Once again, the exact thing we said was going to happen, vis-à-vis the horrific Texas legislation allowing people to sue anyone who “aids and abets” an abortion, is happening.

At some point this year, a Texas woman made the decision to run off to Colorado to seek an abortion in order to avoid giving birth to the purported child of one Collin Davis. Given what we know about this Collin Davis character, this is the smartest possible decision she could have made, as having his child would have meant being chained to him for life in some capacity — and he sure seems like a goddamned nightmare.

In February, when Davis found out that she was considering this, he immediately retained Jonathan Mitchell, who is the architect of the Texas law and also the absolute spitting image of Robert, the haunted Edwardian-era doll who destroys the lives of Florida tourists who disrespect him.

Mitchell then sent her a “legal threat” meant to keep her from having the abortion. It did not work (thank goodness).

Now that his ex has had the abortion, Collin and Mitchell are still hoping to ruin her life by filing a petition to investigate her and anyone he believes aided and abetted her in getting the abortion.

Via Washington Post:

In the Davis case, Mitchell is attempting to depose the woman who had the abortion, along with several other people he writes may be “complicit” in the abortion. If deposed, they would be asked about others involved in the abortion, including any abortion funds or any other entities that provided financial support, according to court records. They would also have to provide all documentation relevant to the abortion.

“Mr. Davis expects to be able to better evaluate the prospects for legal success after deposing [the people listed], and discovering the identity of their co-conspirators and accomplices,” Mitchell wrote in the complaint, which he filed on March 22.

He is able to do this because of Texas’s Rule 202, which allows for an investigation prior to filing a lawsuit.

Davis, who we don’t know isn’t related somehow to Texas oil tycoon Cullen Davis who allegedly killed his stepdaughter and attempted to have his soon-to-be-ex-wife and the judge in their divorce proceedings killed, is clearly just trying to continue to exercise control over his ex and everyone she knows — because that is what men like him do. That is, in fact, exactly why it was a good idea for her to have an abortion.

He’s not the first man to try and pull this either. In March of last year, a man named Marcus Silva was also represented by Jonathan Mitchell. Silva was very open — at least to his ex — about the fact that he was using the threat of the lawsuit to force her to continue having sex with him and cleaning his house.

MARCUS SILVA: You’re not considering what can happen to you if I continue to do this sh*t for the next 40 years.

BRITTNI SILVA: Marcus, I’m not gonna be f*cking blackmailed into having sex with you.

MARCUS SILVA: Then you’re just gonna have your f*cking life destroyed in every f*cking way that you can imagine to where you want to blow your f*cking brains out.

What a peach!

So far, we haven’t heard from Collin Davis’s ex, but I think we can all be pretty sure that when we do, she’ll likely have a very similar story to tell. Any man who would sue his ex’s friends and family over helping her get an abortion is at least psychologically abusive.

Donate Just Once!

I’ve always found the “Let’s do Lysistrata!” thing extremely cringe, as we no longer really live in a society in which women are regularly sexually involved with men who hold diametrically opposite views to them and also have any particular power to change anything. Like, it is unclear what a woman going on a sex strike from their equally antiwar or pro-abortion rights partner, who has no more political power than she does, would actually accomplish. It also presumes that all women share the same opinions on things and that sex is a favor they do for men. I could go on about this for a bit, but I will spare you.

What I will say, however, is that if I lived in Texas (I would not live in Texas), I would be getting me to a convent, because there is no way in hell that I would trust any man in that state to not try to ruin my life if we broke up and I needed to get an abortion. Absolutely not, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else either.

PREVIOUSLY:

I like to ask people this question–around 75% of whites in 1968 disapproved of Martin Luther King. So if you are white, I want you to look around at your 3 closest white people and ask which of the four of you would have supported King and the civil rights movement? And why do you think it would have been you? Because you probably would have hated him or at least thought he had gone way too radical and that very much includes liberals. I mean, he opposed the Vietnam War! He talked about socialism! He was supporting labor unions!!!!

The comments around the protests on campuses remind me of this because the arguments against them are incredibly facile. Regardless of the quality of the strategy or whether this is actually going to work or whatever, none of that matters much to the key point, which is that people oppose ALL forms of protest, no matter how peaceful or how not peaceful. For example, see this Gallup poll from 1961:

A question Gallup asked in 1961, about what has been remembered as one of the most iconic and effective protest movements in American history. pic.twitter.com/2Bqpvo3pLO

— Logan M. Davis (@LoganMDavis) May 2, 2024

I don’t know the racial crosstabs on this poll, but presumably they talked to at least some non-whites and presumably those numbers would have been more favorable (though certainly not universally so). The point is, we venerate John Lewis and SNCC and the sit-in and Freedom Rider heroes today. In 1961, most of us would have hated them and thought their crazy radicalism was hurting Black people. Why they might even get Barry Goldwater elected in 1964!

The post Whites Always Oppose Protest Movements, No Matter the Tactics appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

On May 3, 1932, the former president of the Iowa Farmers Union, Milo Reno, organized the Farmers Holiday Association. This was a short-lived but important expression of rural organizing in the midst of the Great Depression.

Farmers are usually left out of labor histories and there’s a good reason for this. They are a bunch of reactionary assholes, by and large. Despite being in a pretty disadvantageous place in the system of American capitalism, few identify more with ideas of individualism and producerism than the people actually tilling the land. This remains true today. We have often talked in our current politics about the so-called “Buddy Garrity Republican,” named after the car dealer from Friday Night Lights. Farmers really embrace parts of this too–they know they are getting screwed, but it is never their fault and they hate change of all kinds anyway, so believing they have built everything they have and that their government welfare is totally different than some unwed mother (PRODUCERISM BABY!!; I’ve seen this argument articulated in exactly this way in various agricultural magazines in the 70s and 80s), they see the world as filled with enemies to their way of life.

Well, it wasn’t that different a century ago either. Going back to the 1880s, the Knights of Labor tried to figure out how to make connections with farmers, but mostly didn’t. Populists in the 1890s tried to figure out to make connections with labor, but also mostly didn’t. These conversations were common enough among reformers on both sides of this divide for decades, up through 1950 or so. But while farmworker organizing became common enough after 1900, both with the IWW and CIO based actions, as well as independent union movements and sharecropper movements, organizing actual farmers was very difficult. There was some rural socialism on the Great Plains in the early years of the twentieth century, but it was of limited vision, not to mention explicitly for white people only.

Despite how we usually talk about the Great Depression as starting in 1929, for farmers, it basically was 1921 or so. The government had promoted overproduction in World War I with no thought as to what would happen when the war ended. By the time farmers had invested in new debt-funded machinery and got these crops in the ground, the war was over. Overproduction ruled the day and farmers got more and more desperate. They began to organize. People such as Henry Wallace became national voices for governmental reform for farmers and eventually, that would happen in the New Deal.

But farmers also engaged in direct action and that is what led to the Farmers Holiday Association. The FHA came out of the National Farmers Union, which was really much more about things such as tariff reform and sales cooperatives than anything like a labor union. The head of the Iowa Farmers Union, the state branch of the NFU, was a man named Milo Reno, who came out of a long-time farm reform family. An older man by 1932, he had been around during the Populists and is a key individual linking that era of reform with the New Deal era of reform.

With the NFU not really that effective, Reno decided to create a sister organization, the Farmers Holiday Association. The name came from the position that farmers should strike to reorder their businesses by raising prices. This was a more aggressive organization for sure. Thanks to Reno, Iowa was the center of the FHA’s activism, but it had significant support throughout the northern Plains and Upper Midwest. It never really extended to the South, but you had very different dynamics there, if many of the same problems. Reno was a great speaker, a man with a booming voice who exerted serious leadership qualities.

The idea behind the FHA, again, was the idea of the strike. Farmers would work together to stop selling their produce until prices rose enough to make it worth their while. They wanted their share of the profits. The question was whether a bunch of individualistic independent farmers could work together to do that. What made the idea interesting was the strategy behind it. Avoiding any kind of centrally planned leadership, members could enforce the strike on their own through radical direct action. When the FHA decided to start a strike in August 1932, it allowed individuals to do their own thing. They could blockade roads, intimidate farmers who did not participate, go after the cops if they interfered, whatever they wanted to see it through. The governors of states such as Iowa and South Dakota were not amused. Neither were truckers, who often plowed into the picket lines. The strike didn’t work and some FHA members were arrested. The FHA did attract attention from larger leftist groups. In fact, the Communist Party hoped to attract members and focused on the Nebraska chapter for this, but it never got very far, which does not surprise me in the least. I mean, the entire idea behind the organization was profit for farmers.

The reason for the FHA to exist was heavily undermined by the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which put into place much of the farm community’s demands. In this case, rather than promote a strike, the government paid farmers to destroy their crops to reduce production and competition, thus leading to the demanded higher prices. AAA was most certainly controversial. Some farmers loved it, others hated the sheer idea of it. The Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional a few years later, but the basic idea of price supports stuck around and really that ended the entire history of farmer organizing in terms of farm owners. Obviously, farm workers would have a long history of organizing that continues to the president. But the price supports did take care of a lot of their problems.

However, the FHA opposed Roosevelt’s plans as not sufficient. Reno himself wasn’t sure what to think and postponed a second attempt at a strike in 1933 to see what would happen. But his members found AAA disappointing. They seemed to think FDR would rain money down on them, and AAA was many things, but it wasn’t that. They also believed that the same people who caused their problems under Hoover were returned to power under Roosevelt. Wallace responded by basically icing them out. Reno tried to appeal directly to FDR. But what AAA ultimately did was undermine much of FHA’s support and it disappeared by 1937. Reno ended his career supporting radical alternatives to the New Deal, flirting with figures such as Father Coughlin and Huey Long.

I borrowed from Jean Choate’s Disputed Ground: Farm Groups That Opposed the New Deal to write this post.

This is the 518th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

The post This Day in Labor History: May 3, 1932 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Monday is your new Saturday morning, the start of the weekend. Once your kids are at school, you have a lazy morning of self-care (clearing your inbox) followed by brunch with friends (an all-hands meeting in the conference room with stale bagels). You round out the afternoon by spending time in nature (dozing off in a desk salad).

Tuesday is Saturday afternoon. After a slight interruption to your weekend (Monday evening with your kids), you’re ready to get back to the fun. You host a boozy book club (your colleague stops by your desk to comb through the latest all-company memo for hints that layoffs are coming). Tired, you decide to take in a matinee (mandatory webinar on cybersecurity).

Wednesday is spa day (pooping in the office bathroom stall with no interruptions). You deserve it!

Thursday, you have a sunny date in the park (meeting with HR to discuss an unfortunate misunderstanding of your office’s policy against filling the bathroom with lighted candles). Against a soundtrack of soft jazz music (buzzing fluorescent lightbulb and stern reprimands), you feel your stress melt away.

Friday is the new Sunday Scaries (chilling knowledge that you will spend an uninterrupted two days and three nights with your loved ones).

Saturday is Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday crammed into twenty-four hours. Your responsibilities include wiping butts, driving inexplicably angry people to soccer games and gymnastics events that happen at the same time in different places, and repeating yourself. Your work will often crawl into bed with you after you think you’ve clocked out. You are paid in bad artwork that you are contractually obligated to display. Also, new Saturdays still include old Saturday night bar fights (between your children, who attended yet another birthday party and are drunk off apple juice boxes).

Sunday is Wednesday (except Wednesday now lasts three weeks and involves picking up vomit).

NOTE: If your children contract any kind of virus, the week will also be the week.

An Oregon City couple has been arrested on first and second degree criminal mistreatment charges related to the death of their infant child in 2023. The parents, Blair and Taylor Edwards, belong to a church called the Followers of Christ that believes in faith healing to the point of refusing to get medical treatment for most conditions. Unsurprisingly, this is very far from the first time that a child in this church has died from a treatable malady, nor the first time that adults in the church have been arrested for having denied their children medical treatment.

Baby Hayden Edwards was only two days old when his health started rapidly declining and he refused to eat. Instead of taking their child to the hospital like normal parents might have, they invited their friends and family from the church over to heal him — which the church does by praying over someone and anointing them with olive oil.

Incredibly, that did not work, his health only got worse and his lips started turning blue. By mid-afternoon he was dead. Medical examiners, upon seeing that Hayden’s skin had turned yellow, determined he was severely jaundiced. While infant jaundice can often clear up on its own, it’s obviously best to take the child to a doctor, especially if it is that severe. Certainly at the point when his lips start turning blue.

Via Oregon Live:

“When asked under what circumstances they would seek medical treatment for Hayden, [Blair and Taylor Edwards’] answers indicated that they never would and did not think they needed to here,” [Senior Deputy District Attorney Bryan] Brock wrote in records filed with the court.

Hayden was the fourth child Taylor Edwards delivered at home, records note. She is pregnant and due in June or July.

“Medical experts indicate that Hayden’s condition may have been caused by a hereditary condition and are concerned that the next child born may also have this condition, which they say is likely treatable with adequate medical care,” Brock wrote.

Yeah, it seems like it’s probably not the best idea to let these people “take care” of another newborn.

The Followers of Christ church first started in the 1890s in Oklahoma, but it didn’t really start picking up steam until the 1920s when a fella by the name of, swear to God, Walter White took over, moving to several different locations before settling in Oregon City, Oregon — though there are branches in Oklahoma and Idaho. Aside from the faith-healing thing, one of the peculiarities of the church is that they stopped accepting new members after White died in 1969, because he was the only person who could baptize anyone. Children who are born into the church are considered baptized because their parents or grandparents were baptized by White and no one is allowed to marry outside of the church. Given that it is estimated to have only about 1200 to 1500 members nationwide, jaundice may not be their only genetic issue.

Members of the church believe that if their faith healing doesn’t work and someone dies, that is God sending them a message that their faith is simply not strong enough. In No Greater Law, a 2018 A&E documentary about the Followers of Christ faction in Idaho, one of the members explained that, to them, getting a child medical treatment would be like throwing them into a fire, because of how the child will be sent to hell as a result.

Here’s my thing. If God wanted these people to faith heal themselves and their children, wouldn’t he have made them like, really good at it?

In No Greater Law, the members talk about how they do faith healing because Jesus did faith healing, because he went around healing blind people with spit (do not try at home, those of us who are not deities have a lot of germs in our mouths!), giving the lepers back their skin and what have you. Forgive my ignorance here, I’m no Bible scholar, but isn’t the whole point of those stories that when he did it … it worked?

Like, I can’t imagine that the New Testament would be a very compelling book, nevermind a Tony Award-nominated Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, if it were just full of stories of this guy walking around, trying and failing to heal people, and then telling them they better not seek medical attention.

So, clearly, it is canon in this universe that if God wants you to be able to magically heal people, you will be able to magically heal people. Would it therefore not follow that, because these people are not able to magically heal people and their kids keep dying of treatable illnesses, they should consider another route?

Donate Just Once!

At the very least, it is illegal in Oregon to just let your child die because you think you have magic healing powers — it’s still not illegal in Idaho, despite several attempts to make it so.

So, yes, just to be clear, almost all abortions are illegal in Idaho, the state is currently fighting for its right to deny them even in medical emergencies … but it’s totally fine if you want to just go ahead and let your born child die because you believe in a God that will send babies to hell if you take them to see the doctor. That, they have absolutely no problem with.

It’s unlikely that sending these parents to prison is going to have any impact on the church or lead to them taking their sick children to see the doctor, but at least it will keep them from being able to kill their next kid.

PREVIOUSLY: