Mick Hartley

The mostly hidden gay civil war

Gareth Roberts at the Spectator on the shameful truth about Pride. It's turned into a party at which many gay people are no longer welcome:

So we come to the end of Pride month. We’re all now familiar with the rituals: the rainbow flag plastered across everything from sandwiches to mouthwash, the vapid statements of obeisance from big businesses and institutions. 2022 has seen a bumper crop of these. Rainbow bullets displayed on Twitter by the US Marines. Central London bedecked with the ‘progress Pride’ flag and its ever-expanding mysterious arrows and circles. Even the Halifax piled in, suggesting its customers close their bank accounts if they oppose a policy allowing staff to display their personal pronouns on name tags....

It’s tempting to sit back and laugh, but there is also something increasingly sinister about it all. Pride now signifies a very different thing from its original purpose: a simple refusal to be ashamed of homosexuality. Today it has taken on board the ideas of the American campus, queer theory and gender self-identification. Yet in trying to be more inclusive, it has become less so: those who don't toe the line on the new orthodoxy when it comes to trans rights are not welcome to join in the festivities.

Ironically, it’s the lesbians and gay men who object to this shift that face the sharp end of Pride and its adherents. Julie Bindel, who was due to give a talk at a library last weekend, was cast out by Nottingham council because of her 'views on transgender rights'. The LGB Alliance has been subject to a legal challenge to its charity status over claims it discriminates against trans people. Academics, lawyers, writers, have been intimidated out of their jobs, abandoned by both their managements and their unions.

As a homosexual man, I remember the Commons debates in 1988 just before the introduction of section 28, and how astonishingly lazy and ill-informed the majority of the speakers were. 34 years on, and the Commons debate on ‘trans conversion therapy’ held this month was equally staggering: MPs from all parties puffed themselves up and pontificated platitudes about an issue to which they clearly haven’t given more than a moment’s actual thought.

The most egregious example was the fuss about the ban on conversion therapy. For gays this was all a bit too late, as the whole business of so-called homosexual conversion therapy is for the most part now, thankfully, in the past. But then trans activists cottoned on that his was a horse they could ride, by suggesting that any attempt to delay trans medical intervention on troubled young teens was conversion therapy and should therefore be banned. The government saw the problem and suggested that trans conversion therapy would not be included in the ban. Cue outrage from the great and the good, who hadn't bothered to understand the arguments. Yes, gender dysphoric youngsters must be counselled, must be talked to, before they're rushed off to the gender clinic for puberty blockers and the rest.

From corporates to institutions to politicians, Pride is now considered an easy PR win, like standing next to a charity boss with a huge novelty fundraising cheque. Yet the cost of actually understanding the issues facing gay people are complicated, so many don’t bother. In the words of the Halifax, compliance with Pride – with its Kumbyaa-ishly vapid slogans such as ‘Be kind’, ‘Love wins’ and pronoun name badges – is ‘quite simply...doing what's right.’. So that’s all right then. End of discussion!

But below decks, in the gay world, a bust up is breaking out. Much of the mainstream gay press ignores this discussion. When the editor of the long-established free sheet Boyz suggested giving the LGB Alliance a fair hearing he was run out of town. This makes it hard to get a clear picture of the disquiet, because few will speak up in public for fear of intimidation and serious harm to their professional lives. But LGB WhatsApp groups are mushrooming across the land. These are the last safe refuges for people to say what they think.

With its ever more bizarre flags, the whole Pride month festival now feels like a party to which many gay people are not invited. Want to talk about gender surgeries on young people, the malice of the gender lobby or heterosexual men claiming to be lesbians? If you know what’s good for you, don't bother. Pride is not a time to celebrate, it's an occasion to stay in line. So thank the gay gods that Pride is over for another year. Meanwhile, the mostly hidden gay civil war rumbles on.

Hidden impure recordings of a strange and decadent nature

More on North Korea's never-ending struggle against anti-socialist and impure cultural imports:

North Korea recently distributed “explanatory materials” to the Socialist Patriotic Youth League emphasizing the struggle against watching or distributing “impure recorded materials.”

With the Fifth Expanded Meeting of the Eighth Central Committee on June 8 to 10 analyzing and reviewing the nation’s efforts to combat “anti-socialist and non-socialist behavior” and calling for an intensified struggle, the authorities are apparently bolstering their efforts to ideologically educate the youth.

According to a Daily NK source in North Hamgyong Province on Wednesday, North Korea recently distributed a set of explanatory materials entitled “Thoroughly Eliminate the Phenomenon of Watching or Distributing Impure Recorded Materials” to Socialist Patriotic Youth League organizations.

The materials called for an intensive struggle against watching or distributing “impure materials.”

In the materials, North Korean authorities claimed the failure to stop the secret viewing and distribution of “strange, decadent” recordings has been “tarnishing a healthy social atmosphere.” The materials warned that “once you get a taste, you just cannot stop and in the end, you will find yourself up to your neck in treason and betrayal, just as the nation’s enemies intended.”

In particular, North Korea called secretly watching or smuggling in and distributing impure recordings “when the imperialists’ ideological and cultural intrusion schemes are growing crueler than ever” an “act of treason fundamentally no different from pointing a gun at your fatherland and its people when they are suffering.” 

The materials further said that, “If you’re still going around with hidden impure recordings of a strange and decadent nature, watching them, smuggling them or illegally selling them, we can only call this an intentional act to drag our youth into fantasies about capitalism and rotten bourgeois lifestyles.”

With young North Koreans continuing to watch and distribute videos from abroad in the face of constant crackdowns, North Korea is demanding young people be on guard against the importation of capitalist culture, deeming its consumption akin to “treason.”

The materials warned that “class enemies, including the US imperialists,” are engaged in “all sorts of dirty, cruel schemes” to “penetrate other nations’ borders and spread strange, impure recordings inside our country.”

The materials said the US imperialists and class enemies are trying even harder to weaken “our socialist system, the life and livelihood of the people from the inside.” What the enemies want is to carry out a “propaganda scheme” to paralyze the ideological consciousness of the youth and — the materials reiterated — weaken North Korea’s socialist system from the inside...

No mention of South Korea, but it's South Korean imports they're really worried about. Yes, for Koreans there truly is another way.

It's all getting a bit desperate. But then it's been desperate for quite a while now, and still it continues.

At the rape crisis centre

Another crack in the wall:

A woman who is suing a rape crisis charity says she felt unable to speak at a support group after a transgender woman began attending the same meeting.

"Sarah", who says she was raped in her 20s, stopped going to the sessions, saying she became uncomfortable sharing details of her past with the group.

She says the centre could have offered separate groups, telling the BBC: "I think my case is about women's rights."

I think she's right.

The charity, Survivors' Network says it plans to vigorously defend the claim.

It says male victims of sexual violence are referred to neighbouring services, but trans women "are welcome into all of our women-only spaces".

The problem is, of course, that Survivors' Network take it for granted that all men who claim to be women are doing so in good faith, and must be believed without question. All they need to do, these men, is say that they're women, and - hey presto - in they come. You'd think that a rape crisis charity, of all places, would be aware that men are not always to be trusted in matters relating to women and sex, but apparently the magic word "trans" overcomes any such qualms.

Sarah's lawyers claim that by adopting a trans-inclusive approach - and not providing a session for women who were born female - the charity, in Brighton, failed to meet the needs of all sexual violence victims.

Sarah is bringing the case under the Equality Act, claiming indirect discrimination as well as victimisation and harassment. She said: "I think women have sex-based rights and protections and these are under threat at the moment from trans activism."...

Sarah says a new person attended a session, whom she understood to be a trans woman. She said the person presented as typically male, wearing male clothing. "I was a bit taken aback. I decided I wasn't going to speak that week because I wasn't comfortable."

"I don't trust men because I have been raped by a man. I've been sexually abused by men. And I just don't necessarily trust that men are always who they say they are," she said.

However, she says the person running the session asked her to speak to the group. "I felt manipulated and coerced into talking," she said. "When I left the session I had a panic attack, I was absolutely distraught."

The needs of men come before the needs of women at the rape crisis centre. Them's the new rules.

Proviso Yard

Jack Delano and the Kodachrome golden rails in Chicago, 1943:

April 1943. "Tracks at Chicago & North Western railroad's Proviso yard, Chicago."

April 1943. "Proviso freight classification yard of the Chicago & North Western R.R"
[Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Office of War Information]

Medicine or just powdered barley root

In its battle against Covid, North Korea has rejected help in the form of proven vaccines in favour of its own traditional Koryo medicines. So how's that going?

North Korea recently suspended supplies of traditional herbal medications to pharmacies in Hamhung after locals complained they were ineffective against COVID-19 symptoms, Daily NK has learned. 

A source in South Hamgyong Province told Daily NK on Monday that the government had previously ordered supplies of herbal medications such as phaedoksan, samhyang and uhwangcheongsimhwan to be placed in Hamhung’s pharmacies as treatments for COVID-19.

“The government then suspended the supplies because the remedies had no clear effect in lowering fevers,” he said.

According to the source, North Korea has been promoting the superiority of its socialist system of free treatments, supplying herbal medications to hospitalized patients and quarantined households through pharmacies in Hamhung since June 4.

He said North Korean authorities had been upping their efforts to supply herbal medications, emphasizing that “North Korea is the only country in the world that provides even medicines for free” and that it is a “really good country because the party cares about the health of the people.”

However, North Koreans reportedly responded with criticism because the herbal medicines had no effect on relieving their symptoms, even though the state claimed the drugs were especially good against fevers. 

In fact, some North Koreans even pressed their doctors as to whether the drugs were really anti-fever medications. Some complained that their fevers “didn’t get better even after ingesting two or three packages at a time, nor were they effective against coughs and phlegm. It’s not clear whether it’s medicine or [just] powdered barley root.”

Doctors equivocated, telling their patients that the medication has little effect on people with pre-existing conditions or poor constitutions, and that while the medicine reduces fevers, it is not right for everyone. The source said North Korean authorities ultimately suspended the supplies of herbal medications, believing them to be ineffective against fevers.

The source said the provincial emergency anti-epidemic command suspended the supply after concluding that phaedoksan — which was rumored to be good at reducing fevers in cold patients — was of absolutely no help against COVID-19. The command decided to leave existing supplies of the medication in pharmacies and that supplying anymore would be “meaningless.” 

Extinct and endangered

Photographs by Levon Biss of endangered insects, from an exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History that aims to show what’s at stake if these species are lost entirely:

Extinct and Endangered is comprised of massive, macro shots by Levon Biss, a British photographer who’s amassed a stunningly diverse collection of images with a variety of natural subject matter from dried seeds to iridescent insects. Biss often collaborates with institutions like the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and the Oxford Museum of Natural History, gaining access to their archives and selecting specimens. He then takes about 10,000 individual images using various lenses that are then stitched together to create extraordinarily detailed shots of beetles, moths, and butterflies.

Madeira brimstone

17-year cicada

Ninespotted lady beetle

Lesser wasp moth

Blue calamintha bee

Giant Patagonian bumblebee

Sabertooth longhorn beetle

Raspa silkmoth
[Photos © Levon Biss]

Simply unlawful

Emma Nicholson, aka Baroness Nicholson, writes to Nottingham Council about that Julie Bindel cancellation.

Please circulate - if you agree of course - BNoW pic.twitter.com/QKS2kpmHSQ

— Emma Harriet Nicholson (@Baroness_Nichol) June 27, 2022

Here you go:

For more detail Siân Louise, who organised the Nottingham event, writes about it in The Critic.

Killing organ donors

Back in April I posted about a Tablet article by Martin Elliott, a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon with a long professional involvement in transplantation, on the business of organ harvesting in China.

Since the 1980s organs had been removed from executed prisoners for transplanting, but now the level of transplants is far outstripping the number of executions. So where are these organs coming from? In the West long waiting times of months or years are the order of the day for those needing an organ transplant, but in China waiting times are minimal - a matter of days. Could the source of these organs be detainees? It's not just the Falun Gong nowadays: there's also the huge number of Uighurs - over a million - held in "re-education" camps in the most brutal conditions. Elliott raised concerns about the strong possibility that organ harvesting was an alarming feature of China's treatment of the Uighurs.

Now, again in Tablet, Jacob Lavee and Matthew Robertson provide evidence that doctors in China’s lucrative transplant industry, rather than wait for death before removing organs, in fact sometimes go about it the other way round and kill donors by removing their organs:

Personal accounts and a sampling of clinical reports may have already convinced those who are predisposed to a skeptical view of the Chinese medical system. But until the system of mainstream medical research has put its imprimatur on the topic, the findings will not be legible to medical societies, policymakers, NGOs, or the prestige press. This is what led us to conduct a methodologically rigorous scientific study on the topic, run the gantlet of peer review, and place it in a respected medical journal, the American Journal of Transplantation, in April 2022.

Our core question in that article was simple: Are prisoners who have their hearts removed for transplantation actually dead? This question is based upon the dead donor rule, the most fundamental ethical rule in organ transplantation. The rule states that organ procurement must not commence until the donor is formally pronounced dead and that the procurement of organs must not cause the donor’s death.

It's complicated - read the original article for more details - but...

In the end we found incriminating revelations in 71 studies published between 1980 and 2015 and sourced to 56 hospitals (12 military) in 33 cities across 15 provinces. A total of 348 surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, and other medical workers or researchers were listed as authors on the papers. In these papers we found that brain death could not have properly been declared, and therefore, the removal of the heart during organ procurement must have been the proximate cause of the donor’s death.

Here’s a choice example from paper 0191 in our appendix: “The donor was intravenously injected with heparin 3mg/kg 1h before the operation … The heartbeat was weak and the myocardium was purple. After assisted ventilation through tracheal intubation, the myocardium turned red and the heartbeat turned strong … The donor heart was extracted with an incision from the 4th intercostal sternum … This incision is a good choice for field operation where the sternum cannot be sawed open without power.” In this admission, the surgeons are explicit that they opened the chest and observed the beating heart of the victim before intubation. In other words, this donor could not have been brain dead.

In other cases, the surgeons inadvertently admit that the victims were not intubated at all, and therefore must have still been breathing at the time. Authors of paper 0173 write: “Before the chest is opened, 100mg of heparin is injected and the mask is pressurized to give oxygen to assist breathing.” Another, paper 0463: “After the donor is confirmed brain dead, 4 cases of tracheal intubation, 3 cases of mask oxygenation, quickly establish artificial respiration, rapid median thoracic dissection …”

Why is this detail so key? Brain death requires that the donor is unable to breathe by themselves. An oxygen mask—as the papers unambiguously attest, using the Chinese term 面罩—means that they must have been able to breathe. In other words, they were alive and breathing as the surgeons cut their hearts out.

China’s crime against humanity—of massive executions by organ-procuring physicians—has been accomplished secretly under the headlights of operating rooms, and so for decades has been hard to detect. The global silence with which these crimes have been met is unconscionable—crimes similar to those of the Nazi doctors are repeating themselves in front of our eyes, and yet the world remains quiet. It is high time for Western scientists, doctors, and the rest of humanity to reaffirm the sanctity of the Hippocratic oath and give meaning to the Jewish slogan after the Holocaust: Never again.

Why Wuhan?

As his book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 - co-authored with Alina Chan - comes out in paperback, Matt Ridley returns to the fray at Spiked. The case for the lab-leak theory:

We keep coming back to this simple question: why Wuhan? It does not do much wildlife trade with southeast Asia compared with other Chinese cities. It is not in an area where the horseshoe bats carry such SARS-like viruses poised for spillover into people: we know this from extensive surveys of bat viruses in the region of Wuhan done mainly by Jun-hua Tian of the local Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

But there is one thing that stands out about Wuhan. It is the home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This is China’s leading bat SARS-like virus research laboratory. It (and nowhere else in China) is the lab that tracked down the ancestral source of the first SARS epidemic. It led more expeditions to look for bat SARS-like viruses in southern China than any other lab. It sampled that mineshaft in Mojiang county at least seven times after the guano shovelers fell ill and found the then closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2 in bats there. It is where scientists sent samples from bats in Laos, a country where an even closer relative to the pandemic virus was found. It has the largest database of SARS-like viruses in the world by some distance, but has refused to release it, even though doing so at the start of the pandemic would have been the easiest way to exonerate its scientists.

And that is only the start of the coincidences. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (and nowhere else in China) is home to the team that collaborated with American labs to develop techniques for manipulating SARS-like viruses in the laboratory to test their infectivity. It kept live bats in the lab to experiment on. It grew live SARS-like viruses in culture and infected human airway-epithelial cells with them. It developed humanised mice to test viruses on. It was swapping parts of spike genes from newly discovered viruses collected from nature into cultured viruses in the lab.

And then came the most shocking revelation of all. We knew from the start that SARS-CoV-2 is the only SARS-like virus ever found – among hundreds – with a furin-cleavage site in its spike protein: an insertion of 12 letters of genetic code that makes the virus especially infectious, and is therefore the reason we had a pandemic and not just a localised outbreak. But in September 2021 a document was leaked to internet sleuths that showed the Wuhan laboratory was party to plans in 2018 to insert novel furin-cleavage sites into undefined SARS-like viruses in its possession. Yet the institute and its American collaborators had never bothered to tell the world about this plan, and they ignored the furin-cleavage site in their seminal 2020 paper about this virus in the journal Nature....

In a court of law, a prosecutor would regard all this as a strong case. ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine’, he would probably say, quoting Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. And then he would start going through the extraordinary litany of unhelpful obstacles that the Chinese government has put in the way of the World Health Organisation and everybody else who tries to get information on the early patients and what happened in the lab. When WHO investigators went to Wuhan in early 2021 they spent just three hours in the institute and visited the wrong lab (with the wrong biosafety level) on the wrong campus (in Jiangxia instead of Wuchang). As far as we know the WHO investigators were not shown the lower biosafety labs where the SARS-like virus work had been conducted.

We don’t say this virus definitely jumped out of a laboratory, but we do say that if there is one city in the world where a laboratory leak of a novel SARS-like virus from bats would be most likely to happen, it would be Wuhan.

Not America

I wrote this just over two years ago:

My neighbours across the road have a large sign on their door: "Justice for George Floyd". Which prompts me to wonder: what's going on? [And no, they're not black.] Why should the killing of Floyd have aroused such universal interest and universal condemnation? The man was killed in another country. We're a long way from Minneapolis. We don't normally take such an passionate interest in events in other countries....except America, that is. If the police killed a black man in Paris, or Rome, or Rio, or Sydney, there'd be concern, no doubt, but however brutal the murder there's no way my neighbours would be proclaiming their views - hardly controversial - to passers-by and the community in such a public fashion. 

I'm sure some of it is the old left hatred of America - fount of all modern evil, and obviously an easy target with its freedom of information and its faults exposed right there for all to see. That kind of gut anti-Americanism is certainly behind much of the undisguised glee on display elsewhere, from the Middle East to China, at this latest US tragedy. But there's more going on. What it shows, surely, is that America is still in many ways at the centre of our world, as it has been, really, since the end of World War 2.

A huge proportion of our popular culture - TV, movies, music - comes if not directly from America, then indirectly. It started in force when the US boomed in the Fifties while the rest of the west, certainly in Europe, was struggling to keep its head above water. And though we like to think things have changed, to a remarkable degree they haven't. In the Sixties the civil rights movement was our movement too. We followed it as though Selma, Alabama, was just south of Basingstoke. Now it's Black Lives Matter - though the echoes here now are greater than they were back then. Back in the Sixties the main issue for the left was Vietnam. The 1968 Grosvenor Square demonstration outside the American embassy was a key moment in the left's development here in the UK. But we weren't even in Vietnam. Harold Wilson, in his wisdom, didn't want the UK to get involved. It didn't matter - we were still out there in force on the street to make our voices heard. And we followed every twist and turn of the anti-war movement in the States - along with everything else over there, from the Black Panthers to Charles Manson to Watergate. It was where the action was. And to an extraordinary extent, for us, it still is.

Now we have the Roe vs Wade decision, and here we go again with the US obsession. Yes, it's a huge deal...for American women. For us in the UK, not so much. Yet we have Corbyn economic adviser Richard Murphy, for instance, tweeting: “Where the Republicans go the Tories follow. We take the right to abortion, contraception, gay rights and same-sex marriage for granted now. We shouldn’t. Very soon Tory think tanks will have their sights on all of them. Fascism is on the march.” This, as Dominic Sandbrook argues, is nonsense:

“Mad,” I thought. I saw that more than 3,000 people had retweeted this ridiculous prophecy, while another 10,000 had “liked” it, and I shook my head in despair. And then I saw another effusion, this time from the Labour MP Stella Creasy: “To every one of our American sisters, we are with you. We will not rest until your rights are restored… You think what you see in America couldn’t happen here? Then you don’t understand who is organising in UK politics.”...

What is it, I wonder, that blinds so many ostensibly intelligent people to the fact that the United States and Great Britain are two different countries? “Where the Republicans go the Tories follow,” says Richard Murphy. But that just isn’t true. There are some similarities, of course; but if you’re hoping to win selection for a safe Tory seat by talking about ending abortion, outlawing socialised medicine and encouraging the high-street sales of automatic weapons, then I’ve got a nice padded cell for you. “We will not rest until your rights are restored,” Stella Creasy tells her American sisters. But what does that mean? How much influence does the Labour MP for Walthamstow have over the American judiciary? Can you truly measure something so small?

“You think what you see in America couldn’t happen here?” asks Ms Creasy. Well, I suppose it’s just possible that in the next few years we could completely change our political system, radically reshape the relationship between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, adopt a version of the US Constitution, develop a deeply religious political culture and set up a fervent anti-abortion movement — all of which would be the cue for our own Supreme Court to hand down a judgement allowing individual counties (Dorset? Wiltshire?) to outlaw abortion. Yes, I suppose it’s possible. It’s certainly no more implausible than a major British political party campaigning to throw out the 1967 Abortion Act — another thing that is clearly never going to happen.

Britain is not America. According to the most recent YouGov survey, just two in a hundred people — two! — think abortion should be illegal. What’s more, only 6% of people think access to abortions is too easy, compared with 8% who think it’s too hard, 47% who think it’s about right, and 36% who don’t know or don’t care. To repeat, Britain is not America.

We’ve been here before, of course. When a Minneapolis policeman killed George Floyd in May 2020, thousands of people defied Covid regulations to demonstrate in British cities, while The Guardian’s Afua Hirsch insisted that “the racism that killed George Floyd was built in Britain”. But in their racial politics and attitudes, as Tomiwa Owolade wrote last month, the two countries are completely different. The plain fact is that if you’re black and you’re British, your chances of being shot by the police are vanishingly small.

To point this out in progressive circles, though, is to identify yourself as the enemy. America’s struggles are Britain’s struggles, and only a fascist would deny it. “The prejudice that black people in America face is the same prejudice we face here. When one is hurt, we’re all hurt, because it could have been us,” a demonstrator told the BBC in the summer of 2020. You’d never guess that the two countries’ histories have been utterly different — or that most of our police are unarmed, so that actually it probably couldn’t have been us. Nor would you guess that there are, in fact, more than two countries on earth....

Does all this matter? I think it does. Obviously we can’t live in a national bubble: our public discourse has always been influenced by trends and events overseas, from Lutheranism in the early 16th century to Jacobinism in the 1790s. But the intense and growing obsession with America isn’t just a curious Anglophone quirk. It’s a poison infecting our public life.

Almost everything about political life in the US today strikes me as deeply unhealthy. The general tone, perfectly reflected in that Richard Murphy tweet after the Roe v. Wade judgement, is relentlessly hysterical. The stakes are always sky-high; every setback is a shattering defeat. Death and despair stalk the land; the very existence of the Republic hangs by a thread, and the world of The Handmaid’s Tale may be only a few years away. And your political opponents are not merely misguided, they are positively wicked. Evil conspirators — militiamen, abortionists, gunowners, critical race theorists — are plotting subversion and civil war. How can you compromise with such people? How can there be a common ground? ...

But Britain isn’t America. Why would we want to import their hysterical tone? We have plenty of issues of our own, of course; but they’re ours, not theirs. Our race relations aren’t perfect, but they’re among the very best in Europe, not that you’d know it from much of the media. Boris Johnson really, really isn’t a fascist, and the worst thing you can say about Keir Starmer is that he’s incredibly boring. And yes, we do take “the right to abortion, contraception, gay rights and same-sex marriage” for granted. But why wouldn’t we? Who’s threatening them? Does anybody seriously think Boris Johnson, of all people, is going to abolish contraception?

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t think the Roe v. Wade judgement matters. It does, but it matters for Americans. Sometimes things just aren’t about us. “You think what you see in America couldn’t happen here?” Yes, I do, actually. Let’s see who’s right.