#clarence — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #clarence, aggregated by home.social.
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#Leonard #Leo was born on Long Island in the mid-sixties.
When he was only a toddler, he lost his father — a pastry chef — to cancer.
At the age of five, his mother remarried, and the Leos moved to New Jersey, where he attended Monroe Township High School.
Leo was chosen as the “Most Likely to Succeed”
a distinction he shared with classmate #Sally #Schroeder, his future wife.
In the yearbook, the two were shown sitting next to each other, holding wads of cash and with dollar signs painted on their glasses.
He was so effective at raising money for his senior prom that his classmates nicknamed him the “Moneybags Kid.”
Throughout his life, he remained steeped in the deep Catholicism of his grandfather, who had emigrated to the United States from Italy as a teenager;
his grandparents attended Mass daily, and encouraged the young Leonard to follow their lead.
After high school, Leo went to Cornell University, studying under a group of conservative academics in the university’s department of government
and with the wider national backdrop of iconoclastic scholars led by Yale University’s #Robert #Bork and the University of Chicago’s #Antonin #Scalia, who were building the case for a novel legal doctrine known as #originalism.
He got a series of internships in Washington, D.C., during the final years of the Reagan administration,
then returned to Cornell to join the law school, where in 1989 he founded the local chapter of a student organization called the #Federalist #Society.
That group had been set up by three conservative-leaning students from Yale, Harvard, and Chicago seven years earlier as a way of challenging what they saw as the dominance of liberal ideology at the country’s law schools.After graduating, Leo married Sally, who had been raised as a Protestant but who used to go to Catholic Mass five times every weekend because she played the organ.
She decided to convert not long before her marriage.
The couple moved back to Washington, where Leo clerked for a judge on the court of appeals and became close with another appellate judge who had recently been appointed to the D.C. circuit
— a man from Georgia called #Clarence #Thomas,
who had toyed with becoming a Catholic priest.Despite being ten years older and from much more humble origins,
Thomas shared Leo’s conservative outlook, and the two soon developed a deep friendship that would endure for many years.During this period, Leo was asked by the Federalist Society to become its first employee
— although he delayed his start date so that he could help his good friend Thomas through his contentious confirmation process for the Supreme Court.Despite accusations of sexual harassment hanging over him, Thomas won Senate confirmation by a slim margin.
It would be the first in a series of fights in which Leo would have to put aside the teachings of his Christian faith as he focused on the greater goal of pushing through a conservative revolution of the courts and of society at large.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/opus-dei-leonard-leo-supreme-court-moneybags-kid-1235115538/ -
“Fetal personhood” activists struggle to maintain the fiction they are neutral on birth control
When asked about their intentions to restrict or protect access to birth control, Republican lawmakers and leaders of the anti-abortion movement will typically point out the fact that there’s no bill currently under consideration explicitly aimed at banning #contraception.
As journalist Jessica Valenti noted in her "Abortion, Every Day" newsletter, the president of Ohio Right to Life mocked a state Democrat who warned of the risk to birth control by saying,
“she can’t cite a piece of legislation that bans contraception … it’s fear-mongering.”Susan B. Anthony #Pro-#Life #America’s website calls it a “MYTH” that Republicans want to stop people from getting birth control.
“FACT: No state anywhere has banned birth control,” it says.
And yet taking one big swing to restrict access has never been the strategy of the anti-contraception playbook.
Rather, activists either maintain neutrality on birth control or say nothing while actively working to conflate abortion with birth control and pass laws that redefine life as beginning at conception.
As journalist Christina Cauterucci pointed out at Slate, the anti-abortion group #Americans #United #for #Life claims on its website that it takes “no stance on the underlying issue of contraceptive use,”
but elsewhere it insists that people who use emergency contraception
“take the lives of their unborn children.”When Mother Jones reporter Kiera Butler attended the annual conference of the anti-abortion group #Heartbeat #International in 2022, she found restriction of birth control to be a major theme, with several sessions dedicated to the topic.
The push to redefine the start of #personhood as the point of #conception holds real implications for fertility treatments and the wide range of available birth control methods.
Many lawmakers in states with such “fetal personhood” laws on the books have not fully grappled with the practical consequences of how enforcing those laws in the post-Roe era might work.
In the near future, most Republicans will likely continue to dismiss the idea that there’s any threat to birth control at all, and leaders of anti-abortion organizations will surely do their best to change the subject.
But ♦️pay attention to how fights over expanding access to birth control
— including nonhormonal methods like condoms
— play out.♦️Pay attention to proposals to gut funding for #TitleX, a federal program that provides birth control to millions of low-income people in the United States.
♦️Pay attention to efforts in Congress to restrict access to contraception in foreign aid spending bills.
♦️And pay attention to how courts and lawmakers aim to expand the definition of abortion.
(4/4)
https://www.vox.com/24087411/anti-abortion-roe-dobbs-birth-control-contraception-ivf
#Human #Life #International #IUDs #Students #for #Life #Marjorie #Taylor #Greene #PlanB #Lauren #Boebert #Matt #Rosendale #Pulse #Life #Advocates #Tea #Party #Catholic #Church #Hobby #Lobby #Roe #Marsha #Blackburn #Mike #Braun #Griswold #Roe #Dobbs #Clarence #Thomas #Blake #Masters #Birth #control #Pregnancy #implantation #implantation #conception #birth #IVF #Alabama #disgusting #Joseph #Scheidler #Randall #Terry
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In rationalizing the idea that 😨birth control can somehow abort a pregnancy before a pregnancy begins😨, activists make a number of claims.
#Human #Life #International, a global Catholic group, maintains that anything that prevents implantation is an abortion-inducing agent.
#IUDs, they insist, cause “early abortions.”
#Students #for #Life of America likewise claims all forms of hormonal birth control, including IUDs and the Pill, are abortifacients.
Georgia Republican Rep. #Marjorie #Taylor #Greene went so far as to proclaim that #PlanB emergency contraception “kills a baby in the womb once a woman is already pregnant” even though studies have shown the drug interferes with ovulation but does not inhibit implantation.
Greene isn’t the only Republican lawmaker blurring the lines.
Colorado Rep. #Lauren #Boebert tried to block funds for “abortifacient contraceptive drugs,” while Montana Rep. #Matt #Rosendale tried adding emergency contraception to a bill barring use of the federal funding for abortion.
In 2022, in perhaps one of the most glaring examples, Missouri Republicans pushed unsuccessfully to restrict public funding for IUDs and emergency contraception, with one of the state senators who led it proclaiming that “life begins at conception,” and “anything that destroys that life is abortion, it’s not birth control.”
Just this past week in Iowa, House Republicans attempted to amend a bipartisan bill to legalize over-the-counter birth control by adding new language that would require pharmacists to provide misleading and inaccurate information implying contraceptives are dangerous and a form of abortion.
#Pulse #Life #Advocates, an Iowa group opposing the contraception bill, claims on its website that birth control “kills babies.”
Many of these objections will sound familiar to anyone who followed the fight around the Affordable Care Act 15 years ago.
The political groundwork was laid in 2010 when the #Tea #Party movement came into power and fought alongside the #Catholic #Church against requirements that employer health insurance plans cover birth control.
And in 2014, the retail chain #Hobby #Lobby won its case before the US Supreme Court in which it argued it shouldn’t have to provide employees with IUDs or emergency contraception since its ownership viewed such things as abortion.
(3/n)
https://www.vox.com/24087411/anti-abortion-roe-dobbs-birth-control-contraception-ivf
#Roe #Marsha #Blackburn #Mike #Braun #Griswold #Roe #Dobbs #Clarence #Thomas #Blake #Masters #Birth #control #Pregnancy #implantation #implantation #conception #birth #IVF #Alabama #disgusting #Joseph #Scheidler #Randall #Terry
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The political playbook for attacking birth control shares some similarities with the playbook for attacking abortion
— a slow and steady chipping away of rights and access.Both efforts rely on measures like slashing funding for low-income patients, enacting parental consent laws to restrict minors’ use, and empowering ideologically supportive lawmakers and judges who push friendly legal frameworks.
But the major difference between pushing to restrict abortion access and pushing to restrict birth control is that leaders are typically much quieter about their goals for the latter, aware that open discussion will prompt fierce backlash.
They typically try to paint those who suggest they’d take aim at contraception as alarmists and conspiracists.
When Democrats in Congress introduced a bill to codify access to birth control following the overturn of #Roe, for example, they were met with emphatic performances of exasperation.
“This bill is completely unnecessary. In no way, shape, or form is access to contraception limited or at risk of being limited,” declared Florida Republican Rep. Kat Cammack during debate on the House floor.
“The liberal majority is clearly trying to stoke fears and mislead the American people.”
Still, a growing number of Republican lawmakers
— including Sens. #Marsha #Blackburn and #Mike #Braun
— have recently declared that ♦️Griswold v. Connecticut♦️, the 1965 Supreme Court decision establishing a constitutional right to birth control, was wrongly decided.#Griswold relies on the same legal right to privacy that underpinned #Roe, and in his concurring #Dobbs v. Jackson opinion in 2022, Justice #Clarence #Thomas encouraged the Supreme Court to “reconsider” Griswold and other privacy-related decisions.
Former Arizona Senate candidate #Blake #Masters went so far as to pledge to “vote only for federal judges who understand that Roe and Griswold” should be overturned.
Leaders more than occasionally reveal their underlying beliefs.
Recent statements, as well as recent actions from reproductive rights opponents, have sent clear reminders about how some influential activists really think about contraception:
that it’s just another form of abortion.Activists aim to blur the line between birth control and abortion
Anti-abortion leaders tend to take advantage of one basic fact about the American people:
There is great confusion about how pregnancy works, how abortion pills end it, and how birth control and emergency contraception (such as Plan B) prevent it.For example, one recent poll found that a stunning 73 percent of Americans think emergency contraception can end a pregnancy.
But among most medical experts, including those at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
— there is no confusion.#Birth #control, including emergency contraception, prevents ovulation (when an egg is released) and fertilization (when egg and sperm meet).
#Pregnancy begins when a fertilized egg attaches to the lining of the uterine wall, a process called #implantation.
Many fertilized eggs never implant.
Yet for a highly motivated wing of the anti-abortion movement, pregnancy starts not at #implantation but at #conception,
and human personhood begins then too, not at #birth.
👉These “fetal personhood” activists want to endow fetuses, embryos, and fertilized eggs with full rights and legal protections and thus frame any effort to prevent implantation
— be it through discarding embryos from IVF or taking a daily birth control pill
— as a form of killing unborn children.It’s a stretch of scientific consensus, but certain Christian activists have long clung to this idea and have slowly been codifying it in state law through bills that claim "human life begins at conception".
More than a third of states currently have such laws on the books.
To blur the line between abortion and contraception, many of these activists call birth control methods “abortifacients”
— agents that induce abortion.♦️But this is misleading because there’s no pregnancy to abort. ♦️
Real abortifacients are the medications that end pregnancies, namely misoprostol and mifepristone.
(2/n)
#IVF #Alabama #disgusting #Joseph #Scheidler #Randall #Terry
https://www.vox.com/24087411/anti-abortion-roe-dobbs-birth-control-contraception-ivf
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Clarence Thomas accused of accepting luxury trips from billionaire Republican donor
For over twenty years, #Clarence #Thomas has accepted multiple luxury trips from #Harlan #Crow, a Republican real estate developer and #megadonor, according to a new ProPublica investigation.
Despite accepting these luxury trips for over two decades, Thomas has **not listed them on his financial disclosures**, according to the report
The report found that the conservative justice frequently travels internationally on Crow’s luxury 162ft yacht, often wearing custom polo shirts gifted by Crow to commemorate the trips which included scuba diving in Indonesia and a cruise in New Zealand.
The justice also frequently visits Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks known as Camp Topridge. In addition to being served by private chefs, Thomas has mingled with top Republican executives at these retreats. In July 2017, Thomas was accompanied by “major #Republican #donors and one of the #leaders of the #American #Enterprise #Institute, a pro-business conservative think tank,” the investigation found.