By: David Conde
One of the significant outcomes for Putin in his war on Ukraine are the heavy losses in the field and the reversal of his vision for his enemy to be absorbed into the greater politic of the Russian State. Unable to achieve a quick win or any win at all, the dictator is resorting to desperate measures by destroying whole cities and killing civilians in large numbers.
This is World War II all over again in that part of Eastern Europe in a losing cause. Russia is doing what Nazi Germany did to the same region and the world beginning 83 years ago also in a losing cause. The attack on a Woman’s right to choose has many of the same characteristics as the United State Supreme Court has joined the fight to do violence to what most of the Justices had said was settled law. In 1973 the same court said that “the Constitution of the United States protects a woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction.”
Evidently, the notion of precedent in interpreting the Constitution now has less value than it used to have. I know the LGBTQ community is very nervous about their recently won rights to marry and be treated as every other American.
Women’s rights issues are much bigger than any other kind for demographic reasons and more importantly, because of the fact that it is a male-female thing. This set of opposites cannot really be reconciled because they are the ultimate psychological and cultural adversaries in any power structure.
The final resolution of that dynamic will come from women taking policy-making power and dictating a new set of rules by which we should live. In our modern democratic society, this is a matter of political will because the numbers are there.
As a Latino, I see this overreach by the Supreme Court as a step that could lead to more bad things for the community. A prime example of this is the Governor of Texas Greg Abbott’s effort to initiate an effort to deny an education to a large number of students from immigrant families in that state.
Decades ago (1982), in a case known as Plyler v. Doe, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that denied undocumented students admission to public schools. The Court found that the Texas law violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
That was the same clause used to rule on the 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education case that abolished segregated schools and declared that “separate but equal facilities for Whites and African American students were inherently unequal.”
However, Governor Abbott is emboldened by the change in stance of the Supreme Court on Roe v. Wade and is poised to try again to deny an education to students from Latino immigrant families. The feeling seems to be that even the 1954 decision of Brown v. Board of Education may not be settled law.
Early in my career, I carried with me the transcript of court testimony by Jose Angel Cardenas the then superintendent of a San Antonio School District that endeavored to prove the gross shortcomings of school finance in poor Texas school systems. At that time, Dr. Cardenas provided Mexican Americans another tool to challenge the condition of education in their communities.
The tools to challenge discrimination are still available to us. They can be a defense against a desperate people.
