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The Best Revenge Against Judicial Tyranny is Secession

 “Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country is a bill of temporary privileges.”

-George Carlin

“But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain- that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.”

-Lysander Spooner

As a Queer pro-life anarchist, I have a rather odd relationship with Roe V. Wade. I was raised with the Consistent Life Ethic as espoused by Catholic Workers like the Berrigan Brothers that preached that all life was precious from the womb to the battlefield to death row and not only is this one of the few values that I still hold dear from an otherwise traumatic Catholic childhood but it’s also a value that led me to embrace anti-imperialism which summarily led me down the Peter Maurin gulch to full tilt anarchism.

However, with that being said, as a born-again voluntaryist who’s as turned on by Samuel Konkin as I am by Dorothy Day, I also hold bodily autonomy to be equally sacred. If a human being is not given agency over their own biology, then liberty quite simply does not exist. This jihad is made downright personal by my birthright as an androgynous gender terrorist who carries the spiritual scars of a lifetime of self-righteous adult authority figures attempting to govern my own goddamn body with their sick hang ups.

This spicey contrarian moral gumbo has led me to the sometimes-agonizing belief that while I may personally find abortion to be immoral, giving any kind of government authority unfettered access to someone else’s insides is an equally immoral way to handle this issue and not a particularly effective one either. My approach to abortion has become pretty similar to my approach to crystal meth, I don’t like it, I sure as fuck don’t advocate it, but I’m not about to hand some bureaucrat a speculum and the license to get busy up in someone else’s guts to stop it.

So, I’ve come to see the right to choose as a sort of necessary evil for someone who struggles to be big enough to put individual liberty before my own personal ethics because autonomy is for everyone, not just the people you spend your weekends getting stoned with. If the government can fuck with a pregnant teenage white girl, then you better believe they can fuck with some genderqueer creature like me and judicial despots like Samuel Alito know it.

He made this painfully clear in his leaked opinion on the Dobbs V. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization decision that looks set to overturn Roe V. Wade this summer. Alito specifically singled out bodily autonomy as being a right with no basis in the Constitution and he specifically references decisions like Lawrence V. Texas, which overturned bans against consensual homosexual activity, and Obergfell V. Hodges, which effectively legalized gay marriage, as being examples of the Court perpetuating values not deeply rooted in our nation’s history.

This decision can hardly be considered particularly shocking seeing as Alito voiced opposition to both of those widely popular decisions using the same argument and the ugly fact about it is that the bastard is right. Neither the Constitution nor the Supreme Court has a goddamn thing to do with individual liberty and that’s why I oppose them both and you should too.

The deeply rooted history of Samuel Alito’s America is a stagnant swamp of bigotry and hierarchy that has never had room for degenerate outlaws like me and my people. The Constitution was a document written by a pack of genocidal slave-driving oligarchs looking to protect their lily-white asses after the Articles of Confederation threatened to shake up their monopoly on morally repugnant behavior in the New World. I love Ron Paul as much as the next antiwar gun nut, but libertarians desperately need to kick their fetish for the Founding Fathers.

They were a bunch of despotic creeps looking to mug their subjects with taxes so they could control them with other autocratic institutions like central banks and standing armies. Thomas Jefferson was the closest thing to a legit libertarian in the bunch and he was an open imperialist who raped his own slaves. What do these assholes have on you? Why the fuck should we all be prisoners to an arcane document that none of us consented to sign? The very notion of making a piece of paper god is anathema to the very notion of civil liberties and the cretins like Justice Alito who zealously protect it are nothing but an unelected judicial junta.

And I’m not just fed up with my more paleo libertarian comrades either. I expect some of this cheesy dogma from that set, but I’m completely vexed by the learned helplessness of my own tribe. Why do Queer people put so much of our time and energy into begging systemically bigoted institutions like the Supreme Court and the Federal Government to protect us from the very despotism that defines their maligned existence? It’s fucking baffling to me.

Any right that loses all meaning unless it is delivered from on high isn’t a right, it’s a privilege and I’m tired of begging the kind of hateful strangers who can’t even bear to look me in the eye without gagging for fucking privileges. We didn’t flip cop cars at Stonewall for fucking privileges. I am not a dog. I will not beg disgusting bigots like Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas for scraps from their table. I would rather flip their table over like a fucking cop car. They say they want small government. Me too. I say that Queer people and our allies on the left start putting our priorities into challenging these scumbags to put up or shut up by thinking big, acting small, and weaponizing our own communities against their institutions.

The best revenge against judicial tyranny is secession and we’ve seen this theory wielded with fantastic results in the form of sanctuary states and sanctuary cities. Local governments who simply refuse to comply with the feds on issues as far-ranging as gun rights and marijuana have exposed their powers for the hopped-up illusions that they really are and rendered them totally impotent in the face of communities who quite simply resist being governed by any authority figure they didn’t vote for.

Let’s take this ethic to the next level by organizing intentional communities across the map around shared ideals like communes and gayborhoods and turning them into sanctuaries from any power that exists outside them. Let’s create a quilt work of Queer autonomous zones and feminist autonomous zones and Black Power autonomous zones and Boogaloo autonomous zones and polygamist autonomous zones and tweaker autonomous zones.

In his dissent to Lawrence, Samuel Alito warned of the horrors that could be unleashed by affording American citizens with the agency over their own bodies. Sammy Boy rambled on in a sweaty Twilight Zone-style monologue about a nation where people didn’t just have the fundamental right to anal sex and tribadism but to drug use and prostitution and free thought and anarchy. The truth is that that country already exists. People get laid. People get high. People build ghost guns. And yes, people have abortions, whether I like it or not.

Assholes like Samuel Alito are banking on the fact that the left and even most so-called libertarians have bought into their cult of constitutional tyranny, that none of us would dare to make a fucking move unless they yelled “Green light!” And so far, they’re right. It’s probably the only thing that lets powerful men like them sleep at night. I say we wake them up. I say we make them regret their conditional devotion to small government by making those small governments ours. Let’s rage against the Supreme Junta and make America radical again.

Don’t hate the Courts, dearest motherfuckers, become the Courts.