Plog Number 107
Behind the Scenes
Hello Ploggers, how are you? Back to life, 🎶 back to reality 🎶. Going back to work after a long weekend is bittersweet. But I am grateful for the long and restful weekend.
I have always said that there will always be things to plog about. That is so true. I started this Plog after the Dobbs decision came out. I knew that women needed their reproductive rights and I was on board with anything I could do to help bring them back. I soon learned that the effort to get rid of Roe was meticulously planned for years. I learn more about it every day. I can kick myself for being so ignorant about what was going on. But the reversal goes back at least to the year 1991 when George H Bush put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court as a replacement for Thurgood Marshall. That was an UNEQUAL💩 replacement if there ever was one. I have a lot of respect for Marshall. He argued and won Brown v the Board of Education allowing school integration. His work changed lives for all of us, especially black people.
Roe survived for 49 years from 1973-2022. From the moment it was ruled upon, there were focused plans to reverse it. Over the years Thomas, Roberts, Gorsuch, Alito, Kavanaugh and Barrett all lied on their job interviews. They all said that they would respect the legal precedent that Roe represented in their Senate Confirmation hearings and then voted it down in 2022.
Recently I learned about the Reverend Robert Schenck. He was an aggressive Pro Life Evangelical minister who was influential in the planned overthrow of Roe v Wade. He testified on December 8, 2022 at a Congressional hearing. He stated that he recruited wealthy conservative donors to serve as "stealth missionaries" at the Supreme Court. Once inside they would develop friendships with conservative justices that aligned with the group's social and religious views. This operation "Higher Court" was to gain insight into the conservative justices thinking. This was an effort to push the justices further to the right with paid 💵 friendly 🍗 dinners, 😎 vacations and social events. This was called "quiet lobbying". This was all allowed because the supreme court justices have no rules of ethics like other federal judges do. Schenck said her raised tens of millions of dollars for the Pro Life cause over the years.
Schenck is now a former anti-abortion advocate. He tells why he no longer supports his former tactics and theories. In an interview with PBS he retells a story of being jailed in a co-ed facility in Montgomery, Alabama. He said there was a mentally ill woman screaming about her 3 children ALL NIGHT LONG. He said it was then that it hit him that it would not be rosy cheeked 👼 white babies that were being saved. Only then did he realize that women with mental illness, impoverished, women of color and others who couldn't afford children were also involved. These "non-white" victims were looked upon with disdain and told to pull themselves up by their 👢bootstraps. There was no help for them. The idea of helping anybody was totally abandoned. The motivation was from people who had 😒contempt for these women and their children. He now realizes that the decision is complicated and unique and should be decided by women rather than politicians. Too little too late with that realization. He wonders if people will donate money and enact policies to help women and children as zealously as they did in ending legal abortion. The answer is no, they do not. George Carlin told jokes about it long before he died.
Then there was the Federalist Society. For Republican Presidents this group was more influential than the American Bar Association,( ABA) which Democrats have relied on in the past. In fact the last two Republican presidents have disregarded the ABA ratings. The ABA is a voluntary group of attorneys who serve the public and the profession. The ABA provides Continuing Legal Education, provides Law School Accreditation, and assists the public in improving legal systems. The ABA gave 4 of the last republican nominees the "not qualified" ratings. But back to the Federalist Society, which has about 60,000 members nationwide. The group does not lobby for legislation. They are funded by the Koch Foundation and other private donors such as Google, Chevron, and the Mercer Family. The overthrow of Roe was planned for years. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D) Rhode Island writes and lectures about what he calls "The Scheme". He writes how the Right Wing used dark money to capture the Supreme Court. He posits that Billionaires in this country have bought and control us through the Supreme Court as opposed to the Federal Judiciary. I will be writing a Part 2 about this and go further into the subject. Meanwhile, the forces who took down Roe should and will be exposed and talked about.
This Plog gives me no pleasure to write but information is power RECLAIM!
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