If you are a queer person you have heard these words your entire life, the Supreme Court case X decided that in our favor. We stand on SCOTUS decisions to grant us access to birth control, equality under the law, our right to non discrimination and equality to marry whomever we choose. These so-called, hard-fought rights are now in danger of becoming yesterday’s news. Relegated to the history books of yesteryear. A time long gone. Our rights are now at risk of being dismantled one by one with the destruction of Roe V. Wade which was the centerpiece holding it all together.
Our democracy died on January 6 2021. We knew that the day those first news reports came about. The other side, the hate mongers who rely on fear to control the masses, won the battle of public opinion. They were treated as political protestors rather than traitors to our republic, now as we watch the January 6 committee dig deeper into the lies that led us here we now have to sit back and watch that very Supreme Court that granted us our rights in the first place hack them out from under us with a machete. There is no going back. We now have to either face the reality of the dark timeline we live in or we have to revolt. The time for fighting in the courts is long gone, we lost that battle. We’re not likely to gain any grounds in that realm going forward as the political landscape has shaped itself in such a way that the conservatives will rule the courts for decades to come. Now we sit back and watch them gut our rights right in front of our eyes as we are now powerless to fight back.
I won’t predict which rights will get tossed next. I can’t live in fear of that. Instead I will do what I can to ensure a brighter future by voting for those Democrats that might, just maybe, have a chance at legislating some of our rights into codified law so we don’t have to depend on SCOTUS decisions that could easily be overturned.
Whenever I heard someone say X was settled case law I wanted to remind them all the cases I learned about in my communication law class while I was in college where fundamental rights were often over turned without any regard to precedent. The Supreme Court is under NO legal obligation to respect the decisions of past courts. This is the reality we find ourselves in without realizing we were already here the entire time. Nothing is settled case law in this country not as long as we have politicians deciding the make up of those same courts.
What can we do going forward? Aside from voting as blue as we can? Not much to be honest. We turn to our law makers now who will be responsible for enacting laws that will protect our rights from a tyrannical party hell bent on wiping us off the face of the earth. We need to take this a lot more seriously as the mid term elections approach. Republicans will make DAMN SURE gas prices remain the political talking point as well as using trans people as scapegoats so they can continue to decimate the corpse of our long dead democracy. We need to hammer them every step of the way and make sure we see a true honest to goodness Blue Wave come November. We need to get out the vote like we have never done before! But we won’t and that is why I won’t cry over the death of our republic because it died on a Wednesday when most of us were at work living our lives.
Stephanie Bri 