I have always been impressed by right-winging males' extraordinary fortitude. These men of men, these happy few but too many, this band of brothers who hold not their manhood cheap; O how their backbones straighten and arms rise when suffering visits — others. Especially women. Especially poor women. Especially poor women of color.
Accordingly I was profoundly impressed yesterday when reading how these rugged men of the right are coping with the Supreme Court's annihilation of Texas women's constitutional right to reproductive freedom. The women, being women, are of course sniffing and whining about the Court's rather abrupt theft of long-standing law and interference into personal(?) matters such as, say, whether a poor woman raped by her drunken, sociopathic father 43 days ago has a right to terminate the resulting pregnancy. Turns out, the men of the right are coping pretty well.
This I learned somewhat pointedly, which is to say, I learned it when reading Claremont College and University of Chicago Law School graduate Henry Olsen, fortitudinous craftsman of "The Supreme Court had no reason to block Texas’s abortion law." For the weak, I repeat: No reason. As in, none. Henry, you see, is strong, because Henry attended those manly institutions of higher education, Claremont College and the University of Chicago Law School, where he learned to remove humans from questions of human decency.
"The court’s majority was legally correct," he intoned in virile contravention of feminized snowflake Chief Justice Roberts' opinion that the majority Court was full of shit. But as the Court's originalists — Henry, too — so often remind us, the constitution is a living document which must take on different hues in different eras; we mustn't think constitutional principles such as stare decisis, for example, are nearly inviolable. (Just kidding, as do the originalists. Boy are those guys some real cutups.)
Why was the Court's majority "legally correct"? Henry explains. "A court can only act if there is an identifiable defendant whose acts could cause an identifiable plaintiff harm contrary to law." Should you be at all fuzzy on this legal concept, as articulated by Henry, permit me to clarify it:
If I, for instance, as a private citizen promised to pay someone, anyone, $10,000 to cause an identifiable plaintiff harm "contrary to law" — presumably, any kind of harm — I'd be legally protected from even the Court's scrutiny until someone took me up on my offer. For first there would have to be an "identifiable defendant."
Perhaps a poor, young, impregnated woman suddenly barred from medial access in violation of Roe? No, she's insufficiently "identifiable." In fact, she's invisible.
Besides, even though my offer might be "flagrantly unconstitutional," as Justice Sotomayor said of the Texas law, the Court added that it was, at least for the moment, uninterested in questions of constitutionality. Pretty nifty for a Court whose primary function is to rule on questions of ? ... constitutionality.
But enough of weird word wrangling and imaginary permutations on what the Court ruled. The vastly more important observation to be made here is that Henry and his fellow right-winging men among men are alway impressively, extraordinarily strong in the face of some poor woman's unwanted pregnancy or even rape, whereupon she then faces a 20-year sentence of having to raise her "love child."
I guess she's just not as tough as the men of the right, who are capable of bearing her pain with such admirable stoicism.