Conservatives on the Supreme Court Try to Erase Gay People in Mahmoud v. Taylor Decision

The logic of fucked in the head Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s fucked in the head opinion in the 6-3 decision in the case of Mahmoud v. Taylor is it’s wrong that LGBTQ+ people exist and it’s wrong that they deserve happiness. The six conservative fucknuts, using the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religious worship, say that it’s wrong if a school district allows books with LGBTQ+ characters in their classroom libraries and it’s wrong if the teacher is going to read the book aloud. Also, the school has to allow the parents to opt out their precious little pure angels or they might be taught the horrors of life in a diverse culture. It’s so dumb and so backwards that it’s an insult to teachers, to religion, to the Constitution, and it is of a piece with the majority’s infantilization of the population in their decisions. 

Without going into the whole case, here’s a quick summary: “Montgomery County’s school system expanded its English Language Arts curriculum in 2022 to include books with LGBTQ+ characters, part of an effort to better reflect the diversity of families in the county’s religiously diverse and politically liberal population… A coalition of parents from a variety of religious backgrounds — Muslim, Ukrainian Orthodox and Catholic — protested the curriculum updates, and three couples and the organization Kids First sued the district. The parents said they were not trying to change the lesson plans or remove any books from classroom shelves. They just wanted to have the option of saying their children would not participate.”

Now, there’s a part of me that says, “Well, fuck it. They should have just let the kids of the stupid parents sit out.” And the school district did have a policy allowing that, but they stopped allowing it. Why? Well, because there was no requirement to teach the books that the parents had an issue with. And the books themselves? Alito goes to great pains to portray them as these evil texts that will hinder the “religious development” of their kids. In his drama queen way, Princess Alito says, “We reject this chilling vision of the power of the state to strip away the critical right of parents to guide the religious development of their children.” 

And what’s causing this chilling vision? One of the books is Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, where Chloe, a little girl, learns her favorite uncle, Bobby, is getting married to his boyfriend, Jamie. Chloe doesn’t give a shit that Bobby’s gay. She gives a shit and is upset because Bobby is the party uncle who does all kinds of fun stuff with her. It’s a story that has been told a million times, and the only difference here is the couple is gay. Chloe learns marriage doesn’t mean Bobby will stop being Bobby, and so they have a party. But that’s the sinister part for Alito, who really writes that the wedding “is presented as a joyous event that is met with universal approval… there are many Americans who would view the event that way, and it goes without saying that they have every right to do so. But other Americans wish to present a different moral message to their children. And their ability to present that message is undermined when the exact opposite message is positively reinforced in the public school classroom at a very young age.”

So, in other words, the simple existence of a gay couple, and, believe it or not, they do exist, and the fact that they experience joy, which, I can confirm, they do, is an abomination to people who believe in a certain kind of invisible sky wizard, who will be very angry if you accept the gays. It’s absurd. And it gets stupider (and stick with me, because the stupid will reach a crescendo in a moment).

Another book, Intersection Allies (a terrible title that makes my teeth hurt, to be honest), is filled with people who are different from regular ol’ middle class white kids. It’s got a kid in a wheelchair, a kid whose family speaks Spanish, a poor kid, an Muslim kid, and a bunch of others, including a transgender kid. It’s like one page of the book, and the whole thing is about having compassion for the different types of people a child in the 21st century might meet or even have in their class. But, once again, Alito is having none of it: “The book and the accompanying discussion guidance present as a settled matter a hotly contested view of sex and gender that sharply conflicts with the religious beliefs that the parents wish to instill in their children.” Yeah, but what about the religious beliefs of the parent who are letting their transgender 7 year-old express their gender identity? Don't those beliefs or lack of beliefs matter?

To put it simply, conservative religious beliefs trump everything else in the majority’s reasoning. As several commentators have pointed out, this could lead to complete anarchy. Should Mormons and Muslims be able to opt out of readings that involve drinking alcohol? Should people who belong to racist religious sects be allowed to opt out of learning about slavery? What if they’re reading a book about a woman president and that offends the sexist fundamentalists in various faiths? It’s all fucking ridiculous, and to avoid a total clusterfuck of dickhead parents allowing their prejudices to dictate the curriculum, most schools will just avoid anything but the most anodyne shit. You might wonder why the hell don’t the kids just go to religious schools, ah, but Alito says that because the families are too poor to afford that, it’s on the rest of us to affirm their crazy.

Students can learn shit in school that they don't agree with. Parents have a right to teach their ignorance to their kids. Alito's just worried the kids will think the ignorant parents are fucked in the head like him and that their religious development is worthless. Yet Alito is saying that the parents’ religion takes precedence over everyone else’s right to not have religion imposed on them.

It’s something that Justice Sonia Sotomayor states pretty fucking clearly in her dissent. She quotes the First Amendment and emphasizes that “prohibit” is the key word: “The Clause prohibits the government from compelling individuals, whether directly or indirectly, to give up or violate their religious beliefs.” In other words, the government can’t force you to believe a certain way. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn shit. 

Sotomayor remarks that the majority’s decision fails “to accept and account for a fundamental truth: LGBTQ people exist.  They are part of virtually every community and workplace of any appreciable size. Eliminating books depicting LGBTQ individuals as happily accepted by their families will not eliminate student exposure to that concept. Nor does the Free Exercise Clause require the government to alter its programs to insulate students from that ‘message.’” Right. Your stupid fucking parents and your dumbass church can teach you, say, all the creationism you want. But get that ludicrous shit out of the public school science classroom. 

But some of you may still be stuck on the whole “Fuck it. Let the poor religion-abused kids stay home on LGBTQ day. The district should just reinstitute its policy of opt out.” Except there is a policy in place that the parents in this case could have used, which Sotomayor mentions: "Rather than avail themselves of the district’s established process for challenging objectionable instructional material, petitioners sued the MCPS Board in federal court.”

And this is the crescendo of the stupid. Yeah, the parents had options. But right-wing groups, like the odious Moms for Liberty, got their legal claws in this and wanted to get the frothing mongrels in robes on the high court to put us further on the road to their Christian nationalist vision for the country. Alito even quotes the local leader of MFL as if she’s just an interested parent: “Some parents showed up at the [Montgomery County School] Board’s public business meetings to express their concerns about the storybooks’ content.  In an early 2023 meeting, for example, one parent represented herself as ‘a voice for parents in [her] community, many of [whom] are actually working today and unable to attend.’” That concerned mom was Lindsey Smith, head of the Montgomery County chapter of the maniac Moms. She’s also testified before Congress about how terrible it is to tell kids that gay people are real.

And there you have it. The set up. The lawsuit. The pay off. A successful attack on LGBTQ people, as well as on the education of students based in reality and not some backwards-ass fantasy world that they want to use to subjugate the rest of us, all under guise of supporting the Constitution that the majority ignores like it’s a homeless queer kid on the streets of DC. 

How ridiculous is this? Here’s Alito: “In making this argument, the dissent seems to confuse our country with those in which laws enacted by a parliament or another legislative body cannot be challenged in court. In this country, that is not so.  Here, the Bill of Rights and the doctrine of judicial review protect individuals who cannot obtain legislative change.” And this was on the same day they said that courts should not be allowed to do national injunctions. 

There is no actual legal theory at work here, no consistency, no real beliefs in anything but letting conservatives get everything they've wanted. 

Spit-Balling Things That Politicians and Local and State Governments Can Try to Do to Slow the Trump Fuckery

I get it: the protests are important. They show that you are not alone in your hurt, in your rage, in your desire for something, fucking anything, to be done to stop the deranged orange ego monster in the White House from dicking over the nation completely. And events like the massive No Kings marches and rallies do serve a purpose in that they show just how many people fucking care. There was never a single day when Tea Party hate rallies were as large as each of the two protests against Trump so far this year, yet the teabaggers (as we loved calling them because it denoted them sucking on nutsacks) were treated as a country-warping movement when it was far fewer Americans involved, and they were just cranks cranking.

But there are concrete things that Democrats in Congress and in localities around the country can at least try to do slow or stop the invasion of their communities by Trump's unholy cabal of twits, twats, and tweeters. Between messaging that might scare the hell out of some cowards to actions that a brave mayor or governor can do, knowing that they will be the recipient of the usual shitstorm of death threats and mockery that comes with crossing the tangerine nightmare. This is not to mention the inevitable lawsuits upon lawsuits because Trump is the most litigious son of a bitch who ever lived. 

Still, it's worth it because you're going to be saving lives and possibly saving souls. Check it out. 

1. Look, Trump's gonna pardon as many people as he can, like the nearly 2000 blatant terrorists, thieves, drug dealers, and violent dickholes he already has pardoned or commuted sentences for. But chances are, he's not getting around to pardoning the thousands of government employees who are doing the dirty work of his filthy administration. So I'd send a message to Big Balls, to ICE agents, to everyone who is passing the paperwork from one shit appointee to another, and I'd tell them that Democrats will come after them when Trump is gone and a Democrat is in charge. Of course, many will think that the Trump dynasty or the MAGA reich will never end because that's the foolish mistake that all tyrant-humpers make. But more than a few would think it might be better to get the fuck out and work somewhere else. Part of this is making clear what laws are being violated and by whom. And part of it is putting out there what the penalties are if someone is found to have broken particular laws. You don't get to get away with it. A few Democrats have already said something to this effect.

2. This is a big what-if, but if we're gonna be serious about slowing the rampage that Trump's stormtroopers in ICE are on, then you gotta push shit to the limit. With Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers (or masked men who claim they are) going to hearings that legal immigrants are attending in order to stay legally in the country and arresting those immigrants for minor or no reason, then, fuck it, do not let ICE into the courthouses. If ICE can block members of Congress from conducting legal oversight for detention facilities, then the cities and states can prevent ICE from going, well, anywhere they want. Set up a perimeter around a federal courthouse for “security” on land the state or city or county controls and then force anyone to go through a security checkpoint, and refuse to allow ICE agents to enter. It's a pain in the ass, but the only way ICE gets anything done is through the cooperation, capitulation, or blind willingness of local authorities allowing them to do it. 

You may say, and justifiably, "Won't ICE officers just be assholes about it?" And I'd answer, "Yes, but they're assholes about everything." ICE's own directives originally stated that they can only act "where such action is not precluded by laws imposed by the jurisdiction in which the civil immigration enforcement action will take place." But then they rescinded that this month, which means they don't give a fuck about any laws or jurisdictions. So they know it's wrong. They just don't care. So fuck 'em. Take them on. In other words, if a locality says that they will not allow its sidewalks to be used for potential illegal actions (which, let's remember, many of ICE's actions are, especially when they refuse to identify themselves or provide warrants, let alone participating in denial of habeas and other civil rights), then block the bastards who are doing it. Yeah, it's a roll of the dice on the ultimate legality. But you gotta throw some blocks on the track just to slow the runaway train down.

3. You've seen the videos of the unmarked SUVs pulling up somewhere, blocking traffic, racing off after snatching someone like our government is run by Pinochet on meth (and it kind of is). Well, motherfuckers can't just break laws without some kind of indication that they are, in fact, law enforcement. Stop any vehicle that is violating state law, like with a blocked license plate or windows that are too dark. Arrest the people driving and search the vehicles, especially if they are unmarked and have no lights or sirens. Arrest the assholes when they hide their faces and refuse to identify themselves. Yeah, most of them will be out quickly, but you might end up saving, say, someone awaiting an asylum hearing from being sent to an El Salvador hell prison just because Stephen Miller needs more arrests to maintain an erection. Shit, they're rescinding student visas and ordering people to leave the country over speeding tickets. Well, if beefy ICE toad runs red lights and speeds away after grabbing a mom picking up her kids at day care because he's afraid of anyone stopping him, that shit doesn't matter. Pull 'em over. Cuff 'em. Let the chips fall where they may.

(Of course, it should be noted that cops break traffic laws all the time with no consequences because, well, ACAB. That doesn't mean the laws don't exist. Use what you have. Get creative.)

Obviously, the reaction to some of this will make Trump lose his already lost goddamn mind, and he'll threaten to withhold various funding or arrest local officials. But courts have so far blocked the funding bullshit. Besides, ICE agents are taught to be the biggest assholes possible to force people into giving up their rights or allow them to get away with breaking the law. If your defense is that you want everyone to follow the law, that's a pretty fucking good one, and federal jurisdiction doesn't get around everything. 

A big part of the goal here is to publicize just how lawless the Trump administration is with its mass deportation horror. How lawless and cruel and useless, how sociopathic and self-defeating. You're dealing with savages who only know force. There are ways of using force that aren't violent. We're not helpless here. We just need the will to push things further. And if you say this is provoking a crisis, I'd just say that the crisis is here. We're trying to end it.

We're Finally On Our Own: Trump Vs. America

There is something you need to understand about Donald Trump and a whole bunch of old motherfuckers from a particularly vile segment of his generation: We look at the Kent State Massacre and think that it was a goddamn nightmare moment in 20th-century American history. Trump and his debased ilk look at it and think, "Too bad the National Guard didn't kill more of those fucking commie hippies." In fact, they look at the protests against the Vietnam War and think that cops should have busted more heads and the military should have opened fire to teach those America-hating kids a thing or two about who has power. The same goes for protests for civil rights, women's rights, and LGBT rights. They wanted more protesters killed as a way of ending the marches and what they saw as violent mobs (who, yes, occasionally did riot, especially when faced with police repression) because, see, they wanted to prove they love this country by purging anyone who didn't love it the same way. 

So you should know that, to most of us out here in Sanity Town, the protesters who blocked ICE officers in Paramount, California (after they had raided the local Home Depot and Dale's Donuts in Los Angeles County and picked up migrants who were not committing any crime other than the misdemeanor of being in a place without the right papers) might be heroic. But to Donald Trump, it's a chance for a re-do of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a perfect opportunity to show What We Should Have Done when a right-wing nutzoid was in the White House and didn't feel hindered by laws or morality. Trump has had a hard-on for murder for his whole pathetic, worthless life, valorizing mobsters and fellating dictators, pining for the chance to enact the dream of crazed conservatives since Kent State. 

Over on Truth Toilet, Trump has proclaimed, "A once great American City, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals.  Now violent, insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents to try and stop our deportation operations — But these lawless riots only strengthen our resolve." There are no riots, only a few tense moments. The protests have been led by Americans. The deportations have rounded up legal immigrants. But that hasn't stopped Trump from calling on his slavering administration of dead-eyed drunks, pedophile enablers, puppy killers, and Stephen Miller to launch a potential military attack inside the country and "to take all such action necessary to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion, and put an end to these Migrant riots. Order will be restored, the Illegals will be expelled, and Los Angeles will be set free." This is in addition to ordering 2000 National Guard soldiers to Los Angeles (and declaring victory before they ever hit the ground). By the way, you know how you know it wasn't "Migrant riots"? Because if it was migrants, ICE and federal agents would have used lethal ammo and not flash bangs or tear gas. 

In a memorandum to the dead-eyed drunk, the pedophile enabler, and the puppy killer, the rapist president said, without a hint of irony, "To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States." You got that? If you slightly inconvenience the mass arrest of peaceful people, it's a rebellion. If you, say, rampage through the Capitol, vandalize the building, attack law enforcement, and prevent the constitutionally-mandated certification of the electoral votes in a presidential election while threatening to hang the vice-president, that's just patriotism, motherfucker, and fuck you if you say otherwise.

Trump and his evil criminal crew are making statements that have no basis in reality to a media ecosystem that will report it as fact to an audience that will only ever see the lies. Where we see Immigration and Customs Enforcement brutally rounding up migrants working their decidedly non-gang-related jobs at construction sites and restaurant kitchens, where we get outraged when a legal migrant checks in at a courthouse as she awaits her asylum hearing and ICE arrests her, where we want to explode with anger at the psychological and physical torture of children seeing their parents arrested or being rounded up and zip-tied themselves, the MAGAnistas are making their brain-dead followers believe that, somehow, 21 million criminals got into the country and joined MS-13 or that Venezuelan gang they can't pronounce and they now are taking over cities that the brain-dead have never heard of before Fox "news" yelled it at them. Or, you know, a "Migrant Invasion."

I honestly don't know how we get out of this without the violence that Trump so obviously craves. Everything has been building to this chance, whether it was calling for the Central Park (now the Exonerated) Five to be executed, or encouraging protesters at his Nazi rallies be beaten, or watching to see if Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi were murdered on January 6th, he wants to kill some people so fucking badly so he can join the ranks of those he worships, so he can make up for all those times the Marxist liberal crazies got away with it. Remember that he had to be talked out of unleashing the military on Black Lives Matter protests. He won't be convinced this time.

The hope, of course, is that the people of Los Angeles, with our encouragement and support, will stand firm in the first real test of Trump vs. America. And one place to look for resistance is the unions, which are being decimated by ICE raids on worksites. Because ICE arrested and injured David Huerta, the genuinely beloved president of the Service Employees International Union in California, the thugs have pissed off the roughly 2 million workers in the SEIU. That's going to activate more protests, and it already has, with events called in Boston, Portland, and elsewhere. It's pissed off the local Teamsters in L.A., which called for "An end to the militarization of immigration enforcement that terrorizes communities and disrupts lives." This is on top of the intense union support for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which continues to this day.

Things are getting more intense in California, with protests growing across L.A., with Gov. Gavin Newsom finding his spine and calling for the National Guard to be withdrawn. By the time you read this, shit might have gotten even worse.

You're going to see the protesters blamed, but there is only one person who caused all this, all of it, all this shit that's fucking up our lives, and it's Donald Trump. He could end this by stopping his deranged mission to bleach the United States white. But I think the chaos is his Viagra and he's not gonna stop until he fucks us all.

Donald Trump's Need to Degrade Joe Biden Is Part of the MAGA Revision of History

Lately, Donald Trump, who really is president of the United States for some goddamned reason, has been saying and approving of some really weird shit about former President Joe Biden. At his morose, deranged press conference last Friday, the one where noted drug addict Elon Musk stared around the room like he was keeping an eye on all those winged devils who want to stab his face, Trump asserted that Biden wasn't actually the one making decisions when he was president, and the proof of that was odd. 

After a typically racist rant about brown and Black criminals coming to the United States from underdeveloped countries, Trump asked, "Why would they do that? It's the one thing I can't figure out and I don't believe it was Joe Biden. I really don't. I mean, look, he's been a sort of a moderate person over his lifetime. Not a smart person, but somewhat vicious person, I will say. If you feel sorry for him, don't feel so sorry, because he's vicious. What he did with his political opponent and all of the people that he hurt, he hurt a lot of people, Biden. And so I really don't feel sorry for him, but he wasn't a person that would allow murderers to come into our country. He wasn't a person that was in favor of transgender for anybody that wanted it, to take kids out of families, etc., etc." You got it? A moderate but vicious person, a dummy who let others take control of the presidency but unworthy of sympathy. 

This veered into the autopen "scandal," which is the use of mechanical pen to sign things in the president's name, which led to more assertions with absolutely no proof: "When you see the autopen, I mean, I think the autopen is going to become one of the great scandals of all time. Because you have somebody operating it or a number of people operating it. Because I knew Joe Biden, Joe Biden wasn't in favor of opening up borders, letting 21 million people into this from prisons and mental institutions and gang members. He wasn't into that at all. And you know, who signed these orders, proclamations and all of the different things that he signed that set our country so far back. That was so bad for our country."

First off, it should be said that Biden's evolution on LGBTQ issues has been well-documented. Some even give him credit for convincing Barack Obama to support same-sex marriage. And, you know, when he was first elected, Biden wanted to make it easier for immigrants to become citizens, but Republicans were fearmongering cockheads about it. Trump lying or not knowing something isn't news. What is news is that Trump can't quit Joe Biden. He needs to keep kicking him because it's that kind of thing that gets the MAGA yahoos all hot and bothered. 

Of course, with Trump, weird shit always gets weirder and shittier. Over on his "social" media money-laundering operation, Truth Toilet, Trump re-flushed a post that declared, without a hint of irony, something that makes a bold claim about Joe Biden: "There is no #JoeBiden - executed in 2020. #Biden clones doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see. Democrats don't know the difference." You got that? The motherfucking president of the United States spread a ludicrous, extravagantly wrong conspiracy theory that the previous president was killed and replaced with clones and robots. And one can only say, "Why the fuck wouldn't they use a robot that could have kicked Trump's ass at the debate?"

As we know, Trump can't do something just for the sake of doing it. It's always got to have some ulterior motive to degrade and debase and insult some perceived opponent. In his first term, he routinely attacked President Obama and Hillary Clinton. But this time around, there's something even more subversively evil at work. Yes, in his first term, Trump was working to erase everything Obama had done (and undid a great deal, but couldn't bring down the Affordable Care Act). This time, it's a much larger project. Trump and his goons, lackeys, and other assorted ass remoras want to revise history. It's not enough to say, "Biden did something and I didn't like it so I'll do it differently." No, it's got to be that, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Biden failed and Trump has to fix it. It doesn't matter that what Trump is saying about the Biden presidency is almost entirely a lie, one that we should be easily able to prove since we all just fucking lived through the Biden presidency. But he still gets away with it.

Take one recent fact sheet from the White House titled, "President Donald J. Trump is Restoring Gold Standard Science in America." Putting aside the stupid "Gold Standard Science" branding, which is pretty much "how science is done but with Trump's name on it," the statement randomly attacks Biden, drawing on more conspiracy theories from lunatics across the nutzoid right-wing mediasphere. "The Biden Administration manipulated science to achieve political ends," it reads, "and conducted subpar science designed to support predetermined outcomes instead of objective science that informed well-designed policies." No examples are offered because why fucking bother? I mean, there was no reason to even put this "fact" sheet out, as it's bereft of, you know, facts, but if you wanted to have an excuse to gut the funding of science grants and programs around the country, this is the shit you have to do to convince your idiot hordes that you're doing the right thing. 

And it's so blatant. Here's a statement titled "Cheapest Memorial Day Weekend Gasoline in Years" which asserts, "The national nightmare that was Biden’s war on American energy is over" and that Trump's actions will "undo the Biden-era stranglehold on American energy production." But we over here in the real world are damned to know that oil and gas production soared under Biden to its highest levels ever. That's not a stranglehold. That's a vigorous hand job. Biden didn't brag about it because all that drilling sure seems like a bad idea. 

Trump's gotta degrade Biden again and again because it is part of an effort to contort all of American history around his crude, skewed, bullshit view. It's why Trump won't give up on the Big Lie about the 2020 election and is demanding that everyone must believe that in order to be part of his administration. It's a way to make a very small man feel just a little tougher than he ever could even try to be while feeding his hungry, mad hordes more raw meat.

A Poem for Memorial Day

Dirt 

by Garett Reppenhagen

Iraqi dirt is everywhere

in my boots and in my hair

the dark clay that soldiers keep

where they march and where they sleep

to prevent the ache in a mothers heart

white sand becomes penned pure art

we exaggerate and bring to light

when the gravel grains are colored bright

under wheels and under track

dirty bombs reality lacks

stuck to sweat under trigger finger nails

that itches and stings when a child wails

dirt so heavy that one can't hide

inside sand bags that divide the sides

turning to grime when it begins to rain

American pride turned to pain

Scandalous chit chat in day to day gossip

"those veterans are insane they really lost it"

closed minds, mass destruction of innocence

and truth gets a purple heart amidst all the ignorance

red white and blue covered in dust

the color of money, oil, and lust

soiled uniforms brown with taint

breathe uranium air contaminate

Jesus pimps our children like whores

like Uncle Sam's hate crimes that the family ignores

under patriot makeup is the garbage and filth

body bags filled with love, swept under the rug is guilt

scum put on sale, but they put us on trial

it's in our teeth when we bite and we smile

grease fed to the masses on the daily news

if the war never ends we'll never lose

we dig and dig, but they cover the hole

when we discover the truth we pay the toll

an unknown soldier in a shallow grave

burdened and battered and buried alive

(This poem comes from Warrior Writers, a non-profit organization that teaches and gives space for veterans to write and create art about their experiences. You can donate here.)

We Cannot Forget That the Climate Crisis Is Coming For Us All

Look, I know, I know, I fuckin' know that with all the more immediate threats that are looming over us, from outlawing dissent to anti-vax madness to the destruction of the economic safety net, your brain might not have the bandwidth to also include the climate crisis in your daily incantation of everything that's going to wreck us, but that motherfucker is coming and we're now on a path that not only doesn't mitigate it but leads to our end. Trump and his savage band of grotesque industrialists, cancerous capitalists, and greedy shitheels are in the midst of gutting anything that would allow the earth to take a fucking breath and slow down our imminent descent into floods and fires and famine. 

For instance, the Environmental Protection Agency, a name that was never meant to be ironic but here we are, is working on a plan to "eliminate all limits on greenhouse gases from coal and gas-fired power plants in the United States." That seems insane, right? Like against everything that nearly every scientist has been saying for decades? Well, the Trump EPA has that covered: they're just gonna say, "Nuh-uh." Actually, it's a little more nuanced, but only a little: "Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from power plants that burn fossil fuels 'do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution' or to climate change because they are a small and declining share of global emissions." You got that? Because of the reduction in greenhouse gases due to policies that recognize the climate crisis is real, it's okay to increase greenhouse gas emissions. It's like when you lose a little weight and you decide you can eat cake more because that won't make you gain it back. That always works. 

Oh, and they want to shitcan the "2009 E.P.A. finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health" because that makes it easier to "regulate carbon pollution from power plants, vehicles, oil and gas infrastructure and other sources," which seems like a good thing. That's a regulation too far. And if you believe that more greenhouse gases are a bad thing, Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the EPA, says you belong to "the climate change religion." That one pisses me the fuck off because, see, I can show you a thousand things that prove climate change is real. You can't show me one that proves your god is.

This administration's war on the future is starkly clear in its refusal to not only acknowledge the climate crisis but in its effort to actively make things worse. Trump issued another executive order of the damned to go after states that try to do anything to mitigate the crisis, like suing California for its stricter emissions standards on cars or Vermont for wanting fossil fuel companies to pay to clean up some of the mess they've made. The EO says, dickishly (which is the mode they're in all the time), "Many States have enacted, or are in the process of enacting, burdensome and ideologically motivated 'climate change' or energy policies that threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security." Yes, the phrase "climate change" is in quotes, as if it's "so-called" instead of abso-fucking-lutely real. But if your state wants to try to make life livable for even the short foreseeable future, you live in a dream.

The fuckery doesn't end with the climate crisis. Last month, the Fish and Wildlife Service of the Department of Interior put out a proposal for commentary: "Rescinding the Definition of 'Harm' Under the Endangered Species Act." See, the ESA has allowed the FWS to say that harm can be done through the modification of a species habitat, like the destruction of a forest or the polluting of a lake. Now the evil fuckers at Interior want to limit "harm" to when someone "takes" an endangered species, as in to "harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct." So, in other words, if you shoot an arrow through a bald eagle, you broke the law. But you can build a plant that exists to burn coal for no reason and if that kills hundreds of bald eagles, you didn't do any harm. Like I said, evil fuckers. 

What got me on this whole subject today was that I woke up this morning, probably still drunk on last night's whiskey bender, thinking very quickly I should just start drinking again, and opened up the BlueSky to get a link to a CNN story titled, "The birds on this tiny, remote island are so full of plastic their bellies crunch," which is exactly as fucked and disturbing as it sounds. And then I saw this one: "An ecological disaster has been unfolding on Australia’s coast," about a toxic algae bloom in the ocean that you can barely see but kills sea life and sickens humans. The bloom was about 4000 square kilometers in size a couple of weeks ago, propelled by climate change that keeps the ocean warm. 

And that's the kind of shit that, with just a tweak or two in the circumstances, could lead to a massive die-off, tilting the very balance of the ocean ecosystem that would then tilt the balance of the entire earth's ecosystem, which, as much as we try to live in our silos of denial, will fuck us harder than any Trump-made dildo of dead democracy. 

It keeps going. Trump fired the 400 climate scientists that were working on the National Climate Assessment. And don't even get me started on the demolition of NOAA and FEMA, which is like firing the military, considering how vulnerable it makes us.

So, yeah, this shit hasn't stopped mattering, and it's still a fucking crisis, and the United States is now in the midst of fucking over the entire world. We better be ready to fight this battle, too. 

There Is No "America" Without Birthright Citizenship

Something has bugged the shit out of me about the whole attempt to end birthright citizenship for children born in the US whose parents are visitors or, dear heavens, undocumented migrants. And that's the way those who seek to gut the first section of the 14th Amendment, you know, the one that says, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside," keep wanting to tie it to what they say is the original intent: to make sure that freed slaves and their children are US citizens. 

Now, I'm not a historian of the Constitution and I'm not gonna give you my sub-Wikipedia summary of what I know about the Reconstruction Amendments or how the 14th Amendment is also a response to the heinous Dred Scott decision, but I can tell you this: if the congressmen and senators debating this in 1866 (it was ratified by the states in 1868) had intended it to only apply to the children of freed slaves, they would have fucking well said so. It's not like this country was shy about segmenting off populations in its founding legal documents. They decided "all persons," not "all those who were once bound to Service" (to use the language of the Three-Fifths Compromise in Article 1). 

The Trump administration's and their ideological fellow fucknuts' argument is, "Well, they meant slaves because that's all they were really thinking about then." It's what Donald Trump himself pissed out over on Truth Toilet: "We didn’t have people pouring into our Country from all over South America, and the rest of the World. It wasn’t even a subject. What we had were the BABIES OF SLAVES." It's what Solicitor General Dean John Sauer said to the Supreme Court this past week: "Our primary contention is that the Citizenship Clause related to the children of former slaves, not to illegal aliens who weren't even present as a discrete class at that time."

Now that's a motherfucker of a thing to say because if you take that logic with the 14th Amendment, that they couldn't have known about undocumented migrants because we didn't define immigrants as "legal" or "illegal," then how does that fuck with the other amendments? The authors of the Bill of Rights couldn't know that arms would advance to the point that one person with an assault weapon can tear the bodies of a classroom full of children to pieces. They just knew muskets, flintlock pistols, and various bladed things. And almost no one was gonna own a goddamn cannon. What about the First Amendment? Would they have been so keen on a free press and free speech if they knew that giant corporations and ultra-wealthy fucks were going to control the press and that certain points of view wouldn't get heard? A Thomas Paine ain't gonna publish enough pamphlets to overcome the Fox "news" shit wave. Maybe they would have guaranteed equal time or something. Who the fuck knows? 

In other words, it's a bullshit argument that is, as I said, undone by the fact that they could have limited it but they didn't. Indeed, despite the argument over the "subject to the jurisdiction" phrase, which has been ongoing for years on the savagely white nationalist right, the only way to get around the 14th Amendment is to argue that the children of undocumented migrants aren't actually "persons" by some weird and contorted mad legal reasoning, and, you know, I don't put it past these twatmites to pull that kind of shit and for at least Alito and Thomas to agree as they fellate whatever billionaire is funding their next vacation. (By the way, if they take away the humanity for one group, that can pave the way for shitcanning the rest of the first section of the 14th Amendment, which is about how habeas corpus rights are for every person, not just citizens or legal immigrants.)

But what galls me and what ought to gall everyone is this simple idea: the United States is what it is because of immigration and birthright citizenship. The very concept of "America" is that it's always been a mongrel nation pasted together by people from fucking everywhere, man, all, in theory, working towards that mythical "more perfect union." We're the only country in the world that has even attempted to do this. We're an incredibly diverse, and an incredibly inclusive country, and if you don't see that as a strength, then you don't actually understand who the fuck we are. 

And I know, I know, I fucking know that much of this exists in the realm of theory, not practice. I know that, in practice, this country has been dickish and oppressive and violent to every new group that came here (and that's not getting into how we genocided the indigenous population). Fuck, in 1856, the Know Nothing Party accused Democrats of getting Irish and German immigrants naturalized in large numbers so they could vote for James Buchanan (a plainly shitty president, by the way). Fuck, we have the concept of "illegal immigrants" because of a late 19th-century freakout over Chinese immigrants "taking our jobs" or some such shit (or, you know, racism). Hell, in this cursed century, we've seen the mass mistreatment in the United States of people from the Middle East, AAPI people, and the migrants from Central and South America. The vast majority of them are not coming here to fuck anything up or take anyone's jobs. Stephen Miller and his ilk don't believe in this country. We who want immigrants here and welcome them are the ones who do.

That concept is something to strive for. It's worth saying that, yes, we want you to come to this country and we want you to do amazing shit that makes your life better and perhaps the lives of others better and if you have kids here, awesome, they are citizens and they're welcome to the fuckin' party, man. Fucking hell, if I sound like I'm in some kind of punk-ass meltdown over this, it's because one of the few things to be genuinely proud of in this country is that idea, however imperfectly or even badly actualized, that we don't just welcome people from elsewhere, we fucking want you here. And I've seen that lovely idea betrayed over and over in our hysteria over migrants, almost all of whom just wanna come here, do some work, and live their lives, but I've never seen this shit that the Trump administration is trying to do in getting rid of birthright citizenship. We're not a white man's nation. We're not a Christian nation. We haven't been for a long, long time.

As SCOTUSBlog pointed out, during the hearing this week at the Supreme Court, "although the court’s liberal justices were the most outspoken in their belief that Trump’s order [ending birthright citizenship for some migrants] violates the Constitution, there was no support voiced by the other justices for Sauer’s contention that it does not." I'm not holding my breath that the conservatives don't dick the nation over as they have so many times before. But even Brett Kavanaugh was aghast at the logistics of what the Trump administration was asking for. Maybe even they see what we lose when we give up what makes us an actually great country. Or at least one that used to like to pretend it was.