Charles Farley
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Defy this Supreme Court

6/29/2022

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Smuggle abortion pills to women in Texas

By Tom Moran | Star-Ledger Editorial Board
In 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade was decided, 130,000 American women obtained illegal or self-induced abortions, according to the Centers for Disease Control. They risked infections, bleeding, and sterility. Some of them died.
We are not going back to that, no matter what this radical Supreme Court says, because the landscape has changed. There are pills now that can safely do the job, and now account for more than half of all abortions. That changes things.
But what is to be done about states, like Texas, that are building the legal machinery to prosecute those who help Texan women obtain these pills, often after online consultations? Are women in Texas, especially poor women, headed back to 1972?
The answer must be no. These laws need to be broken, come what may. This Court has lost its legitimacy and must be defied, outright. If that means people of conscience need to smuggle pills into red states, to knock down the walls this Court has helped to build, then so be it.
Crossing this threshold can be justified only on rare occasions in a democracy. The rule of law can’t survive long if citizens can casually pick and choose which laws they want to obey. And in a democracy, where citizens are vested with powers to peacefully challenge unjust laws, the burden is higher.
But the discussion doesn’t end there.
What if a majority imposes an unjust law on a minority, as in Southern states during the Civil Rights Movement? Defiance is justified not only on moral grounds, but as a political tactic. The defiance of unjust laws awoke the conscience of decent people and led this country to higher ground.
How about the draft laws during the Vietnam War? Was Muhammad Ali wrong when he refused to take part in that unjust killing, even at the cost of imprisonment?
Or consider the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which required that marshals in Northern states help return escaped slaves and set fines for anyone who harbored an escaped slave. Was defiance not a moral imperative?
The question of exactly when lawbreaking is justified is as old as Socrates and has no easy answer. But each instance above shows that it’s not a simple matter of asserting that we must obey the law at all times, even in a democracy like ours.
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In this case, defiance is justified by the unfair tactics Republicans used to build this Supreme Court majority, along with the radical nature of this decision, and the urgency facing woman in states like Texas.
Start with the Senate’s refusal to consider President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016, justified by the bizarre reasoning that presidents should not be allowed to make an appointing during their final year in office. When President Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, the rules somehow changed and the GOP Senate confirmed her two weeks before the election.
History will mark that hypocrisy and bad faith, an act that gave this radical Court the final vote it needed to overturn Roe.
That sin was compounded by the radical nature of the decision drafted by Justice Samuel Alito. This was an unrestrained partisan power play by the Court’s 5-vote majority, which showed a disregard for precedent that was offensive even to the conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, who dissented.
Alito framed his ruling as a win for democracy, since abortion laws will now be settled by states through a democratic process, rather than by judicial fiat through the 14th Amendment. But by moving this to the political arena, he erases the Constitutional protection for abortion, and opens a path for this Court to continue its rampage by striking down other protections that rely on the same amendment.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas argues that the Court should free states to revive bans on birth control and gay marriage, based on the same logic. So much for precedent. So much for restraint.
Adding to this insult is the Court’s defiance of public opinion, based not on a higher call to justice, but on the archaic idea that we should look to 1868, when the 14th Amendment was adopted, to discern its meaning today. That was a time when women couldn’t vote, yet this Court relies on the sensibilities of that half-democracy to rewrite the rules that should apply in 2022. It’s a bizarre and dangerous standard to justify rolling back established Constitutional rights.
States today are scrambling to draft new laws on abortion, including bans on the use of medications and their transport across state borders. It will take time to sort out.
But in the end, one way or another, we need to rescue women who need abortions and have the misfortune to live in a state that denies that right. If that means breaking the law, and smuggling these pills at scale, so be it.
More: Tom Moran columns
Tom Moran may be reached at tmoran@starledger.com. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
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Do Something

6/3/2022

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Roe vs. Wade

5/23/2022

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First Waltz

5/18/2022

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"There must be something happening here," to quote Buffalo Springfield.  And "what it is ain't exactly clear."  But what I think it is, is damn good music, if here is right here in Huntsville, Alabama, the same weekend U.S. News & World Report named the city the best place to live in America.  Maybe so, because that very same weekend, that very same city celebrated the opening of a brand new 8,000-seat music venue called the Orion Amphitheater, featuring a world-class lineup of acts with North Alabama roots, including on Friday:  Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Emmylou Harris, Waxahatchee, and John Paul White; and on Saturday:  Mavis Staples, St. Paul and the Broken Bones, Drive-by Truckers, and Brittany Howard; and on Sunday:  Huntsville musicians Kelvin Wooten and DeQn Sue, Element XI, Translee, The N.E.I.G.H.B.O.R.S., and the award-winning Oakwood University (where Little Richard once attended) Aeolians. Must be something in that muddy Tennessee River water!
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I went on Saturday.  There is no other word for the place but COOL!  And aside from a few rough spots in the landscaping, everything was completed--on time.  Not always a given here in the South.  Signs were up.  Food and booze stands were dispensing.  Staff were super friendly.  The sound, the lights, everything was topflight, as it should be in a place dubbed "The Rocket City."
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Mavis Staples at 82 was still in fine fettle and set the gospel-inspired tone for the evening, with several memorable Staples Singer hits, including "Respect Yourself" and "I'll Take You There," where famous bassist David Hood (now 78 and the last living member of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, aka The Swampers) reprised his backup performance on the original recording 50 years ago in 1972.  A special moment in Alabama music history!
Next came St. Paul and the Broken Bones, a young, neo-soul group from Birmingham who is keeping the old R&B sounds of the 1960s and 70s alive for current generations.
Then came the Drive-by Truckers, a true southern tradition if there ever was one.  Touring contantly since 1996, the band plays kickass, dive-bar, southern rock 'n' roll at its loudest, grittiest best.  Jason Isbell was once a singer/songwriter with the band that is now led by David Hood's son Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, originally from the Shoals and once roommates at the University of North Alabama in Florence
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Toping off the evening was the new queen of southern funk, Brittany Howard, formerly of the Alabama Shakes and Athens, Alabama.  There is simply no one in modern pop music who is comparable.  She sings blues, jazz, R&B, and even fellow Alabamian Sun Ra inflected anarchy--all with stunning proficiency and diva-est vocal power and beauty.  And when she grabs that guitar and slings its strap over the shoulder of her colorful, floor-length robe you could swear Sister Rosetta Tharpe herself had somehow miraculously descended from heaven to dance joyfully across that bright, new, star-studded stage right here in oh-so-livable Huntsville, Alabama. 
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Petite Maman

5/12/2022

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Since I didn't have a mother handy last Sunday on Mothers Day, I decided to take in a movie, appropriately enough entitled "Petite Maman."
It turned out to be a haunting, charming contemplation on motherhood, family, lose, and love, all in just a scant 72 minutes.
Ordinarily, I don't like films with kids (too cloying), but damn if the two eight year-old actresses (Josephine Sanz as Nellie and Gabrielle Sanz as Marion, and sisters in real life) don't act like little cutie pies, but instead real children who are open, intriguing, and full of imagination.
And, ordinarily, I don't like films with subtitles, but even my feeble grasp of the French language enabled me to follow most of the sparse dialogue without having to worry too much about keeping up with streaming titles.
And, ordinarily, I don't care for movies with intentional ambiguity and uncertain endings, but somehow writer-director Celine Sciamma easily drew me in, even when most of the time I didn't have a clue to what was imaginative and what was real, much as I vaguely remember so much of what my own childhood was like.
Go see it!

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Panoply 2022

5/4/2022

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Every spring for the past 40 years Arts Huntsville has thrown a big art and music festival in Big Spring Park in downtown Huntsville, Alabama.  Hobbled by the Pandemic for the past couple of years, this year's party was truly a coming-out moment for the 3-day event, with record-breaking crowds strolling among the 100+ vendor booths and listening to more than 40 bands and musical acts, representing every medium and genre imaginable.
I took in two hot bands last Saturday evening on the back porch stage of the Huntsville Museum of Art.
  
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Element XI is a local band formed in 2012 by several graduates of the Johnson High School music program, whose director just happened to be standing, but mostly dancing, proudly behind me with one of her other students.  To report that the band's unique blend of funk, hip-hop, and soul blew away their audience of family, friends, and many, many others would be an understatement.
Next, was a 10-piece group called The Suffers from Houston, Texas, who played tight, brassy, drum-driven R&B funk that they call Gulf Coast Soul.  It's fun, fast, and seductive, especially lead singer Kam Franklin who has a bright future with or without her high-powered band.
And to top off the entire weekend, even though there were a few sprinkles now and then, it never really rained.  Which, of course, may be the first time in recent memory when there wasn't the traditional Panoply washout.
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Resurrection

4/27/2022

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The Mark C. Smith Concert Hall, in downtown Huntsville, Alabama, is a big, resonant, barn of a venue where even the sounds of large, multi-instrumental, electrified rock bands like those of B.B. King, Trucks and Tedeschi, and the Temptations can bounce around like over-excited toddlers.
The 2,100-seat place was built more for larger symphony, ballet, and musical theater orchestras.  So it was a delight to hear the Huntsville Symphony Orchestra and the 100+ voice Huntsville Community Chorus perform Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 in C minor, also know as the "Resurrection," last Saturday night in the grand, cavernous hall.  You have to give it up for Gregory Vajda, the Symphony's Music Director and Conductor, and for Ian Loeppky, the Chorus' Artistic Director, for packing the stage with as many talented performers as it could possibly hold, including the huge choir behind a full orchestra of seven timpanis, five double basses, two harps, a plethora of horns, strings, and other assorted instruments that, in the piece's most stirring moments, sounded as if they could indeed raise the dead.
"One is first beaten down and then raised on angels' wings to the greatest heights," Mahler wrote following rehearsals for the symphony's premiere in 1895.  "The whole thing sounds as if it came to us from some other world.  I doubt anyone will be able to resist it."  Indeed!


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Faster

4/21/2022

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Drove down to Birmingham last night to have dinner with my daughter and her new husband at a Latin joint called Luna.  Pretty tasty.  Then around the corner at a club called Saturn to hear Samantha Fish out on tour to promote her new album "Faster."  Which it is!
Stood with a crowd of mostly middle-age+ white people who may have been expecting the more bluesy Samantha of former days.  What they got instead was pretty much straight-ahead rock 'n' roll, played by a pared down band of bass, drums, keyboard, and, of course, Fish's flashy guitar, sans horns.  Which, surprisingly, they didn't seem to mind.  I think because Fish is such an exuberant performer who manages to throw herself into whatever she plays with increasing power, precision, and professionalism.  And, of course, since rock is so rooted in the blues, you hear it in whatever she sings.  Regardless, the audience ate it up.  One gray-haired guy behind me yelling at her, "I think I love you!" despite his female partner's cold look of displeasure.
There were only a couple of glitches in the show, to be expected as Fish quickly transitioned from one tune to the next while changing guitars, keys, and tempos, all in a matter of seconds.
One note of caution, if you go, show up about an hour late to avoid the opening act, if it's a guitarist named Django, who played last night with a booming sound machine, sort of like guitar karaoke, and who apparently never heard of the dictum "less is more."  As my wife was apt to quip about these showoff guitar slingers:  "I do believe that boy is a bit too much in love with that there guitar."
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The Blog is Back

4/12/2022

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Apologies for abandoning the Blog for the past few months.  I've been busy putting the finishing touches on my sixth book.  Entitled Then Come Kiss Me, it's a coming-of-age novel set in Kansas during the "Swinging Sixties," and features firsthand concert accounts of some of the period's best performers, including:  Count Basie, Marilyn Maye, the Drifters, B.B. King, Bobby "Blue" Bland, James Brown, and Nancy Wilson, not to mention some regional favorites who some of you Kansas old-timers might remember:  Spider and the Crabs, Little Jimmy Griffin, and Roger Calkins and the Fabulous Silver Tones.
I'll keep you posted on the books plodding progress toward publication.  Meanwhile, here's a blast from the past, the Fabulous Flippers, a tantalizing
teaser of what's to come:
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Vaccinate Now

12/27/2021

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    Charles Farley is an author who lives and writes in Huntsville, Alabama.

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