As we wait for justice, more injustice yet

The dog days of an unusually (but now more usually) hot summer are upon us. The US Supreme Court, which should be a beacon of objectivity and justice, has morphed into a theocratic  abomination, abandoning the rights of women seeking to terminate pregnancies, forcing them to flee state jurisdictions like escaped slaves. And these same states try to control ever more by adopting policies to chase women across state borders, to criminalize both seekers and providers. It feels like pre-Civil War and post Reconstruction over again. This is to say nothing about other injustices they are perpetrating, church and state separation for example, and will gleefully continue to do so until the average citizen has lost all her or his protections. All in the service of “life” and Jesus.

These conditions are an outgrowth of an uneducated (or poorly educated) populace. I can hear Trump bellowing “I love the uneducated!” Of course he did. They either fall for his blarney or use his words to hammer those they fear. But what’s to be said of the educated people who conspire to destabilize institutions that used to protect the rights of the powerless? Presumably they know better. They have Ivy League degrees, privilege, wealth. I can’t understand why only a few of them have broken with the untruth and why most of them have continued to spout sophistries justifying their support of oppression. My experience of such people is that they are the first to protect themselves, to hire expensive attorneys, when they find themselves in trouble. Suddenly the protections built into the system become important to them. Otherwise, like the craven Senator Josh Hawley, they can be seen running away from the trouble they have caused. Hawley will forever be associated with his rat like scurry from the Senate building. He has lost all moral authority but the populace may ignore the symbolic nature of what he did. Those who oppress others will do everything they can to cover their own asses.

Which brings me to wrongful convictions, the atrocities visited upon those who did not know how to protect themselves and spoke to police without an attorney or who didn’t have the funds to hire private detectives and so forth. The courts and the politicians have made it progressively difficult to overturn tainted jury verdicts, and now, after a Supreme Court decision negating Miranda rights, have put in place yet another barrier to truth. It is now some 28 years since the Rafay family was murdered and 18 years after the flawed trial; Atif and Sebastian are still imprisoned. During that time the barriers to their release have only been built higher, like the prison walls themselves. Still we have hope that justice will prevail this year. That the hypocrites, the professed lovers of life and Jesus–who know little of either–will continue to be exposed, like Hawley, as the oppressors they really are.