The Supreme Court's Radical Right Turn Is About Restoring Patriarchy, Plain and Simple

[marmar]

The Supreme Court’s Radical Right Turn Is About Restoring Patriarchy, Plain and Simple

By Leah Litman
May 13, 20255:40 AM

This essay is excerpted and adapted from Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes, which was published by One Signal Publishers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, on Tuesday.

(Slate) When the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in the 2022 decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the dissenters warned that “one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.” In the framework of the biggest hit film the following year, the Barbie movie, the decision to eliminate a woman’s right to reproductive freedom was a Ken-surrection—a move to restore a patriarchy where men are on top.

Overruling Roe was just the opening salvo in this fight, which has raged ever since and only been exacerbated by Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

The decision overruling Roe illustrates how the Supreme Court can make constitutional law worse through a cycle that merges feelings and politics with courts and law. The feeling behind the process that produced Dobbs was patriarchy. Those are now the vibes animating this area of law after Republicans turned assorted feelings about feminism and gender roles into a political strategy, and Republican justices channeled the big feelings about feminism and women’s sexual liberation to hard launch a gender counterrevolution. Originalism was merely a vessel for Republicans’ anti-feminist thoughts and prayers, but that ideology goes well beyond the jurisprudential methodology of originalism. Which means the law may as well.

As the feminist movement of the mid-1900s took off, so too did a strand of anti-feminist male grievance politics. After Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment, the constitutional amendment that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, a countermovement pushed states not to ratify the measure. A young lawyer who worked in the Richard Nixon administration wrote a memo offering various objections to the ERA. That lawyer’s name was William H. Rehnquist (the same William H. Rehnquist who Nixon would later nominate to the Supreme Court and Ronald Reagan would make chief justice of the United States). Rehnquist blasted the ERA’s “overtones of dislike and distaste for the traditional difference between men and women in the family unit” and warned that outlawing sex discrimination would cause “the eventual elimination” and “dissolution of the family.” Phyllis Schlafly, one of the principal organizers against the amendment, urged the country to reject the ERA on the ground that “women’s lib is a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother and on the family as the basic unit of society.” She also accused feminists of “promoting” “day-care centers for babies instead of homes” (among other things). ................(more)

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/05/leah-litman-lawless-supreme-courts-alito-news.html

[Walleye]

1. Well, it's been 50 or 60 years, have Family have been eliminated in America? I don't think so.

[Attilatheblond]

3. Empowerment/equality for women strengthens families

Weak male bullies are not good for families and other growing things. Weak male bullies are trying to use politics and the courts to keep them on the top of the heap.

[Walleye]

7. Weak male bullies, sometimes kill themselves and their whole family because they can't cope with their temper

[rampartd]

4. not eliminated

but the extended family has been almost completely replaced by nuclear families and single parent situations.

[Walleye]

5. If it gives a person a larger support system, ok

They aren’t following any other traditions like due process or freedom of speech. They expect us to be “traditional wives”.

[rampartd]

2. opposition to women's rights includes many women

phyllis shaf[ey claimed credit for killing the era. the anti abortion crowd is mostly female.

[Walleye]

6. Oh, don't I know it, Madeline Albright said, "special place in hell"

[LatteLady]

8. Back to the 1600's

Alito’s opinion in Dobbs relied on the 17th century writings of Hale, an extreme misogynist even for his own time.

By claiming “originalism”, the right wing Supreme Court members purport to represent what the original founders & authors of the constitution “meant”. Of course at the time the Constitution was written, slavery was legal and men “owned” their daughters, wives, and children; no objection to these social horrors was expressed.

While I appreciate the exit from the monarchy and the attempt to develop a set of laws that improved life for “common” white male landowners (guess who wrote the documents!), and no one else, the embrace of such “original” racism and misogyny has nothing to do with fairness or justice, and everything to do with opposition to anything that threatens their patriarchal unearned male supremacy.