Explain why the gun lobby matters more than the safety of our children

I had shopping to do this afternoon and 20 minutes before heading out the electricity cut out. I called the electric company (which is why I keep a land line) and was told the repair guys will be on the scene by 6:45 this evening. At least not a multi-day outage. On my way out of the neighborhood I passed a lot of dark houses and at the main road a dark traffic light. Thankfully, the next traffic light was working. I did the shopping and headed home at about 5:15. The sun had already gone down. The traffic light was still out. The neighborhood houses were all dark. Once inside I started lighting candles. Shortly after I lit the last one the power came back on. It was 5:40. Only 2:10 without power. As I mentioned yesterday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday over Mississippi’s ban on abortion. They set the limit at 15 weeks, though the standard for the last 30 years had been 24 weeks, about the time the fetus could survive outside the womb. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reported some of the arguments. From the conservatives she heard a lot of red flags. From the progressives: Clawson wrote:

Justice Elena Kagan noted that one reason for stare decisis—following precedent in most cases—is “to prevent people from thinking that this court is a political institution that will go back and forth” as its membership changes or depending on who “yells the loudest.”

And:

"To reexamine a watershed” of Roe’s importance, Justice Stephen Breyer said, “would subvert the court’s legitimacy.

As for Sonia Sotomayor, April Siese of Kos wrote a separate post. Sotomayor noted that the sponsors who pushed the bill through the Mississippi legislature said they were doing it because “we have new justices on the Supreme Court.” She then referred to the 1992 Supreme Court ruling Casey vs. Planned Parenthood that set the standard at viability. She noted 15 justices of varying political backgrounds since then have upheld that standard. And now she said:

Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? I don’t see how it is possible. It’s what Casey talked about when they talked about watershed decisions. Some of them, Brown vs. Board of Education it mentioned and this one, have such an entrenched set of expectations in our society: If this is what the court decided, this is what we will follow.

Sotomayor also asked an important question conservatives are determined to ignore:

When does the life of a woman—and risk to her health—enter the analysis? Poor women who elect abortions before viability—they are put at a tremendously greater risk—14 times greater to give birth to a child full-term than to have a previability abortion.

Leah McElrath tweeted a quote from Melissa Murray, who does a podcast on the Supremes>

Y'all. Justice Sotomayor can count votes. She knows where this is headed... either viability is gone or Roe is gone. Her questions are for the public... to let us know that abortion isn't the end. It's just beginning of the unraveling of these other rights of intimate life.

McElrath added:

What was clear just reading tweets was Justice Sotomayor was arguing for our rights now but—even more—she was arguing for the historical record. Laying foundation for a future—that might or might not arrive in our lifetimes—when people will fight to regain what we’re losing.

Marissa Higgins of Kos reported that Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) was driving home when he heard two contrasting stories. One was the oral arguments at the Supremes in which there was a lot of talk about the sanctity of life of the unborn. The other was about a 15 year old boy who pulled out a gun at Oxford High School in Oxford, MI (Detroit’s far north suburbs) and killed three students and wounded eight (one of those has since died). That prompted Murphy to return to the Senate and launch into a speech (I don’t know how many other people were in the chamber). He shared the video on Twitter (and Higgins linked to it) where it has been seen more than 2.3 million times. The core of the speech as reported by Higgins:

Murphy opened his address by saying he’s well aware that his Republican colleagues have “very strong views” on abortion. “But,” he continued, he listened to his colleagues “talk about the sanctity of life, the very moment that moms and dads in Michigan were being told their kids weren't coming home because they were shot at school due to a country that is accepted gun violence due to Republicans fealty to the gun lobby.” Whew. ... "You care about life?” Murphy continued. “Then get these dangerous military-style weapons off the streets, out of schools.” He told Republicans it’s also time to require that everyone buying a gun goes through a background check. Murphy went on to stress that tragedies like this happen in the United States because we “choose to let it happen.” He stressed that we as a nation are not “lucky” but rather that this is a “purposeful” choice made by the nation to “sit on our hands and do nothing.” He said his peers send a “silent message of endorsement” by not doing more to prevent gun violence. "When Congress, the highest, most important, most powerful leaders in the land do nothing shooting after shooting,” he said. “You can understand why those broken brains imply that as an endorsement." “If you're going to come down here and talk about the sanctity of life,” he continued, “explain to the American people why the gun lobby matters more than the safety of our children who are walking into school every day fearing for their life.”

Lili Loofbourow, who writes for Slate, tweeted (NBD = no big deal):

I for one am glad ideas like packing the courts are off the table because it would be *indecorous* for Dems to do anything that might prevent an illegitimate, superpacked GOP court from depriving half of Americans of the right to forgo forced birth and let's face it, there's nothing indecorous about having your body ravaged, your life endangered, tearing stem to stern, bleeding for weeks, and lifelong incontinence or uterine prolapse being dismissed by society as "just one of those things" adoption exists after all! NBD so-called "freedom" fetishists treat these things as trivial, and that's why their pretensions to anything like philosophical or moral seriousness are--and must be treated as--garbage.

McElrath tweeted:

Many seem to believe Republicans are actually going to allow abortion law to be decided on a state-by-state basis because they say so. I don’t think they will. Once they take back power, they’ll likely do whatever is necessary at a federal level to establish fetal personhood.

I’ve written several times that the conservative shouting over Critical Race Theory isn’t really about CRT, rather a whole lot of stuff heaped on top that’s being called CRT. Clawson has the latest from Williamson County, Tennessee. The leader of the local chapter of Moms for Liberty, whose children are not in public school, filed a complaint claiming some texts being used in grade schools violate the state’s new law against teaching about “privilege” or “guilt” or “discomfort” based on race or sex. Clawson lists several books in the complaint. One of them is Ruby Bridges Goes to School. Little Ruby was one of those black children who were a part of integrating Southern schools. The end of that book:

Now black children and white children can go to the same schools. I like to visit schools. I tell my story to children. I tell children that black people and white people can be friends. And most important, I tell children to be kind to each other.

So what about it makes little white kids feel “discomfort?” Which means the conservative argument isn’t even about teaching white kids hate themselves. Wrote Clawson:

The thing is, I get their objections to teaching Ruby Bridges Goes to School. It’s a scary book if you’re a committed racist who doesn’t want anything getting in between your kids and the racism you’re teaching them. After the Moms for Liberty started agitating against the book, I got a copy and read it to my kindergartener. He was fascinated and appalled. He had a lot of questions. It opened up avenues for us to discuss racism in other settings.

DrJessieNYC tweeted:

You think they're "concerned moms" but they're actually fronts for dark money interests

She linked to an article on Truthout described as:

Right-wing women’s groups are raking in donations from organizations spawned by Charles Koch and other billionaires.

Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos reminded us that William Hartmann was a Republican on the Board of Canvassers for Wayne County, Michigan. This county includes Detroit. After the 2020 election Hartmann refused to certify the results, then relented after fierce criticism. Hartmann has now died of COVID. David Neiwert of Kos discussed how frequently far-right groups call each other “patriots.” He gives a lot of examples. Then he got into why that particular term is being used so much. It isn’t because of a love for democracy – they’re quite a seditious lot.

Their notions of patriotism revolve around enforcing authoritarian adherence to “legitimate” leadership figures and not around the democratic values America of our historical traditions. In psychological terms, it’s an expression of a deep need to see oneself, and to be seen by others, as heroic. The dynamics of achieving that heroic status inform everything they do and say, particularly their constant reification of concocted enemies against which they set out to do battle. In the 1990s, the threat was the “New World Order” and its black helicopters; in the 2000s, it became an invading horde of immigrants, combined with the threat of Islamist terror. Under Trump, it became “antifa” and Black Lives Matter and critical race theory.

And in practical terms the word links them to far-right movements of the last 30 years. And Neiwert provided some of that history. John Stoehr and his Editorial Board discussed political violence after the Rittenhouse verdict. Excerpts of his thread:

In America, political violence is normal. So normal it's invisible. Political violence is the predictable consequence of democratic politics seeking to advance the cause of liberty and justice for all coming into conflict with conservative politics seeking to preserve a social order in which white men rule w/ impunity. ... The takeaway appears to be that it’s now OK to shoot anti-racists as long as the shooting can be credibly characterized as “self-defense.” ... After Rittenhouse’s acquittal, anti-racists may feel it’s too dangerous to petition. (The fascists are taking it to mean they can shoot first and often.) But some won’t let the Second Amendment nullify the First. They’ll arm up. When racists with guns meet anti-racists with guns, it’s likely the results will be bad. USA Today, citing a study by Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, said “armed protests are six times more likely to turn violent compared to protests where no guns are present.” ... What we are seeing now, in the potential for armed racists to silence free speech through intimidation or murder, didn’t come from no where. It started at home, in the family, especially between husband and wife. When women challenge “authority,” when children challenge “authority,” conservative politics does not turn to democracy as a means of resolving conflict. It turns to violence. It also covers it up. When a husband hits his wife, when a father hits his kids, our discourse almost never calls it political violence though the maintenance of the man’s authority over his wife and children is almost always the reason he hits his wife and children. We call it “domestic violence.” We call it “child abuse.” These terms are accurate but incomplete. Suffering is a political problem in democratic politics. Suffering is a political goal in conservative politics. Without suffering — without punishment for those people who deserve to feel their pain — anything can happen. Even liberty, equality and justice for all.

Today, December 2, 2021, is both a palindrome and an ambigram! Written as 12022021 (especially using they way the numbers are displayed on a microwave) the string can be read left to right, right to left, and upside down. There are eleven dates this month that are palindromes – 12-1-21 through 12-9-21, 12-11-21 and 12-22-21