DL Open Thread: Saturday, August 19, 2023

In the mood for some schadenfreude?  Read. Enjoy.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Rethugs Can Dish It Out, Can’t Take It.  Man, it sucks to be in the minority when you’ve stuck it to your colleagues for years:

Justice Janet Protasiewicz was sworn in as the newest member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Aug. 1, following an impressive victory over far-right former Justice Dan Kelly earlier this year that gave the court a progressive majority for the first time since 2008. Since Protasiewicz joined the court, a lot’s happened: The liberals fired the director of the state court system, a former judge and Supreme Court candidate who holds some extreme social views; moved to adopt new rules for internal court governance; and agreed to hear a lawsuit over the constitutionality of the state’s gerrymandered legislative districts.

Two of the conservatives on the court, Chief Justice Annette Ziegler and Associate Justice Rebecca Bradley, have not handled the changes to the court very well, either. The liberals’ earliest moves have limited Ziegler’s powers as chief justice, which she’s alleged are abuses of power that violate the Wisconsin Constitution—though she’s been coy on what provision of the constitution, exactly. Still, that hasn’t stopped her from issuing press releases and writing op-eds denouncing the erosion of her power as somehow unconstitutional.

From the first day of the Supreme Court’s new liberal majority, Bradley’s core criticism is that its members are too partisan and biased. She criticized her fellow justices as “political hacks” and “politicians wearing robes,” not “jurists.” She argued on Twitter that their firing of the state courts director was a “[p]olitical purge[] of court employees”—a point that she made while retweeting one of the state’s most prominent right-wing commentators.

This Bradley is a real piece of work:

During Bradley’s 2016 campaign against Kloppenburg, many of her old writings for her college newspaper surfaced, revealing some deeply intolerant views. In 1992, during the height of the AIDS crisis, Bradley wrote that gay people “essentially kill themselves and others through their own behavior.”

She also criticized the attention that AIDS received over diseases like cancer, writing, “How sad that the lives of degenerate drug addicts and queers are valued more than the innocent victims of more prevalent ailments,” and attacked people who were comfortable with homosexuality as “degenerates who basically commit suicide through their behavior.” She called abortion a “holocaust of our children” and said she found it “incomprehensible” that anyone could claim “a right to murder their own flesh and blood.”

The Book Ban Capital Of America.  Will the last person with a brain fleeing Florida please turn out the library lights?:

Clay County has become a flashpoint in the state of Florida on the topic of book challenges. According to recent tallies, more than 175 books have been permanently removed from its public school libraries – a number which ranks among the highest of any county in the US – and hundreds more remain unavailable to students due to a policy unique to the county, requiring that books are pulled from shelves as soon as a challenge form is filed with the school district. Conservative activists from two organizations have seized on that policy, often filing multiple challenge forms at a time, which inundates the systems and committees that process the claims.

“The biggest issue facing Clay County right now is the backlog of challenges and the huge political divide that’s driving it. No other county is dealing with a similar problem,” says Jen Cousins, co-founder of the Florida Freedom to Read Project (FFTRP) and a mother of four. “They’re creating fake outrage over what’s available in libraries.”

Despite the express mission of parental empowerment, it’s rare that book challenge forms are filed by individual parents. Instead, nearly all of the challenges in Clay County have been filed by activists affiliated with the same two organizations: Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. Bess also chalks this up to fear over repercussions and a lack of knowledge about school board politics and procedures.

Uh, Does Anyone Know A Drag Queen?  This is a serious request:  We’re doing a Banned Book Month at the Arden Library in October.  We’re planning to do some readings.  An especially sage attendee at the Matt Meyer candidate event this past week suggested that it would be great to have a reading from a drag queen.  I couldn’t agree more.  So, just drop a note in the DL tipline or something.  But we need a drag queen for some time in October.  Help a blogger out.

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