In my humble opinion…
September 24, 2021
Another in a series of observations of life as I know it.
Women can stand on the Empire State Building and scream to the heavens that they are equal to men and liberated, but until they have the same anatomy, it's a lie. It's more of a man's world today than ever. Men can eat their cake in unlimited bakeries.
― Maureen Dowd
Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.
-George Will
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I have favorite people. Don’t judge. There are a select few Op Ed columnists with whom I share a world view. Colbert I. King, Richard Cohen, Leonard Downie, Eugene Robinson, Frank Bruni, Ruth Marcus, and, when she isn’t too cranky, Maureen Dowd. I search them out in whatever news purveyor they are in on any given day. Some are happy holdovers from my Washington days. I will forever hold a fondness for the Washington Post. So much so that I shell out a size-able chunk of change for an online subscription. It’s worth every penny. Ditto the venerable gray lady, the New York Times. I love the heft of the Sunday edition, with glossy magazines, the book review and the Review and Style sections. And although it got a bad rap from one of my poly sci professors many years ago, the Boston Globe has come up in the world of news. Especially its Spotlight team, which has exposed the darkest underbelly of life here in New England. As a result, I am now a fan girl of two notable scribes. Kevin Cullen is a Boston boy, with Southie street cred and a slight whiff of altar boy incense still clinging to his adult clothes. He is pure Boston. Then, in my new statuary hall of soon-to-be greats, there is Kimberly Atkins Stohr, she of the podcast #SistersInLaw, a former civil attorney, and later a journalist covering the Supreme Court. Now an editorialist. She is a woman of color, a gifted observer and one who does not suffer fools gladly.
As it happens, both Cullen and Atkins Stohr grace today’s Globe. Praise be! And in the way that themes often knit together, they seem to be on the same page. Just in different sections. Cullen is watching the Pisa-like tilt to the far, far right of New Hampshire’s republican legislature. It is aping Texas. Enough said. What I find fascinating is that the second largest state legislature in the US is in the Keystone State of Pennsylvania, logging in at 203 representatives. The nation’s largest state body resides in one of its smallest states. New Hampshire. 400 state lawmakers. When this body convenes, most of the state sits vacant, since there are only about 800 citizens in New Hampshire. Can we spell top heavy, class? Watch NH. Yellow danger lights are flashing at all cross walks.
Atkins Stohr appears in much larger and prestigious newspaper real estate. She sits on the Globe’s Editorial Board, and as such, contributes her own opinion columns as well as those collective efforts penned under the signature of the Board. Her coin of the realm is the Supreme Court. And today she weighs in on the dimming lights of Roe as well as what radiates outward from it. Specifically rights to privacy. Suffice it to say, it’s a gloomy prospect for women. And others. Contraceptive rights could fall next. Just sayin’. Guys, of course, can still get a script for a stiff jolt of Viagra. Hallelujah. But a daily dose of Premarin for women? Maybe not. That would mean that any woman of child-bearing age could decide, on her own, whether or not she wants to make babies. This includes college age gals who are experimenting as well as married women who already have three kids and, thanks but no thanks, have had their quota. No more. We’re done. Let’s start saving for college funds. By extension, the collapse of Roe could extend to LGBTQ folks as well. How so? The right of same sex partners, legally married, to adopt children, just for instance. Health care provided from one partner to another. Legal rights to home ownership, visitation in the ICU. And transgender rights, in toto.
Roe is not a case in isolation. It forms a web of rights, just not terribly well articulated, I will admit. Roe was and remains an imperfect law of the land. In its almost 50 years of existence, it’s been picked, pecked and poked apart like a murder of crows on a long dead piece of roadkill. It stands today, a loosely bound set of nerves and sinews, rent from the body politic. The body itself is diminished to what once formed a living being. Ruth Bader Ginsburg rued Roe’s inadequacies. And as such, her written words may come back to haunt us. She may unwittingly serve as a posthumous witness for the prosecution to the detriment of the defense.
I applaud Atkins Stohr and Cullen. They are voices increasingly crying in the wilderness amid the cacophony of ignorance and intolerance. What I love about Op Ed authors is their ability to dissect an issue and reduce it to its component parts. Admittedly, sometimes conservative George F. Will does that too. Especially in his examination of the Trumpsphere. Now that Biden is the president, Will has fallen back on foundational GOP credo. I am less interested. But I defend his right to espouse and publish his views. As long as there is a system of checks and balances, usually provided by the irascible Maureen Dowd, I am down with it. It’s the American way.
The moral of this tale? Read your newspapers. And not just the regurgitation of wire stories from AP and Reuters. You can catch those online or in brief on the TV evening news. Keep a wide berth away from Fox Spews. Read opposing views. And then, once your interest is piqued, read further, research farther, and form your own opinion. In the final analysis, we have swallowed whole opinions and viewpoints without parsing through them and getting opposing remarks. Do your due diligence. That is why the Big Lie still festers. No one bothered to look on the flip side and see what the counter point to the Lie might be. Some might posit that the stark polar opposite is quite simple.
The even Larger Truth.