Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius

Trump-loving school board member says it's not her duty to protect kids: 'God decides who lives or dies'

Travis Gettys
September 03, 2021

Barbara Crosby. (Facebook)

A South Carolina elected official walked out of a meeting in protest because she wanted God, and not her fellow school board members, to decide whether children should be protected from the coronavirus.

The Dorchester District 2 School Board voted Wednesday evening to move all schools to seven days of virtual learning after Labor Day, over the objections of some parents and at least one board member, after 20 percent of the student body was reported out with positive COVID-19 tests or close contact and 264 staff absences, reported WCSC-TV.

"They should have put option D which is kids go back to school like they should be doing," said parent Derek Clements. "They don't care, they clearly don't care. They don't want to listen."

A dozen parents sat through the school board workshop in hopes of forcing a public comment, but board chair Gail Hughes notified them it would be illegal to change the agenda, which did not include public input, after it had already been approved.

"The ones who were here were one side of it, and that's okay," Hughes said. "It was a board workshop where we gather information to try and make a decision. It was not a board meeting where we allow comments."

But board member Barbara Crosby, who called for an end to classroom COVID-19 restrictions Nov. 2 at a Donald Trump rally, walked out of the workshop in protest because she was unable to vote for in-person learning, no matter what, because it was not included among the options on the agenda, according to the Friendly Atheist blog.

"Now, I hope and pray our kids don't get deathly ill or we don't lose any children," Crosby told WCSC anchor Raphael James afterward. "But you know what? That's not my -- that's up to God."

James were apparently taken aback by Crosby's nonchalance to child safety, so he asked the board member to clarify.

"No, I didn't say concern," Crosby said. "I said that's not going to be my decision. It's going to be -- I mean, God decides who lives or dies, right?

 

The Origins of “kill Them All and Let God Sort It Out ...
https://propertarianinstitute.com/2018/06/21/the-origins-of-kill-them...

Amalric supposedly answered (in French): “Kill them all. God will recognize his own.”. Some sources give the alleged quote as “Kill them all, for the Lord knows his own” or as “Kill them all. The Lord knows his own.”. It eventually came to be most commonly paraphrased as: “Kill them all and let God sort …

Mourning suit: the return of goth fashion

Flirting with goth is the perfect way for celebrities to give their identity an edge, experts say

Travis Barker and Kourtney Kardashian embrace goth chic on a trip to Venice. 

Photograph: Photopix/GC Images

Priya Elan
Fri 3 Sep 2021 

Release the bats: goth style has returned.

This week, Kourtney Kardashian visited Venice with her boyfriend, Blink-182’s Travis Barker, trading in Balmain bodycon for black leather trousers from Rick Owens and studded mules from Givenchy. Selena Gomez appeared on the cover of Elle US with fishnet tights, a choker and blonde bob – more Courtney Love than Marilyn Monroe. While singer Halsey has accompanied her new album (made with goth legend Nine Inch Nail’s Trent Reznor) with mournful black, vintage Dolce and Gabbana.

“Goth signals danger. It disrupts, but not too much,” says ProfCatherine Spooner of Lancaster University. “Flirting with goth is a perfect way for celebrities safely to give their identity an edge.”

The subculture has been trending recently, hair horns and platform heels are popular, while searches for “goth fashion” have increased by 21% year on year, according to jewellerybox.

“There days there’s more fluidity to the look as opposed to it being a set style,” says Daisy Davidson, who runs Hysteric Fashion, a street style page documenting alternative fashion. “It often seems to be a mix of goth and emo, as opposed to one standalone scene like it was in the 80s.”

Other believe the darkness of goth is an appropriate response to Covid-19.

“Many features of gothic narrative such as haunting, monstrosity and the undead are very easily read as social and political metaphors,” Spooner says. “Coming out of the pandemic may be likened to rising again, returning to life after tomb-life incarceration,” says Prof Nick Groom, the co-author of CoronaGothic: Cultures of the Pandemic.

Spooner also sees the rise of goth as a counternarrative to cottagecore and the “back to the country” aesthetic. “In gothic fiction and film, the country is rarely a place for rest and relaxation – it’s where dark things happen to unwary city-dwellers,” she says. “And that evokes the fact that in western countries the countryside is where some of our most difficult politics are currently playing out, from climate change to rural conservatism.”

For Spooner, the trend, by its very nature, is cyclical. “Goth is intrinsically tied up with the past returning,” she says. “It’s rooted in cultural ideas of historical revival, uncanny returns and haunting. This is the latest iteration of the cycle and it won’t be the last.”

Inside New York’s ‘body shops’ that exploit ex-prisoners to drive down wages

Workers are often given no safety equipment and no training for dangerous jobs, but a new law would provide protections

‘Body shops operate in the shadows, with no accountability,’ one union leader said. Photograph: Xinhua/Rex/Shutterstock


Michael Sainato
Fri 3 Sep 2021 

For years, nonunion labor brokers in the New York City construction industry have targeted workers who have recently been released from prison and are under parole supervision or other court surveillance programs, in a move that many say ensures low wages and poses a serious safety risk for employees.

Known as “body shops”, these labor brokers hire and pay workers to perform work for third party companies, profiting by taking a cut of the wages paid by the company. The labor brokers end up competing in a race to drive down labor costs through wage suppression and cutting corners on training and safety.

Former prisoners are usually required to look for work as a condition of their release, so they may be willing to take any job they can get to avoid being returned to jail on a parole violation. It’s not an idle threat: New York imprisoned individuals nearly three times the national average in 2019 for technical parole violations, consisting of 40% of all individuals admitted to prisons in the state.Body shop employers exploit those work requirements to pay parolees’ low wages under unsafe working conditions.

In 2020, there were an estimated 9,173 re-entry construction workers in New York City, and construction work accounted for about 24% of all jobs for recently released prisoners. Typical wages for these workers is just above the city’s minimum wage, with no benefits, while union members in the New York City construction industry start at more than $28 an hour plus benefits.

Shortly after being released from prison in New York City, John Simmons began working for a construction body shop in July 2016, a job he was referred to through a work release program, making $13 an hour with no benefits.

“This was basically the only job I qualified for because of a mistake that I made in my life,” said Simmons. “Giving me a second chance is not just giving me a job, but making sure that I’m able to support myself. How are you giving me a second chance while you’re setting me up for failure working for a body shop?”

Simmons said he struggled to make ends meet while working for the construction body shop, and he suffered from a toothache for three years because he had no insurance and couldn’t afford to get it treated.

When he first started working at the body shop, he was tasked with cleaning duties at job sites, until one day he was directed to start construction duties without any training.

“One day they told me this has to be done, they just put a power tool in my hand and told me to go to work,” explained Simmons. “The body shops have no respect, no care or concern for the employees they hire.”

He wasn’t provided with personal protective equipment on the job, such as gloves or safety masks. He recalled one incident where he was ordered, along with a few coworkers, to climb the scaffolding on the side of a construction site 12 floors up without a safety harness to put up a safety net in anticipation of a coming storm.

“It was like we were climbing monkey bars trying to protect the site from the storm,” added Simmons. “A lot of us were fearful that if we complained, if we said anything, that we would lose our job, and one of the stipulations of parole is that you must seek to obtain and maintain employment. So we were scared to speak out.”

Critics of body shops have argued their practices creates a lower tier workforce within the construction industry, where predominantly Black and brown workers are paid significantly lower wages with no benefits, while employers receive tax credits for hiring them and are exempt from workers’ compensation, unemployment taxes and union organizing.

Workers and unions are advocating for the New York City council to pass the body shop bill. The proposed law would provide a regulatory framework to increase transparency and oversight of subcontractors in the construction industry that rely on formerly incarcerated workers, including enacting licensing and reporting requirements for these labor brokers.

“Body shops operate in the shadows, with no accountability,” said Mike Prohaska, business manager of Laborers’ Local 79. “The body shop bill is the solution to a lack of oversight of the companies taking advantage of New York City’s formerly incarcerated workers.”

Danny Coley began working for a construction body shop in late 2016 after he was released from prison, for $13 an hour with no benefits. He said he was given no personal protective equipment, and he was forced to pay for his own reflective safety vest with the company logo on it.

Coley cited an incident where he was told to wade through sewage water without any personal protective equipment or proper boots to protect him from contact with the contaminated water.

“There’s no retirement, no 401k, there’s nothing for the future, it’s a dead end job,” said Coley.

Coley and other current and former body shop workers who are now members with Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) Local 79 and the Mason Tender Council have been campaigning to rein in construction body shops and provide individuals with real re-entry opportunities rather than funneling them into exploitative jobs likened to re-sentencing to another form of prison.

“Now that I’m in the union, I don’t have to do anything negative to make a dollar,” added Coley. “It’s changed my life dramatically in a positive way and not only financially, but being able to help other individuals in their next step in life.”

The shocking rise in anti-LGBTQ hate crime shows bigotry is still ruining lives

Sadly, blending in for a quiet life remains a necessary survival strategy for far too many people in Britain today

‘The biggest killer of men under 45 is suicide: freeing them from rigid gender norms, which teach them that opening up is unmanly, will make them more likely to seek support.’

Photograph: Barcroft Media/Getty

Fri 3 Sep 2021 
Owen Jones

It is impossible to know how much of the surge in reported hate crimes against LGBTQ people is due to escalating harassment and violence, and how much is down to the increased willingness of victims to inform the authorities. What we do know that is that recorded homophobic and transphobic hate crimes have jumped every year since 2015, and yet with an estimated four in five still going unreported, the already grisly figures only hint at a far bleaker reality.

The incidents vary in nature and severity: from abuse hurled at someone identified as LGBTQ because of their appearance, or mannerisms, or a fleeting or profound show of affection towards a partner; to gay men being beaten and robbed, as happened in a suspected homophobic attack on the streets of Edinburgh last month, or a trans man savagely attacked in Bournemouth earlier this year. “According to our research, many experienced verbal harassment, physical abuse, threatening messages, and damage to property,” says Eloise Stonborough of the LGBTQ civil rights organisation Stonewall.

In all cases, there is often a visceral sense of humiliation linked to a sudden invasive reminder that your innate characteristics still drive a section of society to violent disgust. After all the undoubted progress, anti-LGBTQ bigotry remains a kind of secret authoritarian regime in this country. It compels many LGBTQ people to alter their behaviour in order to quietly blend in, or to pretend they are something they are not to relatives, friends and colleagues in order to avoid experiences ranging from the uncomfortable to the outright menacing.

Reported hate crimes surge. There are no openly trans national politicians and the media is almost entirely hostile

These statistics should not leave a false impression. The experiences of LGBTQ people are not the same. A white, middle-class, gay, cis man – that is, someone generally at one with their gender assigned at birth – in an urban area is likely to suffer far less meaningful oppression than other groups. Beyond the fear of holding hands with their partner in public, their main grievances tend to centre on the psychological scars left by the often suffocatingly homophobic environment of their school years.

This can lead to lasting trauma, which largely explains the higher rates of mental distress and abusive relationships with alcohol and drugs among LGBTQ people. The most damaged are frequently those whose fathers and mothers violated the most sacred principle of parenthood – unconditional love – in deference to their own bigotry, often implanting a ticking time bomb in their children that may detonate in later life, be it in the form of emotional breakdown or drug addiction.

Poland’s LGBTQ protests are glimmers of hope in an illiberal dystopia

Agnieszka Holland

For a young gay black man, homophobia may collide with increased risk of police harassment and racist behaviour from other LGBTQ people: victims can be perpetrators, too, sometimes believing their own mistreatment makes it impossible to oppress others.

Yet as Shon Faye’s brilliant new book The Transgender Issue underlines, it is trans people – the T in the LGBTQ – now suffering the most severe onslaught. It’s said that history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes. Today’s relentless campaign against trans people seems a near-carbon copy of the previously widespread monstering of gay and bisexual people, with all the same tropes repeated: that they are would-be sexual predators, that they seek to brainwash and recruit children, that biology is destiny, that this is a whimsical lifestyle choice, that they are defined by mental illness or a creepy fetish that imposes an intolerable burden on the “normal” majority.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many supposed liberals participated in the anti-gay offensive, lamenting that the case for gay rights was being undermined by “militant homosexuals” making unreasonable demands on the rest of society, such as asking newspapers not to call them “poofters”. Again, history repeats itself. The panic over trans rights has airbrushed the cruel reality facing trans people: the quadrupling of reported transphobic hate crimes; the one in four that have been homeless; the 41% who suffered a hate crime in a 12-month period; the nearly half who feel uncomfortable using public toilets; the quarter discriminated against when looking to rent or buy a home.

This panic has also obscured the threats facing all LGBTQ people. Only last week, police confirmed the identity of Ranjith Kankanamalage, a 50-year-old murdered in a suspected homophobic attack in east London on August 16. This horrific story has been rightly covered by all the papers, but it has been overshadowed in public discourse by the preposterous row over a man who appeared at a LGBTQ rights protest in Manchester wearing a T-shirt and hat with the logo of the LGB Alliance, an organisation whose main purpose appears to be campaigning against trans rights.

This was akin to someone turning up to an anti-Trump protest in a Maga cap, with the same predictable result. After he was met by chants of “Trans lives matter”, police escorted him away from the march. Supporters of the LGB Alliance – many of whom are straight – promptly took to Twitter to denounce this incident as homophobia and even gay-bashing by the queer protesters – some of whom will inevitably have suffered actual hate crimes. The man became something of a cause célèbre, in an incident that has been marshalled to support the increasingly common claim that the trans rights movement is homophobic; a “woke homophobia” as a GB News presenter put it, rendering LGBTQ people the real homophobic bigots.

Yet as reported hate crimes surge, Stonewall – by far the largest LGBTQ civil rights organisation – finds itself targeted by a McCarthyite campaign against its defence of trans rights. Organisations such as Ofcom have been successfully pressured into cutting ties with Stonewall’s diversity scheme. There are no openly trans national politicians, and the British media has been rendered an almost entirely hostile environment for trans people and their LGBTQ allies. Meanwhile, anti-trans activists claim to be “silenced” while enjoying support from the country’s newspapers. While those cruelly hounding trans people may be driven by an undoubted realisation that they will, in time, lose – the polling shows younger people, and women in particular, are most supportive of trans people – that is of little comfort to an extremely besieged minority today.

But as Faye’s book eloquently puts it, the liberation of trans people – and indeed LGBTQ people as a whole – will free everyone. For example, a strengthened welfare state and solved housing crisis would provide a trans person rejected by their family with desperately needed independence; but those benefits would help anyone in need of security. The biggest killer of men under 45 is suicide: freeing them from rigid gender norms, which teach them to believe that opening up about their problems is unmanly or “gay”, will make them more likely to seek support. More than half a century since the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality, LGBTQ people still fear the repercussions of simply being themselves. Oppression rots a society from the inside out.

When true liberation happens, “coming out” as LGBTQ won’t be the stressful ritual known to many with experiences ranging from the good to the tragic. It won’t actually be a thing at all – and everybody else will be much freer, too.


Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

It’s not just Texas – anti-abortion activists are targeting women’s rights in Europe

Draconian laws in European countries and the effects of Brexit and Covid-19 are making safe terminations harder to access

‘We will continue this work until our helplines stop ringing.’ Women protest against the six-week abortion ban at the Capitol in Austin, Texas. 

Photograph: Jay Janner/AP

Fri 3 Sep 2021 
Mara Clarke is the founder of Abortion Support Network


The state of Texas now has the most restrictive abortion law to be passed in the US since Roe v Wade legalised abortion in 1973. Texas residents must now add out-of-state travel to the many barriers that already exist to getting an abortion. There has been an outpouring of support for Texas women from people in the UK and European Union, but it’s worth remembering that while the UK and Europe are an abortion utopia compared with some American states, abortion access is still not guaranteed.

Let’s start with the UK. Due to the herculean efforts of activists (and despite the best efforts of a foot-dragging, anti-abortion government), Northern Ireland now has limited access to legal abortion. But Alliance for Choice, the campaign group in Northern Ireland, says that proper access to abortion is still not guaranteed across the country. Women are still waiting for the department of health to commission abortion services, telemedicine and more types of available abortion. Currently, the majority of abortions happen in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy and are performed with pills, which carry a small risk of failure. Because there is virtually no provision for abortions after the first trimester, people seeking these services are still forced to travel to England.

Many people in Scotland who need late abortions also have to travel to England due to a lack of facilities, despite the law allowing terminations at 24 weeks. In England and Wales, abortion is still regulated by criminal code, and waiting times for abortions vary across the country. Whether you are able to access an abortion quickly often depends on where you live.

The charity I founded, Abortion Support Network (ASN), has years of experience helping people who have been forced by a combination of draconian abortion laws and poverty to access abortions abroad. We offer practical information and financial support, and are funded almost entirely by private individuals. We do this work because we believe “I can’t afford an abortion” should never be the only reason someone continues a pregnancy.

Initially we worked in Ireland (where abortion is now legal up to 12 weeks, and in very restricted circumstances after this), the Isle of Man (where abortion was made legal in 2019) and Northern Ireland (where decriminalisation only happened very recently). In 2019, we expanded to Malta , which has some of the most draconian abortion laws in Europe: abortion is illegal even in cases where it will save a woman’s life. We expanded to Gibraltar in the same year. Although it recently voted to allow abortion in some circumstances, Gibraltar’s abortion laws were previously more draconian than those in Texas; abortion was only allowed in cases where it would save a woman’s life.

At the end of 2019 we expanded our work to Poland as part of the Abortion Without Borders initiative. Poland, which already had one of the most prohibitive abortion laws in Europe, recently made its law even more severe, ruling that 98% of the 1,000-2,000 legal abortions performed by the state each year were “unconstitutional”.

Despite how busy our charity is, we are now looking at expanding into additional countries that need support. Andorra has joined Malta in making all abortions illegal, even where they would save a woman’s life. Other European countries have decent abortion laws but still effectively limit access, such as Italy, where 69% of gynaecologists “conscientiously object” to performing abortions, Romania, where activists say abortion is being quietly phased out , and Hungary, where the government has successfully reduced abortion access in recent years .

Our work is particularly focused on ensuring that people can access abortions beyond the first trimester. Most countries in Europe offer access to abortion during the first 12 to 14 weeks of pregnancy. In countries that don’t, many people rely on NGOs such as Women Help Women and Women on Web, which send early medical abortion pills to countries where abortion is restricted. Thankfully, people are increasingly aware of these pills, which are on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines and offer a safe means of ending a pregnancy. When we first founded ASN, women in Ireland and Northern Ireland told us they had tried far more dangerous things than pills.

Getting an abortion later in a pregnancy, when pills are no longer suitable, can be difficult depending on where you live. Every country has conditions determining when later abortions are permitted and how they are performed. Navigating access to these services can be difficult, especially for people who are marginalised, young or poor. It can be impossible for those with insecure immigration or refugee status. In Europe, the best places to travel to are the Netherlands, where abortion is available on request in clinics up to 22 weeks, England and Wales, where you can get an abortion up to 24 weeks, and in some cases Spain.

And here we return to Texas. Many will say that if a person in Texas now requires an abortion after six weeks, they can travel to a different state. We have been hearing this argument for years. Irish women can “just travel”. Polish women can “just travel”. But this fails to take into consideration the obstacles to travelling for an abortion, such as childcare, insecure immigration status, the fear of stigma or ostracisation, money and Brexit, which is making it hard for non-EU or UK residents to come to England.

These obstacles predate Covid-19, but the pandemic has made the problem worse. Many of our service users have been affected by airport closures in Poland and Malta, and expensive PCR tests required for people entering and returning to a country. Some of the obstacles have been farcical: one non-English-speaking service user arrived at her booked hotel in England to find all the rooms had been given to key workers and rough sleepers, while another woman had her flights cancelled and rebooked seven times for one journey. And travelling during a global pandemic carries extra health risks. The irony of risking your health to access healthcare is not lost on us.

Helping people get abortions requires a strong constitution. We will never be able to reach everyone who needs our help. But we know that as abortion funders we are part of a growing global network of activists who are finding ever more creative ways to help people access abortion care, and that we will continue this work until our helplines stop ringing.


Mara Clarke is founder of Abortion Support Network

TAKE THAT

TikTokers flood Texas abortion whistleblower site with Shrek memes, fake reports and porn

Critics of Texas’s new law have been filing hundreds of fake reports to the whistleblowing website in hopes of crashing it

One TikTok user flooded an online tip website that encourages people to report violators of the law with 742 false reports. Photograph: TikTok


Kari Paul
Fri 3 Sep 2021 

Pro-choice users on TikTok and Reddit have launched a guerrilla effort to thwart Texas’s extreme new abortion law, flooding an online tip website that encourages people to report violators of the law with false reports, Shrek memes and porn.

The law makes it illegal to help women in Texas access abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy. To help enforce it, anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life established the digital tipline where people can send anonymous information about potential violations.

“Any Texan can bring a lawsuit against an abortionist or someone aiding and abetting an abortion after six weeks,” the website reads, and those proved to be violating the law can be fined a minimum of $10,000. An online form allows anyone to submit an anonymous “report” of someone illegally obtaining an abortion, including a section where images can be uploaded for proof.

But pro-choice users had other ideas, bombarding the site with false reports and fabricated data through a campaign primarily organized on Reddit and TikTok.

Though the site was launched a month ago, the fake reports came flooding in on the eve of the bill’s enactment. One TikTok user said they had submitted 742 fake reports of the governor, Greg Abbott, getting illegal abortions.

In a tongue-in-cheek caption, the user encouraged others to do the same: “It would be a shame if TikTok crashed the ProLifeWhistleBlower website.”

Redditors said they had submitted reports blaming the state of Texas for facilitating abortions by having highways that allow people to travel to the procedure.

“Wouldn’t it be so awful if we sent in a bunch of fake tips and crashed the site? Like, Greg Abbott’s butt stinks,” one TikTok creator said.

Another TikTok user showed how he uploaded Shrek memes claiming they were images proving “my wife aborted our baby 4 weeks into her pregnancy without my consulting me”. Meanwhile, other users encouraged people to upload image attachments containing various kinds of porn

The coordinated effort echoes a movement in June 2020 to flood a Donald Trump rally with fake sign-ups, resulting in an empty stadium for the actual event.

An activist who goes by the name Sean Black said he programmed a script to submit reports en masse on the website automatically.

Black, who describes himself as a “regular college student from North Carolina”, has released a Python script and an iOS shortcut for less tech-savvy to send thousands of reports a day.

He said his data shows nearly 8,000 people have used the Python code and 9,000 have used the iOS shortcut. Others have been inspired by his coding against anti-abortion advocates, saying collaborators across the US are working with him on 10 “active branches” of new features in the tool.

The website appears to be doing its best to take on the influx of false reports and remains online despite other sabotage attempts including attacks by hackers.

Nancy Cárdenas Peña, a Texas director for the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, said she was blocked by the website from using the form after she tweeted about it. Some web hosts allow people to block visitors to their sites by IP address.


“Gosh, I wonder if they factored in people abusing the integrity of this system,” she said, jokingly adding: “Hmmm I hope ppl don’t abuse this! That would be terrible.”

GOOD NEWS
Texas abortion snitch website is getting booted off its domain: report
Matthew Chapman
September 03, 2021

'Working on laptop' [Shutterstock]

On Friday, The Verge reported that the website set up by Texas Right to Life to allow concerned citizens anywhere to snitch on anyone who helps a woman procure an abortion is having its registration revoked by GoDaddy.

"'We have informed prolifewhistleblower.com they have 24 hours to move to another provider for violating our terms of service,' a spokesperson told The New York Times," reported Sean Hollister. "GoDaddy didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about whether that applies to the group's other domains, or which terms of service the site violated — but it's probably the part where the company doesn't let anyone 'collect or harvest' any personal information 'about another User or any other person or entity without their express prior written consent.'"

The website — set up to enforce Texas' new draconian abortion ban that allows $10,000 civil bounties on people who "intend to procure" abortions for women past the sixth week of pregnancy — has been flooded with Shrek memes and other content designed to drown out its purpose for days.

But a tech journalist for Gizmodo speculated this week the site could be taken down more effectively by lodging complaints with GoDaddy, pointing out that abortion snitching amounts to non-consensual data collection.

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court declined to stay Texas' abortion law from taking effect, effectively nullifying Roe v. Wade in the state for the time being — although the litigation against the law is ongoing.

Texas anti-abortion tipster site booted by web host

Issued on: 04/09/2021

Protesters demonstrated at the Texas state capitol over abortion rights on May 29, 2021

 SERGIO FLORES GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File

Washington (AFP)

A webpage seeking tips from the public to enforce Texas's severe new abortion restrictions has been told to find a new company to host its site or go offline.

GoDaddy said in a statement Friday it had informed prolifewhistleblower.com on Thursday that it had violated the US web hosting company's terms of service and had to move to a different provider.

The prolifewhistleblower.com website was set up by anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life to collect anonymous tips under the law barring terminations after six weeks of pregnancy -- before many women know they are pregnant.

According to the law, anyone living in Texas can sue an abortion provider or anyone suspected of "aiding" an abortion to take place, with $10,000 rewards if they win in a civil case.

Calls to flood the website with bogus tips sprouted on social media, while by late Friday, an attempt to reach the tip portion of the site was blocked, with a message saying access was denied by a GoDaddy firewall.

Texas Right to Life communications director Kimberlyn Schwartz told AFP the website was in the process of transferring to a new service provider and expected to be back in action within 48 hours.

"We will not be silenced," Schwartz said.

"We are not afraid of the mob. We will not back down."

According to GoDaddy's terms, users cannot collect information about people without their consent.

The website featured links for reporting "anyone who is... aiding or abetting a post-heartbeat abortion," referring to the law's banning of abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected.

"Report any person or entity that aids or abets (or that intends to aid or abet) an illegal abortion in Texas," it adds.

The US Supreme Court formally refused Wednesday to block the law, the biggest hit to abortion rights in the United States in 50 years.

Texas Right to Life has called it a blow to "the unjust ruling of Roe v. Wade," the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case that legally enshrined a woman's right to an abortion.

Roe v. Wade guaranteed the right to an abortion in the United States so long as the fetus is not viable outside the womb, which is usually not until the 22nd to 24th week of pregnancy.

President Joe Biden on Friday called the Texas measure "vigilante" justice and said there may be existing legal avenues "to limit the independent actions of individuals in enforcing... a state law," but did not elaborate.

- Drivers defended -

Ride-hailing services Lyft and Uber sounded the alarm on Friday over possible repercussions of the law for their drivers, with Lyft saying in a blog post it "threatens to punish drivers for getting people where they need to go."

Lyft announced the creation of a Driver Legal Defense Fund to cover 100 percent of legal fees for drivers sued under the new law for providing a ride on the platform.

"This law is incompatible with people's basic rights to privacy, our community guidelines, the spirit of rideshare, and our values as a company," Lyft said in the blog post.

"Imagine being a pregnant woman trying to get to a healthcare appointment and not knowing if your driver will cancel on you for fear of breaking a law."

Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi praised Lyft's move and said it prompted Uber to similarly cover any driver legal costs related to the new law.

"Drivers shouldn't be put at risk for getting people where they want to go," Khosrowshahi tweeted in reply to Lyft chief executive Logan Green.

"Team Uber is in too and will cover legal fees in the same way. Thanks for the push."

Lyft also said it is donating $1 million to Planned Parenthood for healthcare transportation needs.

Earlier this week, the company behind Bumble dating app said on Twitter that it created a relief fund for women seeking abortions in Texas.

The head of Texas-based Match Group, which owns Tinder and other dating apps, put out word to employees she is setting up a fund to help employees or their dependents handle costs of seeking health care outside the state because of the law.

"I am shocked that I now live in a state where women's reproductive laws are more regressive than most of the world," Match chief executive Shar Dubey said in a letter to employees that was shared at Twitter.

© 2021 AFP

Roe v Wade died with barely a whimper. But that’s not all

Financial rewards given to those shredding the US constitution? 

That is the reality of the Texas law on abortion

‘As of a minute before midnight on 31 August, clinics in Texas were already turning patients away out of fear.’ 

Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Thu 2 Sep 2021 
Laurence H Tribe

For years, as the supreme court’s composition kept tilting right, reproductive rights have been squarely on the chopping block. Now they are on the auction block as well.

Observers have speculated how today’s new ultra-right court would commence the slicing: by chipping away slowly at Roe v Wade? Or by taking the political heat and overruling it outright? Few imagined that the court would let a statute everybody concedes is flagrantly unconstitutional under the legal regime of Roe not only go into effect without being judicially reviewed but become the centerpiece of a totally unique state scheme that puts a bounty of at least $10,000 on the head of every woman who is or might be pregnant.

It wasn’t just Roe that died at midnight on 1 September with barely a whimper, let alone a bang. It was the principle that nobody’s constitutional rights should be put on sale for purchase by anyone who can find an informant or helper to turn in whoever might be trying to exercise those rights.

That, after all, is how the new Texas law works. Its perverse structure, which delegates to private individuals anywhere a power the state of Texas is forbidden to exercise itself until Roe is overruled, punishes even the slightest form of assistance to desperate pregnant women. Doctors, family members, insurance companies, even Uber drivers, are all at risk if they help a woman in need. And the risk is magnified by the offer of a big fat financial reward for whoever successfully nabs a person guilty of facilitating an abortion once a heartbeat can be detected, typically six weeks after a woman’s last period, well before most women even know they are pregnant. There is not even an exception for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. No law remotely like this has ever been allowed to go into effect.

The prospect of hefty bounties will breed a system of profit-seeking, Soviet-style informing on friends and neighbors. These vigilantes will sue medical distributors of IUDs and morning-after pills, as well as insurance companies. These companies, in turn, will stop offering reproductive healthcare in Texas. As of a minute before midnight on 31 August, clinics in Texas were already turning patients away out of fear. Even if the law is eventually struck down, many will probably close anyway.

Worse still, if women try to escape the state to access abortion services, their families will be on the hook for offering even the smallest aid. If friends or family of a woman hoping to terminate her pregnancy drive her across state lines, or help her organize money for a plane or bus ticket, they could be liable for “aiding and abetting” a now-banned abortion, even if the procedure itself takes place outside Texas.

Adding insult to injury, if a young woman asks for money for a bus ticket, or a ride to the airport, friends and parents fearful of liability might vigorously interrogate her about her intentions. This nightmarish state of affairs burdens yet another fundamental constitutional privilege: the right to interstate travel, recognized by the supreme court in 1999 as a core privilege of federal citizenship. Welcome to Gilead!

Many wealthy women will presumably still find ways to access care. But their poor, disproportionately minority sisters will be stuck, forced to face down the barrel of unimaginably cruel choices. Desperate women will still seek abortions but will be forced to do so on the black market and in back alleys. Fewer Samaritans will risk heavy fines or imprisonment to help them. Some will die trying.

What can be done? We can give up on this court and try pressuring Congress to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would enshrine a federal statutory right to provide and receive abortion care free of these sorts of state schemes. But such a bill would die at the hands of Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, in a Senate filibuster.

And what if it were somehow to pass? Odds are that a court majority, despite having held that Congress is empowered to enact a nationwide ban on certain late-term abortions because medical procedures are part of interstate commerce, would suddenly “discover” new limits on the reach of the commerce clause as a source of congressional power and strike the act down. When the court so casually lets a law that flouts its precedents take effect, all bets are off.

Or are they? Maybe even justices deeply hostile to abortion rights can be persuaded to balk specifically at the unprecedented financial incentives this grotesque law creates to put a price on the head of every pregnant woman or girl. Shades of sex slavery and prostitution might put this privatization of law enforcement in a light even conservative jurists find unbearable. What if women chilled by this business model, or those seeking to help them to avoid unwanted motherhood, were to sue the Texas authorities who stand ready to disburse $10,000 bounties for each forbidden abortion detected or prevented?

As Justice Sotomayor said in her dissent – there were four dissents in all – the Texas law “is a breathtaking act of defiance – of the constitution, of this court’s precedents, and of the rights of women seeking abortions throughout Texas”. After a puzzling silence of a day and night, “the court finally [told] the Nation that it declined to act because, in short, the State’s gambit worked.” Even if not a single justice in the 5-4 majority rejects the ability of a state to “evade federal judicial scrutiny by outsourcing the enforcement of unconstitutional laws to its citizenry”, and even if all five of the justices in that majority stand ready to trash Roe v Wade, maybe at least one of those justices would agree that no state can hand out financial rewards to people – not only citizens in Texas but people from anywhere in the country, perhaps the world – shredding the constitution of the United States?

At least it’s worth a try.


Laurence H Tribe is the Carl M Loeb University professor and professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard University and an accomplished supreme court advocate. Follow him on Twitter @Tribelaw

AMERIKAN TALIBAN
Evangelicals are one step closer to the ultimate prize: ending abortion in America


Texas is the result of a decades-long effort to undermine the women’s equality movement in the name of saving the US from God’s judgment

A Pro-Trump supporter prays holding a cross at a protest against the electoral college vote count.

 Photograph: Ken Cedeno/UPI/Rex/Shutterstock

Fri 3 Sep 2021 

Matthew Avery Sutton

Thanks to the supreme court’s refusal to act on a new Texas law, American evangelicals are now one step closer to achieving a goal they have pursued for generations: the end of legal abortion in the United States. They believe that stopping abortion is central to keeping the United States a holy and righteous nation, staving off the judgments of God, and surviving the coming apocalypse.

Abortion has not always been controversial among American Protestants. Since colonial times, most Protestants in the United States saw abortion as a legitimate form of birth control. They did not make a clear distinction between terminating a pregnancy and preventing one. Those who believed that contraception was an appropriate practice often had few qualms about abortion when the procedure was performed before “quickening” (the time when a woman begins to feel the fetus move).


How does someone in Texas get an abortion now and what’s next?

This began to change in the early 20th century with the birth of the fundamentalist movement. The most famous evangelist of the era, Billy Sunday, told an audience made up entirely of women that it was their obligation to stop “the murder of unborn babies” or else they – not men – would cause the “damnation of America”. The Texas evangelist John Rice, best known for his 1941 anti-woman pamphlet Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Female Preachers, also called abortion murder.

Other fundamentalists linked abortion with promiscuous sex. They claimed that the push for abortion access was intended to make “free love” more common. A few evangelicals, however, believed that ending a pregnancy might be more humane than subjecting a child to the wrath of God that was certain to fall soon upon the Earth.

Many Black evangelicals in the pre-Roe era, in contrast to their white counterparts, believed that racism, nativism and Jim Crow were the sins most likely to provoke God’s anger. They usually did not share white evangelicals’ obsession with defining gender roles and policing women’s bodies.

In the early cold war era, white evangelicals championed a new model of the family that glorified the breadwinner dad, stay-at-home mom and two children, all living in the suburbs. They saw smoking, booze and the specter of communism, not abortion, as the most immediate threats.

When the women’s movement began challenging the nuclear model family, evangelicals went on the attack. Feminism, they believed, represented women’s defiance of their God-given role.

Feminists in the 1960s made expanding abortion access one of their top priorities, pushing evangelicals to question anew the morality of abortion. After all, if feminists were for choice, God must be against it. Although the Bible was silent on abortion, some evangelicals determined that they would not be.

The supreme court’s 1973 Roe v Wade decision divided the United States’ religious communities. Catholics who accepted the church’s anti-birth control stance felt troubled by the ruling, while Jews and Protestants, including evangelicals, had mixed responses.

Within a few years, however, the abortion controversy moved to the center of cultural debate. Catholics and evangelicals began working together to pressure political candidates and to amend the constitution to invalidate Roe. The most radical Catholics and evangelicals launched vigilante groups such as Operation Rescue that attacked clinics and terrorized abortion providers.

A majority of evangelicals today, like their fundamentalist predecessors, read their Bibles as a code book that foretells the immediate future. What they see in the sacred text is the end of history, and exactly how it will unfold. They believe that what the Bible describes as a horrific, global war is near, which will culminate in the battle of Armageddon.

This theology cultivates in believers a sense of urgency and certainty and a vision of the world defined in absolute terms. They believe that they are engaged in a zero-sum game of good-versus-evil. Anticipation of the end of time gives evangelicals motivation to act – to preach, to evangelize and to wage culture war.

They see themselves as a faithful remnant surrounded on all sides by the devil’s minions. Like players in a soccer game with the clock about to expire, they have much to do and very little time in which to do it.

The men who launched the Religious Right understood this. They made opposition to feminism and abortion one of their key tenets. Minister Jerry Falwell claimed that the United States had turned against God and that the only way the nation could be spared from his wrath was if the American people returned the nation to its supposed Christian foundations. The “national sin” of abortion, he harangued, was going to force God to destroy the United States just as he had flooded the world in Noah’s day.

Billy Graham joined the chorus. He denounced what he called the “abortion holocaust” and, like Falwell, he deplored the women’s movement.

Polling shows that white evangelicals have followed their lead. Evangelicals hold some of the strongest anti-abortion views in the nation, and their opposition to abortion has remained steadfast. What we see playing out in Texas is the fruit of a multi-generational effort to undermine the women’s equality movement in the name of saving the United States from God’s judgment.

But judgment is indeed probably coming to evangelicals for their actions. Just not the kind of judgment they are expecting. Americans are not going to stand by for long while evangelicals try to impose their morals on the nation.


Matthew Avery Sutton is the author of American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism and most recently Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War. He is the chair of the history department and the Berry distinguished professor of liberal arts at Washington State University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect those of WSU

AMERIKAN TALIBAN

Republicans seethe with violence and lies.

AND HATE

Texas is part of a bigger war they’re waging

This extremist vigilante abortion law is of a piece with everything else Republicans are doing: overturning democracy itself

‘In this system, facts, science, history are fetters to be shaken loose in pursuit of exactly your very own favorite version of reality.’

 Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Rebecca Solnit
Fri 3 Sep 2021 

The American right has been drunk on its freedom from two kinds of inhibition since Donald Trump appeared to guide them into the promised land of their unleashed ids. One is the inhibition from lies, the other from violence. Both are ways members of civil society normally limit their own actions out of respect for the rights of others and the collective good. Those already strained limits have snapped for leading Republican figures, from Tucker Carlson on Fox News to Ted Cruz in the Senate and for their followers.

We’ve watched those followers gulp down delusions from Pizzagate to Qanon to Covid denialism to Trump’s election lies. And rough up journalists, crash vehicles into and wave weapons at Black Lives Matter and other anti-racist protesters at least since Charlottesville, menace statehouses, issue threats to doctors and school boards testifying about public health, and plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, for imposing Covid-prevention protocols.

The Texas abortion law that the rightwing supreme court just smiled upon, despite its violation of precedent, seethes with both violence and lies. The very language of the law is a lie, a familiar one in which six-week embryos are called fetuses and a heartbeat is attributed to the cluster of cells that is not yet a heart not yet powering a circulatory system.

Behind it are other lies, in which women have abortions because they are reckless, wanton and callous, rather than, in the great number of cases, because of the failure of birth control, or coercive sex, or medical problems, including threats to the health of the mother or a non-viable pregnancy, and financial problems, including responsibility for existing children.

A vigilante who goes after a woman under Texas's law is willing to see her die

But what was new about the Texas bill is its invitation to its residents to become vigilantes, bounty hunters and snitches. This will likely throw a woman who suspects she is pregnant into a hideous state of fearful secrecy, because absolutely anyone can profit off her condition and anyone who aids her, from the driver to the doctor, is liable. It makes pregnancy a crime, since it is likely to lead to the further criminalization even of the significant percentage of pregnancies that end in miscarriage. It will lead women – particularly the undocumented, poor, the young, those under the thumbs of abusive spouses or families – to die of life-threatening pregnancies or illicit abortions or suicide out of despair. A vigilante who goes after a woman is willing to see her die.

The rightwing stance on abortion is often treated as a contradiction coming from a political sector that sings in praise of unfettered liberty to do as you like, including carry semiautomatic weapons in public and spread a sometimes fatal virus. But like the attack on voting rights in Texas happening simultaneously with the attack on reproductive rights, it is of course about expanding liberty for some while withering it away for others. The attacks on reproductive rights seek to make women unfree and unequal; the attacks on voting rights seek to make people of color unfree and unequal; women of color get a double dose.

Texas now has abortion ‘bounty hunters’: read Sonia Sotomayor’s scathing legal dissent

This is the logical outcome of a party that, some decades back, looked at an increasingly non-white country and decided to try to suppress the votes of people of color rather than win them. Not just the Democratic party but democracy is their enemy. In this system in which some animals are more equal than others, some have the right to determine the truth more than others, and facts, science, history are likewise fetters to be shaken loose in pursuit of exactly your very own favorite version of reality, which you enforce through dominance, including outright violence.

Protesters demonstrate against the Texas abortion law in Austin. 

Photograph: Jay Janner/AP

What was the 6 January coup attempt but this practice writ large? A mountain of lies about the outcome of an election was used to whip up a vigilante mob into an attack not just on Congress but on the ratification of the election results and death threats against the vice-president and against Speaker Pelosi. The sheer berserk violence of it was extraordinary, the mostly middle-aged mostly white mostly men trying to gouge out eyeballs and trampling their own underfoot while screaming and spraying bear spray in the faces of those guarding the building and the elected officials within and the election.
The ideological premise is that one’s own rights matter so much that others’ rights do not matter at all

Their leaders produced lies that instigated the violence, lies to justify that violence, lies to deny the existence of that violence, and then lies to stir up further violence. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, who by his own account furiously begged Trump to call off the attackers, has since been trying to sabotage the investigation into what happened.

As the New York Times reported this week: “Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, has threatened to retaliate against any company that complies with the congressional committee investigating the January 6 riot, after the panel asked dozens of firms to preserve the phone and social media records of 11 far-right members of Congress who pushed to overturn the results of the 2020 election.” He is trying to prevent Congress and the public from knowing what has gone on. Which you could also call covering up a crime, in public, and his threats may themselves constitute crimes.

Madison Cawthorn, the North Carolina freshman congressman who appeared onstage on 6 January to whip up the crowd, calls the rioters “political prisoners” and continues to lie about the outcome of the 2020 election, declaring: “If our election systems continue to be rigged, continue to be stolen, it’s going to lead to one place and that’s bloodshed.” Cawthorne, like the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, like Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, whose votes set the Texas abortion law into action on Wednesday, has been accused of sexual misconduct.

While men across the political spectrum are accused of similar wrongdoing – Andrew Cuomo’s conduct led to New York getting its first female governor last month – in the Republican case it is not an ideological inconsistency. The ideological premise is that one’s own rights matter so much that others’ rights do not matter at all, and that goes from rape to mask and vaccine policies to the proliferation of guns and gun deaths in recent years.

There is no clear way to tell if the right is emboldened because they’ve gotten away with so much in the past five years, or whether they’re increasingly desperate because they are in a wild gamble, but it seems like both at once. If the US defends its democracy, such as it is, and protects the voting rights of all eligible adults, the right will continue to be a shrinking minority. Their one chance of overturning that requires overturning democracy itself. That’s one goal they’re willing to use violence to achieve and no longer bothering to lie about.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist and the author of Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses

Joe Biden tells FBI to release files on 9/11 investigation – and possible Saudi links

Order responds to call by victims’ families suing Riyadh

Full record to be released over six months after review

Joe Biden: ‘As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the American people deserve to have a fuller picture of what their government knows about those attacks.’ 

Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

Julian Borger in Washington
Fri 3 Sep 2021 

Joe Biden has announced the wholesale review and declassification of files from the investigation into the 9/11 attack, in response to intense pressure from Congress and victims’ families currently suing Saudi Arabia.


‘A horn blew when human remains were found’: Wim Wenders’ six hours in the hell of Ground Zero

“As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the American people deserve to have a fuller picture of what their government knows about those attacks,” an executive order issued on Friday said.

It said the full record would be disclosed in tranches over the coming six months “except when the strongest possible reasons counsel otherwise”.

The order said that while the “indiscriminate” release of information could jeopardise national security and the ability to prevent future attacks, a better balance had to be struck between transparency and accountability.

It said “information should not remain classified when the public interest in disclosure outweighs any damage to the national security”.

Victims’ families have long demanded the US release the findings of Operation Encore, a FBI investigation into possible Saudi complicity, particularly contacts between Saudi officials and two 9/11 hijackers who lived in California in the months before the attacks.

Riyadh has denied any involvement in the hijacking and is fighting a lawsuit brought by the families in federal court in New York.

The executive order comes a month after legislation was introduced with bipartisan support in Congress demanding greater transparency in the investigation.

“I’m very excited,” said Terry Strada, whose husband Tom died in the attack on the World Trade Center, and who is co-chair of a families and survivors group, 9/11 Community United.

“I’m thrilled that we have an executive order now that will mandate a full declassification review of all of the documents.”

Strada added: “The onus is now on the intelligence agencies to explain why they’re going to classify a document. The way that they’ve been doing it until now is under cover of darkness. They won’t be able to do that any longer.”

Under the executive order, an FBI electronic communication dated 4 April 2016 would have to be released by 11 September. The families’ lawyers believe that to be a 16-page summary of the Operation Encore findings.

The existence of that document was admitted by the US during the discovery process in the New York case, but its contents were not disclosed.

Within two months of the order, the FBI and other agencies will have to release “all other records that previously were withheld as classified, in full or in part, during discovery”, as well as another FBI electronic communication closing Operation Encore.

Within four months, the government will declassify “all interview reports, analytical documents, documents reporting investigative findings, or other substantive records (including phone records and banking records, if any)” from the FBI’s original investigation into the attacks (known as Penttbom), where there is any relevance to Operation Encore.

Within six months, the government must release anything relevant from any other investigation which concerns the hijackers and any “relationship with a foreign government”.

It will be up to the attorney general or the heads of the FBI or other agencies to prove that the release of any information “reasonably could be expected to result in damage to the national security”.

“The significant events in question occurred two decades ago or longer, and they concern a tragic moment that continues to resonate in American history and in the lives of so many Americans,” the executive order states.

“It is therefore critical to ensure that the United States government maximizes transparency, relying on classification only when narrowly tailored and necessary.”

The declassification is unlikely to resolve all the unanswered questions surrounding the 9/11 plot.

Two decades after 9/11, the real threat to the US is our own far right

The executive order comes only a day after a complaint by the families to the justice department inspector general, over the FBI’s claim to have lost critical evidence, allegedly including photos and videotape of hijackers with Saudi officials, records of witness interviews and phone records of conversations among the plotters.

Brett Eagleson, whose father, Bruce, was killed in the attacks, said the families would be watching to see that the declassification is comprehensive.

“President Biden is asking us to trust that the administration will bring justice to the 9/11 community and we certainly hope this is a genuine step forward,” Eagleson said in a written statement.

“We will closely watch this process to ensure the justice department and FBI follow through, act in good faith and help our families uncover the truth in our pursuit of justice against the Saudi government. The first test will be on 9/11, and the world will be watching.”