Althouse

The open letter, whose signees include regular contributors to the Times and prominent writers and journalists like Ed Yong, Lucy Sante, Roxane Gay, and Rebecca Solnit, comes at a time when far-right extremist groups and their analogues in state legislatures are ramping up their attacks on trans young people....

In recent years and months, the Times has decided to play an outsized role in laundering anti-trans narratives and seeding the discourse with those narratives, publishing tens of thousands of handwringing words on trans youth—reporting that is now approvingly cited and lauded, as the letter writers note, by those who seek to ban and criminalize gender-affirming care.

This is an excellent article by Emily Bazelon in The New York Times. I'm not going to try to summarize it. If you're not a subscriber, I think it's worth one of your "free reads."

The Star Tribune has a column (by lawprof Laura Hermer) titled "Pregnant people have rights. Products of conception don't. The leaked Dobbs draft opinion gets fetal rights backward." The text uses the phrase "pregnant person" 5 times and there's also one "person who gave birth" and 5 appearances. 

The word "women" does show up once at the very beginning and once at the very end — in the phrase "women's rights." If you want strong political speech on this issue, you need to say "women's rights." You invite ridicule — even if we stifle our urge to ridicule outside of the confines of our head — if you decorously substitute "pregnant people's rights."

At USA Today, there's "People of color, the poor and other marginalized people to bear the brunt if Roe v. Wade is overturned" by Nada Hassanein. Wouldn't it be stronger to write "Women of color, the poor and other marginalized women"? 

We're told: "If Roe is overturned, people may travel hundreds of miles to get to states where abortions are still allowed. Young and low-income people, who are disproportionately of color, may not be able to afford the cost of travel." Wouldn't "women" generate more empathy? But "people" is used to remember to be empathetic to trans people. 

Anyway, the word "woman" is also used repeatedly in that article, including to refer to the as-yet-not-renamed National Women’s Law Center. 

The Washington Post has "Roe to be decided in one of the worst cities to be Black and pregnant/The stakes are not evenly spread across people who become pregnant, and if the Supreme Court justices need a reminder of that, they don’t have to look far" (by Theresa Vargas). The article does use the word "women" many times, along with many appearances of "people." We're told the Court's "mulling over what protections pregnant people deserve" is occurring in a geographic location where "almost all the pregnant people dying are Black." There's a quote from a report that says "Black birthing people constitute roughly half of all births in DC." (As if the "birthing people" are the "births"!) 

There are a lot of pieces about the Dobbs draft in The Washington Post, but only one other uses "pregnant people": "Meet the Reddit ‘Aunties’ covertly helping people get abortions/The Reddit group offers a glimpse into a post-Roe era where people resort to informal networks to assist those locked out of an abortion" (by Pranshu Verma). This one is very intent on saying "people" and not "women." "People" appears 18 times and the only appearance of the word "women" (there's no "woman") is in a caption under a photo of a clinic that has the word "Women's" in its name. 

Meanwhile, in the NYT, the phrase "pregnant people" has only appeared once since the draft leaked (and there's no example of "pregnant person"). It's in a new column by Emily Bazelon, "Beware the Feminism of Justice Alito." 

So that's a little evidence that the "pregnant people" nicety is getting nixed.

I can't check every elite publication for the absence of "pregnant people" — not if I want to write in this form called blog — but I did check one more, which I regard as an exemplar of liberal elitism, The New Yorker. It has not printed "pregnant people" since last November, in "If Roe v. Wade Goes, What Next?" (by David Remnick). 

I'll stop here, so I can post, but I'll be looking at this issue.

Creative writing is any writing that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature.... Both fictional and non-fictional works fall into this category....

Writing in Esquire in 1966, Phillip K. Tompkins noted factual discrepancies after he traveled to Kansas and spoke to some of the same people interviewed by Capote... Tompkins concluded:

Capote has, in short, achieved a work of art. He has told exceedingly well a tale of high terror in his own way. But, despite the brilliance of his self-publicizing efforts, he has made both a tactical and a moral error that will hurt him in the short run. By insisting that "every word" of his book is true he has made himself vulnerable to those readers who are prepared to examine seriously such a sweeping claim.

True crime writer Jack Olsen also commented on the fabrications:

"I recognized it as a work of art, but I know fakery when I see it... Capote completely fabricated quotes and whole scenes.... That book did two things. It made true crime an interesting, successful, commercial genre, but it also began the process of tearing it down. I blew the whistle in my own weak way. I'd only published a couple of books at that time – but since it was such a superbly written book, nobody wanted to hear about it."

For seven justices, the decision involved a simple constitutional question. They saw the law as an effort to force religious belief into the science curriculum, and they struck it down.

He saw the case as a question about certainty: What can we really know for sure? Pointing to “ample uncontradicted testimony that ‘creation science’ is a body of scientific knowledge, rather than revealed belief,” he chided his colleagues for treating the evidence for evolution as “conclusive.”

The people of Louisiana... are quite entitled, as a secular matter, to have whatever scientific evidence there may be against evolution presented in their schools, just as Mr. Scopes was entitled to present whatever scientific evidence there was for it. Perhaps what the Louisiana Legislature has done is unconstitutional because there is no such evidence, and the scheme they have established will amount to no more than a presentation of the Book of Genesis. But we cannot say that on the evidence before us in this summary judgment context, which includes ample uncontradicted testimony that "creation science" is a body of scientific knowledge, rather than revealed belief. Infinitely less can we say (or should we say) that the scientific evidence for evolution is so conclusive that no one could be gullible enough to believe that there is any real scientific evidence to the contrary, so that the legislation's stated purpose must be a lie. Yet that illiberal judgment, that Scopes-in-reverse, is ultimately the basis on which the Court's facile rejection of the Louisiana Legislature's purpose must rest.

“History is a rock-solid science compared to moral philosophy,” Scalia said at the University of Virginia School of Law in 2010. In other words, he saw his project as stripping the law of judicial ideology. When his colleagues reached results that matched their politics, he derided them with the phrase “any stick to beat a dog,” according to another former clerk, Bruce Hay, now a law professor at Harvard. To prove the impartiality of originalism, Scalia often pointed to the occasional votes he cast against his preferences, like his support for a 5-to-4 ruling in 1989 that found a right to burn the flag in the First Amendment.

And so it’s striking, observes Justin Driver, a law professor at the University of Chicago, “that the justice who more conspicuously than any other was invested in trying to make legal interpretation objective sometimes seemed to be skeptical of science itself, the best means we have of pursuing objectivity.” 

At an argument before the Supreme Court in 2006, in a case about climate change, a lawyer for Massachusetts gently corrected Scalia for referring to the stratosphere instead of the troposphere. “Whatever,” Scalia responded. “I told you before I’m not a scientist. That’s why I don’t want to have to deal with global warming, to tell you the truth.”

In 2013, the lawyer defending California’s ban on same-sex marriage gave no examples of how allowing gay couples to marry could be harmful. “I don’t know why you don’t mention some concrete things,” Scalia prodded him. “There’s considerable disagreement among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or not.” In fact, at that point there was a strong body of evidence showing that children fare as well with gay parents as they do with straight ones.

He dismissed the findings of a panel of the National Research Council, which surveyed the relevant studies and unanimously concluded in 2012 that the death penalty does not have a deterrent effect. To support his claim to the contrary, Scalia cited three articles. Two were statistical studies that the National Research Council had discredited. The lead author of the third (which was not an empirical evaluation) had previously stated that his paper did not claim the death penalty had a deterrent effect. “Scalia was willing to cite work that was thoroughly refuted by an accepted scholarly institution, without feeling any need to buttress his position,” says John Donohue, a Stanford economist and law professor who conducts empirical research on the death penalty.

And finally, JUSTICE BREYER speculates that it does not “seem likely” that the death penalty has a “significant” deterrent effect. It seems very likely to me, and there are statistical studies that say so. See, e.g., Zimmerman, State Executions, Deterrence, and the Incidence of Murder, 7 J. Applied Econ. 163, 166 (2004) (“[I]t is estimated that each state execution deters approximately fourteen murders per year on average”); Dezhbakhsh, Rubin, & Shepherd, Does Capital Punishment Have a Deterrent Effect? New Evidence from Postmoratorium Panel Data, 5 Am. L. & Econ. Rev. 344 (2003) (“[E]ach execution results, on average, in eighteen fewer murders” per year); Sunstein & Vermeule, Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? Acts, Omissions, and Life-Life Tradeoffs, 58 Stan. L. Rev. 703, 713 (2005) (“All in all, the recent evidence of a deterrent effect from capital punishment seems impressive, especially in light of its ‘apparent power and unanimity’”). But we federal judges live in a world apart from the vast majority of Americans. After work, we retire to homes in placid suburbia or to high-rise co-ops with guards at the door. We are not confronted with the threat of violence that is ever present in many Americans’ everyday lives. The suggestion that the incremental deterrent effect of capital punishment does not seem “significant” reflects, it seems to me, a let-them-eat- cake obliviousness to the needs of others. Let the People decide how much incremental deterrence is appropriate.

The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education released a statement clarifying that the “unfortunate situation” is because “of the student’s change in residency.”

“Even if the family's new St. Louis County school district participated in the transfer program, the student would still not be able to transfer. This situation stems from the 1980 U.S. Court of Appeals ruling that the St. Louis City and County schools were maintaining segregated systems. In 1983, the schools reached a Desegregation Settlement Agreement allowing African-American students to transfer into primarily white suburban school districts and for non-African American students to attend St. Louis schools. The goal was to try to balance the racial makeup of the city and county schools,” the statement read.

Justice Stephen Breyer sounded a sad and grim note of dissent [in Parents Involved]. Pointing out that the court was rejecting student-assignment plans that the districts had designed to stave off de facto resegregation, Breyer wrote that “to invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown.” By invoking Brown v. Board of Education, the court’s landmark 1954 civil rights ruling, Breyer accused the majority of abandoning a touchstone in the country’s efforts to overcome racial division. “This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret,” he concluded.

Breyer’s warning, along with even more dire predictions from civil rights groups, helped place the court’s ruling at the center of the liberal indictment of the Roberts court. In Louisville, too, the court’s verdict met with resentment. Last fall, I asked Pat Todd, the assignment director for the school district of Jefferson County, which encompasses Louisville and its suburbs, whether any good could come of the ruling. She shook her head so hard that strands of blond hair loosened from her bun. “No,” she said with uncharacteristic exasperation, “we’re already doing what we should be.”