The United States are two nations under one flag. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey cinches America’s divide now as deep in hearts and minds as the civil war of secession was on the ground.

Let’s hope the nation’s gunslingers who won New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen don’t use their reinforced Second Amendment rights on the non-gunslinging supporters of Roe v. Wade to defeat Dobbs opponents. Women, medical professionals and LGBTQ individuals must worry they may become targets of concealed-gun carriers who believe there are no limits to what kind of weapons they can purchase, where they can carry those weapons and if in “self defense” where and at whom they can shoot those weapons.

At the same time, the nation is celebrating the 50-year anniversary of Title IX. Though many believe that Title IX only supports athletics, it guarantees access by women and LGBTQ individuals to any aspect of publicly funded education. The rules opened the ascension of many young women into the ranks of valedictorian and salutatorian inaccessible before 1972 due to academic exclusions.

So we’re celebrating the guarantee of equal rights in public schools to women and LGBTQ individuals through Title IX while stripping away the national, most basic right of women, including valedictorians and salutatorians, of decision-making over their bodies.

U.S. Sens. Susan Collins from Maine, a Republican, and Joe Manchin from West Virginia, a Democrat, who both voted to confirm conservative Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, now exclaim “liar, liar, pants on fire” related to the Justices’ farcical claims about sacrosanct precedent.

These senators were certifiably the only two people in the United States who believed the appointees’ deceptions. So-called pro-life citizens had their fingers and legs crossed when these nominees affirmed their precedent commitment. The rest of us saw three noses grow by a foot each. What were the senators thinking? That’s a query every mother puts to her teenage son when he has done some ridiculous thing. It’s not a question often associated with Supreme Court justices.

The three Justices must want the prestige of their imprimatur more than their own integrity. Give Justice Clarence Thomas credit — everyone knew exactly what he would go after in his unrelenting assault on today’s society.

Justice Thomas would leave the right to gay marriage to the states. Given how certain redder areas of the country can’t get their heads around bathroom issues, it’s easy to imagine where gay marriage will land when those rights are left to some legislatures.

Women, do you want access to contraception? For some reason that’s beyond conception, Justice Thomas believes the right to take the “pill” or insert an IUD to prevent conception is not embedded like an egg in a uterus anywhere in our “divinely inspired” constitution. According to Thomas, states should also decide women’s access to the “pill” or IUDs.

Unfortunately, “divine inspiration” doesn’t include seeing the future, because our Founding Fathers and the fathers, always fathers, who wrote the 14th amendment on due process were unaware that a “pill” could give women the right to determine their own reproduction. Those fathers also didn’t know about AK-15s and AK-47s and other handy mow-down-the-masses weapons now available to average persons regardless of their capacity, ammunition-wise or mental.

The lack of coherence and consistency in the Dobbs abortion and Second Amendment decisions is baffling. In the Dobbs case, the court says that elected officers of the states, meaning their assemblies and legislatures, must decide laws related to abortion and reproduction. But in the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association case, the court takes decision-making away from the states. Did the conservative justices think we wouldn’t notice?

Once women are stripped of the most important decision-making authority over their bodies, what’s left for the female half of the nation? And will it be up to the mostly men gunslingers out there to make sure women don’t make their most important decisions?

That’s what it feels like right now in the Disunited States of America.

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.