On Greensboro.com, longtime SCOTUS reporter Dahlia Lithwick describes the impact of the female justices on court proceedings:
The addition of more women justices, Lithwick said, has changed everything.
As recently as the Hobby Lobby case in 2014, Justice Kennedy avoided naming the actual contraceptive devices in question. It took the women in the room to say “IUD” out loud.
When the court heard Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt last October, Lithwick said, questions by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor during oral arguments pierced the pretense that the new abortion clinic requirements were about women’s safety. That law, which required abortion clinics to meet surgical center requirements, would have closed all but a handful of abortion clinics in the state of Texas.
“I have to tell you what it was like to see three women justices just strap on their skates and go,” Lithwick told the gathering. “They held a roller derby of gender in there, and it was so powerful to see the three women justices just take over the room.”
The male justices are hearing women’s voices, stories and perspectives in a way they hadn’t — not just from the women serving on the court, but from women arguing cases before the court, organizations like Planned Parenthood talking to the court and amicus briefs from women who have firsthand experience openly talking to the court.
Which suggests that efforts to shutdown Planned Parenthood may be doomed. Not that they’ll stop; this attack by Kansas Legislator Peggy Mast has attracted a lot of attention. She posted a video in which an anti-choice warrior quoted Hitler in connection with Planned Parenthood and caught a shitstorm in response. This is her explanation:
To clarify the intent of my previous post [connecting Planned Parenthood to Hitler]: Planned Parenthood has learned well the same tactics and deception used by Hitler regarding innocent lives. I was not in any way agreeing with Hitler’s words, rather, I was making a connection between the ideology he used and the arguments made by Planned Parenthood. I find both deplorable and heartbreaking.
