Mia Brett

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A common rallying cry of the right in America, to justify regressive morality laws, is often to say that "America was founded as a Christian country" with "Judeo-Christian values" while the common response from the left is to declare that the United States was founded as an explicitly secular country with a separation of church and state.

Would it surprise you to learn both are wrong?

First of all, "Judeo-Christian values" is a dog whistle that erases Jewish values by subsuming Judaism into Christianity. It also excludes other religions, particularly Islam. When politicians claim "Judeo-Christian values" they're almost always describing Christian values but want to pretend they are being inclusive of Jews.

Initially, in the 19th century the phrase referred to Jewish people who converted to Christianity. It wasn't intended to be inclusive of Jews at all. The current meaning of the term was an invention of American politics in the 1930s, as a phrase to show opposition to Hitler and communism. "Judeo-Christian values" is often used by politicians to proclaim common opposition to atheism, abortion and LGBT issues.

Basically, there's no such thing as a "Judeo-Christian values."

Except Judaism and Christianity don't have a common value system on those issues. While it is hard to declare a universal Jewish value—there are many sects of Judaism and one of our core tenets is argument—most Jewish rabbis acknowledge that abortion should be allowed at least in certain circumstances. Jewish law dictates that life begins at first breath, not conception. Additionally, many Jews consider themselves atheists and consider Jewish practice to be through behavior and attitude, not belief. Unfortunately the acceptance of LGBT people in Judaism is more complicated, depending on the sect, but Reform and Conservative Judaism are publicly accepting of LGBT people. Basically, there's no such thing as a "Judeo-Christian values."

The United States was founded with an attempt at secularism as well as freedom of religion. As opposed to monarchies, democracies in general are less Christian-based, as rulers are not justified on the "divine right of kings." Practically, "freedom of religion" often meant the freedom to practice whichever sect of Christianity, or sometimes even Protestantism, a person chose. Considering a number of colonies were founded based on disagreements over which Protestant sect was "correct," even this level of legally inscribed religious freedom was progressive for the late 18th century.

However, when considering religious freedom in early America, we must look beyond federal law and beyond the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights was not applied to the states, except to declare the citizenship of formerly enslaved people, until the Incorporation Doctrine was applied to incorporate the Bill of Rights to the states through the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. This doctrine has been traced to Gitlow v. New York in 1925, when the Supreme Court held that states were required to protect freedom of speech, partially incorporating the First Amendment.

The relevant text of the First Amendment states that, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." This text is meant to prevent an established state religion but also to protect religious practice from government interference. While protection from a theocracy is important, it is hard to argue that this text is meant to enforce secularism. Additionally, the phrase "separation of church and state" is actually paraphrased from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson in 1802. It was not interpreted as part of the intent of the First Amendment until Reynolds v. United States in 1878.

It's tempting to push back by declaring the United States was founded as a secular country. Unfortunately, that claim would ignore a long history of the privileging of Christianity.

Most early colonies supported religious action with taxes. Many established state religions. While some disestablished with early state constitutions, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maryland, Rhode Island and North Carolina didn't. The Massachusetts Constitution limited office to Protestants until 1821. Non-Protestants couldn't hold office in New Hampshire until 1876.1 Maryland, Rhode Island, North Carolina and New Hampshire did not allow non-Christian voting until well into the 19th century when the franchise expanded in 1826, 1842, 1868, and 1877, respectively.

At the federal level, religion became relevant to citizenship when coupled with questions of "whiteness." Naturalization required an immigrant be "white" or of African descent after the Civil War until 1952. This requirement led to a number of cases, dubbed "prerequisite cases," brought by immigrants to prove their "whiteness." One consideration for the courts was the "racial performance" of immigrants to determine how successfully they would assimilate. Courts often used an immigrant's lack of Christianity as a detriment to assimilation and therefore to whiteness.

There were also forms of state-sponsored discrimination against non-Christians that did not require explicit privileging of Christianity over other religions. Consider the ubiquity of "Sunday Laws," which prohibited people from working Sundays. Jews had to work on the sabbath (Saturday), lose two days of work over the weekend or risk prosecution. These laws resurged in 1880s New York with the arrival of more Jews.

Non-Christians, particularly Jews, faced discrimination in court. Courts often required people to appear on Saturdays and would forbid a "religious exemption" for Jews. Many also considered a belief in Jesus Christ as a requisite for swearability on the witness stand. Not until 1857 did a New York court rule a Jewish witness must be sworn to testify according to the "peculiar ceremonies of his religion," specifically a Hebrew Bible and with his head covered. Jewish witnesses got legal protections in 1871. A Jewish plaintiff was questioned about his belief in Jesus Christ to impeach his honor under oath in a property dispute. When appealed, a Georgia court said a "want of belief in Jesus Christ as the Saviour" was not grounds for exclusion of a witness, and that while some courts have used a belief in Jesus as necessary to render a witness competent, the court clearly ruled that "a Jew is competent at common law."

It's tempting to push back against politicians justifying their regressive morality laws by way of the "Judeo-Christian values" of the founding. It's tempting to push back by simply pointing to the First Amendment and declaring the United States was always founded as a secular country. Unfortunately, that claim would ignore a long history of discrimination against minority religions and the privileging of Christianity.

In order to fight for a truly religiously inclusive society, we must acknowledge the ways in which Christianity is embedded in the laws and culture of our society. Luckily the founders provided the First Amendment, an important tool in this fight.

Business owners are complaining that no one wants to work anymore and there’s a labor crisis in America. The crisis is that workers have more leverage and are refusing to work for minimum wage and be treated like crap.

The obvious solution is raising wages and improving working conditions but some offer a different solution – a return to child labor. After all, children have no work experience, are easily exploited and are unlikely to organize.

Republicans would rather erode child labor laws than support a living wage. But it’s Democrats who have abandoned the working class, amirite?

The reason Republicans want to erode child labor protections is the exact reason we need these laws – children are easily exploited in the labor market.

This discussion gets to the heart of labor laws in this country, which is that the concept of “freedom of contract” doesn’t exist when one party (the employer) has significantly more power than another (the employee).

Initially, many attempts by the labor movement to protect workers from unfair hour requirements and extremely low wages were struck down by the Supreme Court for violating the supposed right to “freedom of contract.”

In Lochner v. New York in 1905, the Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment protected a constitutional right to freedom of contract and, therefore, that a New York state law outlawing bakeries from hiring bakers for more than 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week was unconstitutional.

The theory was that the bakers should have the freedom to work as many hours as they wanted – discounting coercive pressure by employers to force bakers to work extreme and unsafe hours if they wanted to keep their jobs.

The Lochner ruling ushered in the “Lochner Era” of the Supreme Court and was used to strike down laws forbidding “yellow-dog contracts” (contracts that required workers to promise not to join a union) and minimum wage laws out of a belief in laissez-faire economics and “freedom to contract.”

This precedent changed in Nebbia v. New York in 1934 when the Supreme Court ruled there was no constitutional fundamental right to “freedom of contract,” and in 1937 in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, which upheld a minimum wage law. West Coast Hotel v. Parrish stated that economic regulation is reasonable if in the community’s best interest. Protecting kids from exploitation seems to me like it's in the best interest of the community.

Historically, child labor was common. Children often worked on family farms or were apprenticed out to learn a trade when they got a little older.

Child labor became exploitative with the industrial revolution. Children worked away from families in factories. They were paid less than adults. They were often useful for tasks requiring small hands or small stature.

Public education reformers promoted the importance of public education but laws that required school attendance were rarely enforced or only applied to primary school. (This is probably another reason why Republicans are trying to destroy education. They’ll get more workers out of it!).

The first compulsory education law was passed in Massachusetts in 1852. Mississippi was the last to require primary education for all students in 1917.

The National Child Labor Committee was founded in 1904 at the same time the larger labor movement was also trying to pass reforms to protect workers from unsafe and unfair labor practices. It served the larger labor movement’s goals to restrict child labor because child laborers drove down wages and were less likely to join in strikes and unionizing efforts.

The National Child Labor Committee hired a photographer to photograph the conditions children were worked in to influence public opinion.

The Congress passed the first anti-child labor law in 1916. Called the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act, it relied on Congress’ authority to regulate interstate commerce to ban products from “any factory, shop, or cannery that employed children under the age of 14, from any mine that employed children under the age of 16, and from any facility that had children under the age of 16 work at night or for more than eight hours during the day.”

Unfortunately, the law was short-lived. It was struck down by the Supreme Court two years later in Hammer v. Dagenhart when the court said the Congress did not have the power to regulate working conditions. The next attempt – regulating child labor by levying an extra tax on goods made using child labor – was also struck down in Bailey v. Drexel Furniture.

The Congress finally succeeded in restricting child labor in 1938 with the Fair Labor Standards Act. It established a right to minimum wage, overtime pay, a maximum number of hours that could be worked in jobs related to interstate commerce, and set a minimum age of 16 to work in mining or manufacturing industries. The act was upheld in United States v. Darby Lumber Co in 1941. It was later expanded, in 1949, to include more industries.

Today “federal labor law prohibits the employment of workers under the age of 14 in non-agricultural settings. Fourteen- and 15-year-olds must work outside of the hours of school and cannot work: more than 3 hours on a school day…more than 18 hours per week when school is in session…”

Last month, the Arkansas legislature rolled back child-labor protections. Minors under 16 previously needed age verification and work certificates. This requirement has been abolished under the newly passed Youth Hiring Act of 2023. Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders called it an “arbitrary burden” but it protected children from exploitation by ensuring that the state was involved in their employment and that those working weren’t below 14.

Arkansas isn’t the only state eroding child labor law to meet labor shortages. Last year, New Jersey expanded the number of hours teens can work. In Minnesota, Republicans proposed allowing teens to work on construction sites. Iowa is considering a bill to allow 14 and 15 year olds to work in industrial laundry services and meatpacking plants while also exempting them from worker’s compensation protections. Ohio is considering removing the cap on hours minors can work as long as a parent or guardian approves. These will expose minors to exploitation and dangerous working conditions.

Gun violence is the leading cause of death for children because Republicans reject gun-law reforms. Public education is being harmed by anti-history laws and book banning. Now there’s a movement to send children back to work, all to avoid raising wages and improving working conditions.

The anti-drag bills sweeping the nation are the latest in a long history of policing gender expression. While focused on supposedly protecting children from a particular kind of “adult performance,” the legislation is really about enforcing strict white, cis-heteronormative ideas of gender to serve nationalistic aims.

If successful this policing of gender expression will not stop at drag. It intends to control all who live outside of strict notions of the traditional binary of femininity and masculinity.

Anti-cross-dressing laws gained popularity in the 19th century. Between 1845 and 1900, 34 cities in 21 states passed laws used to police cross-dressing. Some jurisdictions, like the earliest law passed in New York in 1845, used anti-vagrancy laws to criminalize dressing in any kind of disguise.

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These laws were used to target people dressed in ways “not according to their sex” (especially women wearing pants) by claiming those dressed in gender nonconformist ways were dressed in disguise. The first law that explicitly prohibited cross dressing was passed in 1848 in Columbus, Ohio.

In the 1850s, two women, Emma Snodgrass and Harriet French, made headlines all over the country for showing up places wearing pants and often getting arrested for doing so. Both were arrested under public indecency and anti-vagrancy laws in Boston, as well as in Cleveland and New York.

French justified her dressing in men’s clothing, saying it got her better wages. When champion Australian swimmer Anette Kellerman wore a bathing suit that showed her legs in 1907, she was similarly arrested for public indecency in Massachusetts because her clothing was not considered appropriate for women, even though it wasn’t gender nonconforming.

In her work studying anti-cross-dressing laws, Clare Sears placed such laws in the context of larger projects to police gender performance, race, disability and the “public visibility of problem bodies.”

READ MORE: Proud Boys bloodied and jailed during NYC drag queen story hour protest

Anti-cross-dressing laws were usually passed as part of anti-indecency provisions and were part of regulatory laws that policed public intoxication, profane language and swimming without appropriate clothing.

The anti-cross-dressing laws were meant to target gender non-conforming people, but in the 19th century, that included feminists pushing for dress reform, “indecent” performances that might include drag, women seen as “fast” and who might dress in pants, and those who might identify as transgender today.

The logic used to underpin anti-cross-dressing laws was also used to justify prohibiting disabled people from public space or anyone who was "diseased, maimed, mutilated," or otherwise an "unsightly or disgusting object." In San Francisco, public appearance regulations were also expanded to target Chinese immigrants and to specifically police Chinese sex workers.

In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, police arrested people for cross-dressing around the country if they were not wearing at least three articles of clothing of their assigned gender.

No specific law requiring three articles of clothing ever existed, but instead police revived old outdated laws, like laws banning costumed dress to commit crimes, to target gender non-conforming people.

While gay men and trans women were mostly arrested in bar raids, lesbians and trans men were often arrested while walking down the street, and police used the pretense of criminalizing cross-dressing to commit sexual assault by checking people’s underwear to confirm their gender. Arrests for cross-dressing mostly stopped after the Stonewall Riots in 1969.

The new anti-drag bills focus more on the performance than the clothing but they rely on the same normative desire to police gender performance, and race and disability, in public spaces as the laws concerning public indecency passed in the 19th century.

The bill that was recently passed in Tennessee doesn’t ban drag but restricts where it can be performed. It states that no “adult cabaret performance” can be performed on public property or in a location where the performance could be viewed by “a person who is not an adult.”

For the purposes of this bill “adult cabaret performance” includes “topless dancers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers, strippers, male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest.”

This bill treats drag like a strip show which could also serve to police the parenting of anyone who participates in drag. While mostly focused on public performance, the restriction on a non-adult (so anyone under 18?) seeing the drag performance could also indict performances in someone’s home. It definitely wouldn’t allow drag brunch or drag story hour and sexualizes drag to the point of claiming drag is inherently harmful to children.

In Texas, a Republican has introduced a law similar to the abortion bounty hunter law to create a cause of action so private citizens could sue anyone who hosted or performed a drag performance in the presence of a minor.

Arizona’s proposed anti-drag bill makes it clear they are associating drag with sexual deviancy by forcing anyone caught performing drag in front of anyone under 15 to register as a sex offender.

Kansas’ bill would include drag in the crime of obscenity and defines drag as “when someone displays a gender identity different from the gender they were assigned at birth, and ‘sings, lip-syncs, dances or otherwise performs.’”

This definition would make trans performers indistinguishable from drag performers and would explicitly restrict trans people in public spaces as well. Ten other states have introduced laws to restrict the performance of drag if a minor is present.

The anti-drag bills might seem only concerned with drag performance mostly in bars and venues, which are without children anyway, but their mission and impact is very harmful and should not be downplayed.

Gender non-conforming performance or dress is not inherently sexual and should not be treated as such. Sexualizing drag and cross-dressing necessitates public policing and will force gender-non-conforming people out of public spaces or risk sex offender status.

This will result in treating gender-non-conforming parents as abusive and give the state justification to take children away from loving families.

Anti-drag laws could be expanded to police the gender performance of cis-women and enforce rigid white cis-heteronormative public gender performance that will once again target any woman not deemed feminine enough, or man not deemed masculine enough.

Will women’s clothing also soon be policed if they are showing too much skin?

Will teachers have modesty codes so as not to expose children to bodies that could be deemed sexual?

It may seem restrictions on drag performance are a minor issue, but it's just the first step that will lead to the rigid requirement of gender conformity.

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Any abortion activist will tell you that banning abortion doesn’t stop abortions – it stops safe abortions. Thanks to the existence of medical abortion (also called the abortion pill), a lot of illegal abortions can be much safer than they were before Roe v. Wade.

We don’t need to resort to back alley abortions with rusty coat hangers, early term abortions (the vast majority of abortions) can be taken care of with two pills that can be obtained legally or illegally (the medication is currently approved for up to 10 weeks but is used later in pregnancy off label).

Unfortunately for conservatives, the abortion pill is thwarting a lot of their plans. So what are they doing? They are claiming the Food and Drug Administration shouldn’t have approved it in the first place.

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Attacking the FDA

Twenty-two years ago the FDA approved the abortion pill, which has been shown to be safe and effective. This approval came a decade after the medication had been available in Europe and after a clinical testing phase in the US. There was significant data to show that the drug was safe.

While conservatives obviously objected to the FDA’s decision, there was little to suggest there was anything suspect about the process of the decision itself. It’s also worth noting that taking two pills is almost always a safer treatment than a surgical option, which requires anesthesia.

As a result of the pandemic, before Dobbs allowed state-level abortion bans to go into effect, the FDA changed its policy to allow the abortion pill to be mailed and be prescribed using telemedicine.

READ MORE: Republicans don’t serve their states. They immiserate them

Unfortunately, despite the common sense of such a policy, many states passed their own restrictions to bar telemedicine for abortion. Eighteen states have laws requiring in-person prescriptions of the abortion pill right now. (Obviously, doctors can’t prescribe the abortion pill in a state where abortion has been banned.)

It’s much easier and safer to have a self-managed abortion with the abortion pill than to track down a doctor willing to perform an illegal surgical abortion (or travel to another state for a surgical abortion).

Obviously, that means anti-abortion activists are really really annoyed that people are still accessing safe, if illegal, abortions. (An anti-abortion organization in Texas is actually planning to test the water for contaminants to see if people are taking the abortion pill.)

Republican lawmakers want to treat abortion pill sites like child pornography sites and actually require internet providers to censor them. Some anti-abortion activists want people charged with trafficking and jailed if they distribute the abortion pill in states which ban abortion.

And in the most dangerous attempt to limit access to the abortion pill, a conservative Christian organization, the Alliance for Defending Freedom, joined by three other anti-abortion groups, has brought a suit to challenge the legality of the abortion pill in all 50 states – not just through state-level bans. They claim that the FDA didn’t have the authority to approve the abortion pill 22 years ago.

They’re claiming an organization that literally exists to approve drugs doesn’t have the authority to approve a drug.

The suit challenges the safety of medication abortion, the process by which the FDA approved the drug, and the science behind the FDA’s decision. The suit claims that “the FDA failed America’s women and girls when it chose politics over science and approved chemical abortion drugs for use in the United States.”

The suit also bizarrely claims that the FDA never studied the safety of the two drugs (under the labeled conditions of use) and that they ignored the supposedly “substantial evidence” that medication abortion causes more complications than surgical abortions.

They even threw in a claim that medication abortion increases the abuse of sex trafficking victims, because the victims could theoretically be forced to take it.

Just as ridiculous

First of all, the abortion pill is incredibly safe. Data suggests it's safer than Viagra, penicillin and even some over-the-counter medications. The FDA had a clinical trial and a decade of European evidence when it approved the drug in 2000 and now has another 22 years to show that the safety of the drug is not in question.

There is nothing to suggest they ignored evidence of complications in 2000, and the data since 2000 does not support significant complications from taking medication abortion.

While this challenge is obviously ridiculous and should be immediately thrown out, we all know conservative judges are happy to entertain totally nonsense arguments if it means they can restrict access to abortion.

The only claim in the suit that could give a conservative judge cover is the language the FDA had to use to grant accelerated approval to the drug. The regulation allowing accelerated approval stated in 2000 that the FDA could approve “certain new drug products that have been studied for their safety and effectiveness in treating serious or life-threatening illnesses and that provide meaningful therapeutic benefit to patients over existing treatments.”

The suit claims that the FDA couldn’t approve the abortion pill under this regulation because pregnancy isn’t a “serious or life-threatening illness” and the abortion pill doesn’t “provide meaningful therapeutic benefit to patients over existing treatments.”

I have no desire to quibble over the term “illness” being applied to pregnancy but pregnancy is unquestionably a serious and life-threatening strain on the body. An abortion, specifically a medication abortion, is obviously a useful treatment of that serious threat to a person’s body and medication abortion provides a significant benefit over a surgical abortion.

Unfortunately, while this claim is just as ridiculous as the others in the suit, I can imagine an anti-abortion judge just salivating at the pedantic argument that pregnancy isn’t an “illness” so the FDA didn’t have the authority to approve the drug. (The suit was filed in Texas where they were sure to get a far-right Trump appointee.)

Killing many of us

However we may feel about applying the word “illness” to pregnancy, abortions save lives. An analysis from the Commonwealth Fund has found that there is a correlation between abortion restrictions and higher infant and maternal mortality. The numbers are staggering.

In states with abortion bans or significant restrictions, maternal death rates were 62 percent higher in 2020 than in states with abortion access. One has to wonder if that number is even higher since Roe was overturned and abortions to save the life of the mother have gotten even more difficult to access.

Obviously, not every death can be attributed to abortion restrictions. States without abortion access are also more likely to be “maternity care deserts.” The same states are also more likely to have worse healthcare outcomes across the board and more restrictions on Medicaid coverage as well as fewer OBGYNs.

However, despite these other factors, the lack of abortion access itself is likely contributing to maternal and infant deaths. Someone without access to good healthcare, financial resources, and prenatal care might decide abortion is the right decision for them before it becomes a life-or-death issue.

Abortion can be used to terminate a pregnancy that increases strain on the pregnant person’s body and can terminate a pregnancy likely to result in fetal abnormalities and infant death.

Finally, so-called “life of the mother” exceptions in abortion restrictions are confusing and often written vaguely to limit their use. Doctors are often put in the position of deciding if the pregnant person is in enough danger to warrant the legal risk of performing an abortion when it’s deemed legally necessary. Unfortunately, these are the cases that medication abortion can’t help with.

If this suit is successful it will upend access to abortion in all 50 states and make self-managed and illegal surgical abortions much more dangerous. People in states where abortion is legal will only have access to the surgical option and people in states with abortion restrictions will be in the same situation we were in before Roe.

Once again, conservatives want to enact policies that will result in killing many of us.

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Antisemitism dominates the news. But the media isn’t focused on rising hate crimes, a study on antisemitism in hiring or a presidential candidate and former president dining with a Holocaust denier.

Antisemitism is only dominating the news because Kanye West is saying blatantly antisemitic things over and over again. (Really he’s just saying the quiet part out loud for most Republicans).

Sure West, or Ye, is a celebrity being outrageous (though so is Mel Gibson) but the real reason his antisemitism gets more coverage than antisemitic violent incidents is that it can be used to fuel racism and divide the Black and Jewish communities (of course, also erasing the existence of Black Jews). This only serves white supremacy.

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There is a narrative in the US that antisemitism is higher in the Black community than in the white. People often point to Louis Farrakhan and the National of Islam. The media sees Farrakhan as a prominent figure on the left but ignores that he doesn’t just peddle antisemitism but also homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and he criticized Barack Obama for being too close to the Jewish community. Farrakhan has appeared on Alex Jones. He has praised Donald Trump.

The media needs to stop pretending this is a liberal movement and demanding the left answer for Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Additionally, as John Blake of CNN explains, while Farrakhan has always been a controversial figure, what support he does have in the Black community is often in spite of his antisemitism – not because of it.

There was the controversy a few years ago about Women’s March members not condemning Farrakhan, but honestly, his homophobia and transphobia should be as appalling to someone wanting to be the leader of a feminist movement. The March did eventually replace these leaders (as well as the controversy dominating news coverage because it once involved Black people and WOC).

While Farrakhan’s antisemitism and false claims about Jews controlling the slave trade have permeated culture (Kyrie Irving recently shared an antisemitic movie on the subject), the popularity of the Nation of Islam has significantly waned in recent years.

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Many prominent Black people have condemned him, such as US Rep. Barbara Lee and Muhammad Ali, and other Black Muslims denounced Farrakhan back in 1984. However, while I am very appreciative when Black people denounce antisemitism generally and Farrakhan specifically, demanding they do so reeks of racism.

Do you ask every white person about David Duke? Stop giving this man airtime and bringing his name up to use against Black people.

There’s some evidence that antisemitic sentiment is a little more common in the Black community than the white, though it has lessened since the 1990s. There is also evidence to suggest that Black people are significantly more likely to agree that Jewish people face discrimination. Based on my experience, some Black people might repeat an antisemitic trope not realizing that it’s harmful, but are much more open to learning than white people are. Many in the Black community have also spoken out against Kanye West, eager to stand with the Jewish community and show solidarity.

So is the Black community really more antisemitic or are these surveys not asking the right questions? Even worse, is the prevalence of some antisemitic tropes in the Black community in large part due to the outsized focus of the media on portraying Black people as antisemitic and encouraging rifts between our communities?

This is not to mention the fact, and I cannot stress this enough, there are Black Jews. We aren’t truly separate communities. To that end, Jewish spaces need to ensure they’re welcoming to Black Jews and Jews of color. White Jews also need to make sure they never-ever ask a Black Jew to condemn Farrakhan or West. These men hurt Black Jews, too.

West repeats antisemitic tropes common among so-called Black Hebrew Israelites (they are a radical fringe group not to be confused with Black Jews), Farrakhan and run-of-the-mill white supremacists.

There’s a lot of crossover in how these groups talk about Jews. It's hard to tease out sometimes. While antisemitic tropes about Jews and the slave trade, or Jews controlling Hollywood, might exist in the Black community and historical Black movements, Holocaust denial and praise of Hitler are common only in white supremacist movements.

In the past few years Kanye West has spent time with Trump, Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist Holocaust denier. West’s antisemitism has nothing to do with the Black community. It’s straight from the white supremacist playbook.

While many Black people condemn West, radical white nationalists embrace him. West perpetuates ideology and politics that are just as harmful to Black people as they are to Jews. It makes no sense for the media to hold him up as a representative of the Black community.

Many of the statements West made are vile and harmful. But if people really cared about antisemitism, they would be more concerned about men traveling to New York to attack synagogues.

A recently published survey, showing that one in four hiring managers exhibit antisemitism in their hiring practices, would have gotten much more attention. Supersessionist Christian cooptation of Jewish holidays would be a big news story. The GOP’s constant invocation of dual loyalty tropes against American Jews would be rightfully reported as antisemitism.

But no.

A rapper’s antisemitic rantings get the most attention.

I could talk about the history of cooperation between Black people and Jews in the US, but that history isn’t really the point.

White Jews must face racism in their communities just as Black people must fight strains of antisemitism in theirs.

Whatever our shared history, good and bad, we must see that it serves white supremacy to divide us and encourage tension.

Jewish liberation will never come through racism. We cannot fight antisemitism by allowing the media to throw Black people away.

The threat is rising white nationalism.

We must fight that threat together.

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The recent story about leaked Supreme Court drafts isn’t about SCOTUS opinions getting leaked. It’s not even that the court is political. The story should be that the court’s right wing is blatantly corrupt and basically exists outside of oversight or accountability.

When the draft of Dobbs, the case overturning Roe, was leaked, way too many people were more focused on the erosion of norms than the horrific content of the draft. Did leaking the draft serve the right-wing agenda of the right wing of the Supreme Court? Probably.

Why else leak it?

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But the focus on the leak was what served their agenda, as it offered a distraction from the fact that the court was overturning important precedent by waving around some nonsense ahistorical argument that abortion wasn’t deeply embedded in the nation’s history.

There was concern that the leaked draft would dampen outrage on the left but, as recent midterm results show, that hasn’t happened. If anything, some Democrat politicians used the leaked draft as an opportunity to protect abortion rights before the ruling’s release.

A report by the Times suggests that Dobbs wasn’t the first opinion to leak. Anti-abortion activist Rob Schenck said he received information about the Hobby Lobby case, in which the Supreme Court ruled that private companies didn’t have to provide insurance coverage for contraception. Schenck said he heard from conservative donors to his group Faith and Action after they had dinner with Justice Samuel Alito.

This is a much more troubling leak, as it was done privately and in a clearly corrupt way. Schenck has previously asserted that his nonprofit engaged in overt attempts to influence conservative justices through dinners and vacations with wealthy donors to his nonprofit. The strategy was to use casual social occasions to influence rulings and gain access to information on pending cases.

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While a sitting Supreme Court justice shouldn’t leak information about cases to donors or participate in obviously political events, they technically don’t break any rules when they do so. Supreme Court justices have no ethical code of conduct they must adhere to and pretty much entirely self-police. There is a Code of Conduct for federal judges published by the Judicial Conference of the United States, which is presided over by Chief Justice Roberts, but it’s not binding for Supreme Court justices. It’s worth noting that the last time a liberal justice got in trouble for political action, conservatives were mad that Ruth Bader Ginsburg publicly expressed dislike of Trump – not really as bad as political dinners with donors.

Supreme Court justices need to exhibit “good behavior” and technically can be impeached for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” The only justice to be impeached was Samuel Chase in 1805 for clearly political motives as Chase was a staunch Federalist who was pissing off Thomas Jefferson.

The House voted to impeach, but Chase was acquitted by the Senate, therefore not removed from the bench. Oddly enough, the majority of impeachment trials have been for federal judges and all eight people convicted of impeachment and removed were federal judges.

A bill has been proposed to require justices to write and adopt a formal code of ethics. The Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act outlines requirements for recusal and disqualification. It does not offer specifics for what would be in a code of conduct. It only requires that one be adopted through the Judicial Conference. The bill already passed the Senate, so we can hope for a lame-duck adoption by the House.

We absolutely need more oversight for sitting justices but the obstacles to impeaching them show why we need to take confirmation hearings more seriously.

Brett Kavanaugh likely lied under oath during his confirmation hearing but people treated moderate questioning of a serious accusation like a witch hunt. Clarence Thomas called a similarly respectful hearing about his history of sexual harassment a high-tech lynching. These are serious job interviews, our last chance to vet nominees.

While we might not have recourse once they’re on the bench, senators need to take their roles in confirming these justices more seriously than a rubber stamp for the president’s political nominee.

While Congress has little oversight outside impeachment, it can hold hearings and call justices to testify. Though unlikely to remove a justice, it would show that Congress is taking the corruption seriously and force the justices to speak publicly about their actions.

While Justice Alito has likely leaked information about at least two Supreme Court cases, Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh have probably committed impeachable offenses.

Clarence Thomas’ wife, Ginni Thomas, has been called in front of the January 6 committee for her possible (likely) involvement in the attempted coup. We know she sent text messages to Mark Meadows urging Trump not to concede and that she attended the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6. She claims her husband knew nothing of these political activities but that strains believability. Thomas also hasn’t recused himself from any of the cases concerning January 6.

As for Kavanaugh, his theoretically possible impeachable offenses occurred before he took the bench but lying before the Congress – committing perjury – is an impeachable offense. Sexual assault should be one too, but we all know how seriously that’s taken.

We need court reform.

We should expand the court to 13 to match the number of federal courts and more realistically pass a bill requiring a code of conduct.

While it's only been done once, there’s no reason we can’t impeach one or more of the current justices for their blatant corruption.

And as many of my articles are going to end – all this will be easier if we manage to elect Reverend Warnock in the runoff in Georgia.

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White Christian men are really scared of immigrants. Or at least they’re scared of immigrants who are “undesirable.”

They’re just terrified that new people are going to come into their country and make them eat weird food or hear weird languages.

They’re so fragile they have to cast poor people and children just trying to survive as “invading.” Texas Governor Greg Abbott is now so scared he’s begging President Biden to invoke the invasion clause of the US Constitution to protect Texans from refugees and migrant workers.

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The US has a decidedly weird relationship with immigration. It’s unique in its need for immigrants to “settle” the country (indigenous Native Americans don’t count). So immigration and naturalization have an outsized importance in the nation’s history. However, despite this need, nativism sprang up with a vengeance as soon as “undesirable” immigrants began arriving in the 19th century.

The narrative that immigrants were an “invading” force began with Samuel Morse’s Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States published in 1836. He said every American citizen who values his birthright should attempt to repel “this insidious invasion of the country” of “illiterate” Catholic immigrants. Chinese immigration was cast as an invasion in the 1870s in such a way that directly led to the Chinese Exclusion Act. Such rhetoric, and comparisons to an invasion of locusts, was applied to immigrants from Eastern Europe. The “invasion” moved on to Mexican immigrants in the 1920s and has remained focused on immigrants from South and Central America, even sometimes being described as a “Wetback Invasion.”

Immigrants are not invading the US.

They are not trying to conquer us, or take land, or forcibly convert us, or steal resources, or do anything else that invading armies have done (or that Americans have historically done to indigenous people).

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Current immigrants are coming to the US for the same reasons immigrants came historically. Undocumented immigrants are coming for the same reason documented immigrants are. Everyone just wants safety and economic opportunities. But casting immigrants as “invading” is a purposeful conscious choice to make vulnerable people doing no harm seem threatening and violent.

And now Abbot isn’t just accusing immigrants of invading rhetorically. He’s actually trying to get the president to treat poor people without weapons or power as a military invasion!

On November 16, a day after tweeting it publicly, Abbot wrote a letter to President Biden informing him that he has not lived up to the promise of Article IV, § 4, that the federal government “shall protect each of them against Invasion.”

Since, according to Abbott, the federal government isn’t treating poor immigrants like an invading army, Abbott will now invoke Article I, § 10, Clause 3 of the US Constitution, which allows states to “engage in War” when they are “actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.”

Oh, and just to make it extra scary, Abbot specifies that the invasion is by “Mexican drug cartels.” You’d think we would have heard about drug cartels invading large swaths of Texas.

As far as I can tell the Invasion Clause has rarely been invoked in US history. The one example I could find was in 1914 when the Colorado governor asked Woodrow Wilson to invoke the clause during the Colorado Coalfield War, a bloody labor dispute, not an invasion.

Abbot’s strategy has been regularly rejected by the courts. In New Jersey v. United States, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals rejected New Jersey’s claim that the US had violated its obligation to protect states from invasion by not controlling immigration through international borders better.

In Chiles v. Florida, the plaintiffs, Florida, claimed that the "government breaches its duty when its failure to protect against invasion of illegal aliens imposes coercive pressure on the state and local political processes.” The Southern District of Florida rejected this argument and said the plaintiffs were making a political argument, not a legal one.

Abbott seems to be trying to enforce war powers which, along with immigration enforcement, is the purview of the federal government.

Therefore, he’s clearly trying to unlawfully invoke the threat of invasion to justify rounding up asylum seekers. Last year, Texas passed Operation Lone Star, which already further militarizes the border by giving Abbot authority to deploy the national guard.

Of course, this was also justified through complaining that President Biden wasn’t doing his job. This latest ploy invoking invasion is likely in response to a Texas court ruling that the arrests under Operation Lone Star violated established law that immigration enforcement was the sole purview of the federal government.

For Article I Section 10 to be invoked, invasions must be armed invasions that are “too formidable for the civil power to overcome.”

New Jersey v. US, as well as Padavan v. US and State of California v. US in the 1990s all confirm this definition. Asylum seekers and poor immigrants are not armed and they are certainly not too formidable for civil powers to deal with. Even if we include the threat of cartels who might be armed, there is nothing to suggest that threat amounts to a formidable invasion.

Like previous courts have said, invoking the Invasion Clause is a political ploy not a legal strategy.

We never know how courts will react anymore but it’s likely Abbott’s actions would be rejected if he did take steps to further militarize immigration enforcement and take jurisdiction away from the federal government.

Unfortunately, harm can be done in the meantime, and immigrants can be unlawfully arrested. Not to mention the political narrative itself is insidious and harmful to any reasonable response to immigration. Asylum seekers are often traumatized. They don’t need to be met with a response as if they are trying to invade.

It might be something we all want to think about the week of Thanksgiving.

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Midterms are (almost) over and we (almost) have the results. While we don’t know which party will win the House yet, Democrats have retained 50-50 control and have a chance to make it to 51 seats.

While there is still a lot up in the air, two things are clear. One, the Democrats outperformed expectations around the country against enormous odds. The other thing that’s clear is that elections are being determined by Supreme Court

Abortion was the second most important issue for people in midterms according to exit polls, only a few points behind inflation. It was also the most important issue in Pennsylvania and Michigan where Democrats made great strides. Maggie Hassan, an incumbent Democratic senator from New Hampshire, managed to hold on to her seat by highlighting abortion in her reelection campaign.

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Abortion should have been the most important issue in 2016, 2018 and 2020 to prevent Roe from being overturned but unfortunately many politicians ignored it and most voters didn’t prioritize it.

Hillary Clinton centered abortion rights in 2016. Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris focused in 2020 on reproductive justice issues. But the larger party and Democratic voters failed to see the import of following their lead. Unfortunately, it took the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson to force people to pay attention.

And pay attention they did! Even before midterms, it was clear many votes were mobilized to protect abortion. In August, Kansas voters rejected an anti-abortion ballot measure by an 18-point margin.

There is also significant evidence that the Dobbs decision drove voter registration in the months preceding the midterm election with higher numbers among young voters and women.

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In every state where abortion was on a ballot measure, abortion rights won. A California amendment passed stating that the state Constitution cannot interfere with someone’s reproductive freedom.

Like Kansas’ earlier abortion vote, Kentucky voters rejected a ballot measure to declare there is no right to abortion in the state constitution. Michigan voters passed a ballot measure to ensure their constitution protects a right to reproductive freedom. Montana voters rejected an attempt to criminalize healthcare providers. Vermont voters passed an initiative to amend the state constitution to ensure a right to “personal reproductive autonomy.”

Another Supreme Court decision, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, got less attention but should probably have been highlighted by the Democrats in the way abortion was.

Gun regulation was in the top five issues most important to voters this election, but few politicians focused on it. Last year, the Supreme Court overturned a New York gun regulation that allowed more discretion for issuing gun permits with a “may issue” law rather than a “shall issue” law. The court ruled that carrying a gun, not just owning one, was a constitutional right. I’m not aware of any politicians who tried to use the case to rally voters.

The case was decided a month after the Uvalde massacre. School shootings have become common and Uvalde did little to move public opinion, though it did start an important conversation about a police officer’s “duty to act.” Many of the parents of the Uvalde victims rallied behind Beto O’Rourke, trying to unseat Greg Abbott as governor of Texas. O’Rourke was one of the few politicians to prioritize gun reform and the Uvalde shooting as part of his campaign. Unfortunately, Democrats couldn’t overcome the voter suppression and gerrymandering enabled by the Supreme Court.

In one of the most devastating decisions for fighting partisan gerrymandering, the court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering issues are not the purview of the federal court system, so a major avenue of redress was removed.

While we’re awaiting a ruling on Merrill v. Milligan, and Ardoin v. Robinson after oral arguments this term, last term the court allowed the racist gerrymandered map in Alabama to go in effect.

The court is likely to sustain the racist map, and the Louisiana map in Ardoin v. Robinson, which they also temporarily sustained, will severely weaken section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and allow Black voter dilution. Gerrymandering is only going to get worse.

The decision to allow the Alabama map to go into effect in February likely influenced gerrymandered maps all over the country for the midterms. A judge declined to block a racially gerrymandered map in Georgia. A Texas court dismissed multiple claims against their gerrymandered map that targeted Latino representation.

In Florida, Ron DeSantis demanded a more extreme gerrymander than what Republicans initially proposed in the state, which the Florida Supreme Court reinstated after a lower court struck it down.

Even a New York court rejected the initial congressional map and forced a map less favorable to Democrats (no surprise Democrats lost 4 congressional seats in New York). Ohio’s map also showed extreme Republican bias going into election day.

And no conversation about elections and the Supreme Court can ignore the effect of Shelby v. Holder. It struck down a key element of the Voting Rights Act. The effect of Shelby was that states with histories of voting discrimination would no longer need federal preclearance to pass new voting laws. It’s likely that the increase in voter suppression laws after 2013 influenced the passage of more voter suppression in states without historical discrimination. Twenty states faced new voter restrictions since the 2020 election.

The 2022 midterms saw a rash of new voter suppression laws in response to the myths about fraudulent elections perpetrated by Donald Trump after losing in 2020. Over two years, there has been a significant increase in laws that criminalize election behavior and ultimately amount to voter intimidation through the involvement of law enforcement in the name of election security. Since 2020, 132 bills have been introduced across 42 states to increase police involvement in elections. Twenty-eight passed in 20 states.

The Supreme Court is controlling our elections.

It is driving the political issues we have to focus on.

It is dictating our access to the ballot box.

There’s not much we can do about the Supreme Court (that is, until Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas need to be replaced) without reform, like expanding the court to 13, but federal judges across the country are working to fight back against the court’s fascism.

Our best hope is to nominate more federal judges, which means we must ensure that Senator Raphael Warnock wins his runoff.

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Originalist arguments will always be silly to me, but if you’re going to apply them at least get the history right. Reconstruction legislation and subsequent case law are all race conscious. They validate the acknowledgment of race when seeking remedy to racial harm.

Conservatives are so obsessed with the concept of originalism they continue to twist history in order to pretend their nonsense legal agendas are in line with what the “founders” of the country or the Fourteenth Amendment actually wanted. The latest historical victim of ahistorical legal ramblings is the entirety of Reconstruction legislation in order to claim affirmative action is unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the latest attack on affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard during which attorney Cameron Norris, for Students for Fair Admissions, the group challenging Harvard’s policy, argued that the legislation passed following the Civil War to address the harms of slavery was not about race and that none of the legislation passed was race conscious (as opposed to race neutral). Buckle in for an angry history lesson to understand just how bizarre that claim truly is.

The Civil War was explicitly about slavery and the US had worked very hard to ensure slavery and Blackness had a strong correlation.

Legally, one could not be enslaved in the US if one was not of African descent. Indigenous people initially could be enslaved, but by the early 1800s, Native Americans were deemed legally free.

Even free Black people were often presumed to be enslaved if they could not prove they were free. Enslavement was not race neutral. Legislation to address slavery was very much not race neutral.

After the Civil War the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were passed not only to ensure the end of slavery but to move toward a racially integrated society with at least nominal guarantees of racial equality.

We have decades of jurisprudence showing the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment was specifically to address the racist harm of slavery, which I’ll get to in a minute.

But the plain text of the Fifteenth Amendment addresses race explicitly by ensuring that no one’s vote shall be denied or abridged on “account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

While the language in the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t mention race specifically, the earlier Civil Rights Act of 1866 does.

It states that all citizens should have the same rights as “enjoyed by white citizens.” Not only does such a statement clearly mention race, but it also acknowledges that race has been a determining factor in a hierarchy of access to citizenship rights until 1866.

The act excludes “Indians” from birthright citizenship, supposedly because they don’t pay taxes, but again, it includes racial distinctions.

Finally, the act specifies that everyone, “of every race and color,” born in the US, except “Indians,” has birthright citizenship.

The language seems pretty race conscious to me.

Even Andrew Johnson said that he vetoed the act (Congress overrode his veto) because the protections in it supposedly “establish for the security of the colored race safeguards which go infinitely beyond any that the General Government has ever provided for the white race. In fact, the distinction of race and color is by the bill made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race.” (emphasis mine)

I think his claims that the act pits races against each other or provides special protection to Black people is nonsense. Point is, at the time no one thought this legislation was race neutral.

In 1872, the purview and intent of the Fourteenth Amendment was tested in the Slaughterhouse Cases. In the Slaughterhouse Cases, butchers of New Orleans were mad at laws passed that created a monopoly on slaughterhouses in order to protect the water supply from contamination. Butchers of the city sued under the Fourteenth Amendment claiming that their civil rights were violated. The Supreme Court rejected this claim and in the majority opinion Justice Miller wrote that the Reconstruction Amendments were meant to protect the “the freedom of the slave race … and the protection of the newly made freeman and citizen from the oppressions of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him.”

During oral arguments Cameron Norris, for Students for Fair Admissions, the group challenging Harvard’s policy, made the argument that Reconstruction legislation was meant to address harm based on status of former slaves – not based on race.

Not only is this argument historically incoherent as race and the status of slavery were deeply intertwined, but it ignores that Reconstruction legislation also addressed previous discrimination against free Black people.

Before the Civil War, plenty of free states had racially discriminatory laws that barred free Black people from voting, testifying in court against a white person or even having the freedom to exist without needing to constantly prove they were free.

Such discrimination was explicitly based on race, not slave status.

Norris also claimed the Fourteenth Amendment was originally intended as a ban on all racial classifications, somehow ignoring the legality of segregation and anti-miscegenation laws.

He does describe Plessy v. Ferguson as the Supreme Court “going off the rails,” but it’s not clear what he means by that.

He asserts that another case, Strauder v. West Virginia, banned all racial classification concerning jury selection, but he completely misstates the opinion. Strauder ruled that one could not be denied jury service based on race, but it argued that doing so would violate the rights of a possible Black defendant by denying him a jury of his peers – explicitly acknowledging the relevance of race.

Additionally, the court said that the purpose of the Equal Protection Clause was "to assure to the colored race the enjoyment of all the civil rights that under the law are enjoyed by white persons.”

Originalist arguments will always be silly to me, but if you’re going to apply them at least get the history right. Reconstruction legislation and subsequent case law are all race conscious. They validate the acknowledgment of race when seeking remedy to racial harm.