An election year like no other
If you hadn’t already had your mind blown by what these authoritarian MAGA monsters are capable of, all you had to do was observe the grotesque display that the Texas government put on this week. The despicable cruelty they dispensed upon a woman and her family enduring one of the worst crises of her life says it all. They didn’t care that she was carrying a fetus with anomalies so extreme that it would probably be stillborn or live for a very short time if it were brought to term. There was no hope. Nor did they care that her pregnancy was risky and dangerous to her and her ability to have more children in the future.
Instead, they demanded that she endure the full length of that pregnancy anyway, no matter the price she and her family would have to pay and go through childbirth all in order to appease fundamentalist demands that essentially define pregnant women as incubators and nothing more.
She finally had to flee to a civilized place that recognized her as a human being.
This issue is not going away. We have just seen a vivid example of how seriously these zealots take “exemptions.” It reminds me of something I wrote many years ago here on this blog about that issue (back when the Democrats were still saying that Roe was inviolable and it was important to meet the zealots half way.) I highlighted the comments of one anti-abortion extremist in South Dakota named Bill Napoli:
BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.
I wondered:
Do you suppose all these elements have to be present for it to be sufficiently psychologically damaging for her to be forced to bear her rapists child, or just some of them? I wonder if it would be ok if the woman wasn’t religious but she was a virgin who had been brutally, savagely raped and “sodomized as bad as you can make it?” Or if she were a virgin and religious but the brutal savage sodomy wasn’t “as bad” as it could have been?
From the moment I saw that I realized that there would be no exceptions to their draconian bans. They would always find a way to say that the women didn’t qualify.
This fight isn’t over folks. They’ve now got it going on in all 50 states, which was something they always saw as a transitional move. There would be battles going on all over the place and they figured they would eventually move to a national ban down the road.
But they didn’t count on the backlash which has been overwhelming. But it’s going to take sustained effort to beat these people back. They are patient and they play the long game.
Well, we’ve been fighting that same good fight here at Hullabaloo for over 20 years now and we’re not going to stop now.
If you value the work we do here to expose the right’s ongoing assault on women’s rights I hope you will consider throwing some support this way as we go into this monumentally important election year. I think we are all going to need each other even more over this next year.
Thanks again for hanging in with me all this time. It’s the passion of my life and I know how lucky I am to be able to do it. It wouldn’t be possible without you, my faithful readers. It means the world to me.
cheers,
digby
If you have a mind to help us keep the light on for another year, you can do so below or at the snail mail address on the left.
And Happy Hollandaise everyone!
*keep scrolling for fresh opinions 😉