The Supreme Court's Radical Right Turn Is About Restoring Patriarchy, Plain and Simple [View all]

The Supreme Court’s Radical Right Turn Is About Restoring Patriarchy, Plain and Simple

By Leah Litman
May 13, 20255:40 AM




(Slate) When the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in the 2022 decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the dissenters warned that “one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.” In the framework of the biggest hit film the following year, the Barbie movie, the decision to eliminate a woman’s right to reproductive freedom was a Ken-surrection—a move to restore a patriarchy where men are on top.

Overruling Roe was just the opening salvo in this fight, which has raged ever since and only been exacerbated by Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

The decision overruling Roe illustrates how the Supreme Court can make constitutional law worse through a cycle that merges feelings and politics with courts and law. The feeling behind the process that produced Dobbs was patriarchy. Those are now the vibes animating this area of law after Republicans turned assorted feelings about feminism and gender roles into a political strategy, and Republican justices channeled the big feelings about feminism and women’s sexual liberation to hard launch a gender counterrevolution. Originalism was merely a vessel for Republicans’ anti-feminist thoughts and prayers, but that ideology goes well beyond the jurisprudential methodology of originalism. Which means the law may as well.

As the feminist movement of the mid-1900s took off, so too did a strand of anti-feminist male grievance politics. After Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment, the constitutional amendment that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, a countermovement pushed states not to ratify the measure. A young lawyer who worked in the Richard Nixon administration wrote a memo offering various objections to the ERA. That lawyer’s name was William H. Rehnquist (the same William H. Rehnquist who Nixon would later nominate to the Supreme Court and Ronald Reagan would make chief justice of the United States). Rehnquist blasted the ERA’s “overtones of dislike and distaste for the traditional difference between men and women in the family unit” and warned that outlawing sex discrimination would cause “the eventual elimination” and “dissolution of the family.” Phyllis Schlafly, one of the principal organizers against the amendment, urged the country to reject the ERA on the ground that “women’s lib is a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother and on the family as the basic unit of society.” She also accused feminists of “promoting” “day-care centers for babies instead of homes” (among other things). ................(more)

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/05/leah-litman-lawless-supreme-courts-alito-news.html