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Land of the free? – Daily Montanan [1]

['More From Author', 'July', 'Mary Moe']

Date: 2022-07-08  

“What, to a slave, is the Fourth of July?” abolitionist Frederick Douglass famously asked 170 years ago. It’s a question that begs revisiting this year. Sure, we’re celebrating the day when 56 men declared that all men were created equal. But let’s be frank. “Men” really meant men and “all” didn’t really mean all.

“All men” didn’t include the slaves these men owned or the women they controlled. The inalienable rights the signers claimed for themselves would remain alien to us “chattel.” Slaves were freed in 1863 and accorded equal protection under the law in 1868. By 1870 Black men, on paper at least, could vote. It took women, whatever their color, another half-century to get that most fundamental right of citizenship.

That’s all we got. In 1920 in this land of the free, we couldn’t wear pants in public, serve on a jury or own property if married. Our husbands could no longer beat us to pulp with impunity, but domestic violence was considered a “private matter” until the 1970s. We couldn’t even get a credit card until 1975.

Fast-forward to 2022. The pay gap is narrowing, but it’s still there. Career progression for women is still lower. Roughly 10% of us make it to the top. The bottom, though, we know inside and out. We’re more likely than men to live in poverty — twice as likely when we retire.

We’re also more likely to suffer harms that affect our earning power: injuries in car crashes, workplace harassment, sexual assault, human trafficking, food insecurity. Clearly, we’re more likely to need healthcare. We pay more and get less for it.

Two weeks ago, that right was stripped away by the highest court in the land. The “originalist” majority tried to put the gloss of respectability on the stripping, trotting out a cherry-picked history of the Fourteenth Amendment, apparently unaware of the accepted abortion practices left untouched by the original originalists. No matter. The neo-originalists’ unreasoned “reason” is just a cover story.

The true reason is that they have a religious belief they want to impose on all of us, the very kind of imposition that brought the first European immigrants to our shores. They were nominated to the Court for that explicit purpose, masked their intent in confirmation hearings, and threw off judicial restraint in their lust to get it done. Dobbs is a travesty of jurisprudence. It’s an assault on our very first freedom. Most importantly, it relegates more than half of this country to second-class citizenship once more.

So what, to a woman, is this Fourth of July?

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