Fraser Sherman's Blog

“it’s not just ads for abortion clinics or pills that would be illegal—even providing information about how to get them might be prosecutable. In addition to banning the sale and distribution of abortion pills, the law makes it a crime to advertise anything “in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing an abortion.” — Jessica Valenti on a new South Dakota law.

“Days after his inauguration last year, Donald Trump pardoned two dozen activists convicted of violating the FACE Act—the federal law that prohibits violence against abortion clinics. Just one day later, the Department of Justice announced that they’d stop enforcing that federal law, and Vice President JD Vance told tens of thousands of anti-abortion activists at the March for Life that they would “never have the government go after them ever again.” — from another Valenti Substack post about the rise an anti-abortion violence. Republicans are not the law and order party. More from Valenti in this old article.

Just last week, the DOJ announced that the Biden administration arresting forced-birth protesters at clinics was religious persecution. No, it was arresting people who break the law, as witness nobody’s getting arrested for preaching that abortion is wrong.

Valenti again: “U.S. House Republicans have introduced legislation that would make it illegal for women to flush their miscarriage or abortion remains when using mifepristone. The Clean Water for All Life Act, introduced by Rep. Mary Miller of Illinois, would instead require women to use “catch kits” when their pregnancy is ending—forcing them to bag up that tissue and blood and bring it back to the doctor as medical waste.” This accomplishes nothing in terms of protecting forded birthers’ beloved fetuses but it will make it easier to hurt and oppress women. “They want women who end their pregnancies at home to be shamed, and what better way to do that than to force them to bag up their own blood?”

“The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said on Thursday that it is investigating 13 states that require state-regulated health insurance plans to cover abortion services.”

“A Tennessee woman says Ascension St. Thomas Midtown canceled her scheduled sterilization surgery Friday morning hours after she had been admitted and an IV had been placed. The woman said she had been seeking a salpingectomy — a surgery that removes the fallopian tubes — after years of trying other birth control options. “Since I was young, I’ve never wanted kids. And I’ve wanted to pursue sterilization since I learned that that was something that a person could do,” she said. “I’ve tried a lot of different options for birth control. None of them have worked for me.” — from a woman who was denied sterilization at the last minute because the hospital ethics committee “cited a ‘duty to protect her sacred fertility.'”

Hospitals’ willingness to investigate minority pregnant women for drug use has encouraged the erosion of reproductive rights.

From a couple of years back, JD Vance explains rape victims should be forced to bear their rapist’s child — it doesn’t matter that the child’s birth is a problem for society. Which erases the fact it’s a problem for the women.

Or consider Stephen Miller’s equally loathsome wife Katie Miller who recently lamented that “Since 2007, the teen birth rate has fallen 72 percent. Hormonal birth control isn’t just poison for women’s minds and bodies — it’s killing population growth.” It used to be the right opposed teenagers using contraception because they opposed them having sex. Now they see them as breeders for the right race — and, of course, getting a girl saddled with a baby will kill her chance of independence (Katie Miller would, I suspect, be fine with a Handmaid’s Tale future — provided she got to be a wife, rather than a handmaid).

Mother Jones responds to Miller’s assertion that “You don’t need to wait for that perfect moment to have kids, you just need to have them.”: “It would take reams upon reams to unpack the arrogance of Miller’s assertions. But it’s her last claim, that women “just need to have” kids and forget the factors that go into the decision-making process, that elides the legitimate and troubling reasons why so many of us can’t decide. A short list: anxiety over the climate crisis, conflicts over career ambitions, the physical stresses, regret over the first one, and fears of identity loss. Then there are the brutal realities of having a child in a country lacking family-friendly policies: paid family leave, affordable child care, flexible working arrangements, and access to affordable fertility treatments.”

Ms. Magazine has some thoughts on fighting back: “Applying King’s arguments to current day abortion laws, we can ask several questions: Do abortion bans uplift or degrade human personality? Do they “distort the soul and damage the human personality?” Do they give people supporting them “a false sense of superiority” and make people seeking abortion feel “a false sense of inferiority?” Do they “substitute an ‘I -it’ relationship for the ‘I -thou’ relationship, and relegate persons to the status of things?” I would answer an emphatic “yes” to all of these questions.”

It always has been, even when “it”woke” meant things like the Tougaloo Nine reading books in a segregated library.

It is, however, effective for rallying whiny white males — Erick Erickson below declares that threatening to destroy Iran is a fair trade for the Toddler’s attacks on trans people.

Consider, for example, whiny misogynist Matt Walsh. According to Walsh (spoiler, any statement that begins that way will be followed by bullshit) “Beginning in 1960s as part of the radical transformation of the civil rights era, Democrats decided to reject, you know, fundamental American principles.” According to Walsh the Democrats forced people to hire POC and women (not true) and unleashed destruction on American cities — “The civil rights era brought horrors beyond imagination to innocent men, women, and children throughout the United States.”

I’m pretty sure the real horror for Walsh is the steps America took towards equality for all. And that he’s much more troubled by that than, say, the horrors of Jim Crow such as brutal lynchings. Walsh’s complaints about hiring POC are understandable considering he also thinks the black middle class “is almost entirely a tax-funded function of the government” which provides them with bureaucratic jobs. There was a black middle class in this country long before the civil rights movement, though white America often burned it to the ground. And one may ponder with black-humored amusement that a guy whose entire career is spewing hate on the Internet complains about other people having worthless jobs. And that a man who’s triggered by pretty much everything thinks people shouldn’t be offended so much (by racist jokes).

Walsh isn’t the only fragile snowflake on the right, terrified of anything that vaguely suggests white male Christian supremacy is not a good thing: “In the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington quietly removed from its website educational resources about American racism and canceled a workshop about the “fragility of democracy.””

The religious right is constantly demanding that gay people lose the right to marry. While I would never bet on the Supreme Court doing the right thing, gay marriage is massively popular — and the Republican loyalists may not want to give the public another reason to vote Dem. Even a lot of elected Republicans don’t want to push the issue.

By contrast there’s a steady drumbeat of support for ending women’s right to vote. They talk a lot about how women’s suffrage ruined America but the real issue is simple: denying the right to vote denies that women are equal citizens. I will add that the NYT article linked to beyond the first link in this paragraph treats the anti-suffrage movement with way too much seriousness — it’s close to “Should Women Have Rights? Opinions Differ.”

Then there’s the attack on birthright citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment says anyone born in the U.S. is an American citizen; Republican white supremacists like Stephen Miller hate that. The Necrotic Toddler lies that no other country allows this when many countries do.

Then there’s the raging fear that if whites become a minority, they might suffer as they’ve made others suffer. There is not the slightest sign that will happen. Nevertheless the fantasy crusade to protect white men goes on. Harmeet Dhillon, one of the Toddler’s attorneys weaponizing the Department of Justice, is investigating whether some medical schools are anti-white in admissions.

In discussing how we can keep boys from turning into creeps, one suggestion is to have them mix with girls as equals. It’s not guaranteed and not always safe, but I think the former Boy Scouts accepting girls is a good thing. I’m not surprised that misogynist male supremacist Pete Hegseth does not. Why it’s almost like saying girls are as good as boys, which is no better than castrating him! And “Whiskey Pete” continues his commitment to purging the military of anyone but straight, white, Christian men.

“The idea that white people are the biggest contemporary victims of systemic bias and unfair treatment is the central pillar of Trumpism.”