Thomas Wictor

The past couple of days have been truly astonishing. I’ve never seen so many people lose their minds in concert. What we need is nationwide psychiatric intervention.

I’m talking, of course, about Burwell, Secretary of Health and Human services et al v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., et al. We’re perilously close to collapse as a culture. What we’re experiencing now has been presented many times in fiction, but now it’s genuinely happening. Millions of us are totally demented. By choice. I’ve spent two days asking people to please read the decision, but they won’t. They’d rather roll their eyes and howl at the moon.

I don’t understand the mindset; luckily I don’t have to. In many ways I’ve become insulated from it.

The most likely explanation is that these are people with absolutely empty lives, so they have to attach themselves to some great crusade. It doesn’t matter if it’s nothing but a hallucination. The fury is what’s important. Rage makes you feel powerful.

Also, I’ve learned from my time on Facebook that almost everybody has to have an “other” to hate. Those who sermonize about “No hate!” are the biggest haters of all. It’s axiomatic.

What kind of people get angry when you prove to them that their worst fears aren’t true? For example, there’s no such thing as a “rape culture.” The crime of rape has declined nearly 60 percent since 1995. Isn’t that good news? But women get hostile when I tell them that.

You know why? Because I’m doing this to their argument.

Well, too bad, ladies. When you accuse men of being part of a nonexistent “rape culture,” it’s defamation. You’re defaming an entire gender. You think I’m just going to hang my head and take it? You don’t know me very well.

The thing is, I don’t want to know you. That’s because you’re idiots. Here I am using a truly incredible human invention, the Internet. Though I’m housebound, I can look up anything. The Internet is a library the size of a continent. It took me about eighteen seconds to find that statistic about rape.

Today a woman wrote to me, “Justice Alito (or maybe Scalia) said the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t apply to women, or it shouldn’t have too[sic].”

I knew without even looking that she was full of it, but I typed “fourteenth amendment doesn’t apply to women” into Google, and the second hit was this.

The equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does not protect against discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual orientation, according to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

In a newly published interview in the legal magazine California Lawyer, Scalia said that while the Constitution does not disallow the passage of legislation outlawing such discrimination, it doesn’t itself outlaw that behavior…

“Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws. You don’t need a constitution to keep things up-to-date. All you need is a legislature and a ballot box.”

Here’s the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Agree or disagree with Scalia, you must admit that saying the equal protection clause does not prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex is NOT THE SAME as saying “the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t apply to women.”

Right? Right.

This poor woman gave me a cargo-cult version of what Scalia actually said. She could’ve found the real quote in five seconds, but she chose instead to spread another stupid, self-pitying, destructive, divisive, tribal, hate-filled campfire tale.

We’re living in Rod Serling’s The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.

Figure One: Understand the procedure now? Just stop a few of their machines and radios and telephones and lawn mowers…throw them into darkness for a few hours and then you just sit back and watch the pattern.

Figure Two: And this pattern is always the same?

Figure One: With few variations. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find…and it’s themselves. And all we need do is sit back…and watch.

Figure Two: Then I take it this place…this Maple Street…is not unique.

Figure One: By no means. Their world is full of Maple Streets. And we’ll go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves. One to the other…one to the other…one to the other—

No, we’re living in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

All the scary fiction written as warnings? It’s become our reality.

Amend that.

Their reality. Not mine. I still have this, even if it’s a bit battered and over half a century old.

The top of my head may be flat, but you’ll never hear me scream, “Burn the witch! Burn her!“