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If July 4th is a Celebration of America’s Liberty, Little to Celebrate in 2022 [1]
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Date: 2022-07-04
“Ruth Sent Me.” A rally for women’s reproductive freedom in New York City. If July 4th is a celebration of liberty, there is little to celebrate in 2022. © Karen Rubin/news-photos-features.com
By Karen Rubin, News-Photos-Features.com
I don’t think I am alone in marking this July 4th as the death knell of liberty, democracy and all the ideals that July4th is supposed to celebrate. There are millions of us who find ourselves stripped of autonomy, liberty, freedom – quite literally feeling tracked and persecuted – and unsafe and insecure. The values of the nation quite literally turned upside down. Orwell’s 1984, The Handmaiden’s Tale no longer fiction, but a lived reality.
People regard July 4th as the birth of the nation, but more accurately, it was the conception. There was first an abortion – the Articles of Confederation – before the Constitution out of which the nation, founded on the Rule of Law and government by the people, was born embodying the DNA of north and south, colonists and slaveholders.
July 4th is typically a time to reflect how much progress we have made toward the ideals set out so gloriously with the Declaration of Independence, ratified on this day. Fan fare and fireworks please.
But in that respect, July 4th 2022 is pretty dismal – instead of celebrating progress toward a “more perfect union” we find this country set back decades, centuries. And the Supreme Court and the White Christo Fascists aren’t done yet, unwinding progress and the clock, conveniently forgetting that this nation was founded in the Enlightenment by the Enlightened Humanists of their time (yes, most were slaveholders and all were white men of property), who knew they were tinkering with a grand experiment, knew they were fallible and hardly omniscient, and also knew they had to make compromises in order to cobble together a union, hoping it would hobble its way to a “more perfect union.”
There is something terribly wrong about a country that claims to be where “all [so and so’s] are created equal,” that the amount of your freedom and liberty depends upon your zipcode, wealth, gender, race and birth, and can change with whichever party happens to be in power at that moment. The level of terror and insecurity is a feature, not a bug. How unfortunate for the women and girls who find themselves pregnant before the midterms have had a chance to change the Senate enough for Democrats to end the filibuster and pass the Womens Reproductive Freedom Act, or how absolutely crappy for the women and girls if the Republicans get control and there are no safe havens or free states to seek refuge.
There is a lot of talk about what the Founding Fathers “intended” in 1791 – as if that could be relevant – but we know from Ben Franklin, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson (who wrote the Declaration of Independence we celebrate on July 4th), that they fully well expected and welcomed progress and change.
"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times,”Thomas Jefferson wrote. “We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."
He also said,“No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship or ministry or shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion.” He famously owned a Quran, purchased in 1765, that “informed his ideas about plurality and religious freedom in the founding of America,” as NPR’s All Things Considered reported. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, used it to swear his oath when he became Minnesota Congressman in 2007, sparking a controversy; so did Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan)
In Florida and Texas and other Red States, they are banning books and speech. Teachers and doctors are being targeted for prosecution (persecution). Just being a woman is criminalized. Women can be tracked and hunted and prosecuted and jailed. Children are not allowed to be exposed to the truth of a cruel history (slavery, lynching, Indian genocide, Japanese incarceration) or to be empathetic to families of different background and composition, but it’s okay to subjugate them to Christian indoctrination and to make non-Christians feel “otherized,” and “less-than” their Christian peers, coaches and authority figures. A 10-year old isn’t allowed to “say gay” or learn about slavery, but in Wisconsin, she is being forced to bear a child.
Think about this: General Michael Flynn can take the fifth so that he doesn’t incriminate himself, but women and children are being forced to put their lives at risk through childbirth.
“If you want to be more informed about is going on with our country, study Germany in the early to mid 1930s,” tweeted Richard Signorelli.
Six extremist ChristoFascist justices on the Supreme Court have basically said that when a Democrat is in the White House or the state house, the government shall be powerless to protect public health, the environment, join in a global endeavor to combat the existential threat of climate change or deadly pandemic, whether a disease or by weapons manufactured for war. But when a Republican is in office, well then, torture and unending imprisonment at Guantanamo without charges or trial, a Muslim Ban based solely on religion, well then, that’s the prerogative of a Unitary Executive (a concept extolled by Justice Alito and the Federalist Society).
And now they are poised to say that regardless of how “the people” vote, the gerrymandered Republican state legislatures can choose the victor in an election. Who else believes that if a state legislature passed a law that only card-carrying Republicans could vote, and closed every polling place but one in a (Democratic-voting) city of 2 million and shut the doors at 8 pm regardless if 1.5 million were still on line (and not allowed to have food, water or bathroom breaks), these justices with an agenda to secure Christo Fascists in power would say that was A-Okay.
It’s no wonder that a majority, including Democrats, say USA is on a wrong track – but the pundits mistakenly drawn the conclusion that voters are upset with President Joe Biden and the Democrats. Democrats are assuredly frustrated – too many naively think that if you control both chambers and the Executive branch, well then, the agenda your victorious candidates ran on will be almost automatically implemented. (On the other hand, those progressives I hear blaming Democrats for failing to enshrine Roe into law over the past 50 years, should shut up and take responsibility if they did not vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.)
Besides the travesty of an out-of-control, anti-democratic Supreme Court majority that seems intent on distorting, ignoring, nullifying and overturning the Constitution, you have the rise of domestic terrorism and violence used as a political weapon. The January 6 insurrection may have used the slogans of 1776 (“Don’t Tread on Me”) to justify their attempt to violently overturn a free and fair election and install a corrupt petty dictator (whose sole motive in keeping the office is clearly to fend off prosecution for crimes from before, during and after his time in office and to continue grifting from taxpayers and cultists) but the failure to hold the seditionists, conspirators and the Mob Boss himself to account threatens the concept of Rule of Law and Equal Justice (No Man Is Above the Law) that this free Republic depends on.
You have a tyranny of the minority, enabled by the manipulation of the Electoral College, the undemocratic Senate and its grossly anti-democratic filibuster rule, the Supreme Court (five of the justices appointed by presidents who LOST the popular vote, three installed by Putin’s Puppet and Moscow Mitch’s abuse) who have anointed themselves with monarchic power, gerrymandered state legislatures and districts – so yes, you can forgive people for being skeptical about America’s promise of freedom and liberty.
When you have gross inequality that is only growing worse because of unequal representation and blatant discrimination in how laws are applied or ignored - when you cannot trust the Supreme Court or any judges to deliver fair and impartial rulings (what was that oath that the Supreme Court justices have to take, again?, to “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me”), when the majority will to feel safe and secure is thwarted and Congress is paralyzed or worse, destructive (McConnell promises a national abortion ban), you can forgive people for not celebrating July 4th.
The essence that the “patriots” love to go back to is “We the People,” but who gets to vote – and have their vote counted – is shrinking. Go back to Bush v. Gore decision when Justice Scalia justified this blatantly unconstitutional decision saying the Constitution does not EXPLICITLY say, “one person, one vote.” Keep that in mind when the Court rules on the North Carolina Moore v Harper redistricting case, and how the Court has already violated the Voting Rights Act – even the way Roberts eviscerated it – to allow blatantly unconstitutional gerrymandering to stay in place.
Even the flag has been hijacked, turned into a weapon, a threat, a source of intimidation, a battle standard.
One wonders why anyone pledges allegiance to the flag – demanding an oath to a God that people should not be required to pledge to – when the oath to the Constitution has been so brazenly ignored. Why bother having an incoming President, Justice, Senator or Congressman swear an oath if there is absolutely no consequence for defying it.
Keep in mind as you sit back wrapped in self-satisfaction of American Exceptionalism and taking democracy for granted: Excluding the Iroquois Federation, no democracy has lasted more than 250 years, not Greece, not Rome, and this July 4th is the 246th.
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