Freedom from oppression became freedom to discriminate

Aldous Pennyfarthing of the Daily Kos community discussed a twitter thread by Rep. Eric Swalwell. The Rep. is losing his patience with the unvaxxed. They have a choice. His 3 children under 5 don’t. So you have a right to not get vaxxed. But the government has the right to say you can’t get on a plane. You don’t have a right to expose my kids. Pennyfarthing added:

But … but … freedom! Freedom to spread death. Freedom to infect other people’s children. Freedom to paralyze our hospital system. Freedom to f--- up our economic recovery. Freedom to sow chaos in order to grease the skids for the return of their ocher overlord. Yeah, you have those freedoms, and others should have the freedom to make you pariahs—at which point you have the freedom to accept the all-too-predictable consequences of your actions and shut the f--- up for once.

Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed the definition of freedom with the help of Gene Slater of The Atlantic.

Slater notes that in the mid-1960s during the heyday of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. and others embraced “freedom” as the purpose of the movement’s struggle against discrimination and racism. In that context, given the nation’s lengthy history of slavery, white-inspired terrorism, and Jim Crow laws, the demand for justice and freedom was nearly impossible to refute, and for those who had a vested interest in opposing equality and civil rights, that presented a very serious problem: No one could risk being tarred as standing against such a bedrock principle as freedom, even if there was a whole lot of money and power put at risk.

In response to MLK’s definition, conservatives began to redefine it, to use the word to mean protect their own interests. Dartagnan wrote:

“Protecting their own interests” meant preserving the riches and wealth that flowed from the practices of discrimination and injustice, and nowhere was such discrimination and injustice more profitable than in the housing market.

That meant the freedom to keep black people out of their neighborhoods because black people made market values drop. So freedom changed from being free from oppression to being free to discriminate. Quickly added on to that was the freedom of government interference, also known as free from government giving other people “special privileges” which is a euphemism for the government giving the target of their oppression anything at all, a “justification for not doing anything that might benefit Americans other than themselves.”

Slater explains that this type of “freedom” language has been formulated and weaponized by conservatives to apply to any issue they choose: “abortion, guns, public schools, gender rights, campaign finance, [and] climate change.” In fact, as Slater observes, the more issues they apply it to, the stronger it becomes. Moreover, by framing it as a struggle between individuals and government, they could recruit allies from every social strata and political persuasion. Some version, some strain of this essential argument can be seen in every utterance and action by today’s Republican Party: “This picture of freedom has a purpose: to effectively prioritize the freedoms of certain Americans over the freedoms of others—without directly saying so.”

Dartagnan then listed seome ways this current definition is playing out, such as targeting trans youth with the phony reason of “parental rights.”

This corruption of freedom by the right wing is fundamentally incompatible with democratic institutions or democracy as we know it.

Kathryn Brightbill, a policy analyst for Responsible Home Education, tweeted a thread, starting with the abortion rights case, the marriage equality case, and the right to birth control case.

Roe isn't the end game. Lawrence and Obergefell aren't even the endgame. Griswold and the entire concept of a constitutionally protected right to privacy is the endgame. And then they'll ban birth control once Griswold is gone. They've been telling you this for decades. It wasn't hyperbole when people tried to tell you that conservatives wanted a government small enough to fit in your bedroom. That's what throwing the right to privacy out the window gives them.

A quick online search showed the original Grover Norquist quote was a government small enough so one could “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” But we’ll let this one slide.

After the right to privacy goes, they're going to revisit Bob Jones v. United States and find a religious freedom right to segregation on the taxpayer dime. And then they're going to go after the civil rights cases. They've told you that openly for years. ... And yes, Bob Jones v. United States is as good as gone as soon as they find the right test case. It's a pre-RFRA decision, and Michael Farris has repeatedly told everyone that he wrote RFRA to enshrine a religious freedom right to discriminate into federal law.

RFRA is the Religious Freedom Rights Act, which says the government cannot infringe on a person’s right to practice their religion without a very good reason. So a Native American can smoke peyote and a Jew in prison can wear a yarmulke. Dartagnan also wrote of the consequences of overturning Roe v. Wade:

In its zealous effort to remake an American society it clearly despises, the reactionary, “conservative” majority that now dominates the U.S. Supreme Court (and several Circuit Courts of Appeal) has relied chiefly on the fact that the country’s founders could not, as a practical matter, predict all of the individual rights that the Constitution could possibly anticipate. Following an opportunistic approach of ignoring prior precedents and cases to reverse those rulings it no longer likes, the focus of right-wing jurisprudence for the past fifty-odd years has been on whittling down or eliminating perceived deviations from the Constitution’s original text, all in the name of a conservative-tinged “originalism.” Not coincidentally, that has diminished the federal government’s power to provide for the American people in matters of environmental, labor, and social policies, for example—none of which are even mentioned in the Constitution. ... The 1960’s era Supreme Court that decided Griswold (and later, Roe) found a right to privacy implicit in multiple Constitutional amendments, including those we call the Bill of Rights, in the private determinations that inform freedom from search and seizure, freedom of speech and assembly, and of due process, for example. What this ultra-conservative 2021 Court appears intent on doing in the Dobbs case currently under consideration is to repudiate the very idea that a liberty interest can be found in anything but the Constitution’s explicit text. Once it finds no inherent Constitutional right for women to terminate their pregnancies, it can then wash its own bloody hands of the issue by deeming it a matter to be decided by individual states. But the Court already knows full well what the states will do, because the need to take peoples’ fundamental reproductive decisions out of individual states’ hands was the entire reason for the Roe and Griswold decisions in the first place.

Magdi Semrau, who writes for Editorial Board, tweeted:

Here are 3 types of imprecise language they use: Euphemisms that render bad things valorous (racism="states rights") Euphemisms that render bad things neutral or technical (torture="enhanced interrogation") Dysphemisms that render good things negative ("racial justice"="woke") "We believe enhanced interrogation is justified" Now replace "enhanced interrogation" w/ a more concrete term or description: "We believe torture is justified" "We believe pouring water over a cloth on a person's face to initiate death-by-drowning is justified" This kind of linguistic manipulation is right out of the Lee Atwater playbook. It allows the GOP to obscure their true arguments & hide monstrous actions, as well as to deride their opponents' character & principles, such as anti-racism ("the woke mob") I wrote about the word "woke" & how it's been appropriated by the GOP & other white critics of social justice. These critics smuggle in negative connotations w/out ever giving a precise definition of "wokeness," thus deriding justice through coded language.

Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, included several interesting quotes. The first is from Anita Sreedhar and Anand Gobal of the New York Times:

Over the past four decades, governments have slashed budgets and privatized basic services. This has two important consequences for public health. First, people are unlikely to trust institutions that do little for them. And second, public health is no longer viewed as a collective endeavor, based on the principle of social solidarity and mutual obligation. People are conditioned to believe they’re on their own and responsible only for themselves. That means an important source of vaccine hesitancy is the erosion of the idea of a common good.

A quote from Will Bunch of the Inquirer reinforces that idea:

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with America? What all these stories share is what the nation has been missing, in accelerated fashion, since the government-is-the-problem “Reagan revolution” of the 1980s, which is any notion of three words that have disappeared from the national conversation: “The public good.”

A quote from Ian Haney López from Protect Democracy:

The GOP’s embrace decades ago of racial dog whistle politics has turned Democrats against each other. One Democratic faction believes with every fiber that white racism must be directly confronted, though this alienates white voters and loses elections. The other side insists that the best strategy is to mainly ignore racism—though this leaves unchallenged the Republicans’ main electoral strategy. Democrats are thus two Titanics, steaming in opposite directions. From their respective decks, each can see the iceberg in the other’s path, but not the jagged teeth beneath their own bows. For democracy itself, whatever hope there is depends on both these Titanics turning.

A quote from Liza Featherstone of NYT referring to Sen. Josh Hawley, the guy who raised a fist in support of the Capitol attack.

Mr. Hawley is not alone in sensing that masculinity is a popular cause; around the world, male politicians are tapping into social anxieties about its apparent decline, for their own ideological ends. The Chinese government, for instance, has declared a “masculinity crisis,” and it is responding by cracking down on gaming during school days and by investing in gym teachers and school sports. ... Mr. Hawley, for all his winking bigotry, is tapping into something real — a widespread, politically potent anxiety about young men that is already helping the right.

One of the things that causes social anxiety for which Hawley is good at tapping into is how to treat transgender people. Marissa Higgins of Kos reported that Ethan Stucker, a trans student in Storm Lake High School in Iowa, was told he couldn’t use the boy’s bathroom anymore, he’d have to use the bathroom in the teacher’s lounge. Why? Another student expressed a little bit of discomfort with a trans boy in the bathroom. Higgins wrote:

"We are investigating the current regulations and are sensitive to both sides of the issue,” said Superintendent David Smith in a statement to KCCI. “We have and continue to provide multiple restroom facilities attempting to accommodate both positions on the issue so all our students feel emotionally and physically safe." Which, of course, opens up the question: What happens if one student’s “emotional” safety causes another student to feel ostracized, excluded, or discriminated against?

Pennyfarthing reported the sheriff’s offfice for El Paso County, Colorado tweeted a picture of a guy with a white beard and hair wearing red trousers appearing to apply for a concealed handgun permit. Yeah, the tweet implies it was Santa. Has the naughty list become a hit list? Since this was tweeted shortly after the school shooting in Oxford, Michigan it was taken in really bad taste, so bad people noticed. One response was from Dara Chaos, who tweeted an image of a protest sign:

Last year, handguns killed 10 people in Japan. 50 in Great Britain. 47 in Switzerland. 611 in Canada. 105 in Israel. 41 in Sweden. 38,658 in the United States. God Bless America.

Aviel Roshwald tweeted:

Initial lab results indicate Omicron is more opinionated but less petulant than earlier versions of the virus.

Rob N Roll tweeted (with pictures):

its that time of the year again, don’t forget to hang your missile toads

Bob Dole died on Sunday. NPR has had several news segments about his accomplishments – his service in WWII in which his arms were injured, his years as a senator, his run for president. One segment talked about what many consider his greatest achievement – getting the Americans with Disabilities Act passed. He’s a hero in the disabled community. Leah McElrath tweeted a thread with the not so good side. He endorsed the nasty guy in 2016 and when he died the nasty guy praised him. And back in 1974 he was the first Republican to weaponize abortion.