in a Buffalo grocery store by a “heavily armed” racist? Unregulated gun owners racked up additional dead and wounded in Texas, Milwaukee and Chicago this weekend thanks to dead Tony and soulless Clarence, a not-coincidental bookend to the Court’s intention to insert itself into medical decisions during pregnancy. No sensible country would leave power in the hands of these sociopaths, but in other news, gas is expensive and formula hard to find, so vote Republican.
One news report about one of the THREE mass shootings in Milwaukee that occurred on the same night (the one that ended with 17 people shot) said the cops arrested 10 people and confiscated 10 guns. If the cops can so easily pull 10 handguns out of a crowd like that, what percentage of the crowd must be carrying? And at what percentage can we call it a militia?
'Pharisee Rabbinism' is up there in the survey, along with 'Mystery Babylon', 'Talmudism', 'Khazarite', and any combination of any two or more of them.
I hadn't either, raised secular Protestant Christian, but when I started using the term "Pharisee" in 2016, more than a few Jewish friends of mine said it had been often used as a blanket condemnation of Judaism by anti-Semitic Christian groups & ministers.
It's what happens when one appropriates an in-group doctrinal conversation as the source of one's faith...
Christianity has always seemed like a Pharisee/Zealot cross, which jibes with the Pharisees' not looking good in their scriptures—nothing like feuds between ideological neighbours, in this case vying for the 'want an afterlife' demographic.
The Sadducee were notable for not really believing in 0.) much of a life after death or 1.) any kind of leniency in administering Biblically-mandated punishments. The latter jibes well with a lot of religionists of all faiths—yes, even some Buddhists—but the former nukes Christianity's nearly Unique Value Prposition: 'Believing in us is better than Hank torturing you forever.'.
Roy, I’m repeatedly on record of being meh on the issue of the masses demonstrating and thereby causing change -- documented not to have worked in over fifty years, Nam peace demos was the last time it did.
So what I wonder is whether at least at your demo there were any efforts at organizing, mobilization to, you know, get some actual power either electorally or to get some agency-through-numbers to get some control over people’s lives. To overly simplify things, there’s a huge problem with excessive passivity among the masses so, you know, anything that empowers engagement is the way.
And of course if any of y’all have anything to report from elsewhere, thanks.
One of the guys who comes to Planned Parenthood frequently is bigtime into BLM (he's white, of course) and ACAB stuff. This is the guy who thinks we shouldn't ever call the cops and if they show up, we should all start chanting "Off the pigs!" or some such shit. Pointing out that 9 times out of 10 the cops are there to protect US FROM the nutjobs got us nowhere.
Anyway, he got pissed and said he was going to organize his own counter-protest for the next Saturday, where they would be all intersectional and shit, and protest the cops too.
Spent the next week advertising on Facebook and social media, all about his big "INTERSECTIONAL FEMINIST" event.
Come Saturday morning, he's there with his banners and signs and PA system and his buddy. Nobody else shows, and we spend most of the morning razzing them and asking if "intersectional feminism" was the kind that didn't have any women. Good times.
"The crowd (thousands, though I don’t think they hit the 17,000 they were permitted)"
Yup. Tho the crowd at the monument was pretty packed together, it was 1/3 to 1/2 the Jan6 crowd in absolute numbers (I estimated Jan6 crowd at the Ellipse about 30,000).
I was perched for awhile right near where Roy got that shot looking downslope to the stage. The thing that bothered me was how low-energy we all were during the speechifying. But later on, on the street, drowning out the stupid guys with bullhorns, the energy was up closer to where we want it, I think.
And bonus: got into the art exhibits, both the Nat Gallery and the Portrait Gallery, and there's great new stuff at both, including the exhibit Roy reviewed last week. Plus, at the Sculpture Garden, the steam calliope was beyond awesome...
A small emendation: the Women's March of January 2017 was hardly the first major repro rights march. As SCOTUS was contemplating (I think) the Casey decision a half-million people marched in D.C. in April, 1989. It was there that I decided I wanted a third child, who was born in January 1990. I was very good at getting pregnant on the first try or accidentally despite *always* using birth control. Denying an individual the right to bodily autonomy is a refusal to recognize them as *persons*, and is the very essence of slavery. I may be post-menopausal, but I feel deeply threatened.
Wakan Tanka(who I would gladly worship in a heartbeat ) or
" Coochie Police" which is perfect in every way possible.
Righties are pushing too hard. They're gonna blow it. They aren't legion. It seems like they are because the press loves them because the press is hot garbage. That being said, I've already made arrangements to be off camping on election day because I am old and my hearts liable to explode from the stress.
I stopped going to protests in the early ‘90s - because I’d gone to a zillion of them since the ‘70s - Black Power Rallies, ACT UP, pro Indigenous, Asian, Jewish, Hispanic, Latino, endangered animals, ecology, Black Lives Matter, Save The Whales, Save The Bees, against nuclear power, against the Dotard/fair elections, etc. I’m pooped!
And as I got older, and people have gotten more violent and insane, it became less fun to do with my friends. I’m very happy people still exercise this civil right, though I don’t think it’s as powerful as it was in the ‘60s.
Anyway - as an almost 60 year old Black American woman, I’m really beyond exhausted from warning White folks (mostly women) about what’s coming and to not get too comfortable…only to wind up telling those same White folks, “I told you so”, and busting my ass to help save this fucking country from itself, when this country hates me.
Anyone remember the football player, Torrold DeShaun "Rod" Smart who had “ HE HATE ME” on the back of his jersey?
Smallish crowd in Des Moines. One speaker, an accomplished black attorney talked about getting pregnant in college and deciding to have her twins. She talked of the struggle and the rewards. Yeah yeah. Cool cool. Then she said NO ONE IS PRO ABORTION. I raised my hand and pointed down at myself. I am pro abortion! I looked at my best friend and loud whispered "That's not true! That is Clinton era BULLSHIT!" Lots of head shaking in the crowd. Following speakers took that comment apart and it was great. There was a young trans man who works for a non-profit helping needy folks get healthcare. A fiery little red-headed socialist who ended her speech with Fuck The Police. The best was a young indigenous woman who also brought fire and called out us white women for our privilege. Kudos to her, the crowd was about 97% white. Due to the Hyde Act (I hope Senator Hyde is suffering somewhere) there are no legal abortions on reservations. Those speakers were pro abortion. I'm pro abortion. The WEASEL-SPEAK about what should be a safe, common and even celebrated procedure is partly why we are here now-- about to lose any right to bodily autonomy. The Court and the Republicans will not stop with abortion. Also, too.
I'm hopeful that the current crisis might force Democratic politicians to drop their general aversion to even uttering the word "abortion." I mean, I get it, "Pro-Choice" is clever if this is 1978 and you're focus-grouping phrases that might minimize the backlash, but we're in a different world now. And I wonder if "abortion" might not be such a scare-word for so much of the population if the pro-choice movement had spent some of the last 50 years getting us used to the term.
I get the reasoning behind "Pro-choice", you're saying women have a right to choose, but you're not telling them WHAT to choose, but it's such a weird formulation that we don't do for other things. We didn't say, for example, "I'm all for the right of gay people to CHOOSE to get married, with the understanding that some gay people may not choose to get married, but whatever choice they make is OK with me." We just say, "We're for gays having the right to marry", or even just "We're for gay marriage." I'm pretty sure that nobody who's not Rod Dreher would read the latter as EVERYONE IS BEING FORCED TO GAY-MARRY.
I guess when the leadership of the Democratic party is in their 70s and 80s the tepid Pro Choice language from 1978 is what they know and that probably won't change. Looking out from my old-lady perch in the Midwest the Party has always seemed lukewarm at best about abortion. It's treated like the ugly stepchild of policy but it's integral to all the rights women and other marginalized groups must have to be equal citizens.
Old habits die hard. "Safe, legal and rare" was the Dem mantra all through the Clinton years (and beyond) I can see how "Nobody's pro-abortion" could come from that. If i'm being charitable I could imagine her meaning "Nobody's happy to get an abortion" but yeah, enough of that Clintonian shit.
Nah. You don't get 10s of thousands of thinking people out on the street unless they are for something, not just against (non-thinking people, on the other hand...) And in this context, people are pro health care, of which abortion is an example.
To be fair, it was never Bill Clinton's goal to get tens of thousands of people out in the streets for ANYTHING. "Tamp down the opposition and put most everyone to sleep so I can get re-elected on a platform of school uniforms and more cops" was more like it.
I wonder how much of the criticism of intersectionality descends from the Old Left's orthodox Marxist belief that (put crudely) _only_ economics 'really' exist. Feminism was dismissed as an upper-class distraction, queer politics as a _degenerate_ distraction; racism was fought on purely strategic grounds: black Americans were particularly proletarianised and so obviously would welcome the new doctrines, and pointing-out U.S. racism was convenient in the days when the Party, like it or not, really was in the end an arm of The Homeland of Socialism. (I very much liked my Communist relatives, and their comparatively happy marriage helped firm-up my resolve that mine would be childless, as my mother said the Party told them theirs must be, true or not.)
…but racism was, in the end, still—like misogyny and the existence of queer people—just another consequence and supporting member of Capitalism, and one must fight The Real Enemy .
Interesting history there, but I don't think there could possibly be enough Old Leftists left to make up any significant part of the criticism of intersectionality. Some of it might be liberals terrified that any left-speak makes them lose elections, the rest (I think) is right-wingers doing what they always do, taking a term the left uses to define one specific thing and turning it into a general ooga-booga-word (see Race Theory, Critical).
How does this intersect with the guy who tried to recruit me into Sendero Luminoso back in the day? And, for those who know me, what could that guy have been thinking?
Funny thing is, I was in the path business then (well, trail planning and development, but same thing, right?) 'Trails Illuminated' is the branding opportunity I missed...
Just my opinion, but--within the criticism of intersectionality there's more than a little leftover Rose Twitter "the economy is the only problem" pushed by devotees of you know who. These people are almost invariably White and relatively privileged, so they don't *have* to think about intersectionality if they don't *want* to.
"They won't stop with Roe" is right. But even if you think they will, everyone should proclaim, everywhere, that they won't. Be specific: "They will outlaw all abortion everywhere. They will outlaw contraception. They will outlaw gay marriage. They will outlaw interracial marriage."
These should be shouted from the rooftops until even married couples using contraception are given pause. It doesn't matter how likely these developments are. The point is, the Court and the right have lost every speck of the benefit of the doubt. There is no doubt. They are now guilty until proven innocent--and even then I won't believe their innocence. This is a scare campaign, yes. Because now it's sensible to be scared.
Good advice, and I like to imagine Democratic politicians actually doing this, simply ASSERTING something and then putting it on the Republicans to respond however they might (instead of using "but the Republicans will say..." as a reason not to assert anything at all) and I live in the hope that I may see this happen even once before I die.
I mentioned this before, but I really do believe we'd be in a much better place right now if the Dems had settled on the message "There were exactly NINE cases of voter fraud in the United States in the 2020 election" and have handy a list of nine Republicans who fraudulently voted for Trump in case anyone wants details, and then if the Republicans want to say if was 10 or 11 of 155,000 then let them bring the fucking evidence, but in the meantime we're going with NINE.
Since the DNC is proven opposed meaningful action, I’m not sure a change in the content of the lip servicing matters in the long run. Would be wonderful to be proven wrong but…
Yeah, last Thursday one of my (Indiana) two Senators, Todd Young, showed locally for a fundraiser and was greeted by about 60 pro abortion protestors. I know it’s popular among the kewl liberal set to dismiss all this and say it won’t matter in November. I think they’re wrong.
We had a decent sized one in Rochester, NY. Good high energy and in-your-face speakers, heavy on the intersectionality. Lots of reminders that poor and POC and LGBTQ+ will be affected the most, as they always are. Our (white, male, middle aged) congressman was there, not a firebrand but a decent Dem. They only let him have the mike to lead a MY BODY MY CHOICE chant. Wide age spectrum, and quite a few men (mine came with me, and ran into a guy from his band). Saw a dad who brought his two young teen girls, and when we were walking in, we heard a young twenty-something say to her sister "Look -- there's Grandma." About a dozen anti-choice protesters stood across the street, saying the rosary or whatever. They had signs like IF YOU'RE PREGNANT WE WILL HELP YOU. Oh yeah? For 18 years?
You get ONE free bottle of baby formula. After that, get off your ass and get to work, moocher.
Sorry, should have mentioned the bottle of formula was STOLEN FROM AN IMMIGRANT BABY. Which just makes it taste that much sweeter.
I agree that the biggest tell showing conservatives realize this could bite them in the ass is the fact the smarter, smoother ones aren't taking a victory lap but are trying to downplay the significance.
And it's absolutely vital we don't let them get away with that. Roe and women's bodily autonomy are vital in and of themselves, but Roe will also be just the first domino to fall. They are planning to come for everything.
Various state legislatures are doing a fine job of showing what the future will bring. It's going to be hard for Republicans to gloss over that.
"States rights--to designate certain classes of people as 'less than'".
My guess is in the red states they think they've got such a lock on power that they can't be dislodged, and in other states women won't care because it's not happening to them, because most Republicans can't even conceive of being motivated out of concern for others. I think both of those things are miscalculations on the order of "Ukraine will be a pushover", but we'll see.
I'm sure they'd like to think that, but every time some place like Louisiana votes on some law that would imprison women for ectopic pregnancy or some such shit, it's going to be a headline. Of course our Dem reps probably won't try and make an issue of it for "civility".
Not civility. It’s apathy. They don’t care to act, haven’t for at least ~30 years.
Turning down the volume is irrelevant since it’s what their voters want and have wanted for years. It’s just the volume; there’ll be no meaningful disavowal.
The famously nonverbal Clarence Thomas airing his infinite sense of victimhood to torture-defender John Yoo at length is Günter Grass level symbolism. Thomas’ defensiveness is impenetrable - can one imagine him ever connecting his deletion of “militia” from the Second Amendment with the slaughter in a Buffalo grocery store by a “heavily armed” racist? Unregulated gun owners racked up additional dead and wounded in Texas, Milwaukee and Chicago this weekend thanks to dead Tony and soulless Clarence, a not-coincidental bookend to the Court’s intention to insert itself into medical decisions during pregnancy. No sensible country would leave power in the hands of these sociopaths, but in other news, gas is expensive and formula hard to find, so vote Republican.
One news report about one of the THREE mass shootings in Milwaukee that occurred on the same night (the one that ended with 17 people shot) said the cops arrested 10 people and confiscated 10 guns. If the cops can so easily pull 10 handguns out of a crowd like that, what percentage of the crowd must be carrying? And at what percentage can we call it a militia?
“We’ll-regulated”? I think not.
Don’t get me started on Thomasby which I mean triggering flashbacks to his confirmation hearings.
Stealing „Pharisee Christianity“
You might want to hold off -- it's largely been used in the US as an anti-semitic attack...
Really? News to me, never seen nor heard it in any context.
'Pharisee Rabbinism' is up there in the survey, along with 'Mystery Babylon', 'Talmudism', 'Khazarite', and any combination of any two or more of them.
I hadn't either, raised secular Protestant Christian, but when I started using the term "Pharisee" in 2016, more than a few Jewish friends of mine said it had been often used as a blanket condemnation of Judaism by anti-Semitic Christian groups & ministers.
It's what happens when one appropriates an in-group doctrinal conversation as the source of one's faith...
Christianity has always seemed like a Pharisee/Zealot cross, which jibes with the Pharisees' not looking good in their scriptures—nothing like feuds between ideological neighbours, in this case vying for the 'want an afterlife' demographic.
O.K. then, howzabout „the Church of the Whited Sepulchre“?
Yglesia de los Basura Blanco
Appropriate description of Matty Yglesias' writing lately
Church of the White Savior?
How about Sadducee Christianity?
Snake handlers speaking in forked tongues?
The Sadducee were notable for not really believing in 0.) much of a life after death or 1.) any kind of leniency in administering Biblically-mandated punishments. The latter jibes well with a lot of religionists of all faiths—yes, even some Buddhists—but the former nukes Christianity's nearly Unique Value Prposition: 'Believing in us is better than Hank torturing you forever.'.
Roy, I’m repeatedly on record of being meh on the issue of the masses demonstrating and thereby causing change -- documented not to have worked in over fifty years, Nam peace demos was the last time it did.
So what I wonder is whether at least at your demo there were any efforts at organizing, mobilization to, you know, get some actual power either electorally or to get some agency-through-numbers to get some control over people’s lives. To overly simplify things, there’s a huge problem with excessive passivity among the masses so, you know, anything that empowers engagement is the way.
And of course if any of y’all have anything to report from elsewhere, thanks.
Just some voter reg going on; didn't see much else, though some speakers gave out texting addresses and whatnot.
So here we go round and round, essentially running in place.
Of course,to the extent it promotes solidarity, it’s good.
One of the guys who comes to Planned Parenthood frequently is bigtime into BLM (he's white, of course) and ACAB stuff. This is the guy who thinks we shouldn't ever call the cops and if they show up, we should all start chanting "Off the pigs!" or some such shit. Pointing out that 9 times out of 10 the cops are there to protect US FROM the nutjobs got us nowhere.
Anyway, he got pissed and said he was going to organize his own counter-protest for the next Saturday, where they would be all intersectional and shit, and protest the cops too.
Spent the next week advertising on Facebook and social media, all about his big "INTERSECTIONAL FEMINIST" event.
Come Saturday morning, he's there with his banners and signs and PA system and his buddy. Nobody else shows, and we spend most of the morning razzing them and asking if "intersectional feminism" was the kind that didn't have any women. Good times.
I want that longer, and as told in Arlo Guthrie's voice.
"The crowd (thousands, though I don’t think they hit the 17,000 they were permitted)"
Yup. Tho the crowd at the monument was pretty packed together, it was 1/3 to 1/2 the Jan6 crowd in absolute numbers (I estimated Jan6 crowd at the Ellipse about 30,000).
I was perched for awhile right near where Roy got that shot looking downslope to the stage. The thing that bothered me was how low-energy we all were during the speechifying. But later on, on the street, drowning out the stupid guys with bullhorns, the energy was up closer to where we want it, I think.
And bonus: got into the art exhibits, both the Nat Gallery and the Portrait Gallery, and there's great new stuff at both, including the exhibit Roy reviewed last week. Plus, at the Sculpture Garden, the steam calliope was beyond awesome...
Oh shoot, I forgot the Kara Walker Calliope! But it's there a few more days, so good.
“If the U.S. Supreme Court is gonna be the coochie police, I’m here to defund the coochie police.”
Nee Nee Taylor FTW!
A small emendation: the Women's March of January 2017 was hardly the first major repro rights march. As SCOTUS was contemplating (I think) the Casey decision a half-million people marched in D.C. in April, 1989. It was there that I decided I wanted a third child, who was born in January 1990. I was very good at getting pregnant on the first try or accidentally despite *always* using birth control. Denying an individual the right to bodily autonomy is a refusal to recognize them as *persons*, and is the very essence of slavery. I may be post-menopausal, but I feel deeply threatened.
I can't decide which I love more -
Wakan Tanka(who I would gladly worship in a heartbeat ) or
" Coochie Police" which is perfect in every way possible.
Righties are pushing too hard. They're gonna blow it. They aren't legion. It seems like they are because the press loves them because the press is hot garbage. That being said, I've already made arrangements to be off camping on election day because I am old and my hearts liable to explode from the stress.
In our household, we follow a strict "unplug the router" policy on election nights, but camping sounds like more fun.
COOCHIE POLICE…MY NEW BAND NAME!
I stopped going to protests in the early ‘90s - because I’d gone to a zillion of them since the ‘70s - Black Power Rallies, ACT UP, pro Indigenous, Asian, Jewish, Hispanic, Latino, endangered animals, ecology, Black Lives Matter, Save The Whales, Save The Bees, against nuclear power, against the Dotard/fair elections, etc. I’m pooped!
And as I got older, and people have gotten more violent and insane, it became less fun to do with my friends. I’m very happy people still exercise this civil right, though I don’t think it’s as powerful as it was in the ‘60s.
Anyway - as an almost 60 year old Black American woman, I’m really beyond exhausted from warning White folks (mostly women) about what’s coming and to not get too comfortable…only to wind up telling those same White folks, “I told you so”, and busting my ass to help save this fucking country from itself, when this country hates me.
Anyone remember the football player, Torrold DeShaun "Rod" Smart who had “ HE HATE ME” on the back of his jersey?
That’s how I feel.
Can't argue. Me, I love these things.
I agree 1000%.
Smallish crowd in Des Moines. One speaker, an accomplished black attorney talked about getting pregnant in college and deciding to have her twins. She talked of the struggle and the rewards. Yeah yeah. Cool cool. Then she said NO ONE IS PRO ABORTION. I raised my hand and pointed down at myself. I am pro abortion! I looked at my best friend and loud whispered "That's not true! That is Clinton era BULLSHIT!" Lots of head shaking in the crowd. Following speakers took that comment apart and it was great. There was a young trans man who works for a non-profit helping needy folks get healthcare. A fiery little red-headed socialist who ended her speech with Fuck The Police. The best was a young indigenous woman who also brought fire and called out us white women for our privilege. Kudos to her, the crowd was about 97% white. Due to the Hyde Act (I hope Senator Hyde is suffering somewhere) there are no legal abortions on reservations. Those speakers were pro abortion. I'm pro abortion. The WEASEL-SPEAK about what should be a safe, common and even celebrated procedure is partly why we are here now-- about to lose any right to bodily autonomy. The Court and the Republicans will not stop with abortion. Also, too.
I'm hopeful that the current crisis might force Democratic politicians to drop their general aversion to even uttering the word "abortion." I mean, I get it, "Pro-Choice" is clever if this is 1978 and you're focus-grouping phrases that might minimize the backlash, but we're in a different world now. And I wonder if "abortion" might not be such a scare-word for so much of the population if the pro-choice movement had spent some of the last 50 years getting us used to the term.
Hmmm...yeah, maybe. And I'm pretty firmly in the camp of 'call it what it is and move on'.
I get the reasoning behind "Pro-choice", you're saying women have a right to choose, but you're not telling them WHAT to choose, but it's such a weird formulation that we don't do for other things. We didn't say, for example, "I'm all for the right of gay people to CHOOSE to get married, with the understanding that some gay people may not choose to get married, but whatever choice they make is OK with me." We just say, "We're for gays having the right to marry", or even just "We're for gay marriage." I'm pretty sure that nobody who's not Rod Dreher would read the latter as EVERYONE IS BEING FORCED TO GAY-MARRY.
I guess when the leadership of the Democratic party is in their 70s and 80s the tepid Pro Choice language from 1978 is what they know and that probably won't change. Looking out from my old-lady perch in the Midwest the Party has always seemed lukewarm at best about abortion. It's treated like the ugly stepchild of policy but it's integral to all the rights women and other marginalized groups must have to be equal citizens.
By now,you should know my response so I’m saying nothing 😉
I admire your self restraint.
Hearted for " I raised my hand and pointed down at myself"
But what a weird thing that woman said in context of the event...
Old habits die hard. "Safe, legal and rare" was the Dem mantra all through the Clinton years (and beyond) I can see how "Nobody's pro-abortion" could come from that. If i'm being charitable I could imagine her meaning "Nobody's happy to get an abortion" but yeah, enough of that Clintonian shit.
Nah. You don't get 10s of thousands of thinking people out on the street unless they are for something, not just against (non-thinking people, on the other hand...) And in this context, people are pro health care, of which abortion is an example.
To be fair, it was never Bill Clinton's goal to get tens of thousands of people out in the streets for ANYTHING. "Tamp down the opposition and put most everyone to sleep so I can get re-elected on a platform of school uniforms and more cops" was more like it.
You're forgetting "where the wimmin at?"
The Democratic Party is a big tent, I guess. Check out Henry Cueller.
I wonder how much of the criticism of intersectionality descends from the Old Left's orthodox Marxist belief that (put crudely) _only_ economics 'really' exist. Feminism was dismissed as an upper-class distraction, queer politics as a _degenerate_ distraction; racism was fought on purely strategic grounds: black Americans were particularly proletarianised and so obviously would welcome the new doctrines, and pointing-out U.S. racism was convenient in the days when the Party, like it or not, really was in the end an arm of The Homeland of Socialism. (I very much liked my Communist relatives, and their comparatively happy marriage helped firm-up my resolve that mine would be childless, as my mother said the Party told them theirs must be, true or not.)
…but racism was, in the end, still—like misogyny and the existence of queer people—just another consequence and supporting member of Capitalism, and one must fight The Real Enemy .
Interesting history there, but I don't think there could possibly be enough Old Leftists left to make up any significant part of the criticism of intersectionality. Some of it might be liberals terrified that any left-speak makes them lose elections, the rest (I think) is right-wingers doing what they always do, taking a term the left uses to define one specific thing and turning it into a general ooga-booga-word (see Race Theory, Critical).
How does this intersect with the guy who tried to recruit me into Sendero Luminoso back in the day? And, for those who know me, what could that guy have been thinking?
Wow, talk about a missed opportunity!
Funny thing is, I was in the path business then (well, trail planning and development, but same thing, right?) 'Trails Illuminated' is the branding opportunity I missed...
Just my opinion, but--within the criticism of intersectionality there's more than a little leftover Rose Twitter "the economy is the only problem" pushed by devotees of you know who. These people are almost invariably White and relatively privileged, so they don't *have* to think about intersectionality if they don't *want* to.
Thank you for this and especially for Sarah Eagle Heart's invocation. What grace.
"They won't stop with Roe" is right. But even if you think they will, everyone should proclaim, everywhere, that they won't. Be specific: "They will outlaw all abortion everywhere. They will outlaw contraception. They will outlaw gay marriage. They will outlaw interracial marriage."
These should be shouted from the rooftops until even married couples using contraception are given pause. It doesn't matter how likely these developments are. The point is, the Court and the right have lost every speck of the benefit of the doubt. There is no doubt. They are now guilty until proven innocent--and even then I won't believe their innocence. This is a scare campaign, yes. Because now it's sensible to be scared.
Hearted not for the political reality but for the call to action.
Good advice, and I like to imagine Democratic politicians actually doing this, simply ASSERTING something and then putting it on the Republicans to respond however they might (instead of using "but the Republicans will say..." as a reason not to assert anything at all) and I live in the hope that I may see this happen even once before I die.
I mentioned this before, but I really do believe we'd be in a much better place right now if the Dems had settled on the message "There were exactly NINE cases of voter fraud in the United States in the 2020 election" and have handy a list of nine Republicans who fraudulently voted for Trump in case anyone wants details, and then if the Republicans want to say if was 10 or 11 of 155,000 then let them bring the fucking evidence, but in the meantime we're going with NINE.
Since the DNC is proven opposed meaningful action, I’m not sure a change in the content of the lip servicing matters in the long run. Would be wonderful to be proven wrong but…