The Supreme Court's Blindness to Gender Violence
FUCK THE GODDAMNED CHRISTOFASCIST THEOCRATIC WOMAN-HATERS (especially the ones in black robes)
The Supreme Court’s Blindness to Gender Violence
9/25/2023 by Victoria F. Nourse
The Supreme Court continues its pushback on women’s rights with the cases Counterman and Rahimi.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) announces a joint resolution to affirm the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment on Jan. 31, 2023 in Washington, D.C. In April, she also filed a discharge petition, which seeks to compel the House of Representatives to vote on H.J. Res. 25 to remove the arbitrary deadline for ratification. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images)
If you thought the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade was the end of the Court’s war on women, think again. Now gender violence laws are under attack. Case in point: last term’s decision in Counterman v. Colorado striking down a stalking conviction as unconstitutional. This upcoming term, the Court is poised to deal another blow to domestic violence laws, in a case about guns: United States v. Rahimi.Though the Court drapes its opinions in the language of liberalism—of free speech and rights—the result is the same: The Constitution somehow becomes the enemy of popular laws devised to protect women. The only way to push back against these Court rulings is for Congress to take the steps necessary to affirm the Equal Rights Amendment.
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But the Supreme Court reversed Counterman’s conviction based on the First Amendment. Traditionally, the First Amendment has had an exception for “true threats.” Many laws criminalize threats: Threaten the president, for example, and that is a federal felony. No one thinks those laws violate the First Amendment. Most of our laws against hate crimes, along with civil rights laws, employ the legal standard of true threats (for instance, a white supremacist saying, “We will kill you if you vote”). Yet the Supreme Court found Colorado’s stalking law unconstitutional because it would “chill” speech.
A March for our Lives demonstration against gun violence in Washington, D.C., on March 24, 2018. (Emilee McGovern / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)
A reasonable observer might ask, “Don’t we want to chill threatening speech? Why would the Court protect stalking? Didn’t Counterman abuse his right of speech?” Unfortunately, the use of the First Amendment to undermine protections for women (and potentially everybody else) is old news. When sexual harassment first emerged, it was considered a trivial matter of “he said, she said” (remember Anita Hill’s treatment in the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings). When the Violence Against Women Act was first proposed, the American Civil Liberties Union opposed it, again based on speech (I know, I was there). As many legal scholars now recognize, the First Amendment has become a sword, not a shield—insulating harm, not shielding dissent.
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As I said to the press before my testimony on the ERA in the House of Representatives, “Be afraid.” And that was before Dobbs. And do not expect rebalancing the Court with more seats to be a realistic fix for this state of affairs: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s own Democrats fought him in 1937 when he sought to change the Court’s composition and add justices to the bench. The only answer is for women to return to a newly vital project since Dobbs: the Equal Rights Amendment. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) have upped the ante, introducing a joint resolution to confirm the amendment’s ratification. We have never been closer.
https://msmagazine.com/2023/09/25/supreme-court-gender-violence-women-counterman-rahimi/