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The “religious liberty” angle for overturning the overturning of Dobbs

Paging the Satanic Temple to the white courtesy stirrups.

Cory Doctorow
6 min readJul 11, 2023
Moses parting the Red Sea. On the seabed is revealed a Planned Parenthood clinic. Image: Nina Paley (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moses-Splits-Sea_by_Nina_Paley.jpg CC0 1.0 https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en — Kristina D.C. Hoeppner (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/4nitsirk/40406966752/ CC BY-SA 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

The Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop (I’m a grad, instructor and board member) is having its fundraiser auction to help defray tuition. I’ve donated a “Tuckerization” — the right to name a character in a future novel:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/clarion-sf-fantasy-writers-workshop-23-campaign/#/

Frank Wilhoit’s definition of “conservativism” remains a classic:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

Conservativism is, in other words, the opposite of the rule of law, which is the idea that the law applies equally to all. Many of America’s most predictably weird moments live in the tension between the rule of law and the conservative’s demand to be protected — but not bound — by the law.

Think of the Republican women of Florida whose full-throated support for the perfomatively cruel and bigoted policies of Ron Desantis turned to howls of outrage when the governor signed a law “overhauling alimony”…

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow

Written by Cory Doctorow

Writer, blogger, activist. Blog: https://pluralistic.net; Mailing list: https://pluralistic.net/plura-list; Mastodon: @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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