One giant leap backwards

Do you get the feeling that the United States Supreme Court, politically crafted and thus dominated by a super majority of six conservative judges, hasn't really thought through the implications of Friday's flawed decision to overturn the 50-year precedent of Roe v. Wade?

Because of their actions, abortions in at least 13 states are immediately illegal, or soon will be. Trigger laws could add another 13 more in less than a month, meaning it will be illegal to seek an abortion in half the country. That goes against 65 to 70 percent of the country, which favored keeping Roe.  

The Court is so out of step.

No abortions, no exceptions. Women will be criminals for having an abortion; doctors will be criminals for aiding in abortions.

Women will have to travel vast distances to seek procedures in states other than the one they live in that bans abortions. That means travel expenses, gas and lodging. Who's going to help the economically disadvantaged through that? Who's going to help the homeless teenage girl who was abandoned by her partner? Who?

It's medieval. It's dangerous. It's about class separation. It's about control. Specifically, it's about a way to control women (this forced birth ruling gives us the 2022 version of keeping women barefoot and pregnant. Well, pregnant at least). And women will die.

What is this country?

No exceptions means if 12-year-old Sally is impregnated by Uncle Jethro, she will be forced to carry that child to term. Or if Carol was raped and impregnated in a grocery store parking lot in a crime of violence, she will be forced to carry that child to term. Or if Matilda had an ectopic pregnancy, she has no choice but to take her chances and hope that she doesn't hemorrhage to death waiting for nature to take its course. Downs Syndrome. Tay Sachs. Poverty level. Single parent. An unplanned pregnancy because the contraceptive failed. A miscarriage could be viewed as a cause for investigation and thus as a potential crime. It goes on and on.

Forced births could mean babies showing up on doorsteps, or police stations, or, even worse, in dumpsters.

What we haven't heard from the Court – or the Conservative Right, as they do their celebratory dancing in the streets – is what happens to the children women are now forced, by law, to bear. These children will be born in a country with no universal health care; no universal childcare; and no paid family and medical leave.

But even beyond the issue of abortion itself, the Court's ruling has ignominiously revoked a fundamental Constitutional right found in the 14th Amendment, which also includes the right to privacy under the amendment's wide-ranging Due Process Clause.

Think about what's just happened. We, the People, in the United States of America, have lost a constitutional right for the first time ever in our history – for now, it was the right to safe abortions that was guaranteed by Roe v. Wade.

What is this country?

And it could be getting worse. Justice (suddenly, the word "Justice" appears to be indelibly corrupted) Clarence Thomas, in a separate opinion, has suggested that other constitutional guarantees, such as access to contraceptives and LGBTQ rights (same sex marriage, for one) are also in jeopardy, which he wrote do not fall under Due Process consideration and thus can not be substantive law.

Yikes.

If Thomas has his way, there goes your right to privacy. So basically, what it all comes down to is that abortion is a private and highly personal decision made by the woman who supposedly has autonomous control of her body in the same way that a man supposedly has autonomous control over his. If that's not true, then a woman has no equal justice under man's law. In fact, why not overturn the 19th Amendment and keep women from voting? It's a lot easier to do now. We have precedent.

The Court is also dangerously close to telling you who you can and can not love. It's nobody else's damn business. Certainly not the Supreme Court's. This case should never have come to the bench in the first place, but then, that was the plan all along. That was the plan for the last 50 years.

And if it's that easy to lose one constitutional right, how easy will it be to lose others? Apparently, easy enough for at least three conservative members – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – who apparently perjured themselves during their Congressional hearings when they told us they respected the legal principle of stare decisis – established precedent. They were voted onto the bench by the Senate, and then promptly ignored the 50-year precedent of Roe v. Wade. Imagine that. Supreme Court Justices who lied to get on the bench.

No wonder the Court has a 25 percent approval rating.

What is this country?

Why we bring down trees

Four years ago, my neighbor, Perry Leonard, absolutely thrilled me with a memorable ride in his classic 1952 Willeys CJ-3A Jeep.

I had so much fun that I couldn't stand myself. We rode through the streets of Lexington, drawing glances, feeling the wind in our faces. I even wrote a blog about it (see here).

Farewell to a fun ride.

 Well, that will never happen again.

Two weeks ago on a Wednesday morning, his neighbor's 100-foot tree decided that it had had enough of standing tall and simply fell over. No wind. No storm. No earth tremors. No reason other than being perhaps 100 years old.

It fell on top of Perry's CJ-3A Jeep. It fell on top of Perry's 30-year-old Jeep Cherokee. It took out a portion of the Leonards' Air B&B located behind their house.

The damage was significant. It actually looked like a hurricane had come through. I can say that because I remember when Hugo came through in 1989 and created swaths of tree damage in town.

Interestingly enough, Perry didn't seem to mind losing the CJ-3A. It was his fun ride, and not really anything more than that. It was the loss of the Cherokee that really bothered him. He was the vehicle's only owner, buying it brand new 30 years ago.

So, for Perry, there was a lot of sentimental attachment to the Cherokee.

Farewell to another old friend.

 But for me, even though my ride lasted only 30 minutes or so, I had sentimental attachment to the CJ-3A. It made me feel military. I liked seeing Perry grind the gears while tooling down the street, wondering if he'd ever get it out of second and into third.

Perry is thoughtful about his personal disaster, however. Yeah, he lost two vehicles in a single moment, but the hidden miracle here is that nobody was booked for the popular Air B&B that night. That could have been horrendous. 

Or the tree could have randomly fallen a couple more feet to the right and taken out their house. If it had fallen more to the left, it could have taken out several offices. So there was incredible luck in play on their unlucky day.

And the entire incident is a reminder that we have to be watchful of Mother Nature. The tree that fell was being choked to death by the ivy that was climbing its trunk and strangling the life from it. Nobody wants to cut down historic 100-year-old trees, but the fact of the matter is that they're 100-year-old trees. Sometimes they'll give you a clue when it's time for the chain saw. And sometimes, you just have to make that decision on your own.

If you plant it, they will come

Kim and I had no idea what to expect about participating in the 16th annual Master Gardener Tour, being held this weekend in the Grimes School and Park Place Historic District.

I mean, after all, we'd never even been on the tour, much less participated in one.

So we held our collective breaths. When we first agreed to do this about seven weeks ago, we did it with the understanding that we weren't going to do much more than we already did with our gardens. We weren't going to throw tons of money at it, and we weren't going to buy anything extra for the yard that we didn't need or already have.

We partially succeeded in that. Our biggest expense, as it turned out, was grass seed. We've never had great lawns in our yards because of all the shade trees on the property, but this year, we gave it our best shot. I guess I spent close to $300 on 100 pounds of Kentucky 31 seed, and presto! We had a decent lawn.

A platoon of tourists fill our driveway.

 Kim, for her part, cultivated her English Cottage garden for the front of the house and the existing multi-variety garden in the back, giving us bee balm, a beauty berry bush, helianthus maximilians, spirea, sunflowers, zinnias, petunias, shasta daisies and any number of other plants. There's also a kitchen herb garden and a smallish vegetable garden.

But as the deadline approached, she became more wired than a Moog synthesizer. Weeds kept popping up without relief; the hibiscus weren't in bloom, and are we over-watering the peonies? In her eyes, nothing ever seemed like it was going to be ready in time. It had to be perfect, she reasoned, because people were paying $20 per ticket to take the tour. We can't disappoint them.

Pressure.

Then yesterday finally arrived. The sun was shining; the skies were clear and blue; the oppressive temperatures of the week before now hovered in the bearable low 80s. Our greeter, Frankie Sisk, and docent, Peggy Walser, arrived, and we were ready to go.

Almost from the start, tour customers started arriving. And kept coming. At one point, I noticed people were walking from Breeden Insurance, where they could purchase tickets, then cross Center Street, march across the field at Mountcastle Insurance, climb up a small but challenging slope and walk directly into our driveway. There was at least a platoon of them. They looked like the Marines assaulting Iwo Jima. They just kept coming and coming. I couldn't believe it.

I have no idea how many people showed up for the tour, but I reckon it was in the hundreds. And why not? It was a beautiful day.

And the best part for Kim and myself was seeing some old friends we haven't seen in a while: former colleagues from The Dispatch, where I worked, and former colleagues from LSB/Newbridge Bank, where both Kim and I worked.

We especially enjoyed overhearing some of the conversations from the tourists who whispered to each other how beautiful our yard looked. That was satisfying, especially after all the work we put into it.

More importantly, Kim and I hope the Master Gardeners make lots of money. This is their annual fundraiser, and one of the things they do is offer two $1000 college scholarships. Other money raised goes back into the community.

So there's still today to go. The weather forecast is identical to yesterday. It seems to me that this is going to be a good day to stop and smell the roses.