The roadsides of my youth were festooned with blazing demands to “Impeach Earl Warren,” the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court throughout most of the fifties and sixties. That’s the last time I remember the Court being so out of step with the citizenry in general, especially the Southerners who were my neighbors at the time. The Warren Court’s impeachable offenses were desegregating schools, assuring criminal defendants the right to counsel, reading criminal suspects their rights, and demanding that states’ electoral district lines count every person’s vote equally.
Embracing a new “Lost Cause,” they steadily chipped away at the progressivism they abhorred and finally packed the Court with a majority that resurrected the misogynist, racist zombies who had lain in their sepulchers these many decades, waiting for this moment like the undead in a bad movie.
The misogyny of the decision to overturn Roe is obvious. The racism a little less so, until you focus on the fact that it is primarily poor minorities who are most grievously affected. Richer people, mostly white, can simply travel to a state where, for now, abortions remain legal.
The same is true of the Court’s expansion of gun rights to permit guns to be carried outside the home. Everyone is a potential victim of gun violence, white or black, but the cities that have struggled hardest to reduce gun violence, like Chicago, New York and Washington, DC, are the ones where gun deaths are devastating minorities. Richer people move to the suburbs, behind a gate if necessary.
The social and political upheaval of the fifties and sixties, culminating in the Civil Rights movement and the protests against the Viet Nam war, led to violence and bloodshed. Martin Luther King urged non-violence, but Huey Newton and Bobby Seale were more impatient. “Burn, Baby, Burn.”
As in Iran in the seventies and Afghanistan today, theocrats have taken over the United States Supreme Court. Christian morals drive their decisions. Our laws grew out of some of those same moral principles, but laws and religious dictates are not the same thing. Until, suddenly, they are. Until Sharia law in the Middle East. Until something like ultra-orthodox Christianity in America.
It’s hard to overthrow the Taliban. It may be just as hard to wrench public policy from the Puritanical death grip of today’s Supreme Court.
But we must try. We must take to the streets. We must vote in every election, state, local and federal. We have been out-hustled and out-flanked by the radical religious right. The decisions by their Supreme Court picks are a call to action. We must heed it.
Unless of course, you’re rich and white and male and like where the Court is leading us, or are too self-satisfied and insulated to care.
