Entanglement

The other day at the dog park, a retired attorney, Spenser, showed up with his two dogs and his wife, a high school teacher who had the day off. As a former high school teacher, I asked her if she had to carry a gun yet. She laughed. “No. That’s why I’m still teaching.”

I also asked her about our governor’s “Don’t say gay” bill and the banned book issue. She said that for awhile, The Diary of Anne Frank was removed from the school library. Then it was brought back. She mentioned several other books but I don’t recall specific titles. The whole purpose of the banned books, she said, was so that white kids wouldn’t feel guilty about their own history.

Interesting, right?

But throughout our history, we have neglected certain segments of our own history when it comes to people of color. At the stops on the Florida turnpike, there are two restrooms for women, two for men. These date back to the days of segregation when blacks and whites had their own public restrooms. I remember traveling in Florida when I was a kid, on a family vacation, and being confronted with this weirdness – the separate bathrooms.

I also remember asking my dad about it when we were all back in the rental car. His response? “Blacks don’t have the same rights as whites. Someday they will, but right now they don’t.”

We’ve progressed beyond bathrooms. But if the supremes pass more “originalist” bans like abortion, then the rights people have gained in the last 50 years are going to go as extinct as the Dodo bird. We’ll be hurled back to the dark ages of the 1950s when birth control wasn’t legal, when women couldn’t open a bank account without the permission of a male relative, when most women supposedly went to college to find a husband, when we lived in a Leave it to Beaver and Marcus Welby, M.D. world.

In other words, in much simpler terms, this originalist interpretation of the law is that women aren’t equal to men, that they are chattel governed by men, that they must submit to the rule of men. In those terms, Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the abortion ban, is living in an alternate universe – that of 1860. He hasn’t entered the 21 century yet.

Right now, there are 299 election deniers running for office. They also tend to be anti-abortion. That isn’t what they call themselves, of course. In their own eyes, they are pro-life.

My hope is that the right to reproductive freedom hurls these jerks out of the running. My hope is that the Dems win both the house and the senate and codify abortion and voting rights and all the rest into law. Why should the majority have to live under the edicts of minority?

All these issues are interconnected, entangled.