Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
We are not used to losing rights and privileges. Throughout my lifetime, and throughout the life of our nation, we have always expanded the circle of people who have rights to self-determination, to agency, to privacy.
As was the case with Prohibition in 1920, soon wide swaths of the American public will be unable to act on opportunities previously available to them. While Chico, Berkeley, Folsom, and Placerville were once considered “sundown towns,” meaning that African-Americans were prohibited from spending the night in those place, this time it’ll be women who are singled out for diminished privileges depending on where they find themselves. Some residents of those towns were comfortable with the racist prohibitions, while other fought back.
This time, the fight is about medical privacy, topics that men and women should be able to discuss with their doctors without governmental interference. As an unlikely source of Billy Graham once commented, “Once you’ve lost your privacy, you realize you’ve lost an extremely valuable thing.” Certain categories of citizen, such as people who look like the late Billy Graham or myself, will now be granted medical privacy, but women will not have the same rights over decisions made about their own bodies that I do. As with sundown towns, the privileges women are granted will be determined by where they live.
As Kaly Soto wrote in the New York Times yesterday, “With the decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the United States joins a handful of countries, like Poland, Russia and Nicaragua, that have rolled back access to the procedure in the last few decades, while more of the world has gone in the other direction.” Is this the company we wish to keep?
Not surprisingly, our international allies have expressed concern about the regressive decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. Canada’s Prime Minister Trudeau tweeted, “My heart goes out to the millions of American women who are now set to lose their legal right to an abortion. I can’t imagine the fear and anger you are feeling right now.”
President Emmanuel Macron of France tweeted that “Abortion is a fundamental right for all women. It must be protected.” Macron expressed his “solidarity with the women whose liberties are being undermined by the Supreme Court of the United States.” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, more conservative than some of these other western world leaders, said this: “I’ve always believed in a woman’s right to choose, and I stick to that view, and that’s why the U.K. has the laws that it does.”
The majority of Americans agree with Johnson. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll finds 71% of respondents, including 60% of Republicans, said they believed the decision to terminate a pregnancy should be left to a woman and her doctor. According to this poll, a mere 15% opined that this decision should be regulated by the government.
Somehow, when it comes to gun control, abortion rights, or even the U.S. Presidential elections of 2000 and 2016, the direction of the country continues to diverge significantly from the expressed wishes of the majority. Will these trends continue? We will see to what extent these dire circumstances jolt progressive voters into action and activism.
Meanwhile, I’m grateful to be a California resident. I hope blue state geographic privileges will last beyond November of 2022, when opponents of medical privacy and bodily autonomy for women are likely to take over both houses of Congress. We will see how many more of our personal rights and freedoms are challenged by our minority rulers then, and what we might be able to do to confront them.
Speaking of confrontations, and the non-violent actions we may be called to take, I will close with the now oft-quoted words of the activist and educator Mariame Kaba: “Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair.”
Thanks to all my Patreon subscribers, including, this week, my new friend Faith from Dallas, Texas. Because of her, expect a few more trivia questions this year about knitting, ice hockey, and the TV show Jeopardy, of which Faith is a past champion. If you find anything in these newsletters valuable, and if you would like to see 31 new questions appear in your inbox weekly, please join the Pub Quiz teams Quizimodo, Outside Agitators, and Original Vincibles in subscribing to the Pub Quiz.
This week’s quiz includes questions on topic raised above, and on the following: Casper, iPhones, job titles, the year 1917, state capitals, ancient Greeks, people named Henry, sports lineages, new possibilities, faucets, kids, con jobs, dystopian geography, mobile phone calls, differentiations from Spain, common surnames, film ages, antiwar activists, caffeine intake, clothiers, Steve Wonder phenomena, smooth curves, yogis in Greece, army generals, Tennessee towns, friends and enemies, name changes, Canada, thorough blends, centenarians, wind speeds, playoff appearances, the differences in measurements, private colleges, current events, and Shakespeare.
Thanks for reading, everyone! Stay healthy!
Dr. Andy
P.S. Here are three questions from a Pub Quiz from June of 2015:
- Four for Four. Which of the following Presidents of the United States, if any, attended the funeral of Eleanor Roosevelt? Calvin Coolidge, Dwight David Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman.
- Science. Starting with the letter P, what term refers to all the normal functions that take place in a living organism?
- Unusual Words. What monosyllabic L word as a verb means “to kick, hit, or throw (a ball or missile) high up”?