The question is, who counts?

In 1857, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger B Taney set the stage for the violent sectional conflict that we call the Civil War by baldly ruling that some people could not possess the full rights of human kind within the United States.

[African Americans] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it.

Taney's legal atrocity was overturned by blood, by 618,000 deaths, roughly 260,000 fighting for the Confederacy, 360,000 for the Union. We think of our times as uniquely partisan. We think of Abraham Lincoln as a wise patriarch, whose best angels looked beyond his immediate battles. And that's a truth. But we should remember, Lincoln was a peacemaker by way of the sword. The cause of human freedom evoked violent defense. Our tradition is not comforting.

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” 2nd Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865

Our rogue, rightwing, results-oriented, Republican Supreme Court is in the process of imposing a series of legal rulings which undermine the humanity of their political opponents no less than Taney attempted in his day.

• Last year, the Dobbs decision allowed states to force pregnancy (and consequently child raising) on women who might have aborted an unplanned, unwanted fetus. States quickly undermined medical provision for all kinds of maternal healthcare. By now, we now have a year's evidence that pregnant women are more likely to die in states with abortion bans.

• On Thursday, the Court outlawed attempts to overcome the effects of past and ongoing racial discrimination in college admissions, by asserting against all evidence that white supremacy is a thing of the past. As too ample experience in California has demonstrated, the affirmative action ban amounts to kicking Black people when they are down.

• On Friday, the Court decided that a Presidential attempt to reduce the burden of loans taken out by students to pay for often dubious "education" could not proceed. Because ... well, because it can. Wouldn't want the young and poor getting educated.

• And further, the Court decided that some lady who didn't want to make websites for same-sex weddings (which no one had asked her to make) was within her free speech rights to discriminate against LGBTQ couples. So much for public accommodation laws requiring businesses to treat all customers equally, what the student Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and '60s sat-in at lunch counters for.

For all the surrounding legal google-de-guck, these decisions announce, as once did Taney, that women, Black people (again), other people of color, young people, and queers have no rights that old white men (one honorary) are bound to respect.

Are we going to put up with this? We are the majority. We kick the system until people in power fix it.