From Pride to Wrath

getting the anger out there

I wanted to write about Tōkyō (I still will, just not today) for my subscribers.

I wanted to write about rejections and querying and might do so later this week.

I wanted to introduce a new subscription tier and the benefits that would come with that.

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But, and the irony has not escaped me after singing the praises of the 2013 Supreme Court just a week ago, the June 30 decision in 303 Creative v. Elenis has rendered me aghast.

artist unknown

Raw emotion incoming. And as my debate teacher noted in ninth grade, I wax histrionic when upset. Buckle up.

After other rulings this week that eliminated affirmative action and imposed fiscal policy from the bench for student loans, the reality of the moral and financial corruption of six of the justices on the Roberts court has been branded into our history books.

Others have written more eloquently on the impact of ending affirmative action on not only Black Americans and Hispanic Americans, but on white women as well. Especially because legacy and athlete admissions, the biggest funnel for white men into elite colleges, remain untouched. Others have noted how eager Clarence Thomas was to burn down the system that got him where he was (although I remember his Senate hearings and still blame Joe Biden for letting that misogynist with the traitorous wife onto the bench in the first place).

Others have highlighted the utter hypocrisy of attacking student loan forgiveness when PPP loan forgiveness benefitted many in Congress for amounts varying from a few hundred thousand to more than one million.

But queer people, myself included, are raging loudest over the 303 Creative decision, which allows for government-sanctioned discrimination against us.

I could veer into ad hominem territory and note, based on the 303 Creative portfolio and the clear penchant the proprietress has for bad 1990s hairstyles, that no queer person would ever bring work there but that would be missing a critical point.

303 Creative did not exist as a business until the day after said proprietress file her initial lawsuit. To make matters worse, the customer she based her complaint on, which, to summarize, said that someone gay is making me create a wedding website and I hate same-sex marriage but the state of Colorado won’t let me exercise my bigotry in peace so I’m suing, was a heterosexual man who, at the time of the suit, was more than ten years into his marriage to his lovely wife.

It’s not bad enough that the Roberts court has basically said fuck you to stare decisis, the legal principle that refuses to challenge settled law, a principle, by the way, that every candidate to the court has claimed to stand by during their Senate hearings, but that they would actually hear a case based on so many falsehoods?

But heck, if such a case is in the interests of the millionaires and billionaires who continue to bribe the court, then what do facts matter? Dragging the country back to a pre-New Deal era of social injustice is apparently sufficient.

And to make everything all the more laughable, on the same day on which the 303 Creative ruling was released, June 30th, the Log Cabin Republicans came out swinging. Not against that ruling, mind you, but against the off-the-charts level of homophobia on display from the DeSantis campaign.

To which I could only respond by sharing the artwork of Adam Ellis.

One final reminder…

Miss me with the blaming people for not voting in 2016. Never mind that the electoral college results wouldn’t have changed. The fact that Mitch McConnell refused to give Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee for Supreme Court Justice, a hearing says all we need to know about the far-right’s desperate need to legislate queer people out of existence. Not to mention the mysterious and under-investigated and under-reported reasons for Justice Kennedy’s resignation during the administration of TFG.