Void

like, i feel like Jason was the only one he got to be a proper big brother too, rather than more of a mentor/guardian figure. when Jason was around he was barely even an adult, and Jason was a little shit of a pre-teen that gave as good as he took. Dick 100% was a piece of shit to him in the brotherly sense. with all the others though? after losing Jason and growing up and being the one that had to hold everything apart every time Bruce got lost in grief/a timestream or something, he is a completely different type of brother to the others than he is to Jason, and i think it would be funny to see the others slowly start to realise how different Dick's relationship is to Jason compared to the rest of them.

like, just the little things. they're all at the manor for a weekend and Dick makes Tim and Damian breakfast, ruffling their hair and sliding pancakes onto their plates. then Jason comes in and makes himself a piece of toast and Dick instantly jabs him in the ribs before stealing the food from his plate.

he always lets the others win at mario kart, chuckling easily whenever he's beaten at any game and actually seeming more proud at them for winning than sad for losing. then Jason picks up Damian's abandoned remote and suddenly he's all focus. snatching the player 1 remote and making Jason be player 2 and the two are literally trying to shove each other off the couch with how hard they're trying to beat each other. if Dick wins, you can hear his yells of mocking from across the manor. if Jason wins and he tries to say anything at all? Dick body slams him to the ground and they're fighting for a solid half an hour.

he steals Jason's shit all the time, and yet the one time Duke saw Jason walk into Dick's bedroom to borrow a shirt, Dick clocked it from down the hall and just yelled 'FUCK OUT MY ROOM' and Jason pivoted and left without even faltering in his movement, like he'd fully expected to be denied. it's worth mentioning that that very same day Tim asked Dick if he could borrow some socks and Dick told them all sincerely that they could go in and take whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. it's just Jason that isn't allowed, apparently.

for the record i think it goes both ways, and i think Jason is also the only guy who knows how to get under Dick's skin in that Specific Little Brother Manner. like that's his big brother, his only big brother. i think the others he either views as little kids to protect or just... random guys that were adopted while he was gone that he didn't even properly meet until he was an adult and out of the house, so he never really built a proper antagonistic sibling relationship with anybody else. Dick though? he pours salt into every glass of water he sees Dick drink out of. he steals his stuff. he stands just outside the doorway of Dick's room just so that when Dick yells for him to get the fuck out he can say 'i'm not in your room, you can't make me do anything'. he snitches on him to Bruce whenever he can, and whenever he figures out Dick has a crush on anybody he relentlessly tries to embarrass Dick in front of them.

Now, this is problematic from a bodily autonomy perspective, and trust me, Jewish feminists have been grappling with it for ages. But from a legal perspective, it is incredibly important.

Many humanist and secular religions are flexible on the subject of abortion, because starting from scratch, it seems like a pretty good idea to bake bodily autonomy into the question. But this isn’t nearly the cudgel against the Christian far-right that people think it is. If one side of the argument (say, an atheist woman) is somewhat flexible on the issue (as in, she morally feels she can choose to either get and abortion or not) and the other side of the argument (say, a Christian-run company that woman gets her healthcare from) is very inflexible on the issue (as in, they feel they morally cannot facilitate abortions under any circumstance), then there’s a tendency to draw the compromise in a deeply unreasonable place. “You think women should be able to either have or not have abortions, and he thinks women should not be able to have abortions – If we go along with your suggestion, he’s unsatisfied in every situation, whereas if we go along with his, you’re getting like half of what you want, so that’s clearly the more fair option!”

This, of course, is a logical fallacy, and a rather silly one at that, but it holds real emotional sway for people, and ought to be taken seriously. Wanting a single thing is a much stronger place to argue from in our society than wanting the ability to choose between things. It’s unfortunate, but I don’t think anyone has the slightest idea of how to to fix it yet – that’s just the way that people seem to think.

HOWEVER –

This all falls apart when you meet another immovable object, such as Judaism. Judaism’s position on abortion is very clear, it leaves essentially no room for choice in situations where the mother’s life could be at risk, and it comes to conclusions which are startlingly different from Christianity’s. To put things into perspective here, the Mishna (one of the earliest codifications of halacha, or Jewish law) explicitly states that not only is third-trimester abortion required to save a mother’s life, but that even the dismemberment of a fetus midway through a breach birth is required when failure to do so would imperil the mother. Let me say that again – Judaism says that if the baby gets stuck literally halfway out of the birth canal during a birth and endangers the mother’s life, you are required to cut the partially birthed infant out of the womb, killing it if necessary, in order to preserve the mother’s life.

This is way the fuck out there in crazy-land, as far as US abortion law is concerned. Even pro-choice advocates that are maximally permissive on the subject of third-trimester abortions usually stop short of saying “you have the right to cut up a partially-birthed and completely viable infant while the mother is in labor.” That’s not a position that anyone has been advocating, literally anywhere that I have ever seen.

AND YET, not only does Judaism permit this, but it explicitly requires it. There’s no room to be mealy mouthed about compromises here – the Christian fundamentalist who claims to have a deep religious opposition to allowing a woman to receive an abortion in the above situation is on no stronger ground than the Jew who claims to have a deep religious opposition to permitting the woman to avoid having the abortion.

And lest you think this is theoretical, please know that this is already a religious liberty issue for many Jews. Every year, there are Jewish women who fly to other countries, by the explicit order of their rabbis, to receive third-trimester abortions which are required by their religion, but banned by law. Every year, Jews facing what is perhaps the most difficult time in their lives are callously reminded that when people talk about religious freedom in America, they do not and never have meant religious freedom for anyone other than Christians.