Dispatch 25 – Freedom has Become a Contranym
“Americans always try to do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else.”
Winston Churchill
Just days before the holiday to celebrate freedom, the Supreme Court has again handed down decisions that actively work to take freedom away from vulnerable communities. Handing down decisions that take rights away right before our nation’s birthday has become a sort of tradition of late. Last year, in Merrill v. Milligan the Supreme Court blocked the decision of a lower court that ruled that Alabama had improperly redistricted its congressional seats which effectively allowed gerrymandering. They also allowed states like Texas and Georgia to reduce voting times and locations which makes it harder for minorities to vote, and of course they also overturned Roe v Wade, allowing states to ban abortions.
This year SCOTUS decided that there will be no student loan relief, saying that everyone should pay back every government loan no matter how predatory the loaning process was, and this decision was applauded by Republicans despite most of them, including Matt Gaetz and Marjory Taylor-Greene, have had their PPP loans forgiven with sums that dwarf most student loans. To continue the hypocrisy, Clarence Thomas voted to strike down Affirmative Action, a policy that he used to get where he is now. This is the same attitude Ron DeSantis used when he signed SB 1718, his attempt to keep immigrants out of Florida despite the fact that if this bill had been in effect 100 years ago it would have kept his illiterate Italian great-grandmother from entering the country.
That all said, there was one freedom given in the latest slew of SCOTUS decisions: the freedom to be homophobic. The Court ruled on a case brought to them by an organization called the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), and of course these freedoms include the use of conversion therapy for gays, banning transgender healthcare, and banning the right for a woman to choose what happens to her body during an unwanted pregnancy.
In 2016, Christian web designer Lorie Smith started a court case saying she had been asked by a gay couple to make a website for their wedding, and ADF picked up the case even though she had never actually been asked by any gay couple to design a site. ADF lawyer and wife of Missouri Senator and outspoken homophobe Josh Hawley, filed a paper a year after she first filed the suit, saying that a gay man named Stewart contacted Smith asking to make the gay website celebrating a new marriage. The thing is, that guy named Stewart was tracked down, and he turned out to be a web designer himself, and he’s been happily married for seven years, to a woman. It feels, to me, like this whole case might have been put together by a senator’s wife in order to get it in front of this conservative court in order to get a win against the “woke” majority, or in other words against the LGTBQ+ community and people who believe “all men were created equal,” and when I say men I mean human beings.
As a kid I couldn’t wait for the 4th of July. I’d light my little magnesium sparkler and run through sprinklers as the adults BBQed. I didn’t understand the beauty and potential of democracy until I was a young private first class in a foreign country with a gun in my hand. I remember the moment I swelled with patriotism. It was during the national anthem of Super Bowl XXIX in 1995. Me and a bunch of infantrymen huddled around a small television in Aristide’s presidential palace in Port au Prince, Haiti, after being away from home helping to quell a revolution in a strange land for months.
I believed I was helping to spread democracy in Iraq, too, in 2004 by leading men in combat and risking our lives to make sure people could vote in fair elections and protecting the most vulnerable population, but today I see half the country celebrating these rulings from the highest court in the land as they make it harder for people to vote in fair elections and take rights away from the most vulnerable population. Let’s stop normalizing a celebration of our freedoms just days after they’re chipped away by our government.
Sean Davis 