JOY REID a few days back, had a long segment on about the history of Protestant "evangelicals" and the issue of abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade, showing what I remembered, after she reminded me, that right after Roe right-wing Protestants, who were still largely openly anti-Catholic, considered it a "Catholic issue" and they openly distanced themselves from it. She pointed out back then, as their central organizing issue opposing school integration and, more specifically, the Carter era Department of Justice Civil Rights Division going after government funding that went to the segregation academies that sprang up in the wake of that earlier decision was becoming less popular among the general public, they decided on an alliance with conservative Catholics. Though she didn't mention it, as I recall, at that time Catholics were the single largest denomination in the country. Also the reason, I fully believe, for the rise in such scum as William Barr's dad and other right-wingers joining the Catholic church, many of them openly embraced by right-wing priests, bishops and cardinals, even those with the marital-sexual history of a Newt Gingrich (just to show how sincere they are in their insistence on the traditional sexual morality they champion). The Roberts-Alito court will likely get to giving them their hearts desire of that period (and today) gutting if not outright overturning the largely dead-letter Brown decision against racial discrimination in education. They'll certainly adopt the Roberts tactic of destroying the decision while leaving its rotting carcass as a fiction to cover their shameless asses. I mean, there have been TV movies made about it so they can hardly mount a full attack on that sacred myth.
Reid also pointed out that in those latter days of widespread and growing acceptance of racial equality when even Carter's far from radical DoJ was pursuing equal justice, the lucrative central command of racist white fundamentalist Protestantism was looking for issues to rally their base to gain political power - something which they had, previously, not been so much all about - it's one of those issues, porn and its allied forms of commercial sex that this is about because it's what the hate mail comment fixated on. Maybe when my online presence is better I'll look more deeply at the pasties and g-string jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, which I would imagine could be seen as rather hilariously absurd, especially if the various amici curiae describing the "free speech right" to bump and grind in legalese can be found online.
The present day court is a direct result of the ACLU successes in opening up the way for the American media to lie for the benefit of its owners, its highly paid on-air and in print hacks, etc. Republican-fascism was born in the 1960s "free-speech-press" legal victories, freeing the media to lie to that effect. That alone is more than enough reason for me to despise a business I once contributed money to. I was as big a sucker as anyone was.
I'll go at it by pointing out that the "liberals" and "left" were played massively for suckers on that issue, first by the porn industry and its legal arm, the ACLU-"civil liberties" industry of lawyers and fundraisers, on the basis of misplaced sentimentality. The focus of that largely show-biz promoted sentimentality was "The First Amendment" and its absolutist language that "Congress shall pass no law" to tell a sleazy cigar chomping strip joint owner to tell his stable of for-show prostitutes they had to cover their nipples. Nor a city council. And the loony, ahistorical notion that that had meant that all and everything from ink on paper to strippers on stage to every depraved sex act that could be filmed or simulated on celluloid and video was to always be allowed no matter what.
I've gone into the stupendous and ignorant double-speak of that complete dope Phil Ochs both lamenting in the same song the terrible "injustice" done to the likes of Ralph Ginsburg on one hand and Kitty Genovese who was murdered by a man who admitted he was partly inspired to rape and kill by the porn the police found in his car, leading them to suspect him of that infamous but widely misrepresented murder. Ochs, like most secular lefties and too many liberals, especially those in pop-kulcha, were such huge suckers for the "free speech" industry that has, as I've continually pointed out, a. carried messages that were not only at odds with equal rights but encouraged the most brutal of inequality, b. exploited the poor and vulnerable, leading them to have short and blighted lives, c. were largely in the hands of rich, white men who were politically reactionary and certainly opposed to equal rights for women and others, for those whose real equality was the superseding legitimate business of any "liberals" or "leftists." Business that was swamped and drowned by such "free speech" and other lucrative "rights" pushed by the "civil liberties" industry.*
Worse than that, once the Republican-fascists decided they had a lot more to gain by using all of that free-speeciness" to corrupt the media to carry their propaganda than it could get by allying itself to the self-styled purity police, using the Supreme Court "free speech-press" rulings they threw them under the bus, imported the porn-merchant - fascist Rupert Murdoch to launch his fascist media here to do what it had done in Australia and Britain, etc. and Republican power, on the basis of the lies, the flagrant carrying of which the media had won for itself (and its largely white, male oligarch owners) to tell to its own financial benefit, the fascists and even neo-Nazis became the biggest fattest fans of "free speech-press" there are.
Which is why I have pointed out that the secular left and its "liberal" allies are the biggest fattest suckers in American history who got sold that line of self-defeating bullshit from the commercial media, show biz, the "civil liberties" industry who were largely financed by the big media and who financially benefited enormously from cutting the legs out from the real left, the real liberals who were all about equality, of real freedom which cannot be had except on the basis of responsible use of it so as not to impinge on the equality and legitimate freedom of others. That article I linked to from the NYT, started out with one of the old lions of the free speech-press industry lamenting how the ACLU's younger lawyers were, in many cases sacrificing that stupid "principle" of the ersatz, faux replacement of real morality for those piddling little things like opposing fascism and Nazism as they gained real power and turned back the clock to the worst days of inequality, discrimination and violent suppression of Women, Black People, People of other ethnic and religious identity, LGBTQ. Which equality those preening (well-paid) lawyers of "free speech-press" may mouth support for but whose actions and professional work has the effect of destroying and even killing.
No more benefit of the doubt for the "civil liberties" industry, the ACTUAL RESULTS of what they advocate are in and apparent with every targeted mass shooting of which there have been literally hundreds directly attributed to the results they got in court.
The old ACLU line lawyers are perfect examples of the kind of "liberalish liberalism" which has every intention, in action, of there never being real equality, real justice (especially not economic justice), real freedom on the basis of mutually practiced responsibility, they are like the "socialists" of Fabianism which was a cynical, preening attack by the wealthy against the British poor and supporters of the Brit caste system, even including the proto-Nazis like George Bernard Shaw who openly advocated the mass gassing of the underclass nine years before the Nazi party was formed and twenty-nine years before the Nazis put his Edwardian era wet dream into reality - as he openly supported Hitler as well as Stalin. I listen to some of the whining of the civil liberties hack lawyers and their media equivalent and I hear the echos of Shaw's witty advocacy of what the Nazis were tried and hanged for in the 1910s. Only without the . . . um. . "wit."
The left, here or anywhere, is all about a. equality, b. social and economic justice and equality, c. freedom in the context of MUTUALLY PRACTICED responsibility to use freedom equitably, or it is just another kind of oppressive gangsterism. The American left and some of those faux liberals has certainly had lots of phonies in it, especially in the media and show-biz. I've got no more patience with them anymore than I do for Susan Sarandon's professional let's pretend, rich white Woman bull shit.
"Free speech - free press" is not immune from the limits of rights and freedoms in real life (though not in the fictions of the law) that they are practiced responsibly and in line with equal rights or they are oppressive of someone else. And, peculiar to those particular areas of freedom and rights, TELLING THE TRUTH, or they are no more real than the fictitious "rights" erected by the gun industry, gun cultists and fanatics, duped hunters and Republican fascists elected and seated on judicial benches. Hate speech and lies are to free speech as selling semi-automatics is to "gun rights." At times, as so many recent massacres have proved, they end up with the same body counts.
To miss that while being alleged "liberals," "lefties," and merely allegedly rational professionals is rightly to be suspected as convenient pretense, none of them are as stupid as they pretend to be. The fact is any old-style ACLU lawyer who doesn't understand who they were empowering with their advocacy for the "rights" of Nazis to proselytize and gain political power and influence, pornographers to profit off of promoting the rape and abuse of Women and Children and others, is lying through their teeth. The carefulness and . . . um, "reasoning" their work contains proves they had to knew and know what they were doing. They just weren't honest about not caring about the results. No wonder it didn't bother them to get such a "right" for the media to do what they knew their clients and those who they wrote amici for openly intended to do, to destroy the real rights and lives of those they targeted.
I never would have suspected that I would look back fondly on the Attorney Generalship of Griffin Bell, that's how far this stuff has rotted. Merrick Garland and those under Obama make him seem like a Democratic AG. The bloom on the rose of the law industry dried up for me entirely in the first Judaical and Intelligence committees' hearings into the first Trump impeachment. I'm no big fat fan of lawyers these days.
* "Gun rights," the "rights" of the hard-liquor industry to advertise on TV, the "smokers rights" smoke screen rightly seen as a co-production of the tobacco industry and "civil liberties" lawyers who got money from the, the prescription drug industry "right" to directly advertise even the most dangerous and addictive products which should never have been given FDA approval, and a myriad of other money-making judicial issues for the ACLU and their ilk could, if someone like the truly honorable Sheldon Whitehouse wanted to do a multiple series expose of it, open as many eyes as his masterful exposure of Court Capture and the fossil fuel industry prevention of real climate change legislation should open. I am not capable of doing that series right now, perhaps I'll get around to it but someone with the resources of a Sheldon Whitehouse or a decent investigative journalist-lawyer could probably do far better than I could.
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