So the ceremony could proceed, the right syllables could be muttered

My Sunday movie was Cicada. It is the story of Ben, who is white. After a series of one night stands Ben meets Sam, who is black. They fall in love. But there is something in Ben’s past (and it’s not homophobia). And Sam, who grew up in a religious home, is closeted. Along the way they have to work through their pasts and also through situations involving race. The movie begins by saying the story is based on true events. The stars, Matthew Fifer and Sheldon Brown, are also the writers. And the IMDB description says, “A New York love story that toes the line between narrative and doc with two actors reliving parts of their own experiences.” It’s a good declaration the story is autobiographical. It is a good story, though the pace is slower than I would have liked. Dartagnan of the Daily Kos community discussed what Garry Wills wrote for the New York Review of Books back in 2012 after the Sandy Hook massacre. Wills described those who love their guns as worshipers of Moloch. The Biblical book of Leviticus (see 18:21 and 20:1-5) describes sacrifices of living children to Moloch as a sign of a deeply degraded culture. Wrote Wills:

The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it? Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god’s bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.

I hope you caught the contradiction of a god who cannot kill but is the same god with a bottomless appetite for death. As with the Biblical Moloch this modern idol is getting fed quite regularly. Then Dartagnan wrote about Beto O’Rourke confronting Texas Gov. Greg Abbott at a news conference in Uvalde:

After Beto O’Rourke unexpectedly intruded into the very temple of the god, the inner sanctum where the high priests of the gun cult—call it the cult of Moloch if you want—gathered to perform their ritualistic rending of their robes, as they bemoaned the loss of life and offered platitudes designed to appease their deity. Flanked by burly sheriffs and officials like Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott presided solemnly over this most sacred of catechisms, all faces a study in performative concern. The shocking appearance of O’Rourke impugning this holy mission seemed, at least momentarily, to disturb the assembly, and he was roughly ushered out so the ceremony could proceed, the right syllables could be muttered, and the event consigned to the endless, fickle memory hole always left in the wake of the next news cycle. The gun lovers’ squealing was truly something to behold, for a fleeting moment, anyway. But it will take many more voices than O’Rourke’s to bring down this priesthood, along with its seemingly insatiable thirst for human sacrifice.

A couple months ago Patrick Lyoya was shot and killed by police in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Lauren Sue of Kos reported that on May 17 at a Grand Rapids city commission meeting Naiara Tamminga, age 13, had a few things to say. Here’s part of it. She first talked about being told children must not disobey those protecting them.

I don't trust any of you. I don't trust any of the police officers because you have shown time and time again that we cannot trust you. I go to City High Middle School. Just voted the top high school. Top high school in the state. You know what they teach us? Teach us to speak up for yourself. We're IB learners, right? We're smart. None of you are smart? None of you can recognize murderers? You can identify that there is a problem, but you cannot fix it. I don't know much about the law. Again, I'm young, but I'm pretty sure an accomplice to a murder should be arrested. And right now, all of you sitting and doing nothing are accomplices to a murder.

The rest of it is pretty good too. Leonard Pitts wrote an editorial for the Miami Herald that was reprinted in Sunday’s Detroit Free Press. In it he talked about readers who complain that he uses the word conservative for people who don’t follow the traditional meaning of small government, strong foreign policy, and minimal regulation. But Pitts will continue to call the extreme actions as conservative because those who complain now were silent when it mattered. He wrote they were silent ...

As newly brazen racism and xenophobia became the heart of the movement. As conspiracy became the voice of the movement. As violence became the good right arm of the movement. As Trump became the face of the movement. They stood by and watched as the values they claimed to venerate were smeared in sludge and the name they used to brand themselves was snatched away like money by a playground bully. What it used to mean, folks, it means no more. The fringe became the mainstream. The game played the player. The tail wagged the dog. Now, along comes that trickle of readers wanting me to know that the Trump cultists are not “real” conservatives. I’m afraid they won’t find me particularly sympathetic. Yes, it’s a good argument. But they’re making it to the wrong audience, about 30 years too late.

I had written about five candidates for the Republican nomination for governor of Michigan who were disqualified from the ballot for not getting enough signatures because the company they hired created fraudulent signatures. M.L. Elrick in the Freep (the article is behind a paywall) wrote that other Republicans have no sympathy. The general view: If you can’t get the signatures right you’re not qualified to be governor. Elrick described that when he ran for Detroit City Council he carefully reviewed the petition forms before turning them in. Garrett Soldano, one of those still on the ballot, said those collecting signatures should be motivated by more than a paycheck.

If you can’t inspire people to go around and get petition signature to get you on the ballot. How can you expect to run the state?

Another Freep editorial, this one from two weeks ago and by Brian Dickerson (and also behind a paywall), discussed that this coming fiscal year the state of Michigan is looking at a $6 billion surplus. It is due to federal infrastructure programs and short term changes in spending habits boosting sales tax collection. I’m not at all surprised at the Republican response to this bounty: Tax Cuts! Dickerson wrote that tax cuts are for cowards. I reply that tax cuts are for supremacists. If money is going to tax cuts it isn’t going to improve Michigan’s bad roads and other infrastructure. It isn’t going to schools or to health programs (physical and mental) or to programs to help people caught in financial difficulties or to lift people out of poverty. Money going to tax cuts means poor people are forced to stay poor. That’s why it’s a supremacist move. That bit about “small government” (mentioned above and implied here) is also a supremacist move. A small government also can’t protect the little guy from the predatory moves of the big guy. In political terms Republicans win by proposing the tax cut and Republicans win if Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer vetoes them. Richard Milne of Financial Times reported that Kaja Kallas, prime minister of Estonia and leader of the Reform party forced the dismissal of seven ministers from the Centre party, the other party in the governing coalition. The accusation is the Centre party is too cozy with the Kremlin, even though formal ties were cut when the Ukraine war started, and that connection threatens Estonia’s independence. The dismissals mean the government collapsed. Kallas will try to build a fresh governing coalition. If she can’t, the leader of the Centre party will be given a chance. The Centre party had recently ruled with the far right Ekre party and may try to do so again. Dartagnan wrote that the Supreme Court is becoming a hostile work environment. The cause is the leak of the draft opinion in the case likely to overturn abortion rights. The focus is on the law clerks, those who assist the justices and probably do most of the work. Since none have confessed there is now intense efforts to investigate the clerks’ phones. And the clerks are concerned about the invasion of privacy and beginning to lawyer up. Wrote Dartagnan:

The irony of the Supreme Court’s law clerks potentially litigating what are essentially privacy issues as a result of a leaked decision that itself overtly revokes the right to privacy is inescapable. The Supreme Court has already affirmed that warrantless smartphone searches violate the right to privacy (in fact, Roberts himself wrote that opinion, for a unanimous court). Any litigation about these issues will simply further highlight the fact that the government can’t intrude on your smartphone communications without a warrant based on “probable cause,” yet can intrude on and dictate one’s right to decide reproductive decisions.

So what happens if Supreme Court v. law clerks goes all the way to the Supreme Court? In other Supreme Court news that’s been in my browser tabs for a while... Three weeks ago Mark Joseph Stern, who writes about courts and the law for Slate, tweeted:

The 5th Circuit just dismantled the SEC's power to enforce securities law. This decision is beyond radical. It is nihilistic. ... The implication of this decision is that most (all?) agency enforcement power is unconstitutional. Which, in plain English, means that the federal government can't enforce a huge swath of regulations. I mean, this is basically striking down the administrative state.

That would eliminate most of the things that protect the little guy from the big guy. From a post two weeks ago Joan McCarter of Kos reported:

The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution is the latest casualty of a rogue U.S. Supreme Court, with the radical extremists deciding that no, not everyone really is entitled to competent legal defense and once again overturning Supreme Court precedent to do it. The court, 6-3, ruled that federal judges cannot hear new evidence from death row inmates arguing that their state-appointed lawyers did not provide constitutionally adequate defense.

If your state appointed lawyers (implying you’re poor) were incompetent and you end up on death row, you no longer have the right to appeal to the federal courts. Meaning: you’re screwed. Sonia Sotomayor for the dissent: “This decision is perverse. It is illogical.” Chrislove of the Kos book lovers community wrote about the book To Believe in Women, What Lesbians Have Done for America – A History by Lillian Faderman. The first issue to tackle is the word lesbian. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries that word was not used and there wasn’t a concept of sexual orientation. Even so, Faderman argued that the word accurately describes the committed domestic, sexual, and affectional experiences described in letters and other documents. Then we get to the core of Faderman’s book:

I also argue that in their eras, lesbian arrangements freed these pioneering women to pursue education, professions, and civil and social rights for themselves and others far more effectively than they could have if they had lived in traditional heterosexual arrangements.

Married to a man these women would have been pressured to create a home for the man. Two women together is a partnership. But a man and a woman isn’t a partnership. She just adds homemaker to any outside job. But in living with a woman they could make of their lives what they wished. Some of these women were: suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony and her lover Emily Gross; Bryn Mawr College president M. Cary Thomas who got the job because her partner Mary Garrett gave large endowments; social reformer Jane Addams was funded by her wealthy partner Mary Rozet Smith; Dr. Margaret Long and suffragist Ann Martin; Dr. Emily Blackwell and Dr. Elizabeth Cushier; Frances Willard and Anna Gordon, both of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union; and Lucy Anthony kept home for suffrage leader Anna Howard Shaw. Faderman wrote:

The individuals who are the subject of this book might all be said to have had “gender trouble,” in the sense that they could not accept the restrictions inherent in the notion of gender: they were dissatisfied with the way the category “woman” was constructed, and they were frustrated by the limitations placed on them as forced members of that category. They desired the privileges that were associated with men. Such desires demanded that they break into the “masculine” public sphere, claim it for their own, and thereby neuter the notion of gender-appropriate spheres.

These women didn’t claim that women were just like men. They declared they were different from men and their special gifts were desperately needed by society. Queen Elizabeth of Britain is celebrating 70 years on the throne. Alas, recent mobility issues have prevented her from attending all of the events. Even so, it looks like she had time for a visitor. Tom Hourigan of BBC News tweeted a 90 second video of the fictional Paddington Bear having tea with the Queen.