The Scathing Atheist - 489: Death Roe Edition

Episode Date: June 30, 2022

In this week’s episode, we talk about the precedent formally known as Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court also gets it wrong with EVERYTHING ELSE, and Andrew Torrez will be here to fill in the blank between the expletives. --- Check out our fundraiser for reproductive rights on Friday night. You’ll be able to watch along here: https://youtu.be/KvbrQF30oBY To make a per episode donation at Patreon.com, click here: http://www.patreon.com/ScathingAtheist To buy our book, click there: https://www.amazon.com/Outbreak-Crisis-Religion-Ruined-Pandemic/dp/B08L2HSVS8/ To check out our sister show, The Skepticrat, click here: https://audioboom.com/channel/the-skepticrat To check out our sister show’s hot friend, God Awful Movies, click here: https://audioboom.com/channel/god-awful-movies To check out our half-sister show, Citation Needed, click here: http://citationpod.com/ To check out our sister show’s sister show, D and D minus, click here: https://danddminus.libsyn.com/ To hear more from our intrepid audio engineer Morgan Clarke, click here: https://www.morganclarkemusic.com/ --- Guest Links: Hear more from Andrew Torrez here: https://openargs.com/ Hear more from Tom and Cecil here: https://www.dissonancepod.com/ --- Headlines: The Christian nationalist dream of overturning Roe is a nightmare: https://onlysky.media/hemant-mehta/the-christian-nationalist-dream-of-overturning-roe-is-a-nightmare/ https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/what-follows-roes-reversal-the-far-right-calls-for-christian-nationalism/ The Supreme Court rewarded religious coercion by a Christian football coach: https://onlysky.media/hemant-mehta/the-supreme-court-rewarded-religious-coercion-by-a-christian-football-coach/ Australian census shows record high non-religious: https://amp.smh.com.au/national/abandoning-god-christianity-plummets-as-non-religious-surges-in-census-20220627-p5awvz.html

Warning, if the profanity is the part of the show that offends you, that's pretty fucked up. This week's episode of The Scathing Atheist is brought to you by What's Left of the First Amendment? What's Left of the First Amendment? No, seriously, I'm asking. And now, The Scathing Atheist. Hi, this is Brian from West Virginia, and I just wanted to say I am so, so sorry for Joe Manchin, y'all. Please, really,

I wish I could do something about him. But I guess if this state's population proves anything, it is a fact that we did evolve from filthy, dirty, monkey people. It's fucking Thursday. It's June 30th. And fucking and fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Yeah, no illusions. I'm Eli Bosnick. I'm Ethan Wright. And from Samuel Alito's New Jersey.

How dare you! And over Michigan and way across Georgia, this is The Scathing Atheist. On this week's episode, we talk about the fucking stupid fucking Roe versus Wade fucking fuck. Supreme Court also gets it wrong with literally everything else they did. Yep, yep. And Andrew Torres will be here to fill in the blanks between Eli's fucks. But first, the diatribe. It's always been bad. We started this show because it was bad, and it's steadily gotten worse nearly every year since.

For a decade, I've had to come on and craft these progressively more terrified, look how bad it's gotten messages and and we're to the point now where like i'm worried i'm going to reach my rhetorical limit the bad news is going to outpace my ability to articulate how bad it is how can i distinguish this new low from all the absolutely abyssal depths that we've reached before it's obviously a question i've been wrestling with a lot this week. So here's what I came up with. As bad as it's gotten, through the entire Trump administration, through Trinity Lutheran, through Espinoza,

through all the incremental steps towards dismantling Roe, through all the foreshadowing about the court's ravenous desire to abolish the Lemon Test, through all the MAGA rallies, through the increasingly fascistic oratory, through the attempted coup by Christian terrorists on January 6th. I have never been afraid that it might be illegal for us to do this show in the near future. But given the extremism that we're seeing from the Supreme Pontificate of U.S. courts, that is no longer the case i had that fear this week i mean we're obviously going to talk about the overturning of row and the return of teacher-led prayer to school more on the show we're going to talk about it for pretty much this whole episode

and i'm sure many more to come but let's take a second to acknowledge that the legal theories that they just upended to make room for their extreme views on abortion and christian privilege are the exact same ones that protect us from blasphemy laws not that it really matters i i think it's pretty clear that they've all but abandoned the pretext of coherent judicial philosophy the law of the land now is whatever the christofascists want using whatever fabricated bullshit of a justification we feel like. Now, let me clarify my concerns here, right? Because it's not like I need my right to tell Jesus to eat a dick more than a pregnant person needs the right to bodily autonomy.

I'm not ranking the rights here, but regardless of how it affects your employment, your proximity to blasphemy laws is a pretty damn handy metric of how deep into theocracy we've plunged. And make no mistake, that's what we're measuring now. It's not enough to talk about how close we are to theocracy. Christians have a profoundly different set of rights than non-Christians at this point. Laws are interpreted through the lens of Christian belief more so than legal precedent.

The government coffers directly fund religious indoctrination. We are already a theocracy. Now it's just a question of how far down that hole are we and how long it'll take to dig our way back out. And that actually makes for a really useful analogy. The idea that this is like a pit that we've fallen into or sorry, a pit into which we are still falling. fallen into, or sorry, a pit into which we are still falling. The rate of descent may have slowed a bit when we got Trump out of office, but at best, we've traded free fall for a dangerously steep grade. We're still stumbling down at breakneck speed, no matter how quickly we manage to arrest our fall from here, and it's too late to save everyone. People are literally going to

die because of it, regardless of how hyperbolic Brett Kavanaugh tried to make that warning sound in his confirmation tantrum. Anyway, eventually, we're going to reach the bottom of this thing, and then we have to figure out the way out. Now, obviously the people who put us here, they're not going to be any help at all, but a lot of our allies probably won't be much help either. On the one side, you'll have the naive optimists that think we're on a bungee cord and the institutional momentum is going to spring us back into balance any second now. And on the other side, you're going to have the jaded pessimists who tried flapping their arms a half dozen times on the way down and they've already given up. And honestly, when we finally roll to a stop at whatever unfathomable depth we wind up in

and look back up those sheer walls, I feel like a lot more people are going to volunteer for that latter group. Still more will propose variations of the arm flapping technique. Others are going to try to scale the wall directly. And yes, a few of them might make it if they have extraordinary resources, but the rest of them will just tumble back to the valley floor with us. The sad fact, though, is that if we ever want to lift everybody back out of this hole, it's going to take a long time and we're going to have to move a lot of earth we're gonna have to dig a ramp along the sides of these walls with a gradual enough grade that we don't have to leave anyone behind or we will have failed and that's a daunting

fucking task right it can't be done quickly and any promises that it can just serve to undermine the realistic effort look we didn't get here all at once you know i know it seems like we did it's it's easy to look back over recent history and think this is all stems from the 2016 election and well not no doubt accelerated and exacerbated the problem it's not like we had trouble finding headlines to talk about before the trump administration right this effort has been underway for decades we got where we are through sustained coordinated political action by the opposition that's been moving in the same basic direction

since before I was fucking born. The only way out is through the same sustained effort in the opposite direction. And I'll be the first to admit that's harder for us than it is for them. They come from a conformist culture and we're mostly drawn from the ranks of the people who rejected that conformist culture.

We're worse at cohesive, sustained effort that forces us to remain committed even when we're not making progress. That very effort has aptly been likened to herding cats, but at a certain point, that actually becomes our strength. It turns out it's pretty easy to herd cats towards the fucking food bowl or the can of treats. What's hard is to get a bunch of cats to go in a direction they don't want to go, which coincidentally is exactly what the theocrats are trying to do right now they're talking about you jesus joining me for headlines tonight are the secular legislative purpose and neutral intent to my excessive entanglement heath ed right and eli b Fellas, what the fuck do you make when life takes away your lemons? Kurtzman's? I don't know.

No, you know what you do? You make a big underground cartel. If anybody needs any lemons, the cartel is going to find a way to get you those lemons, regardless of your state law about lemons. How about that? There you go.

Like camping or whatever. Guys, guys, whoa. I know we have fun here on the podcast but you're suggesting crimes and we would never suggest doing crimes on this podcast i suggested lemons well that was a fun little role reversal it was right yeah kill and it's over cool perfect we're back in our lead story tonight. America is a full-blown theocracy. We dress it up with other words so that we're technically something else, but in practice, that's what we are.

That's what we have been for a while to some extent, and now even worse. Based on very directly their Christian beliefs, six conservative members of the Supreme court just gave each state the right to take away the freedom of personal body control from their entire uterus having population and everything in my brain right now about what to say next and what to do next is i'm pretty sure illegal so i'm gonna have to take a pause right here for a second okay well i'll i'll at least say this one for you then you should should have voted for Hillary fucking Clinton. It's embarrassing.

Yeah. I mean, to be fair to Heath, saying something like aidaccess.org provides abortion bills to all 50 states is kind of illegal now. So I feel like we're going to need a new metric between, you know, illegal and the stuff I say that Morgan has to beep. Right. Yeah. That with lemons. Yeah. That with lemons. Yeah. So we're all feeling extreme rage, obviously.

In fact, if you're not feeling that, here's what you want to do. You probably want to pull out your headphones at this point and go fuck yourself in the face with your headphones. This show is not for you. Don't listen to this show anymore. It's not yours. So rage, it's not usually

a pleasant thing, but I'm hoping it can be useful here. It's true. Noah can actually create it and burn it for sustenance. It's kind of like fury photosynthesis and he doesn't have to eat. It's impressive. It's true. I once saw him de-age by 11 years because the guy in

front of him turned right from the left lane. It's good. Yeah. It's good. Yeah, it's useful. It's a pretty advanced maneuver, the one Noah does. But I'm hoping we can all do our own version of that right now and harness the rage to some extent. So yes, we're going to lean right into it and we're going to talk about the reactions from the Christian right to the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

This is what the enemy was saying this week. We're going to use that rage. I'll start with an obvious one. In his concurring opinion, Clarence Thomas explained that it doesn't stop here, and he described the exact slope of our descent into further theocracy. In his mind, that would include a review of other cases that rely on the same rationale as Roe, like Griswold

and Obergefell and Lawrence. He wants to revisit the idea that we have the right to use contraception and the right to a same-sex marriage and the right to have any other kind of sex than the Christian kind he's used to called

one penis, one vagina, fake orgasm from my traitor wife. He wants to maybe bring back sodomy laws. I can't repeat that one. That was one of the things I just mentioned. Sodomy laws and Griswold, a case about married couples, right? The contra-buck-inception. He wants to take away abortion and condoms at the same goddamn time yeah clarence look we get it if you make your way to loving versus virginia

you don't have to be married to puma from lion king anymore but this is a little extreme my dude just get a divorce guy just get a divorce yeah we also heard from GOP congressional candidate Laura Loomer. She found a way to get multiple bigotries into one single post on the day of the Dobbs ruling. She said, quote, forget about the race baiting holiday in quotes of Juneteenth. Why today? Yeah, that's one that occurred to her on the day of the Dobbs ruling. Let's shit on Juneteenth. Yeah. That's one. That occurred to her on the day of the Dobbs ruling. Let's shit on Juneteenth. Yeah.

Forget about the race baiting, quote, holiday of Juneteenth. Today should be a national holiday instead. That's two. And I can't think of a better way to end the degeneracy of Pride Month than by overturning Roe v. Wade. Four. End quote. She wants a holiday for that now. Wow.

Yeah, no. One side gets a holiday to celebrate gaining race. The other side should get one about losing rights. Both sides are the same. Tie. That's what I'm saying. Fair. Oh, don't worry, Laura Loomer.

People are definitely going to remember this day, just probably not in the fun way I think you're hoping for. Yeah. No. Totally different type of fireworks we also heard from gop senator susan collins fuck her who claims to be pro-choice yet voted to confirm neil gorsuch and brett kavanaugh she said approximate quote oh my god how good this have ever happened i thought for sure

that jv basketball player from yale who got accused of rape during his hearings and i watched that accusation happen uh i thought he was telling me the truth about a building wrong i don't know what happened this is so weird yeah and approximate quote yeah no we actually have um audio of that quote i'm shocked shocked to find that gambling is going on in here you're winning sir oh thank you very much everybody out at once yeah so that's just a handful of examples of what the enemy was saying but you can be sure that all the rest of them were celebrating too marjorie taylor green for example experienced happiness and that is unacceptable to me i know she was happy this week.

Fuck that. You hate it. So now it's time to harness the rage. We're already seeing protests all over the country. Get involved. Do it angrily. Help out with fundraising for groups that are going to help the victims of this ruling. Yes.

Also, let's remember, this is important. Supreme Court justices and Republicans who helped make this happen, they all live somewhere, like in the United States generally. And they probably enjoy doing things like going out in public once in a while. Now, okay, of course, violence is illegal. I feel like I should add that right now. But I'm pretty sure there's a bunch of other stuff that's technically allowed. Like, just for example, if Samuel Alito goes to your restaurant and you hand him his entree

and you say, hey, Samuel, don't worry. I did not put human shit in your food. I definitely did not do that. That's legal. You're allowed to say that. Probably. Especially if you're telling the truth. I think you could say it either way.

The saying's not illegal. Freedom of speech, yeah. Yeah. It's just a fun starting point for you. That was the first one I thought. Public life needs to be unbearable for everybody involved in this. Yeah. Right.

You would be amazed how loudly you're legally allowed to sing in public. It's pretty crazy. That's an excellent one. And also, there are probably illegal things you should do anyways, like talking about aidaccess.org. Laws aren't real, everybody. It's just important to remember. They are real.

Just moving around lemons and camping. Just words. Yep. Okay, here's one other useful reaction to all the evil. Vote against it. Yes. And do that intelligently. You know who I'm talking to.

Idiots who didn't vote intelligently. You need to vote intelligently in a way that helps prevent more of what just happened. And maybe helps fix it. Now, okay, I will admit I was talking to the accelerationists. The accelerationism is going great. I do have to admit we are definitely accelerating toward evil. That's the plan according to the theory eventually. It means good stuff after the accelerating towards evil more a lot.

And you know what? I will admit this too. The GOP has totally fallen for the ruse they think they just you know won a bunch of elections within the voting system that we have and then installed a theocratic judiciary like they think they won success ah but just remember in the meantime while we're doing all that awesome accelerating we got four years of donald trump and everything that that meant. We got giant tax cuts for rich people, for example. We got three zealots on the Supreme Court nominated by Trump.

We got a giant mishandling of a pandemic by science deniers, a whole bunch of death because of that. We got an insurrection of domestic terrorists trying to overthrow American democracy because of that. And now more than half the population of country just had the right to their own bodies threatened. We did get, you know, the radically progressive Joe Biden because of, you know, that awesome message you sent. But still, a pretty big tradeoff. Remind me what your side of that was again, you fucking idiots. a pretty big trade-off remind me what your side of that was again you fucking idiots and in more bad news sorry i feel like i should have but you know you tuned in this week you know how it's gonna be as we've been predicting for weeks now the supreme court ruled in favor of

christian theocracy again this week in the case of kenn versus Bremerton about a Christian football coach who wanted to pray at midfield after games and they didn't even bother to not tell blatant lies about the facts of the case because, let's face it, I mean, after you overturn Roe versus Wade and get away with it, the rest of your court opinions could basically read, bring me the earth seed. Yeah, true story. One of the hardest aspects of writing for this week's show was finding

enough synonyms for terrifying. I can't keep calling them terrifying. Lemons. No, that's not enough. Spice it up. Yeah. So yeah, as Hemant Mehta over at the Friendly Atheist blog has pointed out, the first line of the majority opinion

written by Neil Gorsuch contains two blatantly obvious lies. And then the opinion gets worse from there. So here's the first line. Quote, Joseph Kennedy lost his job as a high school football coach because he knelt at midfield after games to offer a quiet prayer of thanks. End quote. Except no, he didn't. No, no. quiet prayer of thanks and quote except no he didn't no no they just chose not to renew his contract and he didn't bother to reapply and as justice sotomayor pointed out with a fucking photograph in her descent amazing post he literally gathered both teams for a publicly

led prayer to jesus christ of Nazareth at the end of the fucking game. That is not quietly kneeling for shit. There's a photo. Are they not allowed to show each other the photos before they write their big fancy? Are we in such an alternate reality that they think their words literally transform the facts or would like with magic it has to be that one it literally has to be that yeah right no as scary as the facts are in this case it's far scarier that the facts don't matter yeah yeah it became such a huge spectacle this shit kennedy was doing that local parents actually knocked over members of the marching band from the school when those parents stampeded

from the bleachers to the middle of the field at the end of the game for Kennedy's so-called quiet prayer by himself. Yeah. So, yeah. I honestly have no idea what the implications of this are, right? Like, so, on its face, it overturned

state-church separations like the lemon test and the fucking establishment clause but who the fuck knows i mean we have literally never had a supreme court before just randomly and without bothering to try to explain themselves dictate what america would be and as he said right nobody no fucking buddy has a plan to do shit about it. Right. I need to be clear here. There's no revolution. There's no one trick.

Joe Biden isn't going to pack the court or executive order or anything like that. None of that is happening. And if someone is telling you it is, they're lying to you. They're lying to you and they're selling you a product. Right. you they're lying to you and they're selling you a product right the plan is to vote the democrats into a place of such overwhelming majority power that even the fucking nazi accommodators like joe mansion can't stop the progress that's it that's what we can do so do that please again i don't want to turn this whole episode into a big ranty yell at people about how they should vote.

But I do. I do. With sugar. I want to shame you for voting shittily. You had shameful voting. You should be shamed. All right. One third of the.

And look, there's another third of the pot that's going to cut whatever he doesn't like. So we're saved either way. But plenty, please. With sugar on top. Do not do that and do everything in your power to lower the volume on the voices who tell people not to vote in the coming election it is literally our only hope and if we have learned anything from star wars when something is your only hope doesn't always work out great for your planet yeah and finally tonight in coming to their census news in an effort to balance out the profusion

of really shitty news over the past week or so i've got a headline for you that includes the words christianity plummets oh yeah no it gets better it's a headline from the sydney morning herald that talks about the results of their 2021 census and sums up the pertinent information thusly quote abandoning god colon christianity plummets as non-religious surges in census end quote so you know in the competition for noah's backup country australia is now just a recreational marijuana legalization away from overtaking canada for first place that's right it's on an island everyone on it is exactly two points more attractive than their american counterpoint and there's wilderness for noah to wander right it's on an island everyone on it is exactly two points more attractive than their

american counterpoint and there's wilderness for noah to wander into it's perfect there you go we're saying okay just to be clear though the news week is so bad christianity plummets is good but it happened literally as far away as possible on earth yeah it's good though glad for the australians now of course this is the continuation of a demographic trend that's been leaping out of the census data for a decade. Well, for two decades now. And it ramped up considerably thanks to a concerted effort led by the Atheist Foundation of Australia to get the census form changed so that no religion was a more clearly visible option. Okay, what did it say before they changed it? What did the form look like?

They were hiding it. Like, all right, if you want to be an atheist, you just check check the box here it's very small uh then you head to the the motor vehicle bureau you wait in the line that nope not that one the longer one you wait in the longer of those lines and you fill out the application and submit your essay and then you're all wait no it's a different application go back to the original line do that second line essay you're an atheist what like they hit it yeah no it was in the disused lavatory with a beware of leopard sign outside so this was this was coupled by a sustained campaign to tell non-religious australians how important it was that they would be properly counted and holy shit did it work as of 2021 a

record 39 percent of australians say they have no religion that makes them the second largest religious demographic in the country after christians who for the first time in the 2021 census represent less than half the population they're down to just 44 percent yeah and as usual that number includes a bunch of people who are like yeah i'm fucking christian i guess i don't know yes all right keep in mind whenever you see those numbers that includes the idiot on your facebook who's like jesus was a socialist and he hated the new season of the boys or whatever it is i think he thinks this week like that's so much lower so yeah right yeah no so the

non-religious damn near outnumber the christians down under at this point and if you look at the data over time it's pretty clear that virtually all the growth in the no religion category is coming from christian apostasy right like australia does the census every five years between 2016 and 2021 the no religion category rose by a whopping nine percent the number identifying as christ Christian dropped by a corresponding 8%. And the 2016 census represented an 8% rise in non-religious and a 9-point drop in Christianity. So pretty easy math to project out.

And if you do, non-religious has the plurality in the next census and the majority in the one after that. So, you know, as long as they don't have a terrible and inhumane track record when it comes to refugees, we might just be okay, guys. Yikes. And now that plan G and a half is taking shape, I suppose we can close the headlines for the night. Heath, Eli, thanks as always.

Too bongy. And when we come back, Andrew will be here because his show doesn't have the explicit language tag on it. In a world that seems to be more and more a dystopian hellscape by the second. The Supreme Court just made smiling with your eyes illegal. And media that doesn't quite seem to be able to get the point. I rachel maddow and today i'll be dabbing a tiktok fact or cap stay tuned one podcast of us will gather in new jersey for a three-hour live stream of pure unbridled fun the patron only pajama party live stream saturday july 9th at 7 p.m. Eastern.

There'll be fun. There'll be games. And Marsh flew across an entire ocean just for an accent extravaganza. Saturday, July 9th at 7 p.m. Eastern, because damn it, we need something to look forward to next week, too. And the Supreme Court just made looking forward to things illegal. Yeah, that tracks. As was clear from our selection headlines this week, it's been a nauseating week to be a court watcher. This has been a historically bad week to be a court watcher. This has been a historically

bad week for the wall of separation between the court's advocacy for publicly funding religious indoctrination from Carson to the return of faculty-led prayers in public schools from Kennedy. But of course, it'll mostly be remembered as the week that the nearly 50 years of reproductive rights under Roe were abolished by judicial activists with the thinnest thread of bullshit justification. And to talk more about that last one, we're happy to welcome back our resident court watcher, Andrew Torres. Andrew, welcome back, sir.

Well, thanks, Noah. You know, we have this running gag on opening arguments whenever we have Andrew Seidel on, it's going to be to discuss what horrible thing the Supreme Court has done lately. So I'm glad I get to be your Andrew Seidel. There you go.

That's what I'm saying. There we go. You're the Andrew to my Andrew. Yeah. So first things first, this decision obviously didn't come as a surprise. A draft of the decision leaked in early May and gave us a bit of forewarning. So how does this final decision compare to the sneak peek that we got? Okay, so with the following caveats, right, which was we got only the leaked majority

opinion, we didn't get to see the monstrous Thomas concurrence, with the exception of a couple of sections responding to the dissent and to the Roberts concurrence. And those basically amount to, well, you're not giving sufficient weight to what if the state is full of pro-lifers? I'm not making that up, right? And correcting typos, it's the same opinion. It's exactly word for word identical to the leaked draft. They didn't even remove, I thought there was some chance that after it became public knowledge that Alito cited extensively from Sir Matthew Hale, a 17th century idiot who didn't think women had rights as part of the justification of his opinion, that maybe he might remove those references.

Nope, left it in. Wow. All right. So I guess, you know, obviously, many of us already know from the leak. But for those who don't, remind us, how bad is it? So bad enough that I'm on here talking about Dobbs and not Bremerton or Carson, the two cases you mentioned in the intro. It's bad enough that Brett fucking Kavanaugh felt the need to write a concurrence that basically says, look, I know Clarence Thomas

told you what we're going to do, and that's take away your right to contraceptives, gay marriage, and butt stuff. But, you know, we haven't done that yet, so. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty creepy. Okay, so let's get specific here. Can states now ban morning after pills or just abortion clinics?

Yeah, I mean, you know, if you didn't have the right to an abortion pill in 1319, why would you think you could get one 700 years later? So this actually, this is going to be one of two potential battlegrounds, right? Whether the federal government can do something when states try to ban the outside importation of Mifeprestone in connection with medication abortions. Mifeprestone in connection with medication abortions. The argument that says the federal government can do something is to say that the Food and Drug Act granted the Department of Health and Human Services the right to make uniform regulations for the interstate shipment of approved drugs across state lines, right?

And Mifeprestone is one of those approved drugs, right? That seems to me to be a pretty strong argument. The argument to the contrary is that as this episode drops today, Thursday is going to be the last day for opinions in the Supreme Court's term. And one of the cases they've held on to for a very, very long time after Dobbs, right? And you've seen sort of the strategic drops is a case called West Virginia versus the EPA. And my money is that the Supreme Court will completely overrule Chevron deference in that case. And so then the question of whether the FDA Act is granted, you know, gave Congress that authority will not be interpreted in light of how the Food and Drug Administration

or the Department of Health and Human Services interprets that grant of authority, but will be in the hands of how Samuel Alito interprets that grant of authority. So, right. It could get worse. It probably will. Yeah, that's been the theme of the week, hasn't it? All right. Another specific question.

Can states make it illegal to travel out of state to get an abortion? Yep. And this is where the other battleground will be. And so Missouri already has, for example.

And as I analyze this, I just want you to think about this for a second. These are our holding actions, right? Can we send pills through the mail for an unbelievably safe procedure? And can a state pass the Fugitive Woman Act and

basically send a posse after anyone who gets pregnant and tries to escape their jurisdiction? Okay. So again, I want to tell you I think the answer is probably no, right? And I think that the intersection of the full faith and credit clause and also the right to travel between states probably forecloses

on that being a Missouri law. But again, that depends on having a White House seeking to protect those rights rather than undermine them. And here I want to emphasize the day the Dobbs decision was handed down, President Biden promulgated two executive orders on exactly these two subject areas, right? Directing Javier Becerra, Secretary of HHS, to do everything in the government's power to secure access via the mails to Mifeprestone and also stating that the federal government will intervene and defend any person

who becomes pregnant and travels across state lines and is potentially subjected to criminal liability in their home state so again you got somebody in your life in your feed whining that biden hasn't done anything that's nonsense right he can't do a lot but you know that's thanks to joe mansion not not him and he has done the stuff that he can yeah yeah people who think he's not doing enough are really overestimating the hand he was dealt yeah so I also, and I just want to, you know, this is just kind of an odd one, but should people really delete period tracking apps?

Is that a real thing? Oh, God. I mean, every fiber of my being wants to tell you, okay, this part is sheer paranoia. But like, then I look at the fact that Texas SB-8 is still on the books, right? That places a $10,000 privately enforceable bounty in the form of a civil lawsuit on anyone that is collectible against anyone who aids and abets procuring an abortion. And so it seems not likely, but I can't tell you that this is just paranoia, and maybe that's as much as I could. Unbelievable.

Yeah. All right, so this decision claims that there's no right to abortion in the Constitution, but that doesn't mean that Congress couldn't pass a law protecting that right. So first of all, is there any real chance of that happening? And secondly, if they manage to do so, do you think that this court might just strike it down? Yeah, let's get to that. Okay, so the law actually is in final form. It has been tweaked over the past couple of years. It's called the Women's Health Protection Act.

Obviously, that's a misnomer. Trans men and non-binary individuals can become pregnant, but that's the name of the act. It's been proposed at least five times. It has at least 49 Democrats who support it on the merits, including, for the first time, Bob Casey Jr. from Pennsylvania, who identifies as pro-life and has voted against this exact same act in the past. And it would prohibit states from imposing a bunch of criteria, including prohibiting access to abortion at all prior to fetal viability. So good bill. We have at least 49 Democrats. By the way, the Casey thing, just one more sort of occupied Democrats kind of idiocy that's going around.

People who are saying, well, you know, Obama could have passed this when he had a super majority in 2009. No, he could not have. That 60 votes included Bob Casey, who voted against this bill. So Obama had at most 59. at most 59 and yeah so that's just anybody saying you should really be blaming barack obama instead of you know the guy who put three-fifths of the supreme court that crafted this opinion i yeah anyway i'll step down from my soapbox now so i said 49 democrats support it we don't know if joe mansion supports the whpa on the merits. We do know that after the draft opinion was leaked in Dobbs, Manchin did not favor lifting the filibuster to

let it come to a vote. I don't know if he's changed his mind on that. I don't think I would hold my breath. So it really doesn't matter if Manchin supports it on the merits because you don't need 50, you need 60 until we get some more democratic senators in there so the second part of your question was could the court strike it down again a decade ago that answer would have been obviously not right like abortion is very clearly interstate commerce in fact many of the significant problems and legal issues that we face right now are individuals who are pregnant crossing the border to find a more favorable jurisdiction and overburdening that state's health care systems. Right. So this is classic interstate commerce, classic area where you would want uniform regulations. And we've had two plus centuries of the supreme court being like right obviously the

congress can regulate here but in 2012 a substantially more liberal version of this court declared that obamacare was justifiable only as a tax and not as an exercise of interstate commerce so in other words that's the nfib versus similius. In other words, that Obamacare, that regulating health care did not count as interstate commerce. So, you know, if the Supreme Court could say health care is an interstate commerce, I mean, they could say abortion is an interstate commerce, even though, you know, it is. Right. All right. Well, God, Jesus, I hate that I have to ask this, but same question from the opposite direction. Could a federal law ban abortion nationwide?

Yes, unambiguously. And that could occupy the field. constitution that protects individual privacy and says we recognize as a core constitutional right the right to an abortion that probably puts you on the safe side so you are going to see states scramble to do that that is one of the things you can do politically but even then there's some sort of tricky preemption versus ninth amendment versus tenth Tenth Amendment issues. So yeah, if you don't think that's a real danger, it's real danger. All right. So now, obviously, one of the many concerns stemming from this decision is that it undermines the foundation of a host of privacy-based decisions like Obergefell, Griswold, and Lawrence.

And of course, Thomas's concurring opinion states the desire to undermine those exact decisions explicitly. So two-part question. One, how much danger are those decisions in? And two, what would it mean if we lost them? So to answer the first part, Thomas's concurrence was designed to say to right-wing judicial activists who bring, who tee up cases, right? Like outfits like the Liberty Institute

and the Alliance Defending Freedom. Hey, bring these cases in front of us and we will overturn Obergefell, Griswold, and Lawrence. And then we'll get to the mission of looking at every other substantive due process case. That's, I'm quoting Clarence Thomas there, right?

That's not, you know, your wacky lawyer on being extreme. That's what he said for them to do. So those cases will get teed up for the next term. And look, from an analytical perspective, there's no way to sign on to the Dobbs opinion and still think that the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments actually protect substantive due process rights and or a personal right of privacy that like they just don't and so you know clarence thomas is saying the quiet part out loud but he's he's not wrong if if you follow those decisions so they are i think the the question is how this court will unwind them not when yeah what does it mean it means the exact characterization that is being used around the dobbs decision which is well now it just kind of goes back to the states. That's right. Now it will go back to the states to determine if you can be married to the person you love, if you can engage in intimate personal contact with the person you love. That's the butt stuff.

If you can plan on whether to have a pregnancy or not, and yes, Criswell versus Connecticut, you might be thinking, well, you know, nobody is actually interested in outlawing contraceptives. If that's the case, then you missed a half dozen cases in the past

decade challenging the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act. Right. They 100% are coming for contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act. Right. They 100% are coming for contraceptives and sooner than you think. And anybody who said that that's hysteria isn't paying attention. So, okay, those are the three that I keep hearing, Obergefell, Griswold, and Lawrence. Are there any other important decisions that might be in danger if you follow this line of thinking? Yeah, Loving versus Virginia on interracial marriage. important decisions that might be in danger if you follow this line of thinking yeah loving versus

virginia on interracial marriage i mean you know uh maybe we'll get clarence thomas in a 5-4 dissent on that one maybe i just gave a talk to the houston oasis on this and and it cannot be overstated the problem with dobbs is not just that it gets rid of a 50-year right that women, that people who become pregnant in America have had for half a century. It is that it radically transforms the Supreme Court's analysis of what rights even mean. And so by focusing on the historical test, right? So now the test that's explicit that has been written into law by Samuel Alito is, is that unless the Constitution specifically says a word, right, and it doesn't say abortion, I mean, this used to be the kind of thing I would mock like atheist podcasters for making because it's such a bad argument, but,

you know, I guess they were prescient than I wasn't because now it's the law of the fucking land because it doesn't say abortion, right? It doesn't say marriage in the Constitution, doesn't say butt stuff in the Constitution, doesn't say contraception, right? doesn't say abortion, right? It doesn't say marriage in the Constitution. It doesn't say butt stuff in the Constitution. It doesn't say contraception, right? It doesn't say a lot of things that are pretty important to us. That then becomes an implicit right. And the test for whether an implicit right is really in the Constitution is, is it's deeply rooted in our nation's history and tradition as of the enactment of the thing that you think it's found in, the 14th Amendment being ratified in 1868. So unpack what that means for a second, okay?

It means two things. Number one, in order to show you're entitled to a right, you have to show that it's the kind of thing that we have consistently protected throughout history. Well, how fucking stupid is that? If it's a thing that's been protected consistently throughout history, you don't need it as a right. Yeah. You're not in any danger of losing it.

The Supreme Court's historical justification, the reason it exists as a counter majoritarian institution is, yeah, sometimes people get screwed over in the democratic process. It should literally be the exact opposite, right? This should be something that is not well-entrenched in our history because you've been the subject of constant efforts by the majority to step on your basic individual liberties. The second aspect, when you say deeply rooted in our nation's history and traditions and you recognize that the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, you are saying deeply rooted in cis, het, white, male, property, owning. Like, you cannot invent the idea that the traditions and history and values of women or people of color or atheists matter at fucking all because they did not in 1868. There were probably like three atheists in 1868, but they sure didn't write stuff down, right? Like there won't be evidence to find to contribute to this history.

So I cannot, like, I hate being this voice in saying the abortion stuff is really bad. And, you know, you're going to have Tom and Cecil on and we are working to do everything we can to to support boots on the ground and really mitigate some of the impact of this but as the law guy the fact that this is radically gaslighting the country on 200 years of american history that dates back to federalist number 10 that's hard for me yeah no kidding so is court packing a realistic solution uh so here's something where i have done a 180 in six years i think it shockingly so right like i think look we will have to organize and we will have to shock the world by not just defending vulnerable seats, right?

Like Raphael Warnock's in Georgia in the midterm elections. But if Democrats pick up three seats, and again, this is not impossible. This is not likely at this point, but it is not impossible. If you deliver 53 or 54 Democratic senators as a backlash to what the Supreme Court has done, then A, no longer, you don't have to suck up to Joe Manchin anymore. You have 48 hard votes in the Democratic Senate for some version of a partial lift of the filibuster. So let's get, let's elect two more Democrats.

We get 50 Democrats, you get a hard lift to pass basic voting reform and then work from there. Right. And so one of the things that I think super easy to explain, you understand the political consequences, but is, you know, what I would call the Judiciary Act of 2023. Every judge I know you could call nothing but Republican federal district court judges. Right. Who appointed you? Donald Trump. How overworked is your docket? Well, you could appoint two more judges and my docket would still be overbooked, right? You could double or triple the size of the federal judiciary. You could greatly increase and include within that, increasing the number of Supreme Court justices

by an act of Congress. Is any of that likely? I don't know, man, but that's what I'm going to try and do. Well, hey, look, realistic is better than I was expecting. So, you know, likely, you know, we can put likely way off in the future. If it's realistic, that's better than I was expecting. Again. Okay. So important question.

This is this comes from a listener. H. Enright. Should you have voted for Hillary Clinton? Yes, and I want to relay a positive note, right? So I have a bunch of different kind of skeletal outlines for various talks that I give, and I can, you know, I swap in things here and there.

And one of the things that I try and put in every single talk I give before an organization is a breakdown of the 2016 election, which shows that mathematically, had Jill Stein voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin voted for Hillary Clinton, we would have had not Donald Trump as president, and that that's probably an outcome that Jill Stein voters would more rather have had, right? Jill Stein voters would more rather have had, right? And every time I make that point, I get angry and defensive Jill Stein voters who come up during the cross-examination period, right?

And say, well, you know, like, it's not my fault. And I'm like, hey, man, wasn't telling you that this election is your fault. Whose fault is it? The like tens of millions of racists who voted for Donald Trump. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying mathematically, strategically, you could have taken your vote.

You could have exercised it this way, and we would have had an outcome that you and I both would have preferred. And then we kind of go back and forth. I will tell you, I made that argument. I gave it in my speech. I waited to the Q&A period, and not a single person gave the kind of defensive it was okay for me to vote for jill stein so i you know is that progress i don't know i sure hope so but that's you know i'll continue to beat that drum i love that heath beats that drum i love that we beat that drum because you know trump voters don't listen to this show they don't

listen to my show right But Stein voters do. Yeah. And anything we can do to convince you, please, use your vote strategically, I want to continue to say. All right. So as you already mentioned, Tom and Cecil are going to be on in a minute to talk about a fundraiser that you and I are both involved in. But aside from donating to relevant charities,

is there anything meaningful that the listeners can do to mitigate this? Yeah. My approach to this is sort of both the top down and the bottom up, right? So the bottom up means what we're doing in connection with the fundraiser, which is partnering with, supporting fundraising for boots on the ground, local organizations that meaningfully get medication abortion to women in states that are looking to prohibit it, that meaningfully escort women across state lines, set up appointments, provide pay for increased access to reproductive freedom. And again, for all pregnant persons. That's the bottom up. And that look like, you know, I haven't slept in a week, you know, putting together all the foundation stuff. That's going to require a lot of work.

The top down is not losing sight of the argument and not losing in my Oasis talk with Houston is the Lochner era, the last time the Supreme Court was overrun by right-wing activists looking to strike down legislation that, you know, all progressive legislation that they could find, ran from 1897 to 1937. It ran for 40 years. And we're in year five of the howler monkeys running the asylum you know to mix a metaphor there so if you're thinking like oh one one election one vote one outcome is going to fix this that no right i just can't tell you enough like you gotta strap in you got you got to strap in. You got to be prepared. You know, and you and I have talked about this. You know, the people who wrote in to you in 2016 and was like, well, you planning to retire the scathing atheist? I mean, you know, kind of looks like we've won and everything's going to be fine from here on out. Like, you know, yeah.

Turns out that that wasn't the case either. So, you know, it's, we need to take a long view. Yeah. Turns out that that wasn't the case either. So, you know, it's it's we need to take a long view. Yeah. No. As I said in the diatribe, you know, we're fighting against a force that's been a concerted effort aiming in the exact same direction since before either of us were born. Yeah. So it's there's there's no easy way out. Absolutely. All right. Well, Andrew, I really appreciate you coming on and helping us understand just how bad it is. Of course, if you want to hear more perpetually and necessarily depressing analysis from Andrew, be sure to check him out on opening arguments and cleanup on aisle 45,

which you'll find linked to the show notes. Andrew, thank you again for your time, man. Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. Of course, as depressing as the news out of the court is, it's tempting to think that there's nothing you can do. It's the curse of the activist at the moment when your involvement seems the most useless. It's also the moment where it's needed most urgently. And that's why I'm happy to welcome two more guests on tonight. Tom and Cecil, of course, are the hosts of Cognitive Dissonance, the co-hosts of Citation Needed, the authors of The Grand Unified Theory of Bullshit, and our partners in Bulgarity for Charity.

Tom, Cecil, welcome back to the show. Hey, thanks for having us. Thanks so much, Noah. Appreciate it. I wish we could have you on for happier shit again. I don't even know how to like, I normally would come on. I'm so happy to be here. I'm real happy to be here. It's fucking tragic.

Been a tragic fucking week. It has. The decision to overturn Roe was all a 17 minutes old when you guys first contacted us trying to figure out what we could do to help. So let me give you the easy question first. What prompted you to get so involved so quickly? You know, I just think we've been able to partner a number of times to raise funds and we've been successful in raising those funds. And Cecil and I, you know, we've we've had on our sort of back burner docket we've been successful in raising those funds. And Cecil and I, we've had on our sort of back burner docket we've been talking about on the show that when we get to episode 666, we're going to do an abortion fundraiser.

That's an important, it's important to us. It's a subject that's important to us. It's meaningful to us. And we thought we would do something big for our 666th anniversary. our 666th anniversary. But as soon as this happened and you knew it was going to happen, but you just felt the full fucking weight of the things settle on you. Yeah. To me, it just became apparent that this cannot wait. I mean, lives literally are in the balance and we have to do everything we can do. And the one thing I know we're good at doing with this community is rallying everybody together to raise money for causes that are meaningful to this community. And so I think

that's why we knew we had to act and we had to act very quickly. So, okay. So two-part question, what did you come up with and how can we help? Well, the idea was really born from the same save the senate fundraiser that we had done so we had done a real successful fundraiser for the georgia senate seats that fundraiser was you know a multi-hour multi-guest live stream kind of pitting audiences against each other in a friendly rivalry to try to you know raise as much money as possible but you say friendly because we won like like it's only friendly because heath was on the winning team but yes that's that is true if he was on the yeah i agreed um yeah that would be that yeah it would come to blows sure it may it may have come to blows but we you know we were real successful with that fundraiser and so you know fairly

immediately i thought we should just do the same thing. We can get it up and running fairly swiftly. And again, I felt real strongly that time is of the essence. There are, I believe, as of this morning, nine states where abortion is outlawed or severely curtailed, 12 more which are ready to change in the next few weeks. There are women who are in need of these services now. If we can raise money now, we can make a difference for those women in an impactful way. And the time is just so damned urgent. It's just so pressing. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So we're going to do another multi-hour fundraiser event. Who all is involved with it? So this time we are going to have, of course, the most important guests will be the people who are going to donate. The other people though, the other people that are going to be joining us

though are going to be the scathing atheist. I'm sure you know that show because you're listening to it right now. Opening arguments will be their knowledge fight. And then we're also going to kick off by talking to an abortion doctor in Texas. We're talking to Jessica, Dr. Jessica. She's been on our show before. We had a very wonderful interview with her that a lot of people really learned a lot about SB8, which is now wistful. We wistfully look at SB8 as like, wow, if we only had that. Wow. Yeah. How quickly it changed. All right. So who exactly are we raising funds for? So we're actually going to be splitting our donations among three charities.

So we're going to be donating to Lilith Fund. They provide abortion care in Texas. We're going to be splitting funds to the Access Reproductive Care Southeast. They serve Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee. And then the Midwest Access Coalition serves those in the Midwest. They provide logistical support,

such as transport, lodging, medicine, emotional support, et cetera, across the Midwest. You know, here in where Cecil and I, we're Chicago, we're in Illinois. And Illinois, if you look at the map, we are a fucking island in the Midwest. Yeah. The floor is lava. Absolutely. Yes. So the Midwest, the Southeast, Texas, we really wanted to find organizations that were really regional, that were really focused,

and where those monies go directly to the service and care of women. Awesome. All right. So quick, give us the where, what, when for the listeners that want to get involved. So we're going to go on live 7 Central on Friday night. We're going to be starting the show with Jessica and then we're going to bring on Knowledge Fight. They're going to be on for about 45 minutes. We're going to talk to opening arguments for a little while. And then we're going to close the show. The best, we saved the best for last. Scathing Atheist is going to join us for the last bit.

And we are going to, the whole time donations will be open. We're going to be just having fun, hanging out, trying to raise money for a good three and a half hours. And you can find all that at our YouTube page, at our Twitch and at our Facebook. The links, I'm sure Noah will link in the half hours. Awesome. And you can find all that at our YouTube page, at our Twitch, and at our Facebook. The links, I'm sure, Noah will link in the show notes.

Absolutely, yeah. And if there's one thing I know about our audience is that they step up in moments like this. Now, of course, obviously, there are going to be some listeners that want to help but can't afford to donate. How else could somebody help the fundraiser if they can't donate? Yeah, so the best way to help, best way to jump in, share the link with your friends, get the word out, send it out to as many people as you can, get that live stream packed so people will come, people will donate. Last time when we did this for the Senate,

there was an immense outpouring and it was specifically because there's the Republicans in this country, the Christian right in this country have been imposing their will on the voters, on the majority of people in this country. And so that's this country have been imposing their will on the voters, on the majority of people in this country. And so that's why they came out for the Save the Senate. That's why they should come out for this. And definitely send the link out to your friends and have them come and join us. And hopefully they'll

donate. What hour should they attend? Noah? Yeah, Noah. What hour should they go? What hour do you think you'd want them to attend? I mean, honestly, because you're doing like a 45,'m just like I don't remember exactly but we're coming up. 9.30. 9.30. Okay 9.30 would be ideal you know it's always best to make that

rock star entrance 9.45 something like that but yeah whenever you can though obviously. Guys thanks so much for all the work that you've done putting this together. Thanks for inviting us to be a part of it. Again Friday night 7pm Central Time. Check our Facebook page or our Twitter feed or the show notes for this episode. And Tom Cecil, thanks for coming on. Absolutely. Thanks for having us. No, I just want

to say every single time there is a chance for you guys to help, you guys always jump in. That's why we're the first to turn to you every time. So thank you so much for coming along. Oh, thanks. to you every time. So thank you so much for coming along. Oh, thanks. Before we ring out the towel tonight, I want to thank the organizers and attendees of last weekend's Gulf Coast Secular Assembly. Thanks to Buzz and Muffy for all their help. Roger for a much appreciated and well

timed gift. And most especially Devin for going above and beyond the call of duty. I really owe you one. Anyway, that's all the blessing we've got for you tonight, but we'll be back in 10,022 minutes with more. If you can't wait that long, be on the lookout for a brand new episode of our sister show, The Skeptocrat, debuting at 7 a.m. Eastern on Monday, and an even newer episode of our sister show's hot friend,

Godawful Movies, debuting at 7 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, and an even newer episode of our half-sister show, Citation Needed, debuting at noon Eastern on Wednesday. Obviously, this would be a paragraph shy of a real show if I neglected to thank Heath Enright for being the light of my life, Eli Bosnick for being the apple of my eye, and Lucinda Lusions for being the light of my life eli bosnian for being the apple of my eye and lucinda illusions for being the cream of my coffee i know lucinda should be one of the other two but i am not letting heath or eli cream in my coffee i also want to thank the inimitable andrew torres for helping us out tonight i also want to thank

tom and cecil for everything that they're doing i also want to thank brian from west virginia for providing this week's farnsworth quote he said it back in march but it turns out that apologies for joe mansion are perpetually apropos but most, of course, I want to thank this week's best people. See Owens, Joshua, Chris, MK, Bloodbucket, Martin, Dean, Maya, Tim, Darth Waffle, Cody, Dougal, Jordan, and it's not incest porn. It's. See Joshua, Chris, MK, and Bloodbucket, who are so bright, high-intensity discharge headlights complain about it. Martin, Dean, Maya, Tim, and Darth Waffle, whose IQs are higher than Eli on edibles. And Cody, Dougal, Jordan, and NotIncessPorn,

who are so hot, sexy step-siblings masturbate to videos of them. And Martin, Dean, I know that you don't know each other and can't possibly coordinate this, but it would have been way cooler if you guys had swapped places in the chronological Patreon order, okay? Try harder next time. Together, these 14 fabulous freethinkers forked over a fragment of their fortune to forestall our fall this week by giving us money.

Not everybody has the kind of money it takes to give some to us, but if you're into that kind of thing, you can make a per-episode donation to patreon.com slash scathingatheist, whereby you'll earn early access to an extended ad-free version of every episode, or you can make a one-time donation by clicking on the donate button on the right side of the homepage at scathingatheist.com. And if you'd like to help, but you're chained to the bottom of the sea by the powers of the ancient ones, don't worry, your day to arise draws near. Legal services for this podcast are provided by the Law Offices of P. Andrew Torres, Tim Robertson handles our social media,

and our audio engineer is Morgan Clark, who also wrote all the music that was used in this episode, which was used with permission. If you have questions, comments, or death threats, you'll find all the contact info on the contact page at skatingads.com. Ah, nope. Too high. I was too high it was really it was shrill it was shrill it was a little shrill sorry the preceding podcast was a production of puzzle in a thunderstorm llc copyright 2022 all rights reserved