Yesterday’s abortion ruling was underwhelming

On the surface, the ruling by the US Supreme Court in the case of JUNE MEDICAL SERVICES L. L. C. ET AL. v. RUSSO to strike down Louisiana’s law that made access to abortion very difficult was a big win for abortion rights. But a closer examination reveals that it may have just set up the next legal challenge.

To understand the ruling, we must note that the Louisiana law under scrutiny was just the latest in a long line of so-called ‘trap’ (targeted regulation of abortion providers) that anti-abortion legislators pass that try to circumvent the right to abortion not by banning them but by imposing regulations on providers that are highly burdensome and unnecessary under the guise of protecting the health of the women seeking abortions. The aim of these laws is to shut down as many abortion clinics as they can because they cannot meet the requirements. This would primarily affect poor people since rich people will be able travel long distances or out of state or even out of the country to get abortions.
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New York Police Department is the poster child for abuse

If you want to know how bloated US police departments are and how militarized they have become and how blatantly they disregard civil liberties, the NYPD is the place to look. This article by Tana Ganeva and Laura Gottesdiener from back in 2012 lists the “nine frightening things about America’s biggest police force.”

The NYPD is the biggest police force in the country, with over 34,000 uniformed officers patrolling New York’s streets, and 51,000 employees overall — more than the FBI. It has a proposed budget of $4.6 billion for 2013, a figure that represents almost 15 percent of the entire city’s budget.
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What has the NYPD been doing with all that cash and manpower? In addition to ticketing minorities for standing outside of their homes, spying on Muslims who live in New Jersey, abusing protesters, and gunning down black teens over weed, the NYPD has expanded into a massive global anti-terror operation with surveillance and military capabilities unparalleled in the history of US law enforcement.

In an email published by WikiLeaks, an FBI official joked about how shocked Americans would be if they knew how egregiously the NYPD is stomping all over their civil liberties. But what we already know is bad enough. Here’s a round-up of what the department has been up to lately.
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A big question following the court’s LGBT decision

Religious organizations that discriminate against the LGBT community have been stunned by the US supreme court’s ruling handed down last week that it is against the law for employers to fire LGT employees because of their sexual orientation or identity.

The ruling would have “seismic implications” for religious freedom and would potentially set off years of lawsuits for religious organizations, said Russell Moore, the president of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.
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“I am deeply concerned that the U.S. Supreme Court has effectively redefined the legal meaning of ‘sex’ in our nation’s civil rights law,” the president of the Catholic bishops’ conference, Archbishop José H. Gomez, said in a statement. “This is an injustice that will have implications in many areas of life.”
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But what conservative religious groups may see as a religious freedom issue, secular and progressive religious groups see as an excuse to discriminate.

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Samantha Bee on the Supreme Court’s historic Title VII opinion

While welcoming the ruling that said that firing someone because they are gay or lesbian or transgender violates the law, she says that there is much more that needs to be done to protect the transgender community. She highlights the particularly precarious and dangerous situation in our society of the black trans community who get the whammy of racism added to the homophobia and transphobia. And black transwomen have to deal with the added sexism as well.

What is appalling is that so many people try to act as if the non-trans community has to be protected from the trans community, when the reality is the other way around.
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Want to gauge Trump’s fortunes? Look at Lindsey Graham

The level of support for Trump is something that absorbs a lot of interest. His approval numbers, both nationally and in the so-called battleground states, are underwater (i.e., more disapprove than approve) and he also trails Joe Biden. But people are still shell-shocked by his 2016 victory that defied the polls and so are reluctant to place too much stock in them, thinking that he might well pull off another upset win.

But there is another indicator and that is South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham. The warmongering neoconservative Graham is one of the most shamelessly hypocritical and opportunistic members of his party and that is saying a lot. He and his Republican colleagues in Congress have been the enablers of Trump’s many excesses. But he is also a self-serving weathervane. When Trump initially announced his candidacy in 2015 and was written off as a joke, Graham was one of his most vicious critics, savaging him mercilessly as utterly unfit for the office. But as Trump’s fortunes rose and he won the nomination and the presidency, Graham became one of his most unctuous supporters and enablers, slobbering all over him and doing whatever he wanted, and more.
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The gang that can’t shoot straight

If the Trump administration were not so corrupt, dangerous, and harmful to so many people, their sheer incompetence would be laughable. Take for example their attempt to fire the Geoffrey Berman, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Attorney General William Barr announced at 9:00 pm on Friday night that Berman was “stepping down” effective immediately and thanked him for his “tenacity and savvy” while in the office he had led since 2018. The timing of the announcement immediately raised suspicions that this was another of the notorious ‘Friday night news dumps’ which administrations use to avoid media scrutiny of dubious actions.
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Trump reeling from two Supreme Court defeats

The US Supreme Court delivered the second blow to Trump this week when it ruled 5-4 on Thursday that Trump’s executive order rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was not valid because the reasoning behind it was ‘arbitrary and capricious’.. This follows the 6-3 ruling on Monday that said that employers who fired employees because they were gay, lesbian, or transgender violated the law.
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Looking deeply into the Supreme Court’s LGBT opinion

Yesterday I wrote about the 6-3 decision by the US Supreme Court that ruled that discrimination against gay, lesbian, and transgender people in employment violated Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that says that it is “unlawful . . . for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

This case was a consolidation of three separate cases. Gerald Bostock and Donald Zerda were both fired from their jobs when their employers learned that they were gay, and Aimee Stephens, who had presented as a male when she was hired, was fired from her job when she told her employer six years later that she planned to live and work full-time as a woman. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Bostock’s firing but the Second Circuit in Zarda’s case and the Sixth Circuit in Stephens’ case said that the firings violated Title VII. Sadly, Zarda and Stephens have died since the cases were filed and thus were not able to savor their victory but their heirs who continued the cases can.
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Big court win for LGBT community

In a major decision, the US Supreme court ruled today 6-3 that LGBT employees are covered by the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act that bars employment discrimination.

The case concerned whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars employment discrimination based on race, religion, national origin and sex, also covered LGBTQ+ workers.

“Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear. An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids,” justice Neil Gorsuch wrote.

The three cases the court heard, Altitude Express Inc v Zarda, Bostock vClayton county, and RG & GR Harris Funeral Homes v EEOC concerned whether or not a federal ban on sex discrimination forbids employment discrimination against LGBTQ+ workers.

The Harris Funeral Homes case centered on Aimee Stephens, a trans woman fired after her boss claimed it would violate “God’s commands” if he allowed her “to deny [her] sex while acting as a representative of [the] organization.”.

Stephens’ case was the first trans rights case to come before the supreme court and came at a time when attacks on trans people have spiked and the federal government and conservative states have moved to erode the rights of trans people.

Donald Zarda and Gerald Bostock, both gay men, alleged they were fired from their jobs because of their sexual orientation.
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Before the ruling job discrimination against gay and transgender workers was still legal in much of the nation. Some 29 states currently allow some form of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity in employment, housing and public accommodation.

This is big and very much good news in these troubled times, especially the fact that two very conservative justices like Neil Gorsuch and chief justice John Roberts were part of the majority.

You can read the opinion here.

Was Jeffrey Epstein working for the FBI?

Jeffrey Epstein, who died in prison while awaiting trial for pedophilia, had earlier received an extraordinarily lenient plea deal for charges related to sex with minors, with one of the federal prosecutors who negotiated that deal, U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, ending up as a cabinet member for Donald Trump. Questions had been raised as to why Epstein off so easily and most answers were that he had used his money to buy favors from influential people.
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