Not sure all these White Christian Jihadists – bent on regime change at home – are going to be as happy with authoritarianism as they think they are. – Barker Ajax
The Ginni Thomas Supreme Court this morning took away a woman’s right to physical autonomy.
As if the rape itself was somehow insufficient.
When the memo to overturn the half-century-old Roe vs. Wade first leaked, I was struck by the notion that our rights now depend on what our rights once were.
When most people had next to no rights at all.
“not a fundamental constitutional right because such a right has no basis in the Constitution’s text or in our nation’s history.”
Abortion is not protected specifically by the exact words of the Constitution; somehow an AR-15 with a thirty-cartridge clip is.
Firearms are an American tradition, the Court tells us. Abortion is not.
Makes you wonder what else those slave-owning white Founding Fathers also overlooked.
What other rights might the Mitch McConnell Court take away from us next?
A History Of Pet Ownership
By Kerry Hacecky for Heartland Humane Society. February 18, 2019.
Ours is a pet-loving culture. Americans own an estimated 90 million dogs, 94 million cats, 20 million birds, 14 million small mammals and 9.5 million reptiles, according to pet industry statistics.
But, when did the trend of pet ownership begin?
Greger Larson with the University of Oxford suggested animals were domesticated twice – once in Europe about 16,000 years ago and then again in Asia about 14,000 years ago. In a separate study, a Belgian study in 2008 reported finding a 32,000-year-old canine-like skull found in a cave in Belgium.
Dogs and cats were buried with humans some 12,000 years ago, suggesting the beginning of true “companion pet’ ownership.
Research suggests pet cats came significantly later, around 9,000 years ago. During this time, human life was changing from nomadic hunter to settled farmers. Working dogs would have been increasingly valued and cats would have been cared for to keep rodent population down.
Dog and cat breeds as we know them today date back to about 2,500 years ago with breeds such as the Pekingese in China, the Lhasa Apso in Tibet, the Basenji in Africa, and the Chow in England. Romans were best known for keeping small toy breeds and designing clothes where pockets were big enough to house these small dogs.
Pets first become a topic of discussion in America in the 1600s. The Christian church frowned on pet keeping during these struggling times – stating the food used to feed these pets should be given to the poor instead. In addition, fear of pet ownership linked to pagan worship was a real thing.
Move into the 1800’s and Britain became the center for dog breeding, holding its first competitive dog show in Newcastle in 1859 for Pointer and Setter breeds. A “Temporary Home for Lost and Starving dogs” opened in Holloway in 1860 and marked the beginning of animals shelters.
The trend increased the popularity for dog ownership. Rare dog breeds were often used as indicators of status, folks began training dogs to assist the blind and deaf, and psychologists began studying the emotional welfare of pet ownership.
By the late nineteenth century, however, the industrial revolution rapidly urbanized new spaces and the middle classes began to bring animals into their own homes in greater numbers.
There was a lot of good happening, and a lot of bad. New York City officials, fearing rabies and dog attacks, paid 50-cent bounties to those willing to collect the strays and bring them in for euthanasia in the 1850’s. New York’s ASPCA established in 1866 to combat the war against pet ownership, eventually taking over the city animal control and opening the first pet shelter in the United States. It is a well-established nonprofit still today.
Forward another 75 years, and as motor cars replaced horses, veterinary offices in American began rebranding themselves as small animal vets, making vaccinations more accessible and promoting the spaying and neutering of domesticated pets.
In 1941, Lord and Taylor’s Christmas catalog highlighted a full-page advertisement for a cat scratching post and a cat bed. By 1947, clay cat litter was being sold, as opposed to sand or dirt, and cat ownership was becoming easier or more prominent for city-dwellers.
Today, the pet industry is a $70 billion business with predictions of continued increases in the next 10 years.
The Pedigree pet food company offers this explanation of the tradition of pet ownership.
Pet ownership by the ruling or noble classes has a long history, dating back at least as far as ancient Egyptian times. Murals from this era depict pharaohs keeping companion animals. Many generations of Chinese emperors kept dogs that, as puppies, were often suckled by human wet nurses, and as adults were tended to by their own servants. Greek and Roman nobility were also avid pet keepers.
As civilizations developed, human-animal relationships became more symbolic and less central to human life, and with this change came the view that humans had dominion over all animals. Although animals lost much of their religious and cultural importance, some animals remained closely associated with humans, but subtly, in the role of companions.
The Middle Ages
In medieval Europe, from the 13th–15th centuries AD, pet keeping was popular among the aristocracy and some senior clergy. Lap dogs were fashionable among the noble ladies, whereas male nobility were more inclined to lavish their attention on more “useful” animals, such as hunting hounds and falcons. During this period, hunting, or “venery,” was of great importance to the aristocracy as a symbol of power and status. Dog breeds spread throughout Europe as different types of hound were developed for chasing different quarry.
Nevertheless, the Christian church frowned on pet keeping. Church leaders suggested that the food used for these animals should be given to the poor. However, the Church was probably more afraid that close associations with animals were strongly linked to pagan worship. The prejudice against pets reached its height during the Inquisition, where evidence against heretics often included references to close associations with animals.
Throughout the barbaric witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries, a large number of innocent people were accused of witchcraft and condemned to death. Possession of an “animal familiar,” considered to be a symbol of Satan, was used as evidence of their guilt. The accused were most often elderly and socially isolated women who probably kept animals for companionship. As interest in witchcraft declined, however, companion animals returned to favor and even came to symbolize good fortune.
The most likely reason for negative attitudes to companion animals throughout history is that affectionate relationships towards animals were considered immoral and against the natural order of life. Until relatively recently, there was a commonly held view in the Western world that animals lacked feelings and were created in order to serve humanity.
The Rise of Pet Keeping
Pet keeping wasn’t generally accepted in Europe until the end of the 17th century, and it wasn’t common among the middle classes until the late 18th century. Pet keeping in its present form is probably a 19th century Victorian invention. At this time, it was perceived as a link with the natural world, which itself was no longer seen as threatening. It also allowed a visible demonstration of man’s domination over nature.
Britain had been a center for dog breeding since Roman times, and one of the first formal competitive dog shows was held in Newcastle in 1859 for the Pointer and Setter breeds. Still, little was known about the inheritance of various characteristics until Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species in 1859. Since that time, dog breeding has become more formalized with the establishment of strict breed standards.
The practice of pet keeping in Victorian times also reflected other social attitudes of the time. Pet keeping was not considered appropriate for the “lower classes,” as it was thought to encourage the neglect of other social duties.
If you read that carefully and know your history, when the Constitution was composed, pet ownership was “not a fundamental constitutional right because such a right has no basis in the Constitution’s text or in our nation’s history.”
That’s in Alito’s leaked opinion on a woman’s right to choose what happens to her body.
“not a fundamental constitutional right because such a right has no basis in the Constitution’s text or in our nation’s history.”
What else isn’t mentioned in the Constitution?
Pussycats. I imagine we can grandfather dogs, coon hunting and shit, but cats.
Don’t think so.
No text. No tradition.
The 17th-Century Judge at the Heart of Today’s Women’s Rights Rulings
Both in India and in the Roe v. Wade draft ruling roiling the United States, Lord Matthew Hale — an English judge who wrote that women were contractually obligated to husbands — still looms large.
By Amanda Taub for The New York Times. May 19, 2022.
Reporting trips, for me, are always an exercise in finding similarities among differences: the ribbons of shared dilemmas, conflicts and social changes that link people together, no matter their nation.
I spent most of the past two weeks in India, where that effort turned out to be more straightforward than expected. I was there working on a long-term project about young women struggling to strike a balance between their ambitions for new opportunities in a modernizing economy, and the constraints of a patriarchal system that expects them to remain at home, confined to the private sphere and governed first by their families, and then by their husbands and in-laws.
Many of their struggles seemed like more extreme versions of the dilemmas facing women around the world, including in the United States, where I grew up, and the United Kingdom, where I live now.
But somewhat unexpectedly there was also a far more direct link, which became clear when opinions by prominent judges in both countries became public within days of each other, both drawing on reasoning from the same man: Lord Matthew Hale, a 17th-century English jurist.
Hundreds of years ago, his decisions about women’s rights within marriage and over their own bodies — or, more precisely, his decisions that those rights ought to be constrained so that they wouldn’t encroach on men’s rights too much — became part of British common law, and so by extension the common law of the United States, India and other British colonies.
In the United States, Justice Alito’s leaked draft opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade cited Hale eight times. In India, an opinion from the Delhi High Court refused to criminalize spousal rape, upholding a legal exception that Hale had codified in a treatise in the 1600s. (The Indian court split, with another judge voting to end the exception. The petitioners plan to appeal the decision.)
“It’s so startling that within 10 days of each other, we have the leaked Alito decision and the decision on marital rape,” said Karuna Nundy, a lawyer who represented the petitioners in the Indian case. “Both traced back to a colonial-era misogyny that the constitutions of India and the United States — that guarantee individual rights, the individual rights to privacy of the body, to bodily integrity, to free sexual expression — have overridden.”
Or at least seemed, on paper and in other decisions, to have overridden. But both cases have shown how that kind of reasoning, once embedded not just within court judgments but also in social norms and practices that have their own collective momentum and power, can persist, even in the face of apparent progress.
The past is not dead: legal edition
A central tenet of Hale’s legal philosophy was that giving women legally enforceable rights over their own bodies was a threat to men’s freedom.
That comes through clearly in his famous description of rape as “an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho never so innocent.” That became the basis for centuries of jurisprudence and jury instructions that treated the moral character of rape victims as the paramount concern in rape cases, and often presumed that they were lying if they could not produce corroborating witnesses or other outside evidence for their claims.
Hale also wrote in his influential common-law treatise that marital rape could not be a crime because marriage itself constituted irrevocable consent to sex — but only for the wife. “For by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract,” he wrote, “the wife hath given herself up in this kind unto the husband which she cannot retract.” That belief was an outgrowth of the doctrine of coverture, which treated a married woman’s rights as “covered” by her husband’s. Her property became his, and she could not bring legal actions in her own right. The family, in this view, was a private sphere in which the husband was essentially the sovereign, and the wife could not appeal to the state for protection.
So far, so 17th century. Except that in common law systems, judicial opinions become binding the same way written laws do, so many of Hale’s beliefs didn’t stay in the past. Some are thankfully now defunct: We no longer hold witch trials, for instance. But his views on rape, marriage and abortion, enshrined in legal opinions, became part of Britain’s legal system, and then those of its colonies. And to say they have had global staying power there would be an understatement.
In the United Kingdom, marital rape was not criminalized until 1991. In the United States, it took until 1993 for it to be a crime in all 50 states. In India, it is still not criminalized at all.
Just two weeks ago, in the leaked draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health that promised to overturn Roe v. Wade, Justice Alito cited Hale’s treatise eight times as evidence that abortion was considered a crime at the time the U.S. Constitution was written.
And last Wednesday in India, the Delhi High Court issued a split verdict in the case challenging the country’s marital rape exception. The Indian government opposed the case in a brief that warned that removing the exception would make rape law “an easy tool for harassing husbands” and could have a “destabilizing effect on the institution of marriage” — ideas that seemed to flow directly out of Hale’s conception of marriage as a zone of male control.
One judge of the two-judge panel agreed, writing that it would be “antithetical to the very institution of marriage” for a husband to be regarded as a rapist — even if he compels his wife, repeatedly, to have sex without her consent.
The wiring of the patriarchy
But the common law is just the procedural mechanism by which these views became and remained law. The bigger story here is a political one.
In colonial India, allowing men control over the private sphere became part of an uneasy détente between the colonial authorities and Hindu nationalists who focused on the family as a zone that should be protected from foreign authority, Tanika Sarkar, an Indian historian of law and women’s rights, wrote in a famous 1993 article. (She also pointed out that it probably held some appeal for male colonial administrators who were uncomfortable with even just the modest progress that British women had won at home.)
In the United States, as numerous legal scholars have written, treating the family as a “private” sphere, protected against state interference, became a shield for male violence, including domestic abuse and spousal rape.
And just as protecting the hierarchy of male power became intertwined with nationalist politics in India, in the United States, traditional gender roles became a central element of southern states’ justification for white supremacy, including the Jim Crow laws.
“To justify and rationalize the brutality over Black men, they created this faux chivalry, and this supposed threat that white women had to be protected from,” said Angie Maxwell, a political scientist at the University of Arkansas. Protecting traditional gender roles thus became linked to protecting the racial hierarchy, she said.
That meant that the Roe v. Wade decision and other feminist reforms created an opportunity for the Republican Party: By framing feminism as a threat to white women’s safety and support, Republicans were able to win support among white women in the South. But that strategy also helped to cement the divide in American politics between a Republican Party dedicated to protecting existing hierarchies, and a Democratic Party that mostly sought more egalitarian reforms.
So while citing Hale looks from one angle like a sober reference to legal history, from another it reads as a more partisan political statement: This is how America has always been, and any change from it is illegitimate.
“The wiring of the patriarchy has been laid bare by the leaked Alito decision, and the fact that it hasn’t changed, even though both countries have constitutions that are meant to protect the individual rights of full citizens since then,” Nundy, the lawyer for the Indian case, told me. “It hasn’t changed from 300 years ago, though both countries gained independence since then. You’d expect that liberty of these sovereign nations would also bring liberty of the human body.”
Here’s the white-washed biography of Lord Judge Hale foisted upon the public by the British, our former overlords.
Feel free to skim this, but do not miss the next part.
Sir Matthew Hale
By David Eryl Corbet Yale for Britannica.
Sir Matthew Hale, (born Nov. 1, 1609, Alderley, Gloucestershire, Eng.—died Dec. 25, 1676, Alderley), one of the greatest scholars on the history of English common law, well known for his judicial impartiality during England’s Civil War (1642–51). He also played a major role in the law-reform proposals of the Convention Parliament and in promoting Charles II’s restoration.
Hale was the son of Robert Hale, a barrister. Orphaned at the age of five, he was educated according to Puritan principles under the direction of his guardian, until he enrolled at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1626, with the intention of taking holy orders. He soon changed his mind and began to devote most of his time to fencing, gambling, and other diversions; at one time he considered enlisting as a soldier in the service of Frederick Henry, prince of Orange. A consultation with an eminent lawyer on family business so impressed him that he chose the law as his profession. In 1628 he was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn, where he studied under the guidance of John Selden, one of the leading jurists and scholars of his age, who extended his studies to include Roman law, English history, mathematics, and natural philosophy. Called to the bar in 1637, he soon had a flourishing practice.
Hale remained aloof from the Long Parliament’s opposition in the 1640s to King Charles I and avoided taking sides during the Civil Wars between the king and Parliament. Nevertheless, he defended many Royalists, most notably Archbishop William Laud, who had persecuted Puritan churchmen; and he probably advised Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, who was impeached by the House of Commons on charges of high treason, and later Charles I during his trial.
In spite of his support of the Royalists, in 1649 he took the oath of fidelity to the republican Commonwealth and, later in 1654, was persuaded by his Royalist friends to accept a judgeship from Oliver Cromwell, now lord protector. In 1651 and 1652, he was active in the law-reform movement and contributed much to the work of the committee that advised Parliament on far-reaching improvements in the law and legal system of the time. On Cromwell’s death he refused to continue as judge and was returned to Parliament as member for Oxford. He took a prominent part in the proceedings of the Convention Parliament, called after the dissolution of the Long Parliament, and in promoting the restoration of Charles II.
In 1660 Hale was appointed chief baron of the Exchequer, the court principally concerned with matters of crown revenue, and in the same year he was knighted. Between 1666 and 1672 he spent much time on the statutory tribunal that resolved disputes between owners and tenants of property destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. In 1671 he became chief justice of the King’s Bench, an office he relinquished in 1676 when his health began to fail.
Hale’s work on the Bench—in an age when these attributes were not common even among judges—was characterized by singular personal integrity and impartiality. He acted, moreover, with scrupulous fairness toward prisoners. The one point on which he was criticized by later writers was his belief in witchcraft, and he once permitted the execution of two women accused as witches. Hale was tolerant in religious matters and on numerous occasions mitigated the rigours of the law against dissenters from the Church of England. Throughout his life he retained his Puritan sympathies and numbered among his intimate friends prominent nonconformists. Evenhanded also in his friendships, he maintained ties with Anglican bishops as well.
Lord Chancellor Nottingham (the other outstanding legal figure of Hale’s generation) wrote of him that
as great a lawyer as he was, he would never suffer the strictness of the law to prevail against conscience; as great a chancellor as he was, he would make use of all the niceties and subtleties of law when it tended to support right and equity.
The published work by which he is perhaps best known is his History of the Pleas of the Crown (the House of Commons directed in 1680 that it be printed, though it was not published until 1736). This work remains one of the principal authorities on the common law of criminal offenses. But he also wrote widely on topics of constitutional and civil law, as his editorial talent enabled him to analyze and rearrange the jumbled collection of 17th-century and earlier law materials. When Sir William Blackstone wrote his classic Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69), he found that he could not do better than adopt Hale’s “Analysis of the Civil Part of the Law.”
Hale’s literary talent was enhanced by his considerable critical faculty. He was both a historian and a critic of the law, and his writings take stature from his talents as historian and critic. His place is undoubtedly among the principal figures in the history of English common law.
Basically, Hale was not a woman-hating religious fanatic per se, just the way he saw his world.
This bio glosses over Hale’s battles with witchcraft and various other egregious pronouncements that have followed us over the centuries like so much crap floats down stream.
The man left a stain and Samuel Alito can see God there.
When Activist Judges Impose Christian Sharia Law
“Procuring an abortion is not a fundamental constitutional right because such a right has no basis in the Constitution’s text or in our nation’s history.” – Samuel Alito
Excerpts from article by Willow Grace, Ph.D. – area of expertise: women and gender in the early modern era (1500-1700).
Regarding Justice Alito’s invocation of Sir Matthew Hale in his leaked majority opinion.
1) Matthew Hale, just like a lot of Christian extremists today, believed that women were made from Adam’s rib. God did not make her as an autonomous being with rights. She was a physical extension of his body, made to be his “helpmeet,” namely to exist to help him to whatever he wants. Women were not legally independent human beings.
2) Hale therefore wrote in his posthumously published book Historia Placitorum Coronæ (1713) that marital rape was totally legal. In fact, because a man owned a woman’s body as it was an extension of his own to do with whatever he willed, he was incapable of marital rape. Women who denied men sex needed to be punished.
3) It should be no surprise that Hale was responsible for the trial and execution of women for witchcraft and that his legal opinion would be used as a base for the execution of women and children by the state both in England and the Americas.
4) Women were viewed as extremely susceptible to immorality and becoming a Satanic force in the community. Hale believed it was in society’s best interest for men of the state to step in and control these women. A woman’s primary purpose in adulthood was to be married, be obedient to a man, & to have children.
5) Alito invoking Hale in his opinion made it clear that he also thinks this too. It’s his duty as a man to put the bodily fate of women in the hands of states run by white men.
6) Keep in mind that Hale was only talking about white Christian women. Nonwhite, non-Christian women were viewed as less than human with even less rights.
7) Alito’s invocation of Hale is so deeply, deeply insane that there isn’t a way to possibly overreact to his legal standing here. Rage, horror, disgust, etc. are not deep enough reactions to his legal opinion.
8) Hale is all over our legal system. The easiest application to find was the Salem Witch Trials, but his influence on our laws is much more insidious than that. Marital rape was not completely outlawed in the United States until 1993.
9) Justice Alito and men like him do not see women as independent human beings with their own human rights. They see us as incapable of making our own decisions. They consider men to be divinely appointed to rule over women. This is not an exaggeration.
10) Imagine what they think about women of color, women of non-Christian groups, or trans women and men. The utter disdain towards them is deep, disturbing, incomprehensible, and violent.
I think I know just what she’s saying.
First women lose control over their own bodies.
Then we take away their cats.
Kinda traditional when you think about it.