A Season of Changes

I’ve had the Quill now for six years as of this summer.

That normally wouldn’t be a huge deal. Hell, there are t-shirts I’ve owned for twice that amount of time. I have receipts that I’m using for bookmarks that are older than that.

The list goes on and on. I’m nearly forty. Six years is a drop in the bucket.

However. However…

The last six years have been anything but normal. I have now experienced so many internal, external, domestic, international, and existential crises that I will need to start cataloging them so I don’t lose track.

This last Friday, two days ago at the time of this writing, one of the biggest crises yet came home to roost.

By a six to three stolen and unrepresentative majority of supreme court justices decided that hundreds of millions of women were second class citizens. Old, mostly white, and mostly male, these arrogant and hypocritical individuals decided that the last 150 years of slow, grinding, and still incomplete social progress was unwelcome.

No one, and I mean not one soul, who is celebrating what happened Friday has thought through any of this for even half a second.

To take one of literal thousands, did you know that technically speaking (in the new post-Roe technical world we all live in now), IVF would be outlawed under current abortion regulations going into effect across the country?

No. I am not exaggerating. I am not making that up. I am not misreading or misrepresenting the legislation. You know how I know that? Because I listen to the people whose livelihoods depend on appropriate interpretation and representation of the law.

Some are thinking “Is Obergefell next?” You know what those same legal individuals are thinking? “Is a woman’s right to own property in her own name truly established enough to withstand this new line of reasoning?”

Yeah. Now, it might not come to that. That may be taking a corner situation and blowing it out of proportion, but we also live in a country where people have read 1984 and watched A Handmaiden’s Tale and have thought to themselves “Yeah, that seems like a good way to govern.”

I don’t know how to reason with people who view the rollback of 50 years of established constitutional rights as something to celebrate. I just don’t understand the level of self-deception required to get there. You can be against abortions. You can refuse to get abortions. You can refuse to use contraception of any kind.

What you can’t do, what you should never do, is legislate your religious views upon hundreds of millions of people (including the plurality of voting aged adults both male and female) whose lives will be adversely affected or potentially even ended because of your decision.

There is a separation of church and state for a reason. Roe being overturned wasn’t even all the bad things the supreme court did this week! They effectively ended the separation of church and state (twice over), removed the protection of Miranda Rights, and broke the due process and fair representation guarantees asunder.

This is not the time for me to sit here and whine about all the things that are going wrong with our country and our world when all I’m trying to do is be an author.

No, now is the time to speak out and to speak up. To present within these pages the truth that love will win, the fierce pride and joy and hope that still lives within me despite all that has happened.

I will not be broken. I refuse to sink. I will not let everything I have gained and all the growth I have struggled so long and hard to achieve be swept away by wanton cruelty and the arrogant whims of (mostly white) man-children who don’t think anyone else should ever have a say in their own lives. 

So take this post as a declaration of intent. I will continue to write. Every week. About whatever is going on that has dragged me to the point of screaming incoherence this time.

I need to do this. For myself, mostly. But also for those who might be as lost and as frustrated as I’ve been of late.

I want to help people. I need to help people. Perhaps the best way to do that is to utilize my voice and my platform to speak up for those whose rights have been threatened or removed.

Even if it only ever reaches one soul, it’ll be worth it.

Ferociousfully,

The Unsheathed Quill