The Supreme Court v. The People of the United States
The U.S. Supreme Court has a long record of deciding who is human and who is not, or at least fully human. Nine years ago, the catastrophe that is the Court voted to gut the Voting Rights Act. Since that time, efforts to restrict voting have increased. Legislators have run amuck. In at least 27 states, they have introduced, pre-filed, or carried over 250 bills with restrictive provision.
A quick graze of the history of the Court shows that we the people win some and we lose some, and sometimes we win some after we have lost much. Plessy v. Ferguson was atrocious, and after nearly six decades of carnage and diminution of Black bodies, Brown v. Board of Education reversed it. Our country has never held the Supreme Court accountable for the actual harm it does to the people. If all persons were regarded with dignity, one might conclude that the Court would become irrelevant.
Something so simple as honoring human rights and being kind and respectful points us to the dream of a better, not just more civil but a more humane society. The Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that women were autonomous decision-makers and held power over their own bodies.
Now it seems to be saying women are no longer capable of making rational decisions, but these people in black robes are no more or less human than the rest of us.
We must never let any court, no matter how “august,” tell us who we are.
