Tag: state laws
Good Luck Fighting Disinformation – The Atlantic
In April 2022, Nick Sawyer sat down before a committee of the California State Assembly to argue for legislation to help limit the spread of COVID falsehoods. Sawyer, an emergency-room physician, had become frustrated by what he saw as the failure of his profession to respond to doctors sharing false information about the pandemic. He’d co-founded an advocacy group, No License for Disinformation (NLFD), and now he was testifying in favor of legislation that warned doctors of professional consequences for
End Adoption Secrecy – The Atlantic
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You could say I grew up not knowing who I was. I knew that I’d been born in an Indianapolis hospital in 1968, and that my parents had adopted me when I was 10 days old. That was it. I didn’t know who my birth parents were, or why they couldn’t raise me. I had no medical history.
If you had asked
The Anti-abortion Movement’s Attack on Wanted Pregnancies
In the nearly two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, we’ve witnessed the sober consequences of denying abortions to people who desperately want them. Women have been forced to continue pregnancies that have almost killed them, and given birth to children they can’t afford to care for, children conceived by rape, and children they are simply not ready to have. Now we’re seeing the flip side of the anti-abortion movement’s push to give legal rights to
How Financial Strength Weakened American Feminism
By the time the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, many Americans had already opened their wallets to protest. In the approximately 24 hours after the Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization leaked early, the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue raised $12 million, and Reproductive Freedom for All’s donations increased by 1,400 percent. According to one researcher, more than 300 crowdfunded GoFundMe campaigns drew in nearly $3.2 million in the seven months between the
Red States Are Rolling Back the Rights Revolution
The struggle over the sweeping red-state drive to roll back civil rights and liberties has primarily moved to the courts.
Since 2021, Republican-controlled states have passed a swarm of laws to restrict voting rights, increase penalties for public protest, impose new restrictions on transgender youth, ban books, and limit what teachers, college professors, and employers can say about race, gender, and sexual orientation. Some states are even exploring options to potentially prosecute people who help women travel out of
Dobbs Is No Brown v. Board of Education
Homer Plessy is being recognized more and more. In 1896, the light-skinned, French-speaking Louisianan gen de coleur was memorialized in what is considered one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history, Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld Jim Crow segregation laws. The decision is second in infamy only to the Dred Scott decision, which upheld slavery and declared that Black men had no rights that white men were bound to respect.
As one of the worst Supreme Court
The Supreme Court Begins the Next Fight Over Guns in America
This morning, the Supreme Court struck down a New York State law that limited concealed-firearm permits to those with a demonstrated need to carry arms outside the home. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the 6–3 majority in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, said, “The Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.” Bruen thus opens one of the next major battlegrounds over guns in America:
The Fight for Democracy Will Be a Long, Long Haul
The fault lines of today’s political chasm go back to the decades that preceded the Civil War. One can see them in our geography—most of the states that will recriminalize abortion, for example, are in the old Confederacy and the rural or deindustrialized regions it influenced—and in our racial division, which continues to render the country into, more or less, two camps.
A democratic society might resolve its conflicts by counting heads. But the rigid Constitution, written to protect the
What Voter Fraud in Texas Really Looks Like
When I met with Crystal Mason recently at her home in Rendon, Texas, we sat on a wide couch that served as the center of her domain, with plenty of space for children, grandchildren, nephews, and nieces. Their photographs filled the house. Mason’s mother called to her from another room, needing advice; later, her eight-month-old grandson, Carter, joined us on the couch after waking up from an afternoon nap. For hours that day, Mason spoke candidly about the
The Judge Who Told the Truth About the Mississippi Abortion Ban
Of all the arguments that animate the anti-abortion cause, two stand out as particularly far-fetched: that banning abortion protects women’s health and shields African Americans from genocide. Yet for years, these arguments have driven debates over state laws, served as justifications for court decisions upholding those laws, and even appeared on billboards warning women in predominantly Black communities not to kill their babies. Three years ago, Mississippi lawmakers prohibited almost all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy to save