Ted Cruz on a Mission

Ted Cruz Just Told Us What the Right’s Coming For Next.

Abortion rights are just the beginning.

Written by Lauren Elizabeth and published in Medium.com 7/23/2022

Ted Cruz (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) (Andrew Harnik/AP)

America is still reeling, of course, with most of us struggling to come to terms with the gravity of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade. It was just days later, after all, that we heard the story of a ten year old little girl in Ohio who was forced to travel out of state to Indiana in order to get an abortion and not be forced to carry her rapist’s baby to term. Indiana, it’s certainly worth noting, is poised to implement its own draconian anti-choice legislation in the coming weeks, and the story was made even worse when the state’s attorney general announced to a FOX News audience that his office would be launching an investigation into the doctor who helped the girl get an abortion.

All because she helped a little girl, and ensured she would not be forced to go through the trauma of giving birth to her rapists baby.

The right’s endeavor to turn a uterus into the property of the state, and weaponize the state against privacy and women’s reproductive healthcare is — as so many of us have come to realize — only the beginning.

But, we’ve had glimpses of what they’re coming for next.

None other than Texas’ Ted Cruz gave us another insight just recently.

Virginia Chamlee with PEOPLE Magazine writes:

“…On Sunday’s episode of his podcast, Verdict With Ted Cruz, the Republican said the 2015 case that legalized gay marriage in the U.S. “was clearly wrong when it was decided.”

“It was the court overreaching,” Cruz added, USA Today reports.

Elsewhere in the episode, Cruz compared the Obergefell case to Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion until being overturned by the court in June.

The issue, Cruz suggested, is that the legality of same-sex marriage should be left to the states.

“Obergefell, like Roe v. Wade, ignored two centuries of our nation’s history,” Cruz said. “Marriage was always an issue that was left to the states. We saw states before Obergefell, some states were moving to allow gay marriage, other states were moving to allow civil partnerships. There were different standards that the states were adopting.”…”

Ah, yes.

The court stepping in to ensure the government doesn’t get between you and your doctor when it comes to healthcare, or ensuring that the government doesn’t get to step in and prevent two consenting adults from getting married on the basis of gender or sex…that’s government overreach.

Seizing our bodies as property of the state though, and forcing us to give birth…that’s perfectly acceptable?

Women using coat hangers in desperate attempts to give themselves abortions…that’s fine. By Ted Cruz’s logic, that’s simply American history. Simply the price we pay for having a uterus, and the federal government has no right to step in and ensure safe abortion access in states that don’t want to provide it.

After they came for our bodies, can we really be surprised they’re coming into our homes and bedrooms next?

Can we really be surprised that after they’re dictating what happens inside our bodies, they’re trying to dictate who we can and cannot marry? They’re all about freedom though, right? Freedom to control. Freedom to discriminate. Freedom to dictate the most intimate details of someone else’s life.

In his concurring opinion for the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, Clarence Thomas was practically begging. Begging for cases to come up through the courts where the Supreme Court could overturn rights to contraception, allow for the reimplementation of sodomy laws, and the right for LGBTQ couples to marry.

Ted Cruz, of course, is using the platform of his podcast to essentially do the same.

All they’re looking for is one lawsuit. They just want one lawsuit related to each of these specific issues to make its way to the Supreme Court, and they’re ready and waiting to overturn each one of those past rulings.

This is war, and we better start acting like it. Right wingers like Ted Cruz and Clarence Thomas…they’re nothing but creeps. Sick freaks. Absolute monsters who are literally dedicating their careers and their power to attempting to control who you marry, what you can and cannot do in your bedroom, and what grows inside your body.

Of course, hearing stories like these I can’t help thinking about Ted Cruz’s young daughters. One is eleven, the other fourteen. Fourteen. Barely even a teenager, but certainly old enough to understand the weight of her father’s stance on these issues.

What if one of them is gay? What if one of them gets pregnant their senior year, and absolutely does not want to carry a fetus to term and put their body through that, let alone raise a child? Oh, I’m sure Cruz would ensure his daughter got whatever she needed. They’re above these laws, after all. But imagine being in that situation, knowing what their father has done. Knowing that countless other girls have been robbed of the freedom he’s ensuring they will still have, and carrying the weight of that with you.

Honestly, my heart goes out to them.

Abortion Decision Draft

What’s Missing from Alito’s Decision to Revoke the Right to Abortion

In a leaked draft, the Justice points to “history and tradition” but ignores the context of both the past and the present.

By Jessica Winter and published in the New Yorker May 3, 2022

Just in time for Mother’s Day, a draft of the majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court case focussing on the constitutionality of a fifteen-week abortion ban in Mississippi, was leaked to Politico, which published it on Monday night. In the draft, Justice Samuel Alito repeatedly cites the Fourteenth Amendment, which specifies that any right conferred by its due-process clause must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” The right to an abortion—which Roe v. Wade and its successor, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, ascribed to the due-process clause—has no such roots, Alito argues. “Until the latter part of the 20th century,” he writes, “there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Zero. None.” Alito is entirely correct that, in 1973, the Supreme Court was somewhat out of step with its time in codifying women’s rights. When Roe was decided, a married woman in the United States needed her husband’s permission to get a credit card, something that did not change until 1974. No state outlawed marital rape until 1975. No man was found liable for sexual harassment until 1977. Pregnancy was a fireable offense until 1978. Alito does not itemize forms of gender-based subjugation that persisted after Roe, many of which might be persuasively argued as “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” But the history of such discrimination offers helpful context for why some conservatives might have seen the legalization of abortion—and the freedom that it conferred on women—as so radical, so potentially destructive to the social order, that they would spend nearly fifty years working toward its reversal.

Other, more recent Supreme Court decisions have rested on the presumption of a right to privacy in the due-process clause—Lawrence v. Texas, for example, which struck down so-called sodomy laws across the country, or Obergefell v. Hodges, which enshrined the right to same-sex marriage. Some conservatives viewed these progressive victories in the same apocalyptic terms as they did Roe, and some progressive activists are legitimately concerned that, if finalized, the decision in Dobbs will open the door to dismantling L.G.B.T.Q. rights. But the draft opinion, which upholds Mississippi’s ban on abortion after fifteen weeks of pregnancy, is careful to specify that reproductive rights are special, even unique. No other issue involves “the critical moral question posed by abortion”—i.e., the rights, the standing, the precise ontology of “fetal life,” “potential life,” or “an unborn human being.” This uncertainty, Alito writes, requires the Court to “return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” He adds, “At the time of Roe, 30 States still prohibited abortion at all stages. In the years prior to that decision, about a third of the States had liberalized their laws, but Roe abruptly ended that political process.” (The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg saw Roe in broadly similar terms—as an interruption to a more organic, less contentious advance of reproductive rights—albeit from the other side of the aisle.) Roe intruded on the will of the people, Alito contends. The decision was “exceptionally weak,” an “abuse of judicial authority,” “egregiously wrong from the start,” and one that “short-circuited the democratic process.”

VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKERThe Bus Ride from Hell

If a majority of the Supreme Court decrees that Roe is, at its core, a subversion of American democracy, then there is some symmetry in the fact that four of the five Justices voting to end it were appointed by men who won the Presidency despite losing the popular vote, that three of them were appointed by a man who was twice impeached, and that one was appointed to an essentially stolen seat. A majority of Americans support abortion rights, but Republican-controlled legislatures in heavily gerrymandered states do not, and it is those lopsided governing bodies that are responsible for Mississippi’s fifteen-week ban, for Texas’s six-week ban, and for bills that would restrict or ban abortions in at least twenty-one other states should Roe be officially overturned. On the national level, gerrymandered districts in the House, conservative overrepresentation in the Senate, and Joe Manchin’s dedication to the filibuster will almost certainly doom any federal action that President Biden may attempt. Minoritarian rule, regardless of its merits, is also deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition, and it is grimly easy to foretell what will result from it now: an increase in adverse maternal-health outcomes, especially for poor women and Black and brown women; unjust prosecutions of women who suffer miscarriages; enormous pressure on already overtaxed clinics in states that preserve abortion rights; and more.

To the layperson, at least, the decades-long debate—undertaken by scholars on the left as well as the right—about if or where a right to abortion is found in the Constitution can look like a pedantic fixation. Childbirth can be physically and psychologically debilitating, and so can parenthood, even in the most favorable and desired circumstances; it would not seem to require a law degree to determine that carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term and being forced to give birth is a matter of life and liberty. Abortion rights are only a part of one of the central, most vexing, most consequential questions of our entire judicial system: Who does your body belong to? Who is in possession of you, of your self, at any given moment in your life? Is it you? Is it your parent, is it your spouse or sexual partner, is it a physician, is it a police officer or prison warden, is it a state legislature, is it the God you pray to? Is it Samuel Alito?

Lewis Powell, a moderate Nixon appointee to the Supreme Court, voted with the majority in Roe, following an incident in which a young colleague at his law firm came to him in desperation after his girlfriend bled to death as a result of a botched abortion. (Powell intervened with the local prosecutor on the young man’s behalf, and no charges were filed against him.) Powell was confronted with a body that had been harmed by the law, and he acted accordingly. In the Dobbs decision, Alito nods a bit at women’s lived experiences in a manner at once abstract and upbeat, implying that the need for abortion has diminished since 1973, owing to weakened stigmas against single mothers, prohibitions on pregnancy discrimination, and the fact that parental leave “is guaranteed by law in many cases,” among other reasons. He does not mention that American women have the highest maternal-mortality rates in the industrialized world, that America is the only industrialized nation without mandated paid leave, that sixteen per cent of its children live in poverty, that it spends something like two per cent of what some Scandinavian countries do on day care per toddler. Alito does not quantify what the end of Roe means, nor does he personify it; there are no women here. There is “the womb”—the generic vessel outside of which the fetus cannot survive—but there is no body. For all the suffering and havoc that may result from this decision, it is a bloodless text, on a matter that is all blood.