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My default position is the separation of powers is essential. The legislature representing constituents setting policy (Influenced by popular opinion), executive administering the government business for all the people, and judicial making decisions without the influence of popular opinion. The leak put at risk the judicial ability to make decisions without popular opinion pressure.

I gathered information to see if I could better understand John's argument. Is turning the regulation of abortion back to the states worth jeopardizing the protection of the judicial branch of our government.

This is the information I found.

Roe vs Wade only guarantees up to 13 weeks (first trimester)

1. In the first trimester of pregnancy, the state may not regulate the abortion decision; only the pregnant woman and her attending physician can make that decision.

2. In the second trimester, the state may impose regulations on abortion that are reasonably related to maternal health.

3. In the third trimester, once the fetus reaches the point of “viability,” a state may regulate abortions or prohibit them entirely, so long as the laws contain exceptions for cases when abortion is necessary to save the life or health of the mother.

State regulations.

What states do going forward may change. I think it is unlikely to change much since some of these laws were passed in anticipation that the regulation of abortion would be return to the states.

This is understanding of state abortion regulations.

Every state allows abortion up to a certain number of weeks without state consequences. Lowest number of weeks is 6+.

According to CDC - The majority of abortions in 2019 took place early in gestation: 92.7% of abortions were performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation; 

54% of abortions are by pill taken anytime up to 10 weeks.

EU most countries limit abortion to 12 & 13 weeks after conception. 1 country 20 week and 1 country 22 week.

Two states have heartbeat limit - 6+ weeks.

Most common limits 15 to 24 weeks

22 states have viability no restriction. It is not clear how viability is defined.

Some states have laws to provide for civil lawsuits (damages). I have read Oklahoma's. This is my understanding of it. Civilians who can show standing (injury) can sue abortion providers for abortions from fertilization forward. Abortions that are protected from lawsuit under this law are rape, incest, life of mother, etc. Also protected from lawsuit are abortions using Plan B "morning after" pill. Plan B is effective up to 10 weeks. The mother of aborted chilled cannot be a defendant only providers. The mother can be plaintiff. This is 100% a law for civil lawsuit. It states clearly that the state will not take any action toward abortion providers based on this law. It is HB 4327.

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In general I support the idea of people being able to live their lives the way they want. However, the problem is that's not enough. They REQUIRE the whole rest of the world to pretend along with them.

My wife does most of the construction around the house, and fixes the car too. That doesn't make her a man. Anymore me wishing I was a cat makes me a tiger.

That being said, If a guy wants to dress like a girl that's his prerogative. But that doesn't mean he gets to go into women's bathrooms, or be housed in women's prisons. There's a reason we have women's only spaces.

Moreover, there's a huge difference between adults and kids. Growing up is hard enough. We shouldn't be trying to confuse things anymore than they are. One of the biggest keys to being happy is learning to accept the way things are in life. Stop wishing for the impossible, you will just wish your life away.

Final though, puberty blocking hormones, or surgery on children below the age of 18 is child abuse. WTF has happened to our society that we can't recognize basic facts like this.

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founding

I really like John and as much as he tries to be a maverick and fight the good fight on wokeism and a lot of modern left silliness, he is still a “default liberal“ with many unfounded “default liberal assumptions“. Need assumptions are either incorrect at worst or not objective reality at best.

 saying that Republican senators represent a minority of the population even though they have majority, or something to that effect, requires a lot of selective thoughts. 

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founding

Isn’t there more to the conversation? They were in the middle of talking and the video ended

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Prof. McWhorter is incorrect about the effect of Dobbs (i.e., the case which appears set to reverse Roe). The Court is not *now* taking it into their hands to make policy independent of a clear public majority sentiment; it is *returning* a mixed and contentious policy issue to the public which had been *taken* from it by judicial usurpation in 1973 - the original Roe decision itself.

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Wow. That last fifteen minutes was intense, but it got me thinking: Yes, Prof. McWhorter, I agree that sometimes a wrench needs to be thrown into an ideological machine that's gotten out of control. But when said wrench causes equal, if not more, damage to the institution, then it's doing more harm than good. So no matter how well-intended, dutifully moralistic, and righteously justifiable the person who leaked Alito's opinion may have felt, the action alone has saddled the Supreme Court with irreparable damage. At some point this nation has to set aside ideological differences in order to save the institutions, which define America's singularity. Prof. Loury, this goes back to your conversation with Stephanie Lepp, in which she kept arguing that at least in the interim, what would it hurt to lower admission standards to correct past historical wrongs? (Sort of a pedestrian summation of what she was saying, but I could barely sit through that show because she was so condescending.) Well, for one thing, it weakens the standards of the institution. Look at Congress. That branch of government is more focused on winning elections than actually doing its job: reaching comprise over the legislation needed to address contemporary problems. There is a part of me that says abort and abort often, because far too many people in this country are having children who shouldn't, but the fact remains, the Supreme Court's job is jurisprudence, not deciding what is morally right or wrong. But we live in a country in which every day is hyperbole and hysterics instead of pragmatism and rational thinking. In some ways, we have always been like this. As laudable and exceptional America was when it abolished slavery and bestowed citizenship and voting rights to freed people, there was no plan to deal with the economic and political vacuum left behind in the South after the abolition of slavery and a devastating war. Who could have predicted that the GI Bill would eventually lead to an inundation of people going to college who should have learned a vocational skill instead? Or the draconian drug laws, advocated by community members in the early seventies, which eventually became partly responsible for destroying the nuclear family? I'm ranting at this point, but to speak to the impending war: the best historians of the Civil War will tell you that Americans slaughtered each other wholesale because each side had effectively dehumanized the other, and when every issue in this country today gets a moralistic bent, well, frankly, I'm scared.

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Theo here again with clarification about St. Olaf: What Santurri would not say, but he referred to was this 2017 hoax, a year before our daughter went there. A black girl put a racist note on her own windshield. Not even Minnesota Public Radio would say what it was. Obviously. They’re MPR. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2017/05/10/racist-note-hoax-st-olaf-college-president-says

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John's comment about "non-binary" people is disgraceful. the notion that being eccentric makes one not a member of their sex or that their sex should be irrelevant is completely regressive. The suggestion that people's membership in a sex class is contingent on having the most stereotypical personality? Horrendous. Is a male nurse somehow less of a man for choosing a profession more typical of women? And he mentions Some people "don't like" being associated with their sex class because they are eccentric? maybe society should encourage people not to treat those people as outcasts for being that way. to assert that men with a more feminine personality type are "in-between" is *reprehensible*.

John ask yourself which private single-sex spaces these non-binaries should use. Should they be convicted of a crime, which prison estate should they be sent to. Engaging in this sex rejection is disembodiment, and harmful to children who need to know that their sex informs their bodies' life course.

Enough of this nonsense. we are mammals. we as a species come in to sexes. the fact that some people "don't like this" is as meaningful as a person who doesn't like that we are vertebrates. we simply are.

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founding

This was a weird episode. There were various points where I couldn't possibly get on board with John's point, and it often seemed like he believes that the bubble he lives his daily life in is representative of the US population as a whole.

Most disappointing, though, was his view of the (draft) Supreme Court decision. There was a complete breakdown in logic. Instead he asserted that this decision was a result of the majority power-tripping and pushing a wildly unpopular opinion simply because they had the rare opportunity to do it. I really wonder whether he spent any time reading Alito's decision. On top of that, he straight-out admitted that he was unable to separate the abortion argument itself from the broader argument about whether Roe v Wade was a sound judicial decision. I'm not used to seeing such sloppy thinking from John.

It seems to me that he believes that the ends justify the means in this case, and is unwilling or unable to consider what other ends have come about as a result. When a people get into the habit of believing they're on the right side of history, they start to see checks and balances as unnecessary barriers on the path to utopia. Convinced that they have a full grasp of the TRUTH they can justify actions that undermine our system, such as leaking draft supreme court decisions, because, well, do we REALLY need a court to figure all this stuff out if we've already got the one true answer? It's not a good path to go down.

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Regarding the SCOTUS leak, Nina Totenberg said today: "There's another theory that it was an outraged liberal clerk, but I think the only one that makes sense is that it came from somebody who was afraid this majority might not hold — that Chief Justice Roberts might persuade one of the conservatives to come over to him." That makes sense. Of what possible value is this leak to the left? Sure, it gins up outrage, but it's coming out anyway in two months, when it will be just as much of a bombshell and closer to the election. If the goal was to influence a justice to change or not change their vote, it could only have come from the right. If, say, Kavanaugh was thought to be persuadable by Roberts, this leak has guaranteed that he won't go wobbly.

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Another interesting and thought-provoking episode. I really appreciate the stand that Professor Santurri took, and that Glenn and John are trying to raise awareness about what St. Olaf College did to Professor Santurri.

On the question of transgenderism, I think one part of the story left undiscussed is what must be confusion on the part of children as young as five. As far as I understand, historically, traditional sex education hasn't happened until junior high school at the earliest. Children younger than that aren't even ready for traditional sex education, let alone for instruction that calls into question if they are really boys or girls, distinctions between sex and gender, etc. If we've gotten to a point where one out of eight adolescents consider themselves non-binary, maybe it's a combination of educators causing confusion and doubt from young ages, and the social pressures and search for who one really is that are part and parcel of the adolescent experience. We can add to that the regressive tendency to label certain characteristics (e.g. girls playing sports and boys dancing ballet) as indicative that, respectively, those girls are boys and those boys are girls. (Note: Andrew Sullivan's recent interview with Douglas Murray was an interesting discussion of these topics.) Let's leave the kids alone, instead of leveraging them to their detriment to force their a cause and ideology that has complex implications and is, therefore, worthy of adult conversations amongst, well, adults.

Finally, I'll just say we need to stop deciding that, if we can't get what we want by working within our Constitutional system of governance and existing laws, we'll go outside the system. We hear a lot about how so-and-so is eroding our democratic institutions, almost invariably from people who are happy to act outside of them to advance their own agenda. It can't just be wrong when other people do it. It needs to be wrong all the time and we need to accept that, even on really important issues, everyone wins some and loses some in a democracy, democratic republic, Constitutional republic, etc.

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This book contains valuable information on the transgender trend that has suddenly become such an extraordinary phenomenon: "Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality" https://www.amazon.com/Trans-When-Ideology-Meets-Reality-ebook/dp/B08XQYMWVQ/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1652198616&sr=1-2

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See also “How Personality is being conflated for (sic) gender identity”. Critical African Thinkers - a Substack

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When my kids were in high school in the 90s it was cool to “come out” as bisexual and some of their friends did. It has no consequences, unlike declaring one’s homosexuality. I think that is what is going on with non-binary today. Making that declaration doesn’t require any further steps. And John is right that they will outgrow it .

He does admit that the whole trans business is a fad. He doesn’t want his daughters to follow the crowd. He wants them to think for themselves.

He should get a pass because I am sure his every word in every situation is being monitored by the NYT and social media mavens. God forbid one of his kids does claim to be trans, any critical remarks he might make could lead to visits from a social worker and the transfer of a child to a “more tolerant” foster family. This is no idle threat and many parents have that on their minds as they navigate the always treacherous years of adolescence.

As always these sessions are evidence of Glenn’s clear thinking.

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Sex is like the laws that govern language, like nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Gender is like the conventions we adhere to that make it possible to understand one another: the order in which we arrange them, the ways we identify parts of speech.

There’s room for a great deal of creativity. We can use verbs as nouns, the order of words rearrange we can, and still understand. Poetry may be highly formalistic, or it may break the all the rules.

But all that is still based on a common, universal understanding of how languages work-- and that’s the premise of stories like Arrival. That by knowing how languages work, human beings could understand an alien species like the Heptapods.

What is going on with gender fluidity is an attempt to abolish sex as the foundational starting point for understanding the human condition and to replace it with gender.

I think that eventually this eventually destroys our capacity to relate to one another and to understand the human condition. And when you medicalize it in children, effectively neutering them, you also destroy the future.

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Let’s be honest here. What the democrats did to Trump was

unprecedented. Russia lie, quid pro quo lie, Jan 6th lie and impeachment what 3 times. Then Zuckerberg’s $450 million election money to who and for what? The leak is an extension of this same behavior. The left can justify it all. The media justifies it all. Now going after Clarence Thomas’ wife as well and protesting outside of their homes which is a felony..still justifying. Blaming Trump for a VIRUS, while calling him a every name for closing the borders. Going as far as New York mayor and Pelosi going to China towns in respected states saying all is ok.. leaving the subway system open AND instead of using the ship provided for overruns of sick with Covid, the elderly population was sent back to the senior living facilities ..to make a point against Trump? Sacrificing loved ones. The 2020 rioters are released while Jan 6th bystanders where arrested by Feds for standing outside the Capitol. See Brandon Straka’s story. Some still held in jail 17 months later with no charges. All justified in the eyes of the liberals. It’s political persecution whether it’s Trump or American citizens. There is no limit. The leak is but one more example of democrats creating a crisis to create chaos. They are a group of dangerous people who will stop at nothing to push their narrative.. it’s no different then what’s happening in the schools, as well as all of the new words we are forced to learn such as non binary, fluid and blah blah blah. Where does it stop. LGBT has turned into the entire alphabet and frankly It’s my opinion this is no different than hippies, punk rock, grudge.. over the years.. however, it’s worse. For example, trans are now taking over women’s sports, sex ed is being pushed to children.. so many “blows” for conservatives to fight against and then “gas lighted” by the media. 2000 Mules.. a documentary on the 2020 election .. just another holy hell what is going on? Chaos everywhere.. perpetrated by one group of people. It’s disgusting.

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