Ripples In A Teacup

  A nine-judge bench of the United States Supreme Court has ruled 6-3 in Dobbs v. Jackson that the right to abortion is not a constitutionally protected right. By overturning the ruling in Roe v Wade which had enshrined the right to abortion for nearly five decades in the United States, the Supreme Court gave back to individual states the freedom to legislate on abortion. It is expected that a number of states, especially those with Republican legislatures, will put in place or reinstate laws that either make abortion illegal or make the process of getting an abortion very difficult. This process had already begun in the form of trigger laws designed to be effective if Roe V. Wade is overturned. I am outraged by the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson . In a country where people have so much freedom to buy firearms, why don’t women have the right to have an abortion? Until the foetus is delivered, it is not a separate being and does not have rights that are distinct from the w...

 Today is Juneteenth. Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, when Union Army Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and issued General Order No. 3, proclaiming that the enslaved African Americans there were free. "The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free," the order read. "This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor." Two months before Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3, Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered to the Union Army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia which marked the end of the Civil War. Two-and-a-half years earlier, President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which expectedly didn’t have the desired effect in areas under Confederate control...