When Our Supreme Court Goes Rogue

To say I am disgusted with the five conservative members of the U.S. Supreme Court would be a gross understatement. Candidly, I am repulsed by their thinking, utter lack of humanity and complete misinterpretation of the language used in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights intended to guarantee our freedoms and due process.

I imagine when these five men were born their mothers had the same great hopes for them I shared for my son. On the surface these men are wildly successful. After all, they don't call it the 'supreme' court for nothing. Yet it makes me sad that five mothers bore children who were such great disappointments. They spent countless hours raising men only to discover they have no hearts, no sense of fairness and no decency. This Supreme Court has already done incredible damage to the delicate fabric of our laws and they continue to undermine the meaning and intent of our founding fathers.

Perhaps I sit here in judgment of those mothers because I blame myself when my own children make mistakes. Or perhaps it is because we women do hold the power in many ways, even if we choose to abdicate it to some 'higher' authority.

We are simply wired to be good. We risk our health during pregnancy and childbirth. We forfeit our beauty sleep to the point of exhaustion caring and nurturing for the tiny beings who innocently depend on us. We share our food with our families, care for our grandchildren, and function as short stop, pitcher, catcher and right fielder and community volunteer. In a word, most of us are eff-ing saints with our children and others. And all the while we worry about and care for our elderly family and friends.

At work we rarely take full credit, even when it is our due, and we work as a cooperative team, rather than the top-dog-down model. And yet so many there misinterpret our kindness as weakness or gentleness as lack of strength. If we dare to call out mistreatment, we are whiners, bad team players, bitches or even the c word uttered behind our backs. Some of us are even worse off with domestic partners who beat us when we try to defend our children. The police know it is incredibly dangerous for them to interfere in a domestic dispute, so imagine how the women and children victims perceive the situation. Unless these monsters seriously injure us, we are still encouraged to try to get along. Otherwise, he may come back and kill us, they warn. How is this tolerated?

And then there are the cases of rape that the courts see as 'he said/she said', again, unless we have tearing, bruises, broken ribs or acid thrown into our face prosecutors don't want to bother with pursuing a conviction. And then there are the mistakes that prosecutors do make when they vigorously pursue the wrong people, eager for a conviction, letting the real perpetrator wait out the statute of limitations because their department needs some better stats.

With the rarest of exceptions we women are not the serial murderers, the child pornographers, the pedophiles or the rapists. Oh, I know we have some women who are cold and distant to their children, and others who abandon them. If we do, there is no evidence of the acceptance or cavalier attitude with which the courts treat the negligent father or the father who abandons one family to devote his resources to the new one he irresponsibly makes.

And this five-man gang on the Supreme Court wants to take away the power over our own health, and keeps us barefoot and pregnant, even if we are teenagers or have been raped. I am ashamed of these men for their mothers and their fathers. They are collectively a disgrace to themselves and our country.

Ah, by now, many of you are calling me names and claiming I am a man-hater or a damn liberal. The latter is true, but I love men, including my father, husband, brother, son, cousins, nephews and grandnephews and many male friends. Compared to my women friends and family you guys are decidedly low maintenance, but you are among the many good and brave men we have in this country. Thankfully, you are not the five conservatives on the Supreme Court.

Those men represent the proliferation and societal acceptance of men who see life as 'us' and 'them'. Them being defined as those whose luck may not have been the best, as they have ended up incarcerated for a crime they may or may not have committed. 'Us' as the ones who have gone rogue and used their ultimate power to dominate both the Executive and the Legislative Branch of government to overturn our personal freedoms.

This gang-of-five has now given domestic, multi-national and foreign corporations the right to buy candidates and mount campaigns against the ones who refused to be bought with unlimited amounts of money. In fact, these five justices have effectively given these corporations everything but the actual right to cast a vote. Let your senators and representatives know you support their efforts to legislate this interpretation away, as it will be the ruin of our country if we don't.

And here is the latest of the problems. The incarcerated who have lost all freedom are being denied their right to DNA evidence that may prove them innocent. This is as barbaric as the Salem Witch trials or the murders of the Royals that plagued some of my ancestors and their families. This is feudal thinking that has invaded our highest court and, frankly, is a national disgrace.

If you want to take action to give prisoners the right to have a certified independent third party examine crime scene DNA, approach it on the state level. I do not understand why our Supreme Court thinks that justice is less important than the extra expense or work a prosecutor may have to perform to determine the guilty from the innocent. There are 46 states with laws that allow at least some access to DNA evidence, but prosecutors are using all sorts of maneuvers to prevent or delay their access. Four states do not guarantee their citizens any rights to have examined (at their own expense)DNA evidence that could exonerate them. Write to your state legislators, please, if you live in Alabama, Alaska, Massachusetts or Oklahoma.

I feel for those mothers of this Gang-of-Five, but I feel more for the mothers and families of all those innocent people who have been incarcerated for rapes and murders they did not commit. I feel for the victims whose attacker is still at large or the others who will be attacked in the future because of a reluctance by the State to have to manage more paperwork. If we allow a state prosecutor or a supreme court judge to turn back the clock on justice, what kind of people are we?

So please tell me, where is the outrage?