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This piece has no title. No select few words can adequately capture the horror and dread felt during the overturning of Roe. The elections of 2016 and 2017 lit a slow burning fuse with an inevitable outcome. The ones responsible had worked towards this goal for decades, successfully convincing millions to set aside their principles in furtherance of this just and holy mandate. 

While we grieve for the loss of women’s bodily autonomy, they are celebrating. I incorporated party streamers alongside the balloons in this piece to evoke notions of celebration amongst the horrific imagery. This  mirrors the uneasy tension of witnessing the gleeful songs of triumph sung by a sizable portion of the country. A song sung by family members, friends, and colleagues. All the while, an open chasm of uncertainty lays before every uterus owner. The victims of SA forced to relive their trauma. Literal children kept pregnant while their bodies are irreversibly damaged. Those turned to desperate measures in back alleys.

All that despair and pain. Blood on the hands of the five Supreme Court justices and those who worked to put them in power. Blood red balloons and party streamers. Set against a backdrop of American Christianity. Atheist activists had been ringing the alarm bells for years, warning of the existential threat of christian nationalism, largely to deaf ears.

This court’s theocratic reign has only just begun. I replaced Francis Bacon’s Pope Innocent X with Clarence Thomas in protest of this modern day religious ruler. Thomas’s concurrence makes it crystal fucking clear what’s next on the chopping block. They will come after contraceptives. They will come after gay marriage. They will reinstate sodomy laws. The Christian Taliban is here. And they’re reshaping the nation.