Dear Readers,
This week, we were planning to give you an update on the House of Representatives’ inquiry into the Washington Commanders’ sexist workplace culture. The inquiry, which has been going on for several months now, reached a new level of absurdity this week when NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was called to testify. But right as we sat down to write, the Supreme Court released its decision overturning Roe — which, as you may imagine, took the wind out of our sails a little bit.
As regular readers of the newsletter know, the two of us genuinely believe in the power of sports to serve as an arena for collective action, and we’re committed to covering athletes’ attempts to build a more just and egalitarian social order. But in moments like these, it’s hard not to feel like all of this is just small potatoes. It’s true that some athletes have spoken out against the Supreme Court’s assault on abortion rights—though not nearly as many as we would have hoped or expected—but really, what could athletes actually do to change the mind of six unelected judges in D.C.?
The Supreme Court, now firmly in the hands of its right-wing justices, has decided to take an even more activist role in our society, overturning Roe v. Wade, gutting the enforcement of Miranda rights, and limiting states’ abilities to stop people from carrying handguns in public. As a result of its decision in Dobbs, thirteen states will ban abortion outright within 30 days. Some already have. A group of nine people who have no responsibility to the public—two of whom have credible sexual assault allegations against them—have made these decisions. The sporting world has basically been silent about all of this.
Anyway, this is all to say that we’re not quite in the mood to pillory Dan Snyder once again, even if he deserves it. If you’re curious about the Congressional inquiry into the Commanders — or about new sexual assault allegations against Snyder — you can check out The Washington Post’s excellent coverage here and here. In the meantime, we’ve put together an annotated reading list with some resources that are helping us make sense of this depressing and disorienting moment in American politics. We hope you find something valuable in them, too. At the end, we’ve also included some more fun sports coverage, if (quite reasonably) you want to read about something lighter for a moment.
We’d also like to say that in times as horrible as these, small communities take on even greater importance. We hope Southpaw can serve in a small way as one of those communities — one in which we can support one another and maybe have an interesting think about a topic or two while we’re at it. Let’s continue to be kind to one another.
-Ian and Calder
What the Hell is Happening: A Reading List
We're Not Going Back To The Time Before Roe. We're Going Back To Something Else., by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker.
“We have entered an era not of unsafe abortion but of widespread state surveillance and criminalization—of pregnant women, certainly, but also of doctors and pharmacists and clinic staffers and volunteers and friends and family members, of anyone who comes into meaningful contact with a pregnancy that does not end in a healthy birth,” Tolentino writes in her latest piece for The New Yorker. Tolentino’s talking about the decision in Dobbs, but she’s also getting at the decisions behind the decision. Yes, many of the opponents of Roe simply hate women and want to see them suffer. But they also have a larger political project in mind, one that criminalizes any action or thought that challenges an increasingly reactionary right-wing worldview.
The court’s decision in Dobbs is best understood as part of this broader rightward shift in American politics. This past month (Pride Month!) has seen a spate of new legislation targeting LGBTQ+ people, and next month, the wheel of hate will no doubt land on more marginalized groups. It often feels random and cruel, but as we saw this week, it all adds up to a concerted attack not only on the legal rights of minorities but also on the concept of rights as such. The new “alt” thing to do might be to go alt-right, but the truth is that even the “New Right” doesn’t really have a positive political project. Their mission is simply to strip everyone of their rights—beginning with the right to bodily autonomy, but certainly not stopping there.
The Tolentino piece breaks this dynamic down well—and completely disabuses anyone of the notion that “nothing will change” in the post-Roe world.
“The Christian Right and Roe,” by the Know Your Enemy podcast
Know Your Enemy is a fantastic podcast about the American right hosted by two lefty journalists named Matthew Sitman and Sam-Adler Bell, who bill the show as “a leftist’s guide to the conservative movement.” The podcast is fantastic in general—if you want some background on it, you can check out Ian’s recent piece about the podcast for Politico Magazine—but this episode provides an especially insightful overview of the history of anti-abortion politics over the past fifty years, focusing in particular on how the Republican Party became the chief vehicle for the religious right to pursue its anti-abortion agenda. As Adler-Bell and Sitman explain, the political alliance between the Republican Party and the religious right was hardly inevitable, and the Republican Party had to work hard to win over anti-abortion voters. The history of these efforts, as the Know Your Enemy hosts point out, offers some valuable lessons to the Democratic Party as it seeks to re-mobilize pro-choice voters who’ve grown skeptical of the party’s ability to serve as an effective vehicle for pro-choice politics.
This Is Not an Abortion Story, by Sarah Jones in New York Magazine.
Sarah Jones grew up among anti-abortion Christians, and in this piece, she succinctly clearly explains how this perspective “makes a person a resource to control, not a full human being with bodily autonomy.” “In this view the fetus itself is more than a pawn in a political game,” Jones writes. “It’s a punishment that a person must bear, no matter the cost.”
When Jones grew up, she abandoned that worldview for a more secular one—a decision that she considered radical at the time, and also a decision that she believed she had the freedom to make. The Dobbs decision throws all of us—in particular those living in states that will ban abortion, but all of us—back into the world that Jones made the choice to leave, where pregnancy can be punished as a crime and people are reduced to resources to be managed and, ultimately, controlled.
Good Guys with Guns, by James Pogue in Harper’s
This is a relatively old article—it was first published in Harper’s in April 2020—but it came to mind again this week in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen, a major Second Amendment decision striking down a New York law regulating the licensing of handgun possession in public places. In the piece, Pogue—who primarily covers right-wing militia movements in the American west, but who recently made the rounds with a Vanity Fair feature on the “New Right”—spends time with a group called the Socialist Rifle Association, a left-wing gun group that’s “attempting to offer an alternative to the ‘mainstream, toxic, right-wing, and non-inclusive gun culture’” and “use [a] shared interest in guns as a starting point for engaging in a more hopeful politics,” as Pogue puts it.
Gun rights are always a fraught issue on the left—especially now, in the wake of several major mass shootings—but Pogue makes a strong case that instead of dismissing gun ownership offhand (or, alternatively, seeking to curtail it completely), the left should explore new ways to use gun ownership to “build a politics that tends toward a more caring and collectively minded society while also being sensitive to some of the currents of anti-authoritarianism that run through our national life and often find expression in an attachment to gun rights.” If you’re looking for a piece that’s working to unpack many of the contradictions in modern-day American life, it’s a great place to start and Pogue presents legitimately novel arguments, whether you agree completely or not.
“Get Married or Go Home,” from Slate’s “Slow Burn” podcast, produced by Susan Matthews, Samira Tazari, Sophie Summergrad, and Sol Werthan.
Slow Burn, the popular podcast series from Slate best known for its deep dives into notorious political scandals, is forgoing its usual scandal-based model to devote an entire season to the history behind the Roe decision, beginning with the early history of the anti-abortion in the 1950s and 1960s. The first episode, “Get Married or Go Home,” tells the story of Shirley Wheeler, who became a prominent face of the early pro-choice movement after she was convicted of manslaughter in 1971 for obtaining an abortion in Florida when she was 22 years old. The rest of the season unfolds from there, and it is well worth a listen for its well-rendered portraits of the figures who set the stage for the national debate over abortion in the pre-Roe era.
Tracking Abortion Laws By State, from The New York Times’ digital desk.
There are a lot of visual resources out there explaining how the Dobbs decision will impact state laws in the short and long term, but we’ve found this one to be the cleanest and the most helpful.
And now, here are a few cool sports stories, if you’d like a break from the doom and gloom (or to redirect some of that doom and gloom):
“Shohei Ohtani Is Doing All Kinds Of Crazy Shit Out There,” by Tom Ley in Defector.
This article is useful primarily for the video highlights contained within. (You’ll get a similar effect typing “Shohei Ohtani” into your YouTube search bar.) For the uninitiated, Ohtani is a baseball star with the Los Angeles Angels’ who both pitches and hits, a feat that has basically never been done at this high a level. (Even Babe Ruth, the most famous pitcher-hitter in baseball history, didn’t pitch much later in his career.) This past week, Ohtani drove in eight runs in one night and then struck out 13 batters the next. Baseball has such a long history, but Ohtani is doing stuff that we’ve never seen before. It’s remarkable.
“Benching the patriarchy: 50 years of Title IX and how 4 women fought for change” by Emily Harris and Ida Hardin in NPR / on All Thing’s Considered
Harris and Hardin tell the story of Title IX—which became law 50 years ago this week—through the story of the University of Oregon Women’s Basketball team, one of the most successful teams in the country and one that was created thanks to Title IX. Today, female athletes are still fighting for equal recognition and equal compensation in the sporting world, but Title IX is one of the areas where we can see real progress. Thanks to the statute, rates of female participation in sports have exploded, and women’s sports are seeing huge upticks in television ratings and sponsorship deals, even as major obstacles remain. Regardless, take a moment to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the landmark law with Harris and Hardin’s story.
“U.S. officials say they're doing all they can for Brittney Griner. Are they?” by Dave Zirin for MSNBC.
WNBA star Brittney Griner has been detained in Russia for almost six months now, and during that time, she’s had basically one thing to look forward to: a phone call with her wife, Cherelle Griner, on the couple’s fourth wedding anniversary. That anniversary fell last weekend, but the call never took place. Why? Because the U.S. government—home to the most powerful and sophisticated diplomatic corps in the world—screwed up the logistics. Dave Zirin, always an incisive commentator on stupid shit in American sports and politics, draws the right lesson from this episode: the U.S. government just doesn’t care that much about Griner.