Something I Didn't Know

After The Limeliters (I was rather precocious as a tween, if the word had been coined then) came The Byrds, rather more age appropriate by that time. Alas, their early work didn't draw me, but "Dr. Byrds and Mr. Hyde" did. Some view it as their best album (battling with "Untitled" for the title) that didn't sell. Anyway, some reporting, of a sort, today reminded me of a bit of "King Apathy III" -

All the changes superficial
Apathy still a king
Liberal reactionaries
Never doing anything, for now

is dropped into the stream of conciousness lyrics. Of course, McGuinn (I suppose) was being sarcastic, to the extent that a 'reactionary' is, by definition, one who wishes to push society back to some earlier time, aka Right Wingnut. Let's see what a reference has to say...

In political science, a reactionary or a reactionist is a person who holds political views that favor a return to the status quo ante, the previous political state of society, which that person believes possessed positive characteristics absent from contemporary society.
-- the wiki

About right, from my point of view. Following "Dobbs" the Supremes have been tossed into that bin, both as punishment and as praise. Today's report further discusses that condition, in the frame of the recent Circuit ruling that protective orders cannot stop the perp from getting a gun. As I've allowed a few times in the last few years, the Radical Right Wingnuts are determined to turn the 21st century USofA back into the 18th century version. Or, possibly, worse; it was Alito in "Dobbs" who justified that phony decision on some obscure 13th century jurist. Why the heads of the rest of the Supremes didn't explode when reading such nonsense is puzzling.

So, what I didn't know that is in today's reporting

Oh, and at the time the Constitution was written, it was legal to beat your wife. It was only in 1871 that two states made it illegal.

Wow! A whole two. Let's go see if we can find out which... the wiki says

In 1850, Tennessee became the first state in the United States to explicitly outlaw wife beating.

You're right - who wooda thunk it? The wiki doesn't list state by state, alas.

This source sets Alabama and Massachusetts (who wooda thunk, too?) as the 1871 adoptions in law.

Liberal reactionaries, my skinny ass.