Wednesday, January 4, 2023

News bits: Abortion wars could get super ugly, etc.

From the Arrest That Mailman! Files: An article in Politico discusses a strange legal defense the DoJ issued for people who deliver abortion drugs by US mail in states where abortions are banned. This one might wind up in the Supreme Court in the next couple of years. Politico writes:
The Justice Department has cleared the U.S. Postal Service to deliver abortion drugs to states that have strict limits on terminating pregnancy, and has offered limited assurances that a federal law addressing the issue won’t be used to prosecute people criminally over such mailings.

A legal opinion, from Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, concludes that a nearly 150-year-old statute aimed at fighting “vice” through the mail is not enforceable against mailings of abortion drugs as long as the sender does not know that the drugs will be used illegally.   
“We conclude that [the statute] does not prohibit the mailing, or the delivery or receipt by mail, of mifepristone or misoprostol where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully,” OLC chief Christopher Schroeder wrote in the 21-page opinion posted online Tuesday.
“There are manifold ways in which recipients in every state may use these drugs, including to produce an abortion, without violating state law,” Schroeder added. “Therefore, the mere mailing of such drugs to a particular jurisdiction is an insufficient basis for concluding that the sender intends them to be used unlawfully.”
One can easily imagine some creepy anti-abortion zealot-busybody reporting a mailman or mail-lady to the cops and the cops arresting them and charging them with murder or whatever crime red state law specifies. That a 150 year old law is at issue seems a bit odd. 

Anyway, the take-away is clear here. Don’t put labels on abortion medicines that get sent through the mail. That way the mailman cannot know what is in the package and thus cannot have the requisite criminal (mens rea, i.e., ‘guilty mind’) intent to establish criminal liability.

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Moral rot in congress: In surprising comments, a Democratic representative in the House commented about the serial liar George Santos (R-NJ). Rep. Don Beyer (D-VT) said this: “He’ll get sworn in. Politicians lie. He may have gone a little overboard.”

A little overboard? Santos lied blatantly about most of the things on his resume. He brushed it off as just a little thing: “If I disappointed anyone by my résumé embellishment, I’m sorry. I will be sworn in. I will take office.”
Clearly, the profound moral rot in American politics is not confined to Republicans in congress. At least some Democrats are just as rotted, rancid and immoral. I want a third party in power with the other two left out as small permanent minority fringes. 

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In a WaPo opinion piece, Jennifer Rubin writes about the GOP’s direct attack on House ethics:
Once they figure out how to resolve their leadership dispute (however long that will take), they will get straight to work disrupting good governance. 

Among their first tasks: neutering the Office of Congressional Ethics.

The OCE, which Democrats created in 2008, was designed as an independent office with the power to investigate ethics violations among House members.

Ever since the office’s conception, Republicans seeking to avoid independent scrutiny have attempted to dismantle it.

The MAGA majority’s current plan to gut the OCE is telling. As Norman Eisen, who served as ethics counsel in the Obama administration, observed, “When there is a change of control in a branch of our government, incoming leaders usually like to signal their commitment to ethics as the first order of business. But the new House GOP majority is doing the exact opposite. .... the Republican caucus is inviting more corruption in their ranks.”
Republicans in congress = deep moral rot, deep corruption & deep Christofascist theocracy. Or, is that assessment going just “a little overboard” as the morally rotted Democratic Rep. Beyer might say?

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Abortion wars update: The Statanists are at it again: An interview with Lucien Greaves (at the Satanic Temple) updates us on the secularists’ fight against America’s bigoted, evil Christofascist Christian nationalist movement:
The overturning of Roe v Wade last June opened the door for more than half of US states to effectively ban abortion or restrict access to it, horrifying supporters of reproductive rights. The Satanic Temple – and many other observers – believe the decision of the supreme court was made on the basis of religion: specifically the extreme form of Christianity that has come to dominate Republican politics in the US.

The Temple has “seven fundamental tenets”, one of which states: “One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.” This, it believes, offers a way around these draconian new laws. It is arguing that its members are exempt from bans or restrictions on abortion, due to their right to a “Satanic Temple religious abortion ritual”, more of which later. With lawsuits already filed in Indiana, Idaho, Texas and Missouri, the Satanic Temple is about to find out whether US courts agree.

.... Lucien Greaves, who co-founded the Satanic Temple in 2012, points to the success the Republican party has had in overturning Roe v Wade – a decision brought before the court through decades of lobbying and legislating.

“I get messages from people denigrating us for taking legal action to assert our rights, saying: ‘You can’t change the system from within the system,’” Greaves says.

“And I keep asking them: ‘What the fuck do you think you just saw happen? That’s what they just did.’”

“We have to play the long game,” Greaves says. “They spent generations doing this.”

Satanists don’t believe in Satan in a literal, demonic sense, Greaves explains, but rather as a symbol of rebellion and opposition to authoritarianism. According to the Satanic Temple’s website: “To embrace the name Satan is to embrace rational inquiry removed from supernaturalism and archaic tradition-based superstitions.”

“Right now, we have a minority religious theocratic movement, so entrenched in politics and getting away with whatever they want,” Greaves says. “Now they’ve got the courts on their side and everything – and they don’t need to bend to the will of the majority.”  
“It’s getting really frustrating now with the overturn of Roe v Wade, when people are still treating us not like we’re a minority religion – which we are – but more like, we’re just this kind of clever tactic that may or may not work,” Greaves says.

“That gets to be really tedious, because I think people aren’t terribly invested in the outcomes of the Satanic Temple’s lawsuits. And it shows that they don’t understand that the outcomes of what the Satanic Temple is doing have ramifications for everybody: all minority religious organizations, all different types of viewpoint positions that might be outside the Christian nationalist perspective.”
The article comments that the fascist American group Sovereign Citizens has offered a $100,000 bounty to the person who murders Greaves.


TST’s Baphomet is a pagan idol used in popular culture as a representation of the devil, with the head, horns and feet of a goat, the torso of a man and the wings of an angel

Here's the Sovereign Citizens crackpot lies and slanders notice from Dec. 2021 calling for Greaves to be captured dead or alive. It is getting dangerous for Americans to stand up for civil liberties, democracy and truth.


INTERNATIONAL, NATIONAL AND LOCAL PUBLIC NOTICE

That Douglas Mesner A.k.a. Douglas Misicko and doing business as “Lucien Greaves” is hereby classified as a domestic and International terrorist along with his group known as The Satanic Temple, a terrorist organization that is advocating for the sacrifice of babies in their so-called “religious ceremonies”. Furthermore Douglas Mesner is WANTED DEAD or ALIVE on grounds of an act of international terrorism with multiple witnesses; against The United States of America, a Sovereign country under the Law of Nations. Members of the LGBTQ community were cooperating and were a part of the terrorist attack.

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