this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
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He's the leading figure in the largest conservative state's dominant pro-life political party. If he's not the standard for "the other side" who is? He is quite literally dictating the policy by which "the other side" is being judged.
This is the explicit stated goal of the most influential financial and religious leaders within the movement.
Its no secret that Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist. And it would be deeply insincere to claim abortion advocacy is - at least in part - driven by a desire among aspiring parents not to give birth to children with sever developmental issues. A down's syndrome diagnosis is a leading cause of abortion.x
These are realities that people have to confront, not caricatures we should pretend are fabrications of the opposition. Some women simply do not want to be pregnant, full stop. And abortion opponents do not believe they have the right to terminate that pregnancy, full stop. The state intervention in that decision is - explicitly and definitively - an attempt by the pro-life movement to subjugate these women.
That's categorically untrue. The goals of these organization leaders range from the cynically mercenary to the outright misogynist. The goals of their members are entirely confrontational and removed from any kind of functional beneficial public policy.
This is a country that is ratcheting back everything from the public financing of emergency medical assistance to food aid for elementary school students. The goals are not noble. The perceived ends are not virtuous. The people are not simply coming at a complex problem from different points of view.
Eric Erickson, Steve Bannon, Ron DeSantis, and Mike Johnson are not your friends. They are not trying to do right by you. They do not want the best for your children.
And they aren't regular people. That's my entire point and you're intentionally ignoring it.
Pro-lofe voters are a single-issue voting group. They legitimately believe that children are being murdered en masse, and that all other political issues combined are inconsequential. The Republicans have used that fact to get millions of people to vote for a party they find otherwise abhorrent. It's why they can get religious people to vote for policies that are so hateful.
If Biden had been Pro-lofe and Trump pro-choice, millions of people would have voted for Biden instead. How many people would have swapped to vote for Trump? The Republican party is entirely dependant on the single-issue voter. The pro-life and pro-gun voting groups are why they are still so powerful.
It's absolutely true that Republican leadership doesn't care about "unborn children" or any other kind of child. Their policies make it clear. They're monsters that are 100% willing to watch millions of poor people die if it puts another nickel in their pockets. In the 70s they were about to collapse entirely in the aftermath of Nixon when Roe gave them an opportunity to pick up voters, and the "religious right" movement took it from there.
Previously, when people thought of religious politicians they didn't think of Republicans. Jimmy Carter was a textbook religious politician. He believed in social welfare and protecting the environment. His post-presidential career was focused entirely on charity.
Religious figures had featured prominently in the Civil Rights movement. They fought for immigrantion reform, welfare, social justice, and more. The Republicans needed a way to steal their influence and direct the religious to their side, and Roe was the key.
It's actually something that quietly terrified Republicans when Roe was overturned. They'd spent 50 years depending on it to get people to vote Republican, and when it was actually overturned lots of voters felt freedom to vote based on other issues.
They are the leadership of the movement. The people that the "regular people" listen to when developing their views and understandings of the policies at hand.
You can't decouple Ken Paxton from the political movement that champions him.
Jimmy Carter hasn't been on anyone's ballot in over 40 years. We have two full generations of voters who are utterly uninformed of his politics.
None of these right-wing "moderate" abortion opponents are crusading to expand Medicaid or public housing or provide any kind of state funded pre-natal care.
At which point the state agents - themselves prominent in their religious communities - arrested, abused, and ultimately killed many of them.
The modern civil rights movement has been hollowed out by decades of intrusive surveillance (famously, the Bush Administration had the NSA and FBI spying on The Quaker Communities of Pensylvania), illegal detentions (anti-terror laws used to round up "Cop City" protest church groups in Georgia), and financial coersion (state funded lawsuits seeking to bankrupt Planned Parenthood).
That's absolute horseshit. The GOP movement organizers used the downfall of Roe as a validation of their entire political strategy. Its the liberals who have been terrified, both at the brazenness of the courts to overturn such a historical standard and at the powerlessness of their own representatives to push back in any meaningful way.
I have friends and relatives who are afraid to visit anti-abortion states, entirely thanks to the slew of news stores about women dying in hospitals from paranoid staff. My own sister has scuttled her plans to move back home, because she wants to have another child and can't risk getting pregnant in Houston.
That's what we're squaring up against in the modern moment. Not some polite disagreement between well-meaning neighbors.
I'm assuming you, like me, vote Democrat.
So you agree with Biden supporting genocide in Gaza? He's the leader of the Democratic party, so by your logic every single thing he does is 100% in line with the morals and goals of everyone who votes for him.
It's possible to vote for someone when you don't support everything they do. That's the entire platform of the GOP. Pick a few single-issue voter groups, cater to them partially on those specific issues and use that guaranteed vote to torpedo everything else.
Many pro-life voters desperately want to expand Medicare, but the party that caters to them does not, so they vote pro-life. The hypocrites are the party leadership who uses their devotion to a cause as a tool against them.
If only. That party is also choke full of pro-lifers. The President has been a vocal advocate of restricting abortion since his early Senate days.
??? No. Why would I agree with him on that?
Its surprisingly difficult to vote for someone when you can't support anything they do. But that's just it. Lots of Zionism in the Democratic Party, too. And its not as though the mass slaughter of Arabs is a policy Biden cooked up yesterday. This practice goes straight back to the Truman Doctrine.
They do not. They consistently vote in opposition to both candidates and policies that would achieve this end. The conservative pro-life movement routinely describes public (aka Socialist) medicine as a means of providing more abortions to more women, and so actively work to undermine it.
So do you vote third party? Because in the real world that's a vote for whichever of the 2 parties you like least. Which is to say it's voting for Abbot and Trump by the sound of it.
Single-issue voters vote based on a single issue. This is my entire point and you're either willfully ignoring it or you're too dumb to understand. So which is it: are you stupid or disingenuous?
If they disagree with a party on 99.9% of issues but they're the only one supporting their single-issue they'll vote for that party anyway. It's how the Republicans stay politically powerful.
If there's someone downticket worth supporting. Otherwise, just submit a spoiled ballot with nobody at the top.
Its a big issue. But more importantly, there is no brilliant silver lining to vote for.
You're talking about a guy whose three biggest legislative achievements over his four years in office have been
Oh yeah, and inflation. He's overseen an enormous spike in domestic prices, without any comparable rise in wages or public services. The last four years have been a series of empty promises and thread-worn excuses. This, from a guy who says "Bipartisan" every chance he gets, while bemoaning the threat of a resurgent rival party.
Even Reagan drew the line at 80% and he was a hand-puppet for the party at large. This isn't about voting single issue. This is about witnessing a genocide on the watch of a guy who ran on being a civil rights champion.