Goodbye, legal right to abortion.
Goodbye, separation of church and state.
Goodbye, commonsense gun laws.
Goodbye, Miranda rights.
And that's just the beginning.
With a fundamentalist, conservative Supreme Court majority in charge, brace yourselves for the possibility of the end of so many civil rights we take for granted: privacy, contraception, in vitro fertilization, gay marriage, interracial marriage.
This is not hyperbole.
On Friday, the court released its devastating ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health and also overturning Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
Here's how radical the majority is: The court was not even asked to overturn Roe v.Wade; it simply could have upheld Mississippi's law. That five justices were willing to go so much further tells you this court has absolutely no qualms about tossing Americans' hard-fought rights back to the states, where many Christian conservative-dominated legislatures will simply erase them.
Proof? In his separate concurring opinion in the Dobbs case, Justice Clarence Thomas said the court should reconsider all of its "due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell."
Griswold v. Connecticut, decided in 1965, legalized contraception.
Lawrence v. Texas, decided in 2003, legalized gay sex.
Obergefell v. Hodges, decided in 2015, legalized same-sex marriage.
What else is at stake at this fraught moment in American history? Everything.
If Republicans can figure out how to undo the results of elections that don't go their way by installing elections officials and state attorneys general willing to do their dirty work, prepare to bid farewell to our very democracy.
This is not hyperbole, either.
As we saw Thursday during the fifth public hearing of the Jan. 6 House select committee, former President Donald Trump came very close to blowing up the Department of Justice, and not incidentally the Constitution, in his monomaniacal quest to steal a second term.
"Few rights are more central to individual freedom than the right to control one's own body," Attorney General Merrick Garland said Friday in a statement. Abortion bans will inevitably and disproportionately hurt women of color and the poor, he said.
Garland also said that states may not ban Food and Drug Administration-approved abortion drugs like mifepristone, which are used in more than half of all abortions today.
In December, the FDA said the pill could be prescribed over the phone and distributed by mail. But with at least half a dozen states already trying to ban the drug entirely, this clash is surely headed to court.
We can only hope that the Supreme Court's devastating recent rulings will energize the electorate this fall. The solution to this wholesale revocation of rights will have to come at the ballot box.
Americans by an overwhelming majority support the right to abortion and always have. If this issue doesn't energize the suburban women voters who have proved decisive in so many recent elections, what will? How can we allow the court's anti-feminist cabal to take away the rights from our children and grandchildren that so many of us have benefited from?
On Friday, The New York Times reported that Trump has been telling people privately he thinks overturning Roe will be "bad" for Republicans, who will suffer a backlash this November.
God, I hope he's right.
The Los Angeles Times