Opinions from Breyer, Kagan and Sotomayor send stark warning about increasingly radical court abandoning long-held principles
Taken together, the dissents written by the three liberal justices this term send a clear warning about an increasingly radical court that is abandoning long-held principles and even the facts of a case to enact an extreme conservative agenda in America.
While supreme court opinions can frequently become mired in legalese that is incomprehensible to the average reader, the wording of the liberals’ dissents is often simple and direct. The opinions can read like a desperate attempt to reach beyond the court’s standard audience of legal experts to speak to the millions of people who will feel the impact of these rulings.
“Today, the court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion to conservatives’ decision in Carson v Makin. She concluded: “With growing concern for where this court will lead us next, I respectfully dissent.”
At a recent family wedding, I was asked to give the happy couple some marital advice. I had jotted down a speech on a piece of paper that was now folded up in my pocket. As I listened to the other guests’ toasts, my 2-year-old granddaughter pulled at my legs, begging to be picked up. “Nana, Nana,” Joli called.
Her mother, Janine, my foster daughter, tried to peel the child’s limbs from mine, her two legs tighter than a stink bug on a stick. Finally, it was my turn.
Joli nestled her head into my neck, thumb in mouth. I pulled Janine closer with my other hand, kissing her mop of curls.
In that moment, I traded in my carefully written tribute for the succinct maxim that had just popped into my head — and had brought endless joy and meaning into my life. “Make room for the unexpected,” I said. Continue reading Doctor FeelGood: The Unexpected Foster Mother→
[Note: It’s rare that blog material turns up in the real estate section, especially the mainly rather upscale version in the Washington Post, and particularly in the rather very upscale horsey parts of Loudoun County, Virginia, out near where the Shenandoah Valley begins. But for many decades once upon a time, much of Loudoun was Quaker country, and there are still active meetings in the region. There’s also lots of Quaker history to see and explore; and here’s a glimpse at a special piece of it.]
Stone Eden Farm is typical of the small farms owned by Quakers in the 18th century
The stone house was built in 1765. An addition was made in 1817. (Mario Mineros Photography)
By Kathy Orton — June 3, 2022
Stone Eden Farm, a historical Quaker farm in Hamilton, Va., with roots that go back more than 250 years, is on the market for just under $1.4 million.
When Lord Fairfax owned what would become Loudoun County, he granted land there to William Hatcher, a Quaker who moved to the area from Pennsylvania. By 1765, Hatcher had built a house on the land as required by Fairfax as a condition of the deed, or patent. That stone patent house has been home to generations of farmers.
Like most Quakers who came to Loudoun County, Hatcher was drawn to its fertile pastureland. Stone Eden Farm was typical of the small farms owned by Quakers in the 18th century. Because of their religious beliefs, Quakers did not rely on enslaved labor, and their farms tended to be smaller than the plantations in eastern and southern Loudoun. Continue reading Here’s a Great Look at the Quaker “Good Old Days.” Beautiful — But a Lot of Work→
Reuters- More than 4,500 antiwar protesters arrested in one day in Russia, group says .
On March 6, antiwar protesters were beaten with batons as they were arrested by Russian police in Yekaterinburg, Russia. (Reuters)
By Brittany Shammas and Reis Thebault — March 6 2022
More than 4,500 protesters were arrested Sunday at antiwar demonstrations across Russia, according to the independent human rights organization OVD-Info, as people risked jail time to denounce the nation’s war with Ukraine.
The scenes joined other displays of defiance in a country that has continued to clamp down on opposition to the invasion. Crowds chanted “No to war!” while streaming through Moscow and St. Petersburg in a pair of videos posted to Twitter. In another, a demonstrator being hauled away by law enforcement sang Ukraine’s anthem.
A woman was recorded telling a police officer she had survived the Nazi siege of Leningrad, the former name of St. Petersburg, and lost both her parents. Another woman added, “We have relatives, we have friends in Ukraine.”
“You came to support fascists?” the officer responded, a reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s justification for the war.
“What fascists?” the crowd asked.
The officer then gave an order: “Arrest everyone.”
Authorities on Sunday arrested at least 4,640 people across 56 cities in Russia, reported OVD-Info, which was declared a foreign agent by Russian authorities last year during Putin’s sweeping suppression of activists, rights groups and opposition figures. The group reported multiple instances of excessive force against protesters, including beatings and use of stun guns.
Among those detained were 13 journalists and 113 juveniles. Russia’s interior ministry said earlier Sunday that police had arrested more than 3,500 people “for taking part in unauthorized rallies” in Moscow, St. Petersburg and elsewhere. The agency warned protesters that authorities would continue to target demonstrations and their organizers.
Love & War
John Stephens, who Zoomed with Kyiv Friends from Virginia
Quaker Bulletin, From Our Far-Flung Correspondents:John Stephens, northern Virginia USA:
I attended morning worship with the Friends in Kyiv at 2:15am our time last night.
Over 120 Friends from around the globe were connected on Zoom. Many of those were from Australia and New Zealand, but there were folks from Europe, and even a couple others from the U.S.
What was most striking to me was how “same” it was to any other unprogrammed Quaker gathering. They really were the same as us, all over-at least it seemed .. . .
Looking around the Zoom room, especially when someone spoke, it was almost like: “Hey, we have that guy in our Yearly Meeting, only with a different
accent.”
From: “I’m a Cold War Historian. We’re in a Frightening New Era.”
By Mary Elise Sarotte, professor of historical studies at Johns Hopkins University
New York Times: The longevity of the [First] Cold War also gave both sides time and incentive to negotiate arms control agreements. Washington and its allies concluded a host of detailed treaties with Moscow that, while flawed, at least provided predictability and monitoring — all while serving to build a long-term relationship in managing nuclear danger.
In recent years, however, both sides rashly shed many of these accords, seeing them as outdated and inconveniently constraining. The New START Treaty is now the only restraint on the number and types of U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons — and it expires in 2026, with little hope of renewal.
Already gone are the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which George W. Bush abrogated in 2002, and the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, from which Mr. Putin “suspended” Russian participation in 2007. And, most relevant to today’s crisis, in 2019 President Donald Trump abrogated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty over U.S. claims of Russian violations and Chinese arms buildup (though China was not a party to the treaty).
Signed by President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty eliminated that class of weapons entirely. Now that it is no more, Mr. Putin claims to fear that the alliance could deploy such weapons on Ukrainian territory against Russian targets. He has cited that possibility, along with denying that Ukraine is a separate country, among his motivations for invading Ukraine.
Even if Moscow can be brought back to the negotiating table, which seems highly unlikely for the foreseeable future, it would take years of painstaking talks to resurrect these treaties. Their disappearance is especially grievous in light of other losses — of military-to-military communication, expelled embassy and consulate staff members — and the development of new forms of weapons, such as hypersonic missiles and cyberwarfare. Two of the world’s largest military powers are now functioning in near-total isolation from each other, which is a danger to everyone.
Another problem is cultural. The threat of thermonuclear conflict was omnipresent for those who came of age during the Cold War. Yet after decades of peace between the West and Russia, that collective cultural awareness has largely dissipated — even though the threat of nuclear conflict remains, and has, in the past week, ramped back up to levels unseen since the Cold War.
The Russian president has now definitively put an end to the post-Cold War era, which rested on an assumption that major European land wars were gone for good. . . .
Becoming a historian requires the ability to develop a sense of periodization. I sense a period ending. I am now deeply afraid that Mr. Putin’s recklessness may cause the years between the Cold War and the Covid-19 pandemic to seem a halcyon period to future historians, compared with what came after. I fear we may find ourselves missing the old Cold War.
To everything there is a season . . . and in the small field of Quaker publishing, this seems to be the season for books to help Friends, and friends of Friends, get through hard times.
I won’t rehash the reasons for this spurt; they’re as near as the morning’s headlines. It will suffice to cite recent comments by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founder of the much-maligned Critical Race Theory, in the Washington Post, about:
“[T]he history of progress around race in the United States: Modest reform creates tremendous backlash. And sometimes the backlash is more enduring than the reform.
Consider, we had about a decade of Reconstruction. And [then] we had about seven decades of white supremacy, racial tyranny, utter and complete exclusion.
[Then] We had probably a good decade, maybe a decade and a half, of active civil rights reforms. And then three, four decades of conservative retrenchment, reactionary responses to these reforms that allow for people to say what they’re saying now, which is that anti-racism is racist, your civil rights violate my civil rights.
These are very old and repetitive ideas. So the reform, retrenchment frame is now taking place in the midst of a tremendous resurgence of anti-democratic, anti-inclusionary politics.”
The one thing I would add is that the “retrenchment frame” that seems to be building now concerns much more than race: women’s rights, labor organizing, assaults on the press and education, book banning, LGBT rights, forging a de facto religious establishment, and a drive against what is called the “administrative state.” To name a few.
In that moment, I traded in my carefully written tribute for the succinct maxim that had just popped into my head — and had brought endless joy and meaning into my life.
“Make room for the unexpected,” I said. 
I won’t rehash the reasons for this spurt; they’re as near as the morning’s headlines. It will suffice to cite recent comments by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founder of the much-maligned Critical Race Theory, in the