I used to love the month of June. The days are at their longest, and all the possibilities for summer fun are laid out before you as unrealized potential and delicious anticipation. As a schoolchild, summer meant freedom to me, and I’ve never fully shaken the association as an adult, which I suppose makes particular sense given how much of my adult life I spent in academia. On top of all that, I have a summer birthday. But these days, June brings me more dread than anticipation, and for that I have the Republican Party and its transformation of the US Supreme Court into a radical partisan institution to thank.
The Supreme Court’s annual term begins on the first Monday in October and ends in late June or early July. In fall and winter, the court hears oral arguments for the cases it will rule on by the end of its term. Most of its decisions are handed down in June. And over the past few years, many of those decisions have been antidemocratic bombshells, undermining the (at this point largely fictional) separation of church and state in this country and dealing painful blows to civil rights for people who aren’t straight white Christian men.
Last year, of course, the extreme right-wing court overturned Roe vs Wade, ending the federal right to abortion in the United States, and explicitly left open the possibility of abolishing the rights to same-sex marriage and even contraception in the future.
