SCOTUS – Feministe

Hobby Lobby = The Worst

I’ve been writing about it over at Cosmopolitan.com. Here’s the basic summary of the case. Here are 13 of the biggest misconceptions about the case (this one is especially helpful for Twitter / Facebook / family dinner table fights). And, finally, how the right-wing reaction to women with opinions on Hobby Lobby is a pretty good illustration of how this is all about misogyny and hostility toward female sexuality, not religious beliefs.

Open Buffer Zone “Free Speech” SCOTUS Decision Thread

They argued they are not anti-abortion protesters but peaceful “sidewalk counsellors” who want the freedom to talk to women entering the clinic.

They want to counsel women who are entering Planned Parenthood clinics for Pap smears and pregnancy wellness checks against abortions they’re not planning to have, too.

Open Gutting of the VRA Thread

Not even 50 years since Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were lynched–really lynched, not what conservative assholes call “lynching.” And how many of those states moved to restrict voting how many hours after the ruling? I feel like so much of what was fought for and won with good men and women bleeding and dying was just rolled back and thrown out.

This thread will be pre-moderated.

DOMA, the VRA and our narrow ideas of “justice”

I’m overjoyed about the DOMA ruling earlier this week. But coming on the tails of the gutting of the Voting Rights Amendment and the meh ruling on affirmative action, it tasted less sweet. And it reflected a very simplistic American idea of “fairness.” That’s what I’m writing about in the Guardian this week:

Sorry, Canada.

Breaking: SCOTUS upholds Obamacare. In other news: Thousands of Twitters vow to move to Canada to escape universal health care.

No More Mandatory Life Without Parole for Children

Good news. Sad that we live in a country that ever thought it was appropriate to sentence children to life without parole, but glad that era is over.

The Real People Behind Lawrence v. Texas

Dahlia Lithwick:

That’s the punch line: the case that affirmed the right of gay couples to have consensual sex in private spaces seems to have involved two men who were neither a couple nor having sex. In order to appeal to the conservative Justices on the high court, the story of a booze-soaked quarrel was repackaged as a love story. Nobody had to know that the gay-rights case of the century was actually about three or four men getting drunk in front of a television in a Harris County apartment decorated with bad James Dean erotica.

Goodbye, Rev. Shuttlesworth

October 5th was a rough day for civil rights leaders: Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who not only helped establish and lead non-violent anti-segregation actions and the civil rights movement as we know it but also took the right to protest right up to the Supreme Court, passed away yesterday. He stared the devil in the face over and over and over, and was repeatedly injured, threatened and nearly killed. From the WaPo obit:

Rev. Shuttlesworth faced down violence from police and racist mobs soon after he began preaching in Birmingham in 1953. In December 1956, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation of buses in Montgomery, Ala., was illegal, he announced that he would challenge other discriminatory laws in court.

On Christmas Day that year, 15 sticks of dynamite exploded beneath his bedroom window. The floor was blown out from under him, but he received only a bump on the head.

“I believe I was almost at death’s door at least 20 times,” he told the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education in 2001. “But when the first bomb went off, it took all fear from my mind. I knew God was with me like he was with Daniel in the lions’ den. The black people of Birmingham knew that God had saved me to lead the fight.”

In 1957, when Rev. Shuttlesworth tried to enroll his children in a white school, he was beaten unconscious with chains, baseball bats and brass knuckles by a Ku Klux Klan mob. His wife was stabbed in the hip.

“He was a tested warrior,” civil rights activist Jesse L. Jackson said Wednesday in an interview. “He was bombed. He was beaten. He was the soul of the Birmingham movement.”

Rev. Shuttlesworth’s biographer, Andrew Manis, told the Birmingham News in 1999: “There was not a person in the civil rights movement who put himself in the position of being killed more often than Fred Shuttlesworth.”

Rev. Shuttlesworth was arrested more than 30 times and, Manis said, was involved in “more cases in which he was either a defendant or a plaintiff that reached the Supreme Court than any other person in American history.”

Harassment of Rev. Shuttlesworth knew no limits. The Alabama Supreme Court refused to consider one of his legal appeals because it was submitted on paper of the wrong size. In 1960, nine police officers boarded a bus and arrested his three teenage children for refusing to sit in the back.

“We’re tired of waiting,” Rev. Shuttlesworth said at a 1963 rally. “We’re telling Ol’ Bull Connor right here tonight that we’re on the march and we’re not going to stop marching until we get our rights.”

In May 1963, Rev. Shuttlesworth was hospitalized after being struck by a blast from a high-pressure fire hose in Birmingham.

“I waited a week to see Shuttlesworth get hit with a hose,” Connor said. “I’m sorry I missed it.”

Told that Rev. Shuttlesworth had been taken away in an ambulance, Connor replied, “I wish they’d carried him away in a hearse.”

The whole thing is worth a read. People throw around words like “brave” and “hero” a lot, but they definitely apply here.

Meaningful Enforcement in the War Against Domestic Abuse

By Madeline Lee Bryer, cross-posted at On The Issues Magazine

*Trigger warning*

The war against domestic violence is heating up. In a decision released publicly on August 17, 2011, an international human rights tribunal has determined that the U.S. authorities paid insufficient attention to domestic violence and violence against women in violation of the nation’s human rights obligations. This ruling, the first ruling from an international tribunal on a U.S. domestic violence case, comes only days before an important domestic violence case is heard by New York State’s highest court.

The decision from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) reviewed the 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision of Castle Rock v. Gonzales.

The Supreme Court held that Jessica Gonzales, a domestic violence victim who had an order of protection against her husband, had no constitutional right to police protection or enforcement of her order of protection.

Cut Prison Populations in California

Good good good.

Conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons are so bad that they violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday, ordering the state to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a 5-to-4 decision that broke along ideological lines, described a prison system that failed to deliver minimal care to prisoners with serious medical and mental health problems and produced “needless suffering and death.”

Naturally, the more conservative justices dissented, saying that decreasing prisoner populations would put Californians in jeopardy. But huge numbers of prisoners are non-violent offenders, and they face disease and death living in squalid and cramped conditions:

The majority opinion included photographs of inmates crowded into open gymnasium-style rooms and what Justice Kennedy described as “telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets” used to house suicidal inmates. Suicide rates in the state’s prisons, Justice Kennedy wrote, have been 80 percent higher than the average for inmates nationwide. A lower court in the case said it was “an uncontested fact” that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies.”