If you think overturning Roe v. Wade doesn’t apply to “us”, think again. “Us” has come to mean everyone who is not a heterosexual white man.

I awoke Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022, my iphone messages blowing up with the obscure meme “Welcome to Gilead”. The draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade penned by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, and leaked the night before to Politico and later affirmed as genuine by S. Ct. Justice John Roberts, damning, unequivocal, strident, lifts the federal prohibition on banning abortion. The Republic of Gilead is the fictional country created by author Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale, chillingly elaborated on in the HBO series, in which the former U.S.A. has been taken over by a right wing religious theocracy in which women are little more than baby producers and sexual companions, subject to torture and enslavement, and the edict “hang by the neck until you are dead”, is amplified by public hanging as an example to the populace, which was likely preceded by a stoning by your peers.

Assuming the Supreme Court’s leaked opinion stands, it is a stepping stone to overturning every right that we have obtained in the last 50 plus years. To wade through the legalese, the opinion as written rejects the legal basis for privacy rights we now take for granted but which we did not have when I was an adolescent: Gay marriage aside, who among you remembers that we did not have the right to contraception; we did not have the right to marry outside of our race; and so on. Lets not forget that marital “rape” was not rape, just legitimate sex. I expect to see gay marriage on the chopping block in the next couple of years. Right wingers across the nation are rubbing their hands in anticipation of the massive rollback of landmark cases that have made our country more humane and civilized and that have rubbed them the wrong way for decades.

“Our collective inattention to the good vs. evil battle that has been waged and won has placed the Supreme Court of the United States in a position to impose a theocratic rule of law is now coming to fruition.”

Alito’s opinion upends the Constitutional legal structure on which privacy rights, including the right of gays to marry, bears witness to the ultimate irony that legal rights are indeed fragile and that our collective inattention to the good vs. evil battle that has been waged and won has placed the Supreme Court of the United States in a position to impose a theocratic rule of law is now coming to fruition.

When Alito says banning abortion is not invidious discrimination against women - that is a conceptual legalese bullshit conclusion - men are unable to get abortions thus, it is per se discrimination against women. You can expect that they will also say that removing the right to gay marriage is not “discriminating” against us. The key reason for the court to avoid “discrimination” is to allow a less rigorous legal analysis of the relationship between the facts and state law that has come before the court. Thus, to conclude that a ban on abortion does not discriminate against women allows the court to apply only a “rational basis test” to the law in question. Those of us who study constitutional law know that a rational basis test will allow the states to enact almost any egregious law. All it means is you have to present some scenario that “rationally” connects the law to the fact pattern.

“Heightened scrutiny” of a contested law will only occur when the court concludes that discrimination against women or another minority will result by upholding the law. So in this case it was very important to emphasize that banning women from obtaining abortions is not discriminating against them as women. That’s not only counterintuitive, it’s an oxymoron. Alito and his right wing cohorts will twist legal concepts to suit their goals of sending this country back to the 1950s, women back to the kitchen with our bare foot firmly nailed to the floor, and us the LGBTQ alphabet soup - back to our closets. And I mean all of us. They are coming for you and for me.

Thus, the meme “Welcome to Gilead” is most apt and chilling. The only possible good outcome of this decision is that it will inflame and mobilize Democrats who have sunk into apathy and reliance on seeing the grownups back in the White House. Wake up ladies and gentlemen and non binary folk - This may be the last chance to catch the freedom train before the gate slams shut behind us.