I have always believed in peaceful change, the Rule of Law, fairness, love and non-violence. Trump, Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Gaza, Starvation, and the abuse of Children have all challenged that.
I am on the brink of violence.
No longer able to contain my silence,
Or content to have life unfold slowly
Since those who practice cruelty never rest,
Nor take a breath.
I have lived a life of reverence for love & the law,
But my faith is shaken in those north stars, anymore.
Especially, when abject evil is rewarded and applauded,
And consequences go unreported, or worse,
Are never borne.
I am on the brink of violence,
When I learn that children are abused
For the Rich and Powerful to play with,
Or be amused by their lithe little bodies
Lacking the strength to scream, or to resist.
I cannot contain my silence,
When children are subjected to sexual or emotional violence,
Denied love, compassion or simple humanity,
And made to question their own sanity,
As abusers imprison them in the narcissism of adult vanity.
I am on the brink of violence.
I have never owned a gun, nor desired one,
And believed all difference could be peacefully fixed,
Until power shifts, humaneness dies or drifts,
And then, the world we longed for, is long gone.
What is to be done to those who starve others to death?
Or take away the pure, sweet breath
Of children desperate to be loved, or fed, or cared for like a child?
What is to be done when their cries are met with silence?
How can one not be pushed to the brink of violence?
No one, Jew or non-Jew, has to apologize for standing up against inhumanity, cruelty, or the slaughter of non-combatants seeking food and humanitarian assistance.
(Photo and story from PBS News Hour, July 20, 2025)
One of the most thoughtful writers on Substack—more and more a portal for free, non-corporate owned expression in this country—is Jay Kuo in his column “The Status Quo.”
The author of the book and lyrics for Allegiance: The Musical, which told the story of the United States’ immoral and inhumane incarceration of tens of thousands of Japanese American citizens during World War II, Kuo has written incisively about abominable US Supreme Court decisions, which strip away the rights of the individual. A member of the National Board of Directors of the Human Rights Campaign, he is especially eloquent and effective in writing about crimes against humanity.
This weekend, Kuo posted a seering piece describing the methodical murder by Israeli forces in Gaza of another 60 innocent civilians—mostly women and children—gunned down while attempting to alleviate their war-caused starvation as they barely carried themselves to humanitarian centers. This utter brutality followed by a day the Israeli bombing and destruction of the only Catholic church in Gaza, and the murder of the Catholic priest who ministered to that tiny congregation of Christians and chatted with Pope Francis every evening to assure the Pontiff of their continued safety. That priest is dead, the church obliterated, that small Christian refuge in Gaza gone forever.
Jay wondered aloud that if by calling attention to the continuing mass murder of non-combatants in Gaza by Israeli forces, he would be accused by some of his Jewish friends of being “anti-semitic.” As one of his Jewish friends, I assured him he was on the right side of humanity, of history, and of the basic values of Judaism:
Here’s some of what I wrote:
‘Thank you, Jay. I am a Jew–having converted to Judaism 45 years ago.
I am adamantly opposed to the inhumane ultra Nationalism of the Netanyahu Government and his extreme Right Wing enablers.
Their actions are actions of genocide against the Palestinians, and experts on Genocide have defined them as such.
Israel’s actions are also against all of the fundamental teachings of Judaism, a humanitarian, inclusive and loving faith which existed more than 5,000 years before Israel did. Netanyahu has violated the values of Judaism, and the origins of Zionism, flipping it from a humanistic movement to create a safe homeland for Jews and other oppressed minorities, into an Ultra- Nationalist movement of hate, exclusion and constant war.
Israel, since its founding, was not governed by a Constitution, but by 14-separate laws, based on human rights and the protection of human life against murder and genocide. It was intended to be a haven for humanity, ethical behavior and diversity. Netanyahu has reversed and upended those laws, the essential foundation of Israel, and the bedrock of Judaism.
Even the IDF, which had a strict military Code of Ethics which included not killing non-combatants and only responding to attacks in a “proportional” manner, has had it’s Code of Ethics corrupted, its’ reputation for professional integrity politicized, and its place in Israeli history destroyed by Netanyahu and his Ultra- Nationalist extremists, and have turned the IDF into an instrument of brutality and of ethnic cleansing, much as Trump is using ICE in our own country.
The indiscriminate slaughtering of up to 100,000 Palestinians—mostly women and children and non-combatants in Gaza—is not a proportional nor appropriate response to the murder of 1,200 Israelis nor was it ever the intention of Netanyahu to adhere to the IDF Code of Ethics, under which he was trained, and be “proportionate” in his response. In no universe, except the most perverse, is the slaughter of 100,000 Palestinians considered justifiable or proportionate for the lives of 1,200 Israeli’s.
By continuing to kill innocent, unarmed Gazans seeking food, water or medical care—in the absence of attacks by Hamas on Israel—Israel has, like Russia, become a terrorist state. The United Church of Christ could have just as well included Israel in its condemnation of the United States this week, as a State sponsoring terror.
Like Trump, Netanyahu is seeking the domination and the destruction of all whom he judges to be an enemy. A constant state of war against someone is in Netanyahu’s, not Israel’s, best interest.
For many of us Jews, who love our faith but detest how Netanyahu has bastardized Israel and what it means to be a Jew, this is an extraordinarily painful time.
I had the great privilege of meeting in person with the last democratic leader of Israel, Yitzak Rabin, a hero of the 1967 War who later suffered a nervous breakdown from seeing so many young Israelis die under his command, in battle.
Just a few years after Mario Cuomo and I met with Rabin in Jerusalem, the great Israeli leader was assassinated by a disciple of the Ultra Radical Right Wing Jewish convicted terrorist Meir Kahane, the Brooklyn-born madman who founded the terrorist Jewish Defense League, and still serves as an inspiration and hero to the twisted tyrants of the Ultra Nationalist Right Wing now ruling Israel, pushing it far away from the fundamental values of Judaism.
Rabin was assassinated at a rally for peace, exactly 30 years ago, where he was advocating for a practical, two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. Even during that time, while Rabin was sacrificing his life for peace, Netanyahu—at the beginning of his political career— was campaigning against him, and against a two-state solution.
No, calling attention to or bearing witness to the horrors being committed by Israel in Gaza are not anti-Semitic; they are pro-humanity which has, for centuries, been the essence of Judaism. By extension, any inhumane actions are anti-Semitic, and a grotesque violation of Judaism. Netanyahu and his Ultra Extreme Nationalistic government is, at it’s core anti-Semitic, and an enemy of a democratic Israel, and of all of us Jews worldwide. Never, ever apologize for standing up for humanity.
One week after Hamas’ horrific massacre of 1,200 Jews in Israel on October 7, I was struck by the knee-jerk social media posting of many fellow Jews that they “Stand With Israel.” To me, they were missing the lessons taught by our faith. In response, I wrote a poem entitled “I Stand With Humanity.” ( villano.subtack.com., October 12, 2023, “I Stand with Humanity.)
In it, I cited the teaching of the great scholar of Judaism, Rabbi Hillel, the elder, who lived during the time of Christ:
“I stand with equality,
Either real or aspirational;
With the value of each life,
Being, by existence, inspirational.
I stand with Rabbi Hillel,
Who knew well, that, to be human,
When others were not,
Would point the way through hell.”
Like Rabbi Hillel, I stand with humanity, and, while he was considered progressive for his time, no sane person in the present day would call his teaching, his beliefs or his interpretation of Judaism “anti-Semitic.”
Harry Chapin’s sudden death 44 years ago on July 16, in a car crash on the Long Island Expressway, ended his life. But his musical & humanitarian legacies and his family’s devotion live on.
(This year marks the 50th Anniversary of the release of Harry Chapin’s one and only number one song “Cat’s in the Cradle.” The song, written first as a poem by Harry’s wife and partner Sandy, has gained a life of its’ own in movies, television shows, documentaries, and as a mantra for how people can too easily let the lives of those they love slip away from them as they pursue their own dreams.
In Harry Chapin’s too-short life of only 39 years he followed his dreams as a musician, an activist, a humanitarian, a father, and human being who wanted to live a life that made a difference in this world.
Chapin devoted the last decade of his life to his music and to fighting hunger and reducing poverty. He was inspired by his older brother James; the great anti-poverty champion Michael Harrington, author of The Other America; Harry’s spouse & partner Sandy Chapin; and his friend and former Catholic priest Bill Ayres, who followed the progressive Catholic Worker teachings of Harry’s great aunt, Dorothy Day.
The organizations which Harry Chapin co- founded, from WHYHunger to Harry Chapin Food Banks across the nation, continue to serve those most in need more than four decades after Chapin’s death. The tough, day-to-day work of those anti-poverty organizations, and the extraordinary dedication of the Chapin family has carried forward Harry’s hope, and given his social justice work a life that is now longer than the time on earth enjoyed by the singer/songwriter. His family continues to carry on his many legacies.)
When Tom Chapin, the younger brother closest in age to Harry, got a call on that July day in 1981, from the Nassau County, NY, cop who recovered Harry’s charred body near the Jericho exit of the busy Long Island Expressway (Interstate 495), he knew something wasn’t right.
“What’s your relation to the deceased?” the police office asked.
Tom was taken aback. “ Deceased?”
Someone had died in a terrible car accident on the L.I.E. and his wallet was incinerated, destroying all of the victim’s ID.
“We have a body here, and the only way we can identify it is by this pocket watch we found on him with a name inscribed on it,” the Nassau County Cop said.
“What does it say, “ Tom asked, fearful that he already knew.
“It says: “From the Flint Voice. To a great American, Harry Chapin,” the cop said.
Tom Chapin felt as if he had been punched in the stomach, and that the world stopped. He knew that Harry always carried a cherished pocket watch given to him by Michael Moore, the documentary filmmaker, before Moore made any films or was known beyond Flint, Michigan.
As a pushy 22-year old, Moore had thrust himself into Harry’s face backstage at intermission of a 1976 Grand Rapids, Michigan concert, begging Chapin to do a benefit for his fledgling, muckraking publication, the Flint Voice.
“He said, ‘sure,’ I’ll do it,” Moore told a crowd at the Huntington, N.Y., Book Review bookstore in October, 2011, some 30 years after Chapin’s death, “and two months later he came to Flint to do a benefit concert for us. Harry came for five years, every year — even when Flint was down and out — sometimes doing two to five concerts a year. When Harry died it sent shock waves through the people of Flint because we kind of adopted him.”
What Moore didn’t learn, until years later, was that it was the inscribed pocket watch he gave to Harry Chapin out of gratitude for his generosity, that enabled his brother Tom to identify the body.
Chapin’s simple act of human connection, of wanting to improve life for the people of Flint, Michigan; his great act of love for a cause championed by another idealistic organizer, and his spirit of making the world a bit better, had survived the fire, even though his body had not. It was a metaphor for how Harry’s social justice work lived on, longer than his 38 years on earth.
“Yes,” Tom said to the cop after he finished reading the inscription on the pocket watch. “I’m Harry Chapin’s brother.”
“Then you may want to come down to the Nassau County Medical Center and identify the body,” the cop said.
The shock of Harry’s death spread slowly, stubbornly, with each call Tom Chapin made, as if, not even the truth could believe itself.
Family and friends flocked to the Chapin home in Huntington Bay, to be with Sandy Chapin and her children — the youngest of whom, Jason, Jen and Josh, were 17, 10 and 8 ½ years old.
Fans flooded the band shell at Eisenhower Park in East Meadow for a benefit concert to fight hunger that Harry Chapin was scheduled to give that same night, refusing to leave for hours, refusing to believe that the news they heard was real.
The day after Harry’s death, thousands of people spontaneously showed up in downtown Flint, Michigan, to pay their respects to someone who’s “greatest gift and the curse he lived with was that he always cared,” about them, and people like them — a lyric Harry prophetically wrote about folk singer Phil Ochs, who killed himself in 1976.
The profound and prolonged reaction to Harry Chapin’s sudden death, and the work of WHYHunger and Harry Chapin Food Banks around the country over the next four decades to pull people out of poverty and make millions of families less food insecure, was, and continues to be, a reminder of why Harry’s life mattered, well beyond his music.
Yet, performing artists like Billy Joel, considered a consummate musician and songwriter who has received every conceivable musical honor, along with selection into the Rock & Roll and the Songwriters’ Halls of Fame, had the highest praise for Harry’s artistry, as well as his activism.
“He wrote the best story songs,” said the singer/songwriter from Hicksville, Long Island, who wrote some pretty good songs himself. “ A lot of people said to me, ‘you wrote Piano Man?’ I thought it was a Harry Chapin song.”
A slight grin brightened Billy Joel’s face, in the sunny front section of his motorcycle shop in the Village of Oyster Bay, Long Island.
“No I wrote that, I would say. Harry’s songs were about human beings, humanity. Whether his career was big enough, that’s not important. It was his impact. And he had an impact upon other songwriters that was all positive, all to the good,” said Billy Joel.
For Harry Chapin, as it was for one of his heroes, Pete Seeger, commitment to a cause, to his family and his craft, made his life full. Bruce Springsteen, who raised $2 million to fight food insecurity during the COVID-19 Pandemic, has picked up the musician’s mantle of social justice leadership carried by Chapin, Seeger, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Chilean folksinger Victor Jara and many others over the decades.
In his comments at the December 7, 1987, Carnegie Hall Tribute where Harry Chapin was posthumously awarded a Special Congressional Gold Medal for his Humanitarian work — only the fourth musician in US history to ever be so honored, along with Irving Berlin and George & Ira Gershwin — Springsteen talked about the legacy of an activist artist like Chapin.
“ Harry instinctively knew it would also take more than love to survive,” he said, before singing a haunting rendition of Chapin’s song Remember When, “it was going to take hard work, with a good, clear-eye on the dirty ways of the world.”
In his own autobiography Born to Run: Bruce Springsteen (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, NY, 2016, by Bruce Springsteen) Springsteen writes about his own “clear-eyed look at the dirty ways of the world,” after beginning his work with food banks and anti-poverty groups around the country in the mid-1980’s, following Harry’s death:
“I never had the frontline courage of many of my more committed musical brethren. If anything, over the years, too much has been made of whatever service we’ve provided. But I did look to develop a consistent approach. Something I could follow year in and year out, and find a way to assist the folks who’d been hit hardest by systematic neglect and injustice. These were the families who’d built America and yet whose dreams and children were, generation after generation, considered expendable. Our travels and position would allow us to support, at the grassroots level, activists who dealt, day to day, with the citizens who’d been shuffled to the margins of American life.” (P. 328).
At the Carnegie Hall Chapin Tribute concert in 1987, Springsteen acknowledged that Harry was one of those with such relentless “front-line courage.”
In fact, Harry was living the line he wrote in his own story song “The Parade’s Still Passing By” about Phil Ochs, the Civil Rights activist and anti-war folk singer who rivaled Bob Dylan for a time in the 1960’s, and killed himself in 1976, at the age of 35: “your greatest gift and the curse you lived with was that you could always care.”
Ochs had traveled to Hazard, Kentucky, to perform for the families of striking coal miners in 1963; to Mississippi in 1964 as part of the Caravan of Music to support the Freedom Fighters throughout the South; to Chicago, in the summer of 1968, to participate in demonstrations against the War in Vietnam at the Democratic National Convention; and to Chile, in 1971, following the election of Democratic Socialist President Salvador Allende to perform with the great Chilean political activist and folksinger, Victor Jara, who was executed four days after Allende was assassinated by Right Wing fascists, in 1973.
Och’s motivating mantra (There But For Fortune: The Life of Phil Ochs, by Michael Schumacher, University of Minnesota Press edition, Minneapolis, MN, 2018) could have been written by Harry Chapin, especially since both devoted significant portions of their careers, and earnings, to fighting poverty:
“ I have come to believe that this is, in essence, the role of the folksinger…I feel that the singer almost has a responsibility with political and social involvement. You can’t look at folk music as simply an element of show business, because it’s much deeper and more important than that.” (p. 74)
Harry’s cauldron of creativity and his own curse — similar to, but far more lasting that Phil Ochs’ — was the degree to which he cared about others, how much he desperately drove himself, how deeply he believed in things, and how determined he was to make his time on earth matter, and prove before he died — and for decades after — how much one person’s life could be worth.
When the meaning of Independence Day has been obliterated, and the Constitution and Human Rights are trampled and torched by the Totalitarians within.
(In times of great stress, and when the darkness begins to crowd out the light, or when despair threatens to drown out hope, I turn to thinkers and writers and activists who never gave up, no matter how terrible the times. Viktor Frankl‘s “Mans Search for Meaning,” written by a concentration camp survivor is one such source of strength. So is the writing of James Baldwin, who sees “hope” as a moral imperative, despite the heinous cruelty and racism of our own country. I wrote this piece two years ago for July 4th, a jingoistic holiday I deplore for its’ self-congratulatory smugness and nationalized delusion. The conditions I described then, are multiple times worse now, and assault us everyday in the image of masked ICE brownshirts, and the grinning, greedy faces of Trump and his supporters who take glee in destroying some 60 years of gains in Civil Rights, crushing working families, and making Apartheid Great Again. As a Jew, outraged by the Israel’s abandonment of every fundamental principle of Judaism, and angry at America’s destruction of democracy and any shred of fairness, James Baldwin speaks for me more now than ever before. Holding onto hope is more difficult for me today, than at anytime in my 76 years of civic engagement, public service, political activism, and as an advocate for humanity. Baldwin and Frankl and my granddaughters compel me to continue to do so.)
July 4th in the USA is jammed with jingoist junk; stuffed with solipsistic slop of self-congratulation and “exceptionalism;” inebriated on the insanity of illuminating the night sky for mere minutes with a fortune in feel-good fireworks, while the people gawking at them below, get ground into the dirt on which they stand.
Nothing illustrates that sharp contrast of Red, White and Black and Blue this July 4th holiday, than the three-pronged missiles of mass destruction aimed at every person of color, and every person of modest means in this country, by the US Supreme Court of High Executioners.
The High Court’s poison-dipped darts came “in bunches, not as single spies,” as Shakespeare wrote, but their targets were all the same: people of modest means, and people of color, left out of this country’s original contract; shackled, whipped, beaten, robbed and robbed again and again and again. Reparations? Don’t be ridiculous—this rich man’s country and its’ institutions are hell-bent on Decimation of any poor, or Black or brown human different from it’s wealthy, White overlords.
First, the repeal of Roe, and the termination of a woman’s right to have freedom over her own body, comes down like a hammer on the heads of predominantly poor women of color, in the States of the Old Confederacy—which once had laws protecting the rights of Slave owners to rape Black women, and now, in 2023, has laws forcing poor, Black women to give birth to the child of their rapists. How far have we come? In the good ole’ boy days of the Confederacy, that’s just the way Slave owners increased their workforce, with the approval of their Christian churches & governments.
Secondly, the assault and dismemberment of Affirmative Action was an arrow aimed directly at a noble, 60 year movement toward fairness, to level the playing field for many whose ancestors’ labor and the very fields they worked were ripped out from under them, without compensation, or remorse. Affirmative Action—an affirmative, constructive step to approach equality—was a measured, modest, long-term attempt to rebuild some of that stolen wealth over generations, and to overcome the onerous obstacles continually constructed to block Black people—like Black Veterans being denied the right to go to college, or use the GI Bill’s benefits they risked their lives to earn. Affirmative Action was intended to make a minor correction to those crimes against Black humanity; a very mild attempt, not unlike Germany’s, to recompense the families of the six million Jews that German Nationalists slaughtered.
Finally, and much like an assault weapon obliterates the flesh of its victims, the Supreme Court’s malicious destruction of a Student Loan forgiveness program, decapitated one concrete hope millions of striving, working-class Americans of all colors had of building wealth for their families and their communities, by dramatically reducing their college debt. But in this rich man’s corporate playground known as the United States, only big banks, oil & gas companies, and Justices Thomas, Alito, & Roberts are permitted to get bailed out –-by government or billionaires, and multi-million dollar law firms with business before their kept Court.
My anger over these these intentional, pre-meditated acts of murder of poor women, Black people and generations of working families, has unlocked some of my darkest demons. I want revenge; I want to even the score; I want to understand how generations of Black Americans have never lost hope in this goddamned, amoral country.
So, not for comfort, but to learn how to better channel my fury, I turned to James Baldwin, in his brilliant book, The Fire Next Time. The tight, tough book, was first published in 1963, the year Medgar Evers and President Kennedy were assassinated; and, republished in 1964, the year that Civil Rights Freedom Riders, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were gunned down in Mississippi by the KKK working in collaboration with local law enforcement officials. The fire, the fury, was all around us; the following year, Malcolm X was assassinated; three years later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
In his powerful and prescient closing pages, Baldwin wrote in 1963:
“ A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay. ‘The problem of the 20th Century, ‘ wrote W.E.B. Dubois around 60 years ago, is the problem of the color line.”
Baldwin continued:
“A tearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world—here, there or anywhere. It is for this reason that everything White Americans think they believe in, must now be reexamined. “
“What one would not like to see again is the consolidation of peoples on the basis of their color. But as long as we in the West place on color the value that we do, we make it impossible to consolidate, according to any other principle. Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality. . .
“And, at the center of this dreadful storm, stand the Black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation that has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains. Well, if this is so, one has no choice but to do all in one’s power to change that fate, and at no matter what risk—eviction, imprisonment, torture, death.
“For the sake of one’s children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion… I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand…
“One is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and in American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less, than the achievement of the impossible.”
“If we—and now, I mean the relatively conscious Whites and the relatively conscious Blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.
“If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in a song by a slave, is upon us: ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time!’
Justice Sonia Sotomayor schools the lesser lawyers on the Supreme Court on the meaning of the Constitution, and the essence of humanity.
(United States Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, photo from the New York Times).
One hundred years ago, the State of Tennessee was the site of perhaps the first big legal battle of the culture wars in the United States following the Civil War. Accordingly, it was no surprise that it was Tennessee again earlier this month, a century later, where religious fundamentalism flared up to set fire to individual rights once again, in the Supreme Court case of United States v. Skrmetti.
In March,1925, the Tennessee State Legislature, dominated by religious fundamentalists, passed the Butler Act, which made it illegal to teach scientific evolution in the State’s public schools, or any theory of evolution that denied “the Biblical account of creation.” Tennessee’s became the first law in the nation’s history to ban the teaching of science-based evolution.
Then, it was a 24-year old High School football coach, John Scopes, who also taught Math, General Science and Biology in the Rhea County High School, who ran smack into the law’s prohibitions on what he could teach, by introducing the concepts of scientific evolution in his high school biology class. Scopes was immediately fired, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took up the case of what became known as “The Scopes Monkey Trial,” in the small Tennessee town of Dayton.
The trial ran for 11-days, from July 10, 1925, with the legendary defense attorney Clarence Darrow, representing John Scopes, and three-time Presidential Candidate William Jennings Bryan prosecuting for the State of Tennessee. The first trial to be broadcast nationwide on the new medium of radio, the Scopes trial riveted the country’s attention, becoming a symbol of cultural conflict between contemporary scientific teachings, and religious fundamentalism. The ACLU’s position on the case was that the Butler Act violated both Academic Freedom and the First Amendment’s prohibition against the Establishment of Religion.
Despite Darrow’s brilliant dismantling of Bryan’s strictly religious arguments (depicted some 35 years later by the actor Spencer Tracy in the film version of the play Inherit the Wind), Scopes was found guilty of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act and fined $100. Two years later, that verdict was overturned on a technicality involving the fine, but the statute’s prohibition against teaching evolution remained. It would not be declared unconstitutional—along with other laws like it across the country—for another 40 years, when, in 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a similar law in Epperson V. Arkansas, on First Amendment grounds—the same basis on which the Tennessee law was challenged in 1925.
Fast forward to the State of Tennessee in 2025, when despite remarkable gains in medical science, scientific knowledge and human and civil rights, religious fundamentalists—now in control of the U.S. Supreme Court and the Executive Branch of the federal government– have seized on a new, human target to tar and feather: children, who have questions about sex and gender, and are seeking either medical or mental healthcare.
Astonishingly, despite the passage of nearly 100 years of time, Tennessee passed a new law in 2023, entitled: “Prohibition on Medical Procedures Performed on Minors Related to Sexual Identity,” or Tennessee Senate Bill SB1. The law explicitly “prohibits healthcare providers from prescribing, administering or dispensing puberty blockers or hormones to any minor for the purpose of (1) enabling the minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s biological sex, or (2) treating purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s biological sex and asserted identity.” United States v. Skrmetti.
At the same time, and by the US Supreme Court’s own statement of the case in Skrmetti, Tennessee’s SB 1 “permits a healthcare provider to administer puberty blockers or hormones to treat a minor’s congenital defect, precocious puberty, disease or physical injury.” That explicit permission to other children of the same or different sexespresenting other reasons for such healthcare procedures is a flashing red-light of discrimination meriting “intermediate scrutiny” to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Sotomayor points out in her brilliant, blistering dissent from the Court’s 6-3 decision upholding the Tennessee statute, that :
“Sex and diagnosis may both be in play. As long as sex is one of the law’s distinguishing features, however, the law classifies on the basis of sex, and the Equal Protection Clause requires application of intermediate scrutiny.” (P. 20, Sotomayor dissent).
The Tennessee anti-transgender children’s law did not materialize overnight. In fact it’s language—and that of similar laws in more than two dozen other states—was virtually ripped out of the pages of Project 2025, a 920-page religious fundamentalist blueprint being followed by the Trump Administration to deny legal and human rights to LGBTQ+ individuals.
In the opening pages of Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership, subheaded “Promise#1: Restore the Family as the Centerpiece of American Life and Protect Our Children” the key author of the Project, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, lays out the underpinnings of the anti-individual rights agenda advanced by the Tennessee statute ( pages 4 & 5, Forward, Project 2025):
“This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion(“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women.”
Justice Sotomayor’s 31-page dissent, is free from knee-jerk ideology and trope-laden language which permeates the Majority’s decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, and the egregiously biased concurring opinions of Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett. Unlike her far more conservative colleagues on the Court, Sotomayor sticks to the law, and the facts of the case.
Her clear, concise legal arguments fall into two categories:
A compelling case made for elevating the scrutiny of the claims in the case to the intermediate or heightened level of scrutiny, an important jurisprudential notch above the “rational basis review”, the lowest level of legal scrutiny which the Majority on the Court applied do the case;
The existence of an unconstitutional sex classification in the law.
Without wasting anytime, Justice Sotomayor immediately reminds the Court that it “has long subjected to heightened scrutiny any law that treats people differently based on sex.” (p. 1, Sotomayor dissent):
“Today, the Court considers a Tennessee Law that categorically prohibits doctors from prescribing certain medications to adolescents if (and only if) they will help a patient ‘identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex. In addition to discriminating against transgender adolescents, who, by definition ‘identify with” an identity ‘inconsistent with their sex, that law conditions the availability of medications on a patient’s sex.”
Justice Sotomayor is relentless in reminding the Court of the failure to perform even their most basic duties of scrutinizing such a clearly discriminatory sex-status case at a higher level:
“Tennessee’s law expressly classifies on the basis of sex and transgender status, so the Constitution and settled precedent require the Court to subject it to intermediate scrutiny. The majority contorts logic and precedent to say otherwise…Thus, the majority subjects a law that plainly discriminates on the basis of sex to a mere rational-basis review. By retreating from meaningful judicial review exactly where it matters most, the Court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims.”
Justice Sotomayor’s torrid dissent is a tour-de-force of jurisprudence, the facts, the law, and constitutional precedence, including a decision Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote five years ago in Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020) which prohibited Title VII employment discrimination on the basis of sex or transgender disrcrimination:
From Bostock: “It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”
Sotomayor noted that Bostock confirmed the classification of “sex” in the Tennessee statute and made it clear that discrimination based on incongruence between sex and gender identity was discrimination “because of sex.” It astounded her that a majority of her colleagues on the Court could so blatantly overturn their own, precisely-on-point legal precedent of only five years earlier, with Gorsuch joining the majority.
Not only did Justice Sotomayor school her fellow Supreme Court justices on the content and meaning of their most recent anti-discrimination decision pertaining to sex and transgender status, but she skillfully used her dissent to educate them about the extraordinarily serious mental health issues that the Court’s Skrmetti decision, ignored, and would make worse:
“Suicide, in particular, is a major concern for parents of transgender teenagers, as the lifetime prevalence of suicide attempts among transgender individuals may be as high as 40%. Tragically, studies suggest that as many as one-third of transgender high school students attempt suicide in any given year.” (Sotomayor dissent, p. 5)
As if to punctuate the callous cruelty of the Supreme Court’s majority decision in Skrmetti, on the very same day the Majority’s Skrmetti screed was released, the Trump Administration announced it was eliminating funding for specialized suicide prevention services on the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline for LGBTQ+ youth.
The National LBGTQ+ Bar Association stripped bare the meaning of those dual, destructive decisions (Skrmetti, and the end of the Suicide hotline for LGBTQ+ youth) the day after they came down, on June 20, 2025: “The message is chillingly clear: our government is willing to let LGBTQ+ people suffer, to let us die, and to harm our community’s children.”
Sonoma County Bar Association’s LGBTQ+ Legal Section Chair and Board of Directors Member Tate Birnie (Birnie Law Office, Sebastopol, California) underscores that warning:
“The ruling sets a dangerous precedent for future actions targeting trans and LGBTQ+ individuals. Skrmetti has intensified the risks faced by transgender, nonbinary, and intersex youth, and anyone who defies societal or state-imposed gender definitions. I see this ruling as both a denial of care, and a fundamental affront to the humanity, autonomy and dignity of trans, nonbinary and intersex people.”
Birnie, a Stanford University Law School graduate, went on to warn that even states like California are not immune from the ban:
“Just this week, Stanford Medicine announced that it had stopped providing gender-affirming surgeries for patients under 19 years old. Similarly, Children’s Hospital in LA—another major provider of medical care for transgender youth in California—has decided to close its’ trans youth program. As a graduate of Stanford Law School, I am dismayed that Stanford has decided to capitulate on this issue, rather than continue to provide safe access to affirming care and recognize the right to bodily autonomy.”
That’s the same powerful message delivered by Justice Sotomayor in her 31-page masterpiece of a factual, jurisprudential and humane dissent in Skrmetti, required reading for every law student in the country and for practicing lawyers in all areas of law:
“…it is difficult to ignore that Tennessee professes concern with protecting the health of minors while categorically banning gender affirming care for even those minors exhibiting the most severe mental health conditions, including suicidality.”
Like the Tennessee Scopes trial 100 years earlier, when the lower court in Tennessee and the local community of religious fundamentalists tried to pretend that the facts in front of their face did not exist, the majority on the U.S. Supreme Court is also opting for an alternative reality, which much higher, more urgent life and death stakes. Justice Sotomayor refuses to permit them to look the other way, as the closing paragraph in her dissent to Skrmetti declares:
“This case presents an easy question: whether SB1’s (Tennessee’s) ban on certain medications, applicable only if used in a manner ‘inconsistent with…sex,” contains a sex classification. Because sex determines access to the covered medications, it clearly does. Yet, the Majority refuses to call a spade a spade. Instead, it obfuscates a sex classification that is plain on the face of this statute…The Court’s willingness to do so here does irrevocable damage to the Equal Protection Clause and invites legislatures to engage in discrimination by hiding blatant sex classifications in plain sight.
“It also authorizes, without second thought, untold harm to transgender children and the parents and families who love them. Because there is no constitutional justification for that result, I dissent.”
***
By Steve Villano, Executive Director, Sonoma County Bar Association (the opinions expressed in this article are the author’s; the facts, are all verifiable, by citation.)
Today is Donald Trump’s 79 Birthday and “NO KINGS DAY,” across the US, with massive protests vs. Trump’s Dictatorship. The Rosenbergs only wish that Trump, a Russian Asset, be treated like they were.
For Donald Trump’s 77th birthday 2 years ago, he was given the gift of a 37-count criminal indictment, with 31 of those charges pertaining to blatant violations of the Espionage Act, including spilling Nuclear secrets.
Next week, June 19, marks the 72th anniversary of the execution by electrocution of Ethel & Julius Rosenberg for violating the Espionage Act. It’s seems so serendipitous, and certainly poetic, that, in the end, the lives of Trump and the Rosenbergs are so intertwined.
Three years ago, on the anniversary of the arrest of Ethel Rosenberg for allegedly providing valuable, top-secret information to the Russians about nuclear weapons designs, radar, sonar and jet propulsion engines, the WashingtonPost broke an explosive story headlined: “FBI searched Trump’s home to look for nuclear documents and other items, sources say.”
Now that we have physical evidence that boxes and boxes of highly classified US secrets—including Nuclear plans, and plans of how best to attack the US—were left in Trump’s bathroom, in a public ballroom and strewn about in closets and storage rooms, Trump’s illegal violations of the Espionage Acts are veering into Ethel and Julius territory.
As we’ve witnessed Trump incessant Smash & Grab 2nd Administration’s frenzied fever to put EVERYTHING in the U.S. up for sale, the prospect of Trump selling highly classified nuclear documents to Vladimir Putin or the Saudis for billions of dollars—or of his recklessness of his mishandling top secret documents he should never have had–is entirely plausible. It adds an entirely new, and dangerous, dimension to Trump’s reign of terror, including the possibility that Russian spies or foreign agents from anywhere, could have photographed these top secret military documents, while using the bathroom at Mar-A-Lago, or that Trump is still monetizing similar top secret, classified information.
Like Trump’s friend, mentor, lawyer Roy Cohn—lionized in the movie, “The Apprentice,” as Trump’s primary tutor—I grew up thinking that only alleged “communists” or “communist sympathizers,” spilled nuclear secrets to the Russians, and our enemies, not Presidents. After all, it was Roy Cohn who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair for violating the Espionage Act. My faith in the US Justice system has been shaken because Trump hasn’t been treated exactly the same way as Ethel & Julius. It is so unfair, as Trump himself would say. And, since the foreign asset Trump was not treated the same way the Rosenbergs were, as a Jew, I believe the actions vs. the Rosenbergs were blatantly Anti-Semitic.
After I devoured the brilliantly researched and written 49-page criminal indictment of Trump which lays out not only his continuing theft of top secret classified documents over two years, but his willful obstruction of the Justice Department’s efforts to retrieve them, visions of Ethel Rosenberg, played by Meryl Streep in the HBO production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, began dancing on my brain.
Quickly, I ran to get my printed and signed copy of Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize winning play.
I turned to the page where the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg shows up at Roy Cohn’s bedside, as he lay dying of AIDS. Cohn, who was Donald Trump’s personal role-model and fellow Studio 54 partier, as well as his attorney, had hounded Ethel and her husband Julius into electric-chair executions three years after her arrest in 1950.
ETHEL: They won, Roy. You’re not a lawyer anymore.
ROY: But am I dead?
ETHEL: No. They beat you. You lost.
(Pause)
ETHEL:
I decided to come here so I could see if I could forgive you. You who I have hated so terribly. I have borne my hatred for you up into the heavens and made a needlesharp little star in the sky out of it. It’s the star of Ethel Rosenberg’s Hatred, and it burns every year for one night only, June 19. (June 19, 1953, was the day Ethel and her husband Julius were executed. Ethel had to be electrocuted three times before she finallydied.) It burns acid green.
I came to forgive, but all I can do is take pleasure in your misery. Hoping I’d get to see you die more terrible than I did. And you are, ‘cause you’re dying in shit, Roy, defeated. And you could kill me, but you could never defeat me. You never won. And when you die all anyone will say is: better he had never lived at all.”
Will the same thing be said of Trump? Is Trump destined to become his own Roy Cohn? Will he die defeated again, in his own shit, and stripped of everything he ever knew?
The only President in all of American history to be twice impeached, twice indicted of crimes, and twice arrested (so far), Trump’s recklessness, and flagrant disregard for any and all laws, have surprised even those of us who have long pegged him as a criminal cipher, a con, a fraud, a liar, and a mob-boss wannabe. Is he capable of selling nuclear secrets to the Russians or the Saudis, the UAE, Qatar, or the highest bidder?
Perhaps, the only appropriate eulogy that could be given for Trump’s lawless, 50-year temper tantrum and his unending drag show of distraction in public, is a variation on the theme expressed by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg—thrice electrocuted– over Roy Cohn’s deathbed: “Better he never had never lived a public life at all.”
