Justice Thomas makes it clear decisions support our rights are next

[BootmanLA]

To the Civil War discussion, I'll add: sure, the North was becoming more economically powerful than the South, but that was only relevant insofar as what the North would DO with that power. And the biggest concern among the powers-that-were in the South was that the North's economic growth would result in more and more free states carved from the west, leading to the majority needed to abolish slavery nationwide. The South had long had power to block this because of the 3/5 compromise boosting Southern numbers in the House, but if newly admitted free states boomed in population, that advantage would erode. In other words, the economic dispute itself turned on slavery.

And that's why (most of) the slave states seceded after Lincoln's election: he'd made it clear he did not believe the nation could endure "half slave, half free" - that "it will all one thing, or all the other." And the South knew the North would never, ever accept "all slavery".

But far from taking my word for it: the surviving declarations of secession, from those states that formally adopted a resolution in favor of it, are crystal clear that preservation of slavery and white supremacy were the driving factors.

Mechanization of agriculture, of course, would have made slavery too expensive to continue, and in any other context, slavery would have gone the way of whale oil lamps and buggy whips when confronted with superior technology. But unlike whale oil lamps and buggy whips, slavery and white supremacy was the very foundation of the social order in the south, and you couldn't simply replace slaves with machines without a massive upheaval in the social order. (In fact, one could argue that with the end of Reconstruction, the old social order was largely restored and it stayed in place until the middle of the 20th century). 

[hntnhole]

Thank you for the interesting response.  Agreed.  American citizens did indeed make that decision, and it led to murmurs of session.  

6 hours ago, hntnhole said:

until one group has the chance to unseat another more powerful group

And also with much respect, particularly since your forebears suffered through the tragedy: There was indeed, as there always is, was, and every shall be, an "us" and a "them", which is based in economic advantage vs perceived economic disadvantage, accompanied by some cultural contrivance (often religious) to divert the attention of the masses.  The Romans marched and conquered because they could. The British sailed the seas sweeping aside all opposition because they could.  The Germans (and their allies in the Far East) marched and conquered because they could, possessing  superior industrial (i.e. killing-power) development. At the time, it turned out that the US was the sleeping giant of industrialization, which is an economic advantage if ever there were one.  Is there a nation that ever existed throughout history that hasn't exerted the will of it's powerful because it could?.  

The "us" vs "them" is always lurking in the shadows.  Choose any ancient text chronicling domination of one economic group against another - or any modern text of the same purpose - and it boils down to who's got control and who doesn't.

I would hazard that in this country, there has always been - since before there even was a Nation - an "us" and a "them", defined by economic status.  When the North found it necessary to mobilize, the concept of using enslavement of another race of people was far easier to rouse the citizens of the North than to stick to the truth. 

It's so much easier to rouse hatred of "the other" by stand-in's, as opposed to the truth.  

Thank you again for your most interesting and beautifully-expressed response.   Never-the-less ...... 

[ffunguy5]

On 6/25/2022 at 3:23 PM, TotalTop said:

This is fear mongering, and nobody can actually accurately predict the future.

A year ago people would have thought that talk of Roe being overturned was fear mongering. And here we are. An Associate Justice of the US Supreme has stated in his concurrence of the decision overturning Roe that three specific decisions using the same legal reasoning as Roe should be re-adjudicated. How is discussing this "fear mongering"?

[JamesL100]

From this side of the pond, that looks like a 'slow-burn' likely intended by Trump. Similar to what I recall of long-lasting judicial reshuffles started by Reagan.

[hntnhole]

2 hours ago, JamesL100 said:

likely intended by Trump

Hang onto your seats, guys - for once, I'm actually not going to blame Cheeto-Head.

I don't believe he possess the intelligence to actually "plan" something like that.  He's hardly intelligent, he's merely clever - like every other conman.  More, I don't think he gives a rats ass about anything other than his own fat ass.  He's just too dull to plan out something like that himself.  He's only able to take advantage of situations begun by others, as you point out. 

Rikers, baby !!!!

[Guest]

7 hours ago, hntnhole said:

He's only able to take advantage of situations begun by others, as you point out. 

Either way, the result is the same though:
a Superior Court with a (Republican-appointed) majority who in their rulings and opinions seem to let their personal belief-system, weigh more than the ideals behind the US constitution and the foundation of your union itself.

 

[rawTOP]

12 hours ago, hntnhole said:

Hang onto your seats, guys - for once, I'm actually not going to blame Cheeto-Head.

I don't believe he possess the intelligence to actually "plan" something like that.  He's hardly intelligent, he's merely clever - like every other conman.  More, I don't think he gives a rats ass about anything other than his own fat ass.  He's just too dull to plan out something like that himself.  He's only able to take advantage of situations begun by others, as you point out.

I think for him it was transactional. He supported a policy he didn't necessarily believe in because it would give him needed support from a large group of people without whom he couldn't win the presidency. And he knew continuing to support their agenda would be his best chance to retain power.

[hntnhole]

10 hours ago, BareLover666 said:

Either way, the result is the same though:

Of course.  Whether it's this crippling of his intellectual capacity or that crippling - the result is the same.

I wouldn't use the word "seem" though.  These old men, subsumed by their firm belief in something intrinsically false, have actually said (vocal or via the written word) that they intend to proceed with the repressions based on the privacy rights.  The way I see it, there's no "seeming" about it.  They're gonna just do it, or die trying.  I hope Whoever or Whatever is reading this last sentence ...... 

[BootmanLA]

5 hours ago, rawTOP said:

I think for him it was transactional. He supported a policy he didn't necessarily believe in because it would give him needed support from a large group of people without whom he couldn't win the presidency. And he knew continuing to support their agenda would be his best chance to retain power.

I agree, with the slight modification that: Trump cared not one whit about conservative judicial priorities as articulated by McConnell and the Federalist Society et al. - it wasn't that he didn't necessarily believe in it, he just didn't give a damn, because his experience with the courts has always been delay, delay, delay, and eventually things go away or settle for a pittance. Notice that he's almost never the plaintiff in any action - he threatens to sue constantly, but he never did when it was his personal or corporate money. He only got involved as a plaintiff when it came to his campaign, because that was all someone else's money.

To the extent he cared about judicial nominees at all, it was with the expectation that they would be "Trump judges" and rule in his favor all the time. That was his big miscalculation, because the FedSoc judges that they crammed onto the federal bench have a dim view of executive power. Right now, it's Biden's regulations they're striking down, but these ideologues (on the appellate courts, that is) are just as likely to strike down Trumpian overreaches if he gets back into office.

[Guest]

On 7/15/2022 at 1:46 PM, BareLover666 said:

That's clarified, thanks.

Yeah, my analogy between not allowing abortions and not allowing anti-retroviral medication was probably more than a little far-fetched. 

I can't imagine that anyone would seriously view abortion as a form of birth control, and I've only seen that particular reason named in some rather raunchy photographic cartoons. It is as you say: using other means (the contraceptive pill I think has a high effectiveness in preventing conception) are easier, cheaper and safer for the woman in question.

So hopefully women will keep acces to real contraceptives and not be slut-shamed in any way for using them. Perhaps the analogy between contraceptive pills and PrEP does work in that regard, that there is at times a form of shaming against people using PrEP and those medication too should be accessible and affordable for anyone who wants to use them.

I do hope nobody in their right mind will suggest abstinence as the solution to prevent both pregnancies and HIV like the Catholic Church does (who - in my not professional opinion - are out of their mind).

 

Glad we have some common ground here, in that there can be good reasons for allowing abortions, the health of mother being one of them. Personally I hope the 'heart-beat' rule goes overboard in the Srates that have implemented them because that means in effect that de foetus is considered to be a separate human being before the woman might realise she's pregnant. 
When the life of the mother is at risk, possibly even then an abortion might still be legally possible (if States allow this); But this creates a very harsh judicial dilemma that could negatively effect women who really don't want to give birth to child if the conception was the result of rape.

These are complicated issues of - literarily - life and death. 

 

And coming back to the concurrent opinion of Justice Thomas I do hope that some basic principles concerning a free availability of contraceptives will be safeguarded more strongly - just in case religious lunatics come into power - just as that our rights as gay, lesbian and bisexual - with an emphasis on sexual - human beings might need to be protected in a stronger way than just by a SCOTUS ruling.

Hopefully you guys don't mind a foreigner butting in here; It's not that The Netherlands is perfect in any way. For years our government has chosen to refuse asylum for homosexual refugees from the Middle East, when they found 'they could have stayed in the closet'.
My point being, that it's good sense to watch out for these foolish and harmful tendencies wherever we live, and it doesn't matter that much if you have a two party system, or a multi party system.  

Democratic processes are not perfect, can never be perfect but it would be nice if all that engage in it, even just by voting, to try hear each other, think and want the best ideas to win. 

(Sorry for blabbing on like this - again. I could have been more concise but I wasn't). 😉

 

 

Many women do use abortion as or instead of the many various types and combinations of birth control, they have a need to be a cum dump or bred and then are shocked when they become pregnant.  I personally know women who have had ten or eleven abortions, they had access to condoms and other contraceptives but made the personal choice not to use any.  If abortion is legal it should only be done in the very first trimester, as anything else is infanticide, and akin to how in Asian countries women use abortion as birth control or kill the infant after he or she is born.  This also happens in abortion clinics in the USA. 

Abortion is not safe, the fetus/almost developed baby dies, and many women who had supposedly "safe and legal" abortions have died.  I am only for abortion in the cases of rape/incest, or in the super rare condition that the mother's life is in danger and a c section cannot be performed.

[Guest]

On 7/23/2022 at 7:17 PM, BootmanLA said:

To the Civil War discussion, I'll add: sure, the North was becoming more economically powerful than the South, but that was only relevant insofar as what the North would DO with that power. And the biggest concern among the powers-that-were in the South was that the North's economic growth would result in more and more free states carved from the west, leading to the majority needed to abolish slavery nationwide. The South had long had power to block this because of the 3/5 compromise boosting Southern numbers in the House, but if newly admitted free states boomed in population, that advantage would erode. In other words, the economic dispute itself turned on slavery.

And that's why (most of) the slave states seceded after Lincoln's election: he'd made it clear he did not believe the nation could endure "half slave, half free" - that "it will all one thing, or all the other." And the South knew the North would never, ever accept "all slavery".

But far from taking my word for it: the surviving declarations of secession, from those states that formally adopted a resolution in favor of it, are crystal clear that preservation of slavery and white supremacy were the driving factors.

Mechanization of agriculture, of course, would have made slavery too expensive to continue, and in any other context, slavery would have gone the way of whale oil lamps and buggy whips when confronted with superior technology. But unlike whale oil lamps and buggy whips, slavery and white supremacy was the very foundation of the social order in the south, and you couldn't simply replace slaves with machines without a massive upheaval in the social order. (In fact, one could argue that with the end of Reconstruction, the old social order was largely restored and it stayed in place until the middle of the 20th century). 

That is some nice revisionist history. It did not really happen this way and the northern states at one time had slaves and they profited from slavery.

 

[NEDenver]

2 hours ago, TotalTop said:

Many women do use abortion as or instead of the many various types and combinations of birth control, they have a need to be a cum dump or bred and then are shocked when they become pregnant.  I personally know women who have had ten or eleven abortions, they had access to condoms and other contraceptives but made the personal choice not to use any.  If abortion is legal it should only be done in the very first trimester, as anything else is infanticide, and akin to how in Asian countries women use abortion as birth control or kill the infant after he or she is born.  This also happens in abortion clinics in the USA. 

Abortion is not safe, the fetus/almost developed baby dies, and many women who had supposedly "safe and legal" abortions have died.  I am only for abortion in the cases of rape/incest, or in the super rare condition that the mother's life is in danger and a c section cannot be performed.

Abortion is far more safe than pregnancy, especially for poor women.  Also, a bunch of fetal abnormalities are not seen until after the first trimester.  In those cases bearing and giving birth is harder on the pregnant person and at best leaves an infant to struggle in pain until it inevitably dies.  I’m not pro-unnecessary pain and suffering.  
 

It should be left to the pregnant person to decide with medical advice from their physician.

[NEDenver]

Oh.  Also Thomas wants to pull a Clarence on Griswold, too, so no more guarantees on birth control, including simply condoms.

[hntnhole]

Thanks, TotalTop, for posting that most interesting video.  As one of those kids who never heard much more about the Civil War in public school other than the traditional "us vs them", every viewpoint is welcome and worthy of introspection.  

I would be interested to know more about the "cash flow" thought-train.  I do know about  the problems with status (s.o.f.) as new States in the West began to form, but there must be more to the cash-flow idea than travelers with their belongings.  The land-purchases idea is one that could involve a decent chunk of change.

Thanks again.

[hntnhole]

Getting back to the original post:

Since the right for two men to be legally married was established years ago, and thousands upon thousands of men have legally married, exactly what could Clancy take away?

These extant marriages were entered into as fully legal marriages (at the time, and to this day).  Isn't it legally impossible for the SCOTUS to declare these legally-performed marriages illegal?   If worse comes to worse, maybe they could make it illegal for any new gay marriages to take place after X date, but can they touch the extant ones?  So what if they were based on privacy rights recognized years ago: they're still legal marriages.  Right?

The difference between marriages and pregnancies (I mean, for the purposes of this thought-exercise) is that pregnancies end after 9 months at most, and marriages can last life-times.  Even allowing existing marriages to continue until one of the partners passes, therefore ending the marriage*, and at the same time making new ones illegal - two entirely different answers to an absurdly perverse issue - is completely nuts .... right ???  

Any legal-eagles (and also rawfuckers) here on BZ ?

on the other hand, we could claim that although our partner-in-marriage has passed, the union still endures in heaven !!!  There's nothing they could say to counter that !!!