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As Protesters Rally Outside SCOTUS’ Homes, Another Exhausting Round of ‘Civility’ Conversations Begins

By May 9th, 2022, 2:18 pm
A small group of protesters gather in a residential neighborhood with a banner reading "repro freedom for all"
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Over the weekend, a group of about 100 protesters rallied in front of the homes of some of the Supreme Court Justices who have voted to overturn legal access to abortion in the United States. The protesters gathered outside Brett Kavanaugh’s home and marched about a half-mile to the home of Chief Justice John Roberts, then back to Kavanaugh’s, where police forced them to disperse, according to Bloomberg.

There have also been rumors that Samuel Alito, who drafted the majority opinion overturning Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey, and his family have been moved out of their home to an undisclosed location for fear of violence. Those reports are unconfirmed but that hasn’t stopped right-wing pundits from decrying the entirely hypothetical acts of “militant leftists.”

In the face of that sort of manufactured outrage, many are drawing comparisons to Christine Blasey Ford, who received a flood of death threats and had to move multiple times after testifying before Congress, alleging Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted and attempted to rape her when the two were in high school.

Like clockwork, these totally peaceful protests are being met with pearl-clutching insistence that we maintain “civility.” In one especially egregious tone-policing tweet, neoconservative writer Bill Kristol wrote, “Please don’t protest at people’s homes. Please don’t intrude on people attending their houses of worship. Organize politically, be civil civically.”

Gee Bill, it must be nice to be able to separate your political life from your civil life. For the rest of us, we would very much like for conservative politicians and Supreme Court justices to stay out of our homes, and not to foist their religious beliefs onto us. But they refuse to do so, so here we are.

Saying that we must “be civil civically” is insisting that we all play by a set of rules that we never had a say in creating, and which are designed to keep us from ever winning these fights.

No one can be expected to adhere to made-up standards of respectability and act “civilly” in the face of an institution actively robbing us of our rights, especially when that civility only ever goes one direction.

It’s not just Republicans and anti-abortion advocates condemning these protests. There is a maddening amount of handwringing coming from liberals worrying that protesting at people’s homes will alienate allies, or condemning violence that, again, did not happen.

Protesting outside of someone’s home is going to make them feel bad. That is not the same thing as making them feel threatened, which is also not the same as actual violence. But we’re supposed to believe that is the protester pipeline on the table. That is a false narrative that helps no one but those already in extreme positions of power and there’s absolutely no reason we have to buy into it.

(image: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

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Author
Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.
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