Da pope and Mom's Day.

Liddiebug | Deposit Photos

Happy Mother's Day to everybody who is, was, has, or had a mother, perfect or im-, and including those with offspring who are or were persons of the nonhuman persuasion.

I think that covers everybody.

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This past week, Catholics got a new pope. Pope Francis, the first of that name (which I had forgotten 'til just now), died on April 21st, and Pope Leo XIV, formerly known as Robert Francis Prevost, was elected on just the second day of the conclave. I joked on Bluesky that it must have driven TV news outlets wild that the cardinals got the job done so fast. Here they'd barely settled on a name for their live team coverage and whomped up the graphics package, and it was all over.

If my take seems irreverent, remember that I'm Pagan. The head of the Roman Catholic Church doesn't have much of an effect on my life. I once worked with a guy who told a story about a conversation he'd had; the other guy asked him what he thought of the pope (different pope, obviously; this was decades ago) and my co-worker replied: "What's a Presbyterian supposed to think of the pope? He's the bishop of Rome!" 

That's pretty much where I am, too.

Anyway, a lot of Catholics have high hopes for this new guy. He's an American, for starters (from Chicago!), although his family background is about as melting-pot as they come. He's also a naturalized Peruvian and has served the church in that country for years. Most recently, he's been holding a top spot at the Vatican. Pope Francis seemed to like him, and it appears likely that he'll be as liberal as Francis was, although church approval for women in the priesthood and LBGTQ+ folks will probably still be a bridge too far. 

Another thing that's extremely unlikely to change is the Catholic Church's directive, shared by virtually all other Christian denominations, that its adherents should be fruitful and multiply. It's because the faith wants as many Christians as possible, either by birth or by conversion. Leo hasn't explicitly said how he feels about abortion since his elevation, but in the past he has taken the church's position against it lumping it in with euthanasia for good measure: "God's mercy calls us to protect every life, especially those society overlooks—the child yet to be born and the elderly nearing their journey's end".

That might look good on paper, but of course it sidesteps the question of practicality, especially in this country, where mothers receive so little social and financial support. And the people running our government right now seem hell-bent on making it even harder. So much for protecting every life.

At least he favors gun control.

But as I said above, I'm not Catholic. Catholics and members of other Christian denominations -- of every religion, actually -- have the right to believe whatever they want to believe and practice their religion as they see fit. As long as they don't force me to live by their rules.

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I mentioned above that Pope Leo is from Chicago. This meme is probably my favorite: 

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These moments of slightly irreverent blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

A little bit about the mass shooting grabbing the headlines.

 

amuzica | Deposit Photos

I owe y'all a blog post tonight, and of course yesterday's shooting in Pennsylvania is at the top of my mind. 

I have a lot of thoughts about it. I'm just not sure how many of them I ought to memorialize in a blog post.

I think we can all agree -- I hope we can, at least -- that violence has no place in political discourse. I also think we can agree that Americans have a history of attempting to settle our differences, real or perceived, with firearms.

The shooter -- whose name I'm not going to mention, in keeping with recent trends -- appears to be a natural suspect in some respects but not in others. He was young -- just a couple of years out of high school -- and worked at an entry-level job in a nursing home. Former classmates said he was quiet and very smart; one said he'd been bullied in school every day. The gunman had donated to ActBlue, the Democratic donation machine, once in the past, but he registered as a Republican for this, his first presidential election. He used an AR-15 that apparently was owned by his father. 

The victims include a volunteer firefighter who was shot while shielding his family from the gunfire. Two more people are in critical condition. All three were in the stands behind Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president and the assailant's apparent target. Trump suffered only a damaged earlobe.

There are lots of questions about how the shooter got to his vantage point without running afoul of the Secret Service, which had ten days' notice of the rally -- plenty of time, presumably, to scope out the venue for potential sniper nests.

And really, right now, that's pretty much everything we know. We don't know the shooter's motivation. We've heard from both Republicans and Democrats who want to make this a partisan thing. A Republican member of Congress has publicly blamed President Biden. Other Republicans want to make Democrats responsible because of their dislike of Trump. Democrats have speculated on whether this was a false flag operation to make Trump into a martyr. That spectators were also shot might discount that theory -- except that the pro-gun lobby hasn't shown much empathy for victims in previous mass shootings, preferring to accept them as collateral damage in their crusade to preserve their presumed Second Amendment right to shoot anyone they want to.

(See, that's the sort of opinion I probably shouldn't preserve in a blog post. I guess it's too late now, though.)

Anyway, armchair speculation is a fun parlor game until someone gets hurt -- and someone has. Let's ratchet back the rhetoric, let the professional investigators do their job, and get on with the election without further violence.

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These moments of targeted blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe out there, everybody.

One step forward, several steps back.

First, happy Easter and happy Passover to those who celebrate. 

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Fair warning: This is a political post.

leszekglasner | Deposit Photos

This has been a week, hasn't it? Particularly for anyone who's interested in the future of abortion rights in this country -- which, given how polarizing the issue is, encompasses virtually everybody. (Back when Kevin's Watch had a political forum, the quickest way to get a bazillion comments on a discussion thread was to post something, anything, about abortion.)

We can all be forgiven if we have abortion-rights whiplash. First, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas ruled -- in an order jam-packed with antiabortion rhetoric where sober jurisprudence should have been -- that the federal Food and Drug Administration erred big-time 23 years ago when it approved mifepristone for medically-induced abortions. The same guy also cited the Comstock Act (which hasn't been enforced since the 1930s) in his ruling, saying pills for medical abortions should not be allowed to be sent through the mail. Taken together, those two points would appear to outlaw medical abortions in the United States altogether.  But within the hour, an Obama-appointed federal judge in the state of Washington ordered that the federal government keep the pills available in the 17 states whose attorney generals had filed suit in his court.

The Texas judge paused his ruling for a week to allow the Department of Justice to file a brief explaining why he's wrong. The DoJ is on it. And given the dueling rulings, it looks like the issue is going to be on a fast track to the Supreme Court. Given the current court, you might think that makes the Texas order a slam-dunk. But the high court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization -- handed down not even a year ago -- deliberately left abortion access to the individual states to decide; this guy in Texas has pre-empted that. Will the Supremes be willing to second-guess themselves so soon? I hope not. The patchwork of state laws that have resulted from Dobbs is bad enough.

There have been shenanigans this week on another hot-button issue: gun control. The Tennessee legislature, which is controlled by Republicans, voted to expel two of its members -- Black men who represent the cities of Memphis and Nashville -- after they and a third representative participated in a protest in favor of gun reforms following a mass shooting at a private school in Nashville. All three of the representatives are Democrats, but the one who wasn't kicked out is a White woman. The ousted legislators say their voters have been disenfranchised. The boards responsible for appointing new representatives for their districts seem inclined to send both men right back to their old seats. But if they do, legislative Republicans are threatening to pull their state funding. 

I can only shake my head. In poll after reputable poll, a majority of Americans support both access to abortion and stricter gun laws. Why Republicans are hellbent on enacting restrictions that most people in this country don't want is a mystery to me. The only thing I can think of is that while these fossils are still in control, they want to lock things down for their side before they're too old to govern and younger folks take over. That day is fast approaching. But it can't come soon enough for me.

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An update to my post of last week, wherein I was so excited to learn that Santa Fe has an arthouse theater that I saw two movies there in the same week: I'm glad I went when I did, because the facility's board of directors voted this week to shut it down, effective this weekend. There has been an outpouring of dismay about the abrupt decision on social media, and apparently there's an effort to raise funds in the community to reopen the facility. But still, I'm bummed. 

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Oh hey, one other thing: I'm going to be out of pocket for the next two weeks. See y'all back here on April 30th.

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These moments of head-shaking blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

What would Aunt Lydia do?

 

Stolen from Facebook / Artist unknown

Well! It certainly has been a week. 

On Thursday we learned from the January 6th committee that five or six sitting members of Congress had asked for presidential pardons for their roles in former President Trump's attempted coup. 

That headline was very shortly superseded by a Supreme Court ruling that makes it easier for gun owners to carry their weapons in public. Within hours, that headline was followed by the news that Congress had approved (and President Biden signed into law yesterday) a gun control bill for the first time in decades. Even though most Americans would view it as weak sauce, it's better than nothing. Among other things, the new law: requires background checks for 18- and 19-year-olds who want to purchase a gun; closes a "boyfriend loophole" that allowed some convicted domestic violence offenders to get hold of guns; stiffens penalties for people who buy guns for those who wouldn't pass a background check; and provides money to states for mental health treatment and for confiscating guns from those who've been deemed dangerous by a judge. Notably, it doesn't ban assault weapons like the AR-15. But hey, baby steps, I guess.

But even that news was overtaken on Friday by the release of the Supreme Court's ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, in which the justices overturned Roe v. Wade and then promptly left for the weekend. Liberals and progressives weren't surprised by the ruling -- after all, somebody at the high court leaked a draft in early May. But they were shocked -- okay, we were shocked -- by Justice Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion, in which he said he'd like to see decisions that legalized gay marriage and access to contraceptives reconsidered, too. The majority opinion attempted to reassure everyone that the court didn't intend to go after those decisions -- but the three justices nominated by former President Trump swore during their confirmation hearings that Roe was settled law, making this most recent claim somewhat less than trustworthy. (Observers have noted that Thomas made no mention of overturning Loving v. Virginia, which legalized interracial marriages. That's especially interesting, given that he's Black and married to a White woman -- with whom, by the way, the January 6th committee would like to have a chat, due to her involvement in Trump's coup attempt. But I digress.)

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I'd attended a lecture -- a Q&A, actually -- given by Margaret Atwood, the author of The Handmaid's Tale. It occurred to me then that I had never read the sequel, The Testaments, so I did. I read the first book shortly after it was published in the '80s; it describes an America that has descended into a fundamentalist hellscape, with women forced to either submit to an arranged marriage or produce babies for the men running the place. The Testaments has been out since 2019, so the statute of limitations on spoilers has probably run; still, I'll try to avoid giving away the ending. Suffice it to say that the prime mover of this second novel, Aunt Lydia, remembers what America was like before Gilead, and is secretly doing everything she can to overturn the regime. 

I find today that The Testaments gives me hope. I don't believe we've hit rock bottom yet; things are going to get worse in the United States before they get better. But women are smart and resourceful. We won't tolerate attempts to make us give up the independence we've had for fifty years. To those who think Dobbs is the beginning of the end for liberal ideals, I say this: 

Just wait.

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These moments of bloggy upheaval have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed! And if you value your freedom, for gods' sake, VOTE!