American law has not historically been good to women, and whatever progress there once was is now vulnerable to regression. This return is being midwifed into the world by the theory of constitutional interpretation known as originalism—the idea that a law’s constitutionality today is dependent on the Constitution’s purported “original public meaning” when the relevant constitutional text was enacted. Its adherents market originalism as fair and free from favor or prejudice—but its effects are not and will not be fair at all. By its very nature, originalism threatens women and other minority groups who were disempowered at the time of the Constitution’s adoption. We must instead develop a new constitutional interpretative method that protects all Americans as equal members of our democratic society.

[Erwin Chemerinsky: Even the founders didn’t believe in originalism]

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals demonstrated as much when it relied on originalism in United States v. Rahimi, a case about a law restricting the gun rights of domestic-violence offenders, last week. The central legal issue in Rahimi was not whether protecting women and children from gun violence is good; the court conceded that it is. Rather, the question before the court was whether protecting women and children from gun violence is constitutional. And the court concluded that it is not.

A three-judge panel unanimously ruled that the Second Amendment was violated by a federal statute that made possessing a gun unlawful for a person who is subject to a restraining order in protection of an intimate partner or child. Its explanation for this dangerous ruling was a straightforward application of originalism. The Founders mentioned a right to keep and bear arms in the Constitution. They did not, however, mention women, who are disproportionately victimized by domestic violence. And although today’s lawmakers may care about women’s rights, they cannot deviate from the Founders’ wishes without a formal constitutional amendment. This will almost assuredly have very real, potentially fatal consequences for women in America: The presence of a gun in a domestic-violence situation increases the risk of femicide by more than 1,000 percent. Originalism is going to get women killed.

United States v. Rahimi is the latest example of the intolerable hazard originalism poses to women’s lives and our democratic society. Originalist ideology glorifies an era of blatant oppression along racial, gender, and class lines, transforming that era’s lowest shortcomings into our highest standards. The country and the Constitution do not belong to the nation’s white and wealthy forefathers alone. But the consequence of chaining constitutional interpretation to a time when much of the country was much worse off and only a rarefied few held power is as foreseeable as it is deadly: Huge swaths of the population will be worse off once again. Originalism is fundamentally incompatible with a legal system interested in protecting the rights of all the nation’s people.

The law at issue in Rahimi survived multiple constitutional challenges in the Fifth Circuit prior to originalism’s intervention. The same circuit court most recently reaffirmed its legality in 2020 in United States v. McGinnis, holding that the statute was reasonably adapted to the compelling government interest of reducing domestic gun abuse. This would have directly foreclosed the argument made in Rahimi if not for the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. In Bruen, the Court announced a strict new originalist standard for evaluating the constitutionality of laws regulating guns. A gun law is now valid only if it is “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” And even then, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority, “not all history is created equal.” (This is how the Bruen court justified striking down a law that had been on the books for more than a century.) The elected branches must prove to the judiciary that a sufficiently analogous regulation existed roughly 230 years ago, when the Second Amendment was adopted, or potentially 155 years ago, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted.

[Thomas P. Crocker: Don’t forget the first half of the Second Amendment]

There’s a certain level of absurdity to this exercise. The Supreme Court essentially disallowed the country’s lawmakers from developing new solutions to the national gun crisis and instead sent the people’s representatives on archival scavenger hunts. “When a challenged regulation addresses a general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century,” Thomas wrote in Bruen, “the lack of a distinctly similar historical regulation addressing that problem is relevant evidence that the challenged regulation is inconsistent with the Second Amendment.” Instead of counseling “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” originalism instructs “If it’s still broken, you still can’t fix it”—a prescription for permanent crises in America, unsolvable in the present because they were not solved in the past.

The government jumped through the required hoops and proffered various historical analogues for the statute at issue in Rahimi. All were rejected. The Fifth Circuit’s rationale for doing so was sometimes disturbing. The government pointed to laws in several colonies and states that disarmed classes of persons considered dangerous—namely, enslaved people and Indigenous people. The Fifth Circuit said that the domestic abusers’ restriction was insufficiently similar, because it disarms people after individualized findings of credible threats to other identified persons, whereas the historical laws disarmed classes of people deemed a threat to the political and social order. Put plainly, the law was held unconstitutional because it disarmed citizens for reasons other than the brazen enforcement of white supremacy.

That it would be challenging to identify colonial laws that took violence against women seriously is not a surprise. Indeed, not until 1920 was wife-beating made unlawful in every state. Finding no historical tradition of disarming people who abuse women, the Fifth Circuit is allowing them to keep their guns. The court concluded that the statute’s ban on domestic-violence offenders possessing guns is an “outlier that our ancestors would have never accepted.” Whose ancestors is unclear. The court does not say whether it includes the ancestors of the 4.5 million women alive today in the United States who have been threatened with a gun by an intimate partner. Or the hundreds of victims of gunmen who first committed acts of violence against the women in their life—a reliable bellwether for mass shootings. Originalism limits who gets to be a part of “our” and who is entitled to the Constitution’s rights and protections.

The country is ill-served by a judiciary that uplifts an alleged original understanding of the Constitution over the public interest and makes false claims of objectivity to obscure oppression. The first drafters of the document articulated important, inclusive democratic ideals but did not yet know how to live up to them. The courts must stop rejecting everything we’ve learned over hundreds of years and calling doing so wisdom. Lives quite literally depend on it.

Author Thomas Leeds lost his memory in a traumatic accident and had to learn to read again.

Stephen B. Thomas, the director of the Center for Health Equity at the University of Maryland, considers himself an eternal optimist. When he reflects on the devastating pandemic that has been raging for the past three years, he chooses to focus less on what the world has lost and more on what it has gained: potent antiviral drugs, powerful vaccines, and, most important, unprecedented collaborations among clinicians, academics, and community leaders that helped get those lifesaving resources to many of the people who needed them most. But when Thomas, whose efforts during the pandemic helped transform more than 1,000 Black barbershops and salons into COVID-vaccine clinics, looks ahead to the next few months, he worries that momentum will start to fizzle out—or, even worse, that it will go into reverse.

This week, the Biden administration announced that it would allow the public-health-emergency declaration over COVID-19 to expire in May—a transition that’s expected to put shots, treatments, tests, and other types of care more out of reach of millions of Americans, especially those who are uninsured. The move has been a long time coming, but for community leaders such as Thomas, whose vaccine-outreach project, Shots at the Shop, has depended on emergency funds and White House support, the transition could mean the imperilment of a local infrastructure that he and his colleagues have been building for years. It shouldn’t have been inevitable, he told me, that community vaccination efforts would end up on the chopping block. “A silver lining of the pandemic was the realization that hyperlocal strategies work,” he said. “Now we’re seeing the erosion of that.”

I called Thomas this week to discuss how the emergency declaration allowed his team to mobilize resources for outreach efforts—and what may happen in the coming months as the nation attempts to pivot back to normalcy.

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Katherine J. Wu: Tell me about the genesis of Shots at the Shop.

Stephen B. Thomas: We started our work with barbershops and beauty salons in 2014. It’s called HAIR: Health Advocates In-Reach and Research. Our focus was on colorectal-cancer screening. We brought medical professionals—gastroenterologists and others—into the shop, recognizing that Black people in particular were dying from colon cancer at rates that were just unacceptable but were potentially preventable with early diagnosis and appropriate screening.

Now, if I can talk to you about colonoscopy, I could probably talk to you about anything. In 2019, we held a national health conference for barbers and stylists. They all came from around the country to talk about different areas of health and chronic disease: prostate cancer, breast cancer, others. We brought them all together to talk about how we can address health disparities and get more agency and visibility to this new frontline workforce.

When the pandemic hit, all the plans that came out of the national conference were on hold. But we continued our efforts in the barbershops. We started a Zoom town hall. And we started seeing misinformation and disinformation about the pandemic being disseminated in our shops, and there were no countermeasures.

We got picked up on the national media, and then we got the endorsement of the White House. And that’s when we launched Shots at the Shop. We had 1,000 shops signed up in I’d say less than 90 days.

Wu: Why do you think Shots at the Shop was so successful? What was the network doing differently from other vaccine-outreach efforts that spoke directly to Black and brown communities?

Thomas: If you came to any of our clinics, it didn’t feel like you were coming into a clinic or a hospital. It felt like you were coming to a family reunion. We had a DJ spinning music. We had catered food. We had a festive environment. Some people showed up hesitant, and some of them left hesitant but fascinated. We didn’t have to change their worldview. But we treated them with dignity and respect. We weren’t telling them they’re stupid and don’t understand science.

And the model worked. It worked so well that even the health professionals were extremely pleased, because now all they had to do was show up with the vaccine, and the arms were ready for needles.

[Read: The flu-ification of COVID policy is almost complete]

The barbers and stylists saw themselves as doing health-related things anyway. They had always seen themselves as doing more than just cutting hair. No self-respecting Black barber is going to say, “We’ll get you in and out in 10 minutes.” It doesn’t matter how much hair you have: You’re gonna be in there for half a day.

Wu: How big of a difference do you think your network’s outreach efforts made in narrowing the racial gaps in COVID vaccination?

Thomas: Attribution is always difficult, and success has many mothers. So I will say this to you: I have no doubt that we made a huge difference. With a disease like COVID, you can’t afford to have any pocket unprotected, and we were vaccinating people who would otherwise have never been vaccinated. We were dealing with people at the “hell no” wall.

We were also vaccinating people who were homeless. They were treated with dignity and respect. At some of our shops, we did a coat drive and a shoe drive. And we had dentists providing us with oral-health supplies: toothbrush, floss, paste, and other things. It made a huge difference. When you meet people where they are, you’ve got to meet all their needs.

Wu: How big of a difference did the emergency declaration, and the freeing-up of resources, tools, and funds, make for your team’s outreach efforts?

Thomas: Even with all the work I’ve been doing in the barber shop since 2014, the pandemic got us our first grant from the state. Money flowed. We had resources to go beyond the typical mechanisms. I was able to secure thousands of KN95 masks and distribute them to shops. Same thing with rapid tests. We even sent them Corsi-Rosenthal boxes, a DIY filtration system to clean up indoor air.

Without the emergency declaration, we would still be in the desert screaming for help. The emergency declaration made it possible to get resources through nontraditional channels, and we were doing things that the other systems—the hospital system, the local health department—couldn’t do. We extended their reach to populations that have historically been underserved and distrustful.

Wu: The public-health-emergency declaration hasn’t yet expired. What signs of trouble are you seeing right now?

Thomas: The bridge between the barbershops and the clinical side has been shut down in almost all places, including here in Maryland. I go to the shop and they say to me, “Dr. T, when are we going to have the boosters here?” Then I call my clinical partners, who deliver the shots. Some won’t even answer my phone calls. And when they do, they say, “Oh, we don’t do pop-ups anymore. We don’t do community-outreach clinics anymore, because the grant money’s gone. The staff we hired during the pandemic, they use the pandemic funding—they’re gone.” But people are here; they want the booster. And my clinical partners say, “Send them down to a pharmacy.” Nobody wants to go to a pharmacy.

[Read: The COVID strategy America hasn’t really tried]

You can’t see me, so you can’t see the smoke still coming out of my ears. But it hurts. We got them to trust. If you abandon the community now, it will simply reinforce the idea that they don’t matter.

Wu: What is the response to this from the communities you’re talking to?

Thomas: It’s “I told you so, they didn’t care about us. I told you, they would leave us with all these other underlying conditions.” You know, it shouldn’t take a pandemic to build trust. But if we lose it now, it will be very, very difficult to build back.

We built a bridge. It worked. Why would you dismantle it? Because that’s exactly what's happening right now. The very infrastructure we created to close the racial gaps in vaccine acceptance is being dismantled. It’s totally unacceptable.

Wu: The emergency declaration was always going to end at some point. Did it have to play out like this?

Thomas: I don’t think so. If you talk to the hospital administrators, they’ll tell you the emergency declaration and the money allowed them to add outreach. And when the money went away, they went back to business as usual. Even though the outreach proved you could actually do a better job. And the misinformation and the disinformation campaign hasn’t stopped. Why would you go back to what doesn’t work?

Wu: What is your team planning for the short and long term, with limited resources?

Thomas: As long as Shots at the Shop can connect clinical partners to access vaccines, we will definitely keep that going.

Nobody wants to go back to normal. So many of our barbers and stylists feel like they’re on their own. I’m doing my best to supply them with KN95 masks and rapid tests. We have kept the conversation going on our every-other-week Zoom town hall. We just launched a podcast. We put out some of our stories in the form of a graphic novel, The Barbershop Storybook. And we’re trying to launch a national association for barbers and stylists, called Barbers and Stylists United for Health.

The pandemic resulted in a mobilization of innovation, a recognition of the intelligence at the community level, the recognition that you need to culturally tailor your strategy. We need to keep those relationships intact. Because this is not the last time we’re going to see a pandemic even in our lifetime. I’m doing my best to knock on doors to continue to put our proposals out there. Hopefully, people will realize that reaching Black and Hispanic communities is worth sustaining.

Gareth Thomas's former partner says the settlement has brought closure following his HIV diagnosis.

If you asked 10 Americans, “Who was James Dickey?,” my guess is that half would shrug, four would identify him as the author of the novel and movie Deliverance, and the tenth might venture, “Didn’t he read a poem at Jimmy Carter’s inauguration?” or “Wasn’t he our poet laureate back in the 1960s?”  

My theoretical estimate would, I think, depress James Dickey, born 100 years ago this February 2, for he wanted above all else to be remembered as a poet. He was the victim of his own success (and excess), having pulled off the neat trick of eclipsing his fame as arguably America’s greatest living poet with a novel about four buddies on a canoe trip that turns very, very weird. (“Squeal like a pig!”)

In honor of his centennial, I laid flowers on his grave in the serene, bird-loud cemetery three miles from where I live in coastal South Carolina.  The gravestone is terse: Poet, Father of Bronwen, Kevin and Christopher, and is inscribed,

I move at the heart of the world

Standing there and recalling the time I first met him made me think of a couplet in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”:

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire

The occasion of that meeting was the launch of Apollo 7 in 1968 at Cape Kennedy, in Florida. Life magazine had commissioned the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress—America’s de facto poet laureate before we officially had one—to commemorate the occasion with a poem.

I was 16. My father had brought me along. It was an earth-shaking event. Literally. As the ground shook beneath our feet, I watched as an armadillo, a creature that has been around for about 35 million years and was no doubt thinking, Again?, grumpily waddled out of the marsh in search of less apocalyptic quarters.

Recognizing my father among the VIPs, Dickey approached, hand outstretched, grinning. Pup whispered to me, “James Dickey. Very-big-deal poet.”  

I’d never met a poet before, much less a very-big-deal one. He was a physical big deal, too: 6 foot 3, with the frame of a former athlete. Sensing my nervousness, Mr. Dickey bent to shake my hand, his grin now a headlight beam, and said in an exuberant Georgia drawl suffused with bourbon—it was 9 a.m.; I was impressed—“Ah have a Christopher, too.”  

He had me at hello. I wanted to know everything about James Dickey.

[Read: To a beginning poet, aged sixty]

In time, I learned that he’d been a college track star; a decorated combat aviator in World War II and Korea; a serious bowhunter and guitar player; and a Homeric drinker and lover. He ticked all the boxes. The vibe was unmistakable: Here was America’s Byron.  

His Apollo 7 poem was a curtain-raiser for what lay ahead for me:

They plunge with all of us—up from the
flame-trench, up from the Launch Umbilical Tower,
up from the elk and the butterfly, up from
the meadows and rivers and mountains and the beds
of wives into the universal cavern, into the
mathematical abyss, to find us—and return,
to tell us what we will be.

As any southerner might say, “If that ain’t poetry, you can kiss my ass.”

Jim Dickey was a capital-b Bard, not one to stop by woods on a snowy evening, wander lonely as a cloud, or compare thee to a summer’s day.  

“The Shark’s Parlor” opens with two buddies baiting a drop-forged hook with a run-over collie pup and tossing it off the porch of an aunt’s beachfront house. The poem concludes with the hammerhead shark they catch, turning Auntie’s parlor into an abattoir, smashing it to smithereens and spewing gore over family keepsakes and gewgaws.

His odd head full of crashed jelly-glass splinters and radio tubes     thrashing
Among the pages of fan magazines     all the movie stars drenched in sea-blood

“Falling” is based on a news story about a flight attendant who got sucked out the door of an airliner at 1,500 feet, stripped of her clothes and stockings as she plunged to her death. “The Firebombing” is about dropping napalm on civilians, not exactly a poetical comfort zone in the 1960s; the incineration described in the poem takes place two decades earlier, during World War II, as 1,000-pound bombs are released from Dickey’s P-61 Night Fighter.

Gun down
The engines, the eight blades sighing
For the moment when the roofs will connect
Their flames, and make a town burning with all
American fire

“The Eye-Beaters,” acknowledged as one of his finest poems, was inspired by a visit to a home for blind children. Some of them would punch their eyeballs to produce sensations of color.  

I wrote my senior paper on Dickey. In an importunity that makes me wince even now, a half century later, I sent him a list of interview questions. He had more pressing things to attend to, like, say, going over the galleys of his forthcoming novel, Deliverance, than a tedious request from a high-school senior with a literary man-crush. (One last question, Mr. Dickey: Have you ever taken hallucinogens?) But 10 days later, there in my mailbox was a thick envelope from Columbia, South Carolina, with three single-spaced typed pages. (As to my question: Yes, once. Peyote.)    

His kindness to his students at the University of South Carolina was legendary. James Dickey had more protégés than the Pied Piper. Among them was the novelist Pat Conroy. I blush an even deeper shade of crimson to reveal that, a decade after my questionnaire, my talent for importunity unabated, I sent Dickey a galley of my first book, asking if he might, um, contribute a blurb.  

He was now James Dickey, author of the novel Deliverance, serialized in The Atlantic, which also published many of his poems; screenwriter of the movie based on the novel; and the actor who briefly but indelibly played the part of the sheriff who suspects that these suburbanite canoeists aren’t leveling with him about what happened on the river. As my father would put it, James Dickey was now a very, very big deal. But his talent for generosity had not diminished, and in due course 150 words of praise arrived that I can but won’t recite from memory. What a generous soul he was!

[Read: Two days in September]

His son Christopher, now alas deceased, wrote a fine but often painful-to-read memoir about the downside of his father’s great success with Deliverance. In an oral history about the filming of the movie, Christopher recalled: “With fame came a particular kind of indulgence. People want poets to be bigger than life, to be outrageous, memorable, excessive. They will give them more than enough to drink. They will sleep with them. They will tell stories about them. And all that is seductive for both the poet and his audience. What Deliverance did was take that to a whole new level that was destructive for my father.”

Outrageous, memorable, and excessive he was. And everyone who knew James Dickey had a “James Dickey story” to tell. George Garrett, the novelist (Death of the Fox) and Dickey’s colleague on the USC English faculty, had many in his repertoire. Most could not be called flattering, and do not need retelling on Mr. Dickey’s centennial. But this one I cherish:

Garrett and Dickey were on an elevator. A student standing behind them nudged his companion and whispered audibly, “Know who that is?” Dickey looked at Garrett and winked. “That’s the guy who played the sheriff in Deliverance,” the student said. “The elevator stopped,” Garrett went on, “and we were pushed out by the tide of students. ‘Wait a minute! Wait just a big minute,’ Jim was calling to everybody, nobody in particular. ‘There’s a whole lot more to me than just that.’”

There sure was. I’ll close with my own favorite James Dickey story, which I heard from the lips of Dan Rowan of Laugh-In fame, a lovely soul.  

Dickey was guest of honor at Rowan’s summer camp in the California redwoods.  

“I woke up early, about six,” Rowan said. “I was getting the fire going for breakfast. Suddenly I became aware of this presence behind me.  

“I turned. And there’s James Dickey. He was a great big man. He had on this ratty old terry-cloth bathrobe that didn’t even come down to his knees. It was kind of a sight.

“I said to him, ‘Good morning, Jim!’ He let out this sound, almost like a bear growl. He was looking a bit ragged from the night before.  

“Our routine in camp is to serve Ramos Gin Fizzes at breakfast. So I said to him, ‘Jim, may I make you a fizz?’”

“Well,” Rowan said, “this look of … I’d almost call it contempt came over him. He stared at me. ‘A fee-yuz?’ he said. So he goes behind the bar, the whole time maintaining eye contact with me. Pulls down a highball glass and a half-gallon bottle of Wild Turkey. Fills the glass—to the brim—and drinks it all down in one go. Slams the empty glass on the counter and says, ‘Now I will have a fee-yuz.’”

At the grave, I left the flowers, congratulated Mr. Dickey on his centennial, and thanked him for his many kindnesses to me. At home, I looked up the line quoted on his gravestone. It’s from the last stanza of “In the Tree House at Night.”   

My green, graceful bones fill the air
With sleeping birds. Alone, alone
And with them I move gently.
I move at the heart of the world.

Strange, to be remembered for “Squeal like a pig” rather than for this.  Stranger still: The oink line wasn’t in his script. It was improvised on the spot. No one present, even the director, was ever able to remember who came up with it. It was just to give “Mountain Man” a line of dialogue as he set about making James Dickey immortal.