#Brown v Board of Education

[odinsblog]

One of the most durable myths in recent history is that the religious right, the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, emerged as a political movement in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion. The tale goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically quiescent for decades, were so morally outraged by Roe that they resolved to organize in order to overturn it.

This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s leaders. In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher, recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. 23, 1973, edition of the Lynchburg News: “I sat there staring at the Roe v. Wade story,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize.

Some of these anti- Roe crusaders even went so far as to call themselves “new abolitionists,” invoking their antebellum predecessors who had fought to eradicate slavery.

But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.

Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.

When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

Although a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly criticized the ruling, the overwhelming response was silence, even approval. Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press.

So what then were the real origins of the religious right? It turns out that the movement can trace its political roots back to a court ruling, but not Roe v. Wade.

In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero.

In Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies” tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible contributions.

On June 30, 1971, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued its ruling in the case, now Green v. Connally (John Connally had replaced David Kennedy as secretary of the Treasury). The decision upheld the new IRS policy: “Under the Internal Revenue Code, properly construed, racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to the Federal tax exemption provided for charitable, educational institutions, and persons making gifts to such schools are not entitled to the deductions provided in case of gifts to charitable, educational institutions.”

Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.

In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties, vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal behind conservative causes.

“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited. “The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”

But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.

The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School, inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.”

One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.

Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation. For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject.

The Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus.

(continue reading)

[whenweallvote]

Today is the 70th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

In this historic civil rights case, the Court unanimously ruled that separating children in public schools on the basis of race is unconstitutional. Their decision marked the end of legalized racial segregation in schools across the country, overruling the "separate but equal" precedent set in the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case nearly 60 years prior.

Then and now, the Supreme Court’s decisions determine our rights as citizens. Any time we vote for President or Senators, our ballots can have a direct impact on the Supreme Court.

Honor our past and fight for our future. Register to vote now at weall.vote/register.

[follow-up-news]

Seventy years ago this week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled separating children in schools by race was unconstitutional. On paper, that decision — the fabled Brown v. Board of Education, taught in most every American classroom — still stands. But for decades, American schools have been re-segregating. The country is more diverse than it ever has been, with students more exposed to classmates from different backgrounds. Still, around 4 out of 10 Black and Hispanic students attend schools where almost every one of their classmates is another student of color. The intense segregation by race is linked to socioeconomic conditions: Schools where students of color compose more than 90% of the student body are five times more likely to be located in low-income areas. That in turn has resounding academic consequences: Students who attend high-poverty schools, regardless of their family’s finances, have worse educational outcomes. Efforts to slow or reverse the increasing separation of American schools have stalled. Court cases slowly have chipped away at the dream outlined in the case of Brown v. Board, leaving fewer and fewer tools in the hands of districts to integrate schools by the early 2000s.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 12, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAY 13, 2024

I write a lot about how the Biden-Harris administration is working to restore the principles of the period between 1933 and 1981, when members of both political parties widely shared the belief that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. And I write about how that so-called liberal consensus broke down as extremists used the Reconstruction-era image of the American cowboy—who, according to myth, wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone—to stand against what they insisted was creeping socialism that stole tax dollars from hardworking white men in order to give handouts to lazy minorities and women. 

But five major stories over the past several days made me realize that I’ve never written about how Trump and his loyalists have distorted the cowboy image until it has become a poisonous caricature of the values its recent defenders have claimed to champion.

The cowboy myth originated during the Reconstruction era as a response to the idea that a government that defended Black rights was “socialist” and that the tax dollars required to pay bureaucrats and army officers would break hardworking white men. 

This weekend, on Saturday, May 11, Paul Kiel of ProPublica and Russ Buettner of the New York Times teamed up to deliver a deep investigation into what Trump was talking about when he insisted that he must break tradition and refuse to release his tax returns when he ran for office in 2016 and 2020, citing an audit.

The New York Times had already reported that one of the reasons the Internal Revenue Service was auditing Trump’s taxes was that, beginning in 2010, he began to claim a $72.9 million tax refund because of huge losses from his failing casinos.  

Kiel and Buettner followed the convoluted web of Trump’s finances to find another issue with his tax history. They concluded that Trump’s Chicago skyscraper, his last major construction project, was “a vast money loser.” He claimed losses as high as $651 million on it in 2008. But then he appears to have moved ownership of the building in 2010 from one entity to a new one—the authors describe it as “like moving coins from one pocket to another”—and used that move to claim another $168 million in losses, thereby double-dipping. 

The experts the authors consulted said that if he loses the audit battle, Trump could owe the IRS more than $100 million. University of Baltimore law professor Walter Schwidetzky, who is an expert on partnership taxation, told the authors: “I think he ripped off the tax system.” 

The cowboy myth emphasized dominance over the Indigenous Americans and Mexicans allegedly attacking white settlers from the East. On Friday an impressive piece of reporting from Jude Joffe-Block at NPR untangled the origins of a story pushed by Republicans that Democrats were encouraging asylum seekers to vote illegally for President Joe Biden in 2024, revealing that the story was entirely made up.  

The story broke on X, formerly Twitter, on April 15, when the investigative arm of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which promises to provide “aggressive oversight” of the Biden administration, posted photos of what it claimed were flyers from inside portable toilets at a migrant camp in Matamoros, Mexico, that said in broken Spanish: “Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open.” The tweet thread got more than 9 million views and was boosted by Elon Musk, X’s owner.

But the story was fabricated. The flyer used the name of a small organization that helps asylum seekers, along with the name of the woman who runs the organization. She is a U.S. citizen and told Joffe-Block that her organization has “never encouraged people to vote for anyone.” Indeed, it has never come up because everyone knows noncitizens are not eligible to vote. The flyer had outdated phone numbers and addresses, and its Spanish was full of errors. Migrants who are staying at the encampment as they wait for their appointments to enter the U.S. say they have never seen such flyers, and no one has urged them to vote for Biden.

Digging showed that the flyer was “discovered” by the right-wing video site Muckraker, which specializes in “undercover” escapades. The founder of Muckraker, Anthony Rubin, and his brother, Joshua Rubin, had shown up at the organization’s headquarters in Matamoros asking to become volunteers for the organization; they and their conversation were captured on video, and signs point to the conclusion that they planted the flyers. 

Nonetheless, Republicans ran with the story. Within 12 hours after the fake flyer appeared on X, Republican representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Dan Bishop (R-NC) brought posters of it to Congress, and Republicans made it a centerpiece of their insistence that Congress must pass a new law against noncitizen voting. Rather than being protected by modern-day cowboys, the woman who ran the organization that helps asylum seekers got death threats.

The cowboy image emphasized the masculinity of the independent men it championed, but the testimony of Stephanie Clifford, the adult film actress also known as Stormy Daniels, in Trump’s criminal trial for falsifying business records to cover up his payments to Clifford to keep her story of their sexual encounter secret before the 2016 election, turns Trump’s aggressive dominance into sad weakness. Covering Clifford’s testimony, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times yesterday wrote that “Trump came across as a loser in her account—a narcissist, cheater, sad Hugh Hefner wannabe, trading his satin pajamas for a dress shirt and trousers (and, later, boxers) as soon as Stormy mocked him.”

In the literature of the cowboy myth, the young champion of the underdog is eventually supposed to settle down and take care of his family, who adore him. But the news of the past week has caricatured that shift, too. On Wednesday, May 8, the Republican Party of Florida announced that it had picked Trump’s youngest son, 18-year-old Barron, as one of the state’s at-large delegates to the Republican National Convention, along with Trump’s other sons, Eric and Donald Jr.; Don Jr.’s fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle; and Trump’s second daughter, Tiffany, and her husband. 

On Friday, May 10, Trump’s current wife and Barron’s mother, former first lady Melania Trump, issued a statement saying: “While Barron is honored to have been chosen as a delegate by the Florida Republican Party, he regretfully declines to participate due to prior commitments.” It is hard not to interpret this extraordinary snub from his own wife and son as a chilly response to the past month of testimony about his extramarital escapades while Barron was an infant.

Finally, there was the eye-popping story broken by Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow in the Washington Post on Thursday, revealing that last month, at a private meeting with about two dozen top oil executives at Mar-a-Lago, Trump offered to reverse President Joe Biden’s environmental rules designed to combat climate change and to stop any new ones from being enacted in exchange for a $1 billion donation. 

Trump has promised his supporters that he would be an outsider, using his knowledge of business to defend ordinary Americans against those elites who don’t care about them. Now he has been revealed as being willing to sell us out—to sell humanity out—for the bargain basement price of $1 billion (with about 8 billion people in the world, this would make us each worth about 12 and a half cents). 

Chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration Richard Painter wrote: “This is called bribery. It’s a felony.” He followed up with “Even a candidate who loses can be prosecuted for bribery. That includes the former guy asking for a billion dollars in campaign cash from oil companies in exchange for rolling back environmental laws.”

The cowboy myth was always a political image, designed to undermine the idea of a government that worked for ordinary Americans. It was powerful after the Civil War but faded into the past in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s as Americans realized that their lives depended on government regulation and a basic social safety net. The American cowboy burst back into prominence with the advent of the Marlboro Man in 1954, the year of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, and the idea of an individual white man who worked hard, wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone, was a sex symbol, and protected his women became a central myth in the rise of politicians determined to overturn the liberal consensus. 

Now it seems the myth has come full circle, with the party led by a man whose wife rejects him and whose lovers ridicule him, who makes up stories about dangerous “others,” cheats on his taxes, solicits bribes, and tries to sell out his followers for cash—the very caricature the mythological cowboy was invented to fight.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[gummyartstradingcards]

[jwood718]

"...Brown remains a milestone achievement, and it likely wouldn’t have played out in the same way if it hadn’t had been for Webb v. School District 90 five years earlier."

May 17, 1954, SCOTUS announced its decision in Brown vs the Board of Education of Topeka, KS, ruling that "separate but equal" was anything but.

KCUR's Mackenzie Martin relates the story of a Kansas court case that paved the way for Brown.

“'There’s a direct line that can be traced from that case in South Park, Kansas, to the one in Topeka,' says Kansas City journalist Dan Margolies.

That case, Webb v. School District 90, might never have come about, however, if it hadn’t been for a few determined women, who pushed for equality with everything they had."

Teachers at an Black school, their students, and local activists took their indignation at White students getting a new school as theirs slowly fell apart.

“'Whatever was there was broken down,' [teacher Cornithian] Nutter said in an interview around 1995. 'We just didn’t have anything.'"

The national NAACP got involved, jobs were lost, threats made, but the Black families and their allies kept up the push, eventually seeing that "separate but equal" wasn't being observed. The Black students went on "strike" and attended classes in private homes, their teachers funded by bake sales.

Teacher Hazel McCray-Weddington with the students she taught in South Park living rooms during the 1948-49 school year. Johnson County Museum.

The state ruled that all the students could attend the same, new, school.

"It was the first grade school desegregation victory in which the NAACP Legal Defense Fund played a direct role. Thanks to the coverage by Black-owned Kansas newspapers like The Call and the Topeka Plaindealer, South Park became nationally famous."

Full story

[ryanwclement]

Brown v. Board of Education

by Ryan Clement, barrister TODAY marks the 70th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. the Board of Education, which put to an end the “separate but equal” precedent set by the Court over half a century earlier in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. IN A NUTSHELL, the challenge was against a segregation policy that forced black and white children to be educated…

[apush-relevancy]

happy 70 years to brown v board

[incorrectclassicbookquotes]

Learning what Linda Brown, the girl who inspired her father to fight against segregated schooling, did with her life makes me so emotional. Like this was a black child who had a disadvantage due to her race and then her father fought for her to get a better education and she ended up becoming a Head Start teacher, a public speaker, and an educational consultant. Her father fought for her rights and not only did she carry on his legacy, but she did so much with her life. It makes me so happy that it proves that if we give children the chance they will do something worthwhile and this is why I want to be a teacher so I can give children that chance to succeed in life.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Dean Obeidallah at The Dean's Report:

The push and pull between white supremacist rule and a multi-cultural United States is nothing new. But on Friday we saw a first in our nation’s history: A school board voted to restore the name of three Confederate generals to their public schools.  That’s right, in 2024, the right is naming schools after people who fought and killed to preserve both chattel slavery and white supremacy. This is just the latest salvo in the GOP’s campaign to move America backwards to before the Civil Rights movement.

This jaw-dropping event happened on Friday, when the Shenandoah County School Board in Virginia voted 5-1 to reinstate the names Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby Lee Elementary School to honor Confederate Generals Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Turner Ashby. This vote to celebrate the traitors who killed US soldiers in the hope of maintaining the barbarism known as chattel slavery was led by the conservative group Coalition for Better Schools. Now the school board will spend an estimated six figures in tax dollars to send a message that this area of Virginia is a place where white supremacy rules. This action is all part of the right’s response to the racial reckoning that was kicked off in the United States after the brutal murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed. In fact, the names of these Virginia schools were changed in that very period.   But this is not simply a “reinstatement” of Confederate names. Rather this is a manifestation of the white right’s desperate efforts to maintain control in the face of changing America. After all, this is exactly what white supremacists did in the past when they felt challenged.

As a reminder, the greatest number of Confederate statutes were erected in the early 1900’s spearheaded by United Daughters of the Confederacy as Jim Crow laws were being enacted across the South.  These racist laws and the Confederate memorials were part of a scheme to both celebrate and preserve white supremacy. The next spike in Confederate monuments came from 1940’s to 1960’s. Why then nearly 100 years after the Civil War? Simple, these statutes were built in reaction to the Civil Rights movement to send a message that white power still ruled that area. It’s no coincidence that in 1956, Georgia redesigned its state flag to include the Confederate battle flag and in 1962, South Carolina placed the Confederate battle flag atop its capitol building. 

When it comes to schools being named after traitors who took up arms against the United States of America to fight for the Confederacy, want to guess when the biggest wave of that occurred? Was it shortly after The Civil War? Nope, it was following the landmark US Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 which ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional.  Between that 1954 court decision and 1970, our nation saw the largest spike in schools being after those who fought to defend slavery. In fact, the schools at issue in Virginia were opened in that time frame, with Stonewall Jackson high school opening in 1960. That’s right. The naming of these Virginia schools was part of the backlash to the Civil Rights movement and Brown v. Board of Education. The white officials in that area of Virginia at the time wanted to ensure that people knew white power still reigned supreme.

Dean Obeidallah gets to the point as usual. The renaming of a pair of schools in Shenandoah County, Virginia by reinstating the name of the pre-2020 names of the schools named after three treasonous Confederates (Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Turner Ashby) is a middle finger to common sense and a win for white supremacist values.

[odinsblog]

The phrase “defund the police” has become a lasting reminder of Congress’s colossal failure to address criminal justice reform. Even though the majority of Americans agreed that George Floyd’s death was a symptom of “an underlying racial injustice problem,” Congress failed to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would enact structural changes to policing, introduce a method for transparency, and accountability.

So, why did “defund the police” get so much bad press when conservatives have been defunding public schools for years without so much as a peep from the other side of the aisle? Because Democrats have a horrible habit of responding to the right’s positions rather than taking on bad-faith talking points. But, letting conservatives’ hypocrisy dominate the narrative is dangerous. The debate over “defund the police” was never about public safety; it was about police controlling Black people in their communities.

Likewise, defunding public schools isn’t about providing parents with “choice.”

White students are not short on options for pursuing their education. America’s first school was whites-only, and only through Black parents’ advocacy over generations did that dynamic change. Attacking public school funding is a blatant attempt to deny Black, Latino, and other marginalized students equal opportunities as White students.

Approximately 64% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and can’t possibly afford to send their children to private schools. Conservatives are trying to find a way around Brown v Board of Education, where they can still provide separate and unequal opportunities for Black students.

(continue reading) related↵ related↵

[whenweallvote]

When farmers Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez sent their children to a local California school in 1945, school officials said they had to go to a separate facility reserved for Mexican American students. Angered by this discrimination, the Mendez family recruited other immigrant parents for a federal court case challenging the school segregation.

On this day 77 years ago, a Circuit Court made a final ruling in their favor — stating segregated education denied the Mexican American students their equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment.

The Mendez v. Westminster decision paved the way for the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, and is a clear example of Mexican Americans fighting for their rights — and winning. 🙌🏽

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

In June 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned more than a half-century of Supreme Court precedent. Five justices voted to deny constitutional protection for a woman’s right to choose and gutted privacy as a fundamental right. Texas and 13 other states now bar abortions in almost all circumstances. Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina have enacted six-week bans.

Writing for the Supreme Court majority, Samuel Alito, a George W. Bush appointee, explicitly compared the death of Roe to the end of state-enforced racial segregation, 68 years before. Back in 1954, in a landmark ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, a unanimous court overruled the doctrine of “separate but equal.” These days, Brown is under attack from Alito’s allies on and off the bench.

In their new book The Fall of Roe, named for Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that previously safeguarded federal abortion rights, Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer masterfully lay out how the cultural right and pro-life movement refused to take “no” for an answer, played the long game, and attained the victory for which they had yearned. Dias and Lerer also capture the somnolence of the left and how “intersectionality” came to divide old allies.

Dias is the New York Times religion reporter. A graduate of Wheaton College, the late Rev. Billy Graham’s alma mater, she holds a master’s degree in divinity from Princeton Theological seminary. Lerer, a veteran of five presidential campaigns, covers politics for the Times. The two of them got Hillary Clinton to speak for the record.

The Democratic presidential nominee in 2016 acknowledges that her party underestimated its adversaries, but doesn’t point the finger at herself.

“We didn’t take it seriously, and we didn’t understand the threat,” Clinton said. “We could have done more to fight.”

“I just think that most of us who support the rights of women and privacy and the right to make these difficult decisions yourself, you know, we just couldn’t believe what was happening.”

“Our side was complacent and kind of taking it for granted and thinking it would never go away.”

Even as polls show that abortion rights have widening public acceptance, the mechanics of federalism have left legislatures in red states to act as a counterforce to the more liberal national ethos, a point stressed in The Fall of Roe.

“Republicans had the state legislatures,” Dias and Lerer write. “They had a top-to-bottom network. They had the court. They had the power to change American life.”

The Fall of Roe also sheds light on the infrastructure that undergirded opposition to Roe. Libertarian-minded donors didn’t particularly care about curbing abortion access and David Koch personally supported abortion rights. That having been said, Freedom Partners, a Koch-driven industry group, donated almost $1 million to anti-abortion efforts, which could be paired on election day with tax cuts and lower regulation.

Said differently, fetuses weren’t the only reasons large checks were being cut to the Federalist Society, or that constitutional originalism had become the civic religion of the right. FDR’s legacy has to be gutted. Social security may no longer be so secure.

Leonard Leo, the driving force behind the Federalist Society, receives particular attention.

“Who’s this little fucking midget?” Donald Trump once said of Leo, a close friend of Justice Clarence Thomas.

Short answer: Leo helped get each of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees across the finish line. Think of him as the straw that stirs the drink.

“After Alito was confirmed to the court, Leo connected him with ideologically aligned businessmen, some of whom had cases before the court,” Dias and Lerer write.

They add that Leo “spent time with Thomas at… a private lakeside resort owned by a major Republican donor, Harlan Crow. Their visits were memorialized in a painting, hanging inside the lodge.”

Thanks to ProPublica’s Pulitzer-winning reporting, the painting is now well known. The group is shown thoughtfully smoking cigars.

Leo’s connections also helped found a nonprofit, the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), “on the same hallway in a downtown office building as the Federalist Society.”

Which all brings us back to Brown v. Board of Education and where the right goes next.

In Justice on Trial, an examination of Brett Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court, conservative talking heads Carrie Severino, of JCN, and Mollie Hemingway, of the Federalist, trashed Brown.

According to Severino and Hemingway, social science wrongly played a role in the court’s calculus. They declared that such decisions “may have been correct in their result but were decided on the basis of sociological studies rather than legal principles.”

Notice the word “may.”

Fast forward to May 2024, when Thomas—who joined Alito’s opinion in Dobbs—turned his fire on Brown.

“Such extravagant uses of judicial power are at odds with the history and tradition of the equity power and the Framers’ design,” he wrote in a concurrence, sustaining a South Carolina congressional map in the face of voting rights challenge.

As another election looms, abortion and contraception have emerged as campaign issues, to the horror of Trump. On the stump, the presumptive Republican nominee has vacillated over possible restrictions on contraception. Then again, Stormy Daniels testified that Trump did not wear a condom during an encounter Trump still denies, notwithstanding 34 guilty verdicts in the case arising.

As for meting out punishment to women who have abortions, Trump would leave that to the states.

“The states are going to make that decision,” he told Time. “The states are going to have to be comfortable or uncomfortable, not me.”

He also declined to say “no” to states monitoring women, to identify those who terminate pregnancies. Think The Handmaid’s Tale.

In the 2022 midterms, Dobbs cost the Republicans their “red wave.” In 2024, it may lead to another Trump loss and Democrats retaking the House. Right now, things are that close.

[aficionadoenthusiast]

did anyone ever explain to hazel that the US has anti segregation laws now? I mean, the girl went straight from the 1940s to the underworld to camp jupiter, does she know she can use any bathroom she wants or is she still looking for white and colored signs?

also, it's been a while since I read the books, so I'm not sure on the timeline, but does nico know about obergefell v. hodges? does he know he and will can legally be married?

actually, what does hazel know about recent women's history in america? does she know she can tell men to fuck off and not be arrested? did anyone tell her her employer has to provide equal pay (assuming she ever decides to venture into the mortal world)? does she know about roe v. wade and contraceptive laws??

does nico know about the immigrant and nationality act (is nico a legal immigrant? is he considered an immigrant at all? did hades somehow fast track nico and bianca's citizenship or did he just create fake birth certificates and social security cards? i feel like he'd have had to do one of those for them to go to that school)

do they know that they're considered protected classes?

do they know their rights??

[whitesinhistory]

On July 31, 1963, almost a decade after Brown v. Board of Education prohibited racial segregation in public schools, the University of North Alabama, known at the time as Florence State College, denied admission to Wendell Gunn, a Black applicant, based solely on his race. The school’s rejection letter stated explicitly, “Neither the Alabama Legislature nor the State Board of Education ha[s] authorized the college to accept Negroes.”

UNA officials later admitted that it was evident from Mr. Gunn’s application that he had a “very good academic record.” At the time, Mr. Gunn was a chemistry major at Tennessee Agricultural & State Normal School, a historically Black college that later became Tennessee State University. Despite the fact that Mr. Gunn lived just 10 miles from UNA, he had been forced to attend college out-of-state because Alabama insisted on keeping its schools all-white.

Three weeks after being denied admission, Mr. Gunn filed suit in federal court. A U.S. District Judge ordered UNA to admit Mr. Gunn for the fall term, which began in September.

In response to the court order, white citizens in Alabama criticized UNA for discriminating in such a blatant, written form, rather than discriminating in the covert methods typically used. White citizens complained that the school’s actions “eliminated any chance of stalling tactics by school officials” and undermined “pieces of legislation carefully written to slow school integration.” Others predicted that Governor George Wallace would block Mr. Gunn’s admission by physical force, in defiance of the court order, as he attempted to do in June, when Black students Vivian Malone and James Hood integrated the University of Alabama. Due to the level of hostility in the white community and the potential for violence, UNA held a separate, after-hours enrollment session for Mr. Gunn, after white students left campus for the day on September 11.

Historically segregated public colleges in Alabama, like the University of North Alabama, which had been an all-white state-funded institution since 1830, declined to admit a single Black student in the nine years following Brown. Violent white resistance to integration necessitated federal intervention to protect Black students on multiple occasions in Alabama, but Alabama continued to defy federal integration orders, to deny admission to Black applicants, and to enforce discriminatory state laws that conflicted with the U.S. Constitution. To learn more about white resistance to integration in Alabama and across the country, read EJI’s report, Segregation in America.

[soleminisanction]

I do not have the time or brainpower to go into it in detail tonight because it's part of a much longer essay I've been trying to string together for ages but.

Someday, I need people to understand that everything you think you know about the infamous "Batman and Robin are gay" section of Seduction of the Innocent is wrong. It's not about sex. There's not a single implication that the comics depicted or even implied a sexual relationship. And it's not some out-there interpretation that Fredrick Wertham pulled out of his ass because he was some weird, paranoid conservative weirdo.

It came from his patients. His gay patients. Gay men and boys who described, in interviews with Wertham and other psychiatrists, how they discovered their sexuality by reading comic books and finding themselves attracted to the idealized depictions of masculinity depicted therein.

With Batman and Robin specifically, the focus is entirely on their emotional bond, the way they care about and constantly look out for each other. There's a quote from one of the patients that starts with, "I think I saw myself as Robin," and ends with, "I thought I would like to be loved by someone like Batman or Superman" that's stuck with me for years.

Mind, this is still framed as a not-good thing, because this book came out in 1954 and homosexuality was still pathologized... but it's always stood out to me that Wertham is not the one going, "Ewww, the icky gays got their gay in my superheroes, so immoral, get it away." That was the mainstream audience's reaction to being told that some gay people were fantasizing about being in a safe, happy, and loving relationship based on that of a superhero duo.