“The police appear perfectly capable of singling out lawbreakers,” John Roberts
Yeah, tell it to the survivors of Lee Ann Nichols and Shannon Lowney, the victims of John Salvi when he shot up the very clinics in the case. Not to mention all the others murdered by anti-abortion fanatics.
I don't own a television anymore, when they made the switch to mandatory high-definition, I used that as an occasion to not update and so to finally give up TV. I'd been intending to do so for decades, it is an addiction. Not that an addiction to being online isn't one, but it's actually possible to find worth-while content, if you look for it, as well as the ocean of crap, lies, porn, propaganda and lunacy that make it ever more doubtful that the breezy optimism about the "information age" that the internet was going to turn the world into a cosy global village, will be anything but about 98% wrong.
But don't get me started on that one. The reason I brought up TV is that while taking care of my dying mother I was exposed to those TV spots meant to dissuade women from having an abortion. The ones that could be a part of a campaign to influence society so the anti-abortion faction could muster a majority or an effective margin of the electorate, to outlaw abortion, again, with all of its attendant horrors of motel room abortions, women dying, a trade in infanticide - which was a hidden but regular feature of societies back then which was widely known of but, by tacit agreement, not discussed. It could be that or it could be an entirely permissible effort to convince women to not have abortions, which, I guess, people have a right to do. I might be suspicious at the motives and purpose of those ads but people do have as much of a right to appeal to women to not have abortions as they do to appeal to people to vote in order to keep abortions legal.
But that is entirely different from the idiocy that came out of the Supreme Court yesterday. I assume that the new restrictions on protective zones around womens' health clinics and abortion clinics was a matter of the four "liberal" justices managing to get Roberts to join them to prevent the outright ban on protective zones which the other four right-wingers wanted. Which is screwed up in results but such is the brilliance of our often outmoded and vague founding FATHERS. When their vague, poetic words can be hidden behind, especially those of the first amendments to the Constitution, right wingers with an agenda can twist things into any form they desire on rare occasions to be used against their positions by other courts.*
The fact is the Massachusetts law requiring a 35 foot separation between any anti-abortion pickets and clinics was the result of murders at two clinics in Boston as well as continuing harassment of staff, clients and patients and the series of murders at other abortion clinics and of doctors who performed abortions
The 2000 law was the response to harassment and intimidation of the 1990s in Massachusetts, a state with a history of violence and intimidation at abortion clinics, including a shooting rampage in 1994 that left two staff dead.
Eight murders and 17 attempted murders have been committed against abortion clinic staff since 1991. Two clinic personnel at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Boston were killed by a gunman who also wounded five others in 1994.
For four Supreme Court Justices, in this case, it's as if that history didn't exist, that those lives didn't matter and were entirely unentitled to protection. Conservatives have a long history of not caring about the lives of people, even those not yet born.**
As I rarely do, these days, I actually agree with what the American Civil Liberties Union said about the ruling.
We agree that a fixed buffer zone imposes serious first amendment costs, but we also think the court underestimated the proven difficulty of protecting the constitutional rights of women seeking abortions by enforcing other laws – especially regarding harassment – outside abortion clinics.
Today’s opinion makes it more important than ever that the police enforce the laws that do exist that in order to ensure that women and staff can safely enter and leave abortion clinics.
As if the Supremes have much if any real knowledge of police work in the real world. I'd like to see them try to do what they assert is so easy.
The Supreme Court members have no problems with a far larger protective barrier around the Court and around themselves, they are the ultimate beneficiaries of a protective bubble, one which they would never consider giving up so that ordinary citizens can bother their contemplative tranquility as they figure out how to twist the words of the wretched Constitution and Bill of alleged Rights to their own ends, always political, always favoring the oligarchs in more than ninety percent of their decisions, these days. If someone managed to break into the chamber and shoot at the bench I would imagine it might make some impression on them, but probably only to bar anyone from the room who hadn't been strip searched, if not seal the building from the public with an even wider corridor of protection for their bunker, with massively armed guards to enforce those. It wouldn't make them reconsider their casual assertions of the police being able to deal with full access to patients, staff and clinics by organized groups and lone psychopaths with a history of murder and arson against them. It wouldn't make them reconsider the expansions of the ability of armed psychopaths to be loaded to the teeth with assault weapons.
I despise the Supreme Court in its stately removal from the hoi polloi it lords it over. It needs to be exposed to far more interaction with the real world that it pretends to be addressing in these decisions. I'd start with the homes of Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy, the most absolutist of "free speech" libertarians, their persons and their families. Let's see how well they like having to depend on the same access to them that they advocate for clinics and doctors who are being shot up now.
* Apparently some other judges are citing Scalia in ways he didn't intend when he shot his mouth off in decisions and dissents. Sort of like I figure he does the founding FATHERS. This issue is exactly why it matters that the Constitution the Supremes use to impose their will on us was written exclusively by men, in Scalia's preferred framing, all of whom were born in the 18th century and dead before the 1830s.
** I have yet to see a case in which conservatives have shown the same regard for fetuses harmed and killed by pollutants, poisons and pathogens found in food, water and air, etc. which probably account for more terminated pregnancies than abortion, legal or illegal. It shouldn't ever be forgotten that a ban on abortion won't end abortions, it will only take them back to cheap motel rooms and worse. That was the history of abortion in the years before Roe v Wade. That and the trade in infanticide, which should be emphasized more.
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