Republican Cruelty Still Ongoing March 2022 Edition

Just your constant reminder that Republicans are assholes and want everybody else in America to suffer.

The Florida legislature passed that "Don't Say Gay" bill, which would effectively muzzle any discussion of gender identities (yes, even hetero stuff, that's how vaguely worded this mess is) and encourage the spread of bullying and harassment of kids and teachers for any perceived Other-ness. Now it's up to DeSantis to sign it, and that SOB is eyeing his Presidential chances in 2024 knowing this pandering to the GOP voter base is how he can win them over. Damn him for the damage he's about to inflict on our school kids.

The Republican-controlled states are rushing to pass harsher anti-abortion laws, getting ready for the expected announcement from the 6-vote Far Right majority of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade. Among these new bills is one from Missouri that would punish any woman who leaves the state to get an abortion as well as anybody who helps them. Worse, that bill would ban any abortion of an ectopic pregnancy that can be lethal to the woman enduring it.

Let's take a moment to talk about what an ectopic pregnancy is (via the Mayo Clinic): 

Pregnancy begins with a fertilized egg. Normally, the fertilized egg attaches to the lining of the uterus. An ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg implants and grows outside the main cavity of the uterus.

An ectopic pregnancy most often occurs in a fallopian tube, which carries eggs from the ovaries to the uterus. This type of ectopic pregnancy is called a tubal pregnancy. Sometimes, an ectopic pregnancy occurs in other areas of the body, such as the ovary, abdominal cavity or the lower part of the uterus (cervix), which connects to the vagina.

An ectopic pregnancy can't proceed normally. The fertilized egg can't survive, and the growing tissue may cause life-threatening bleeding, if left untreated...

Anybody with a passing knowledge of human anatomy - or at least access to an anatomy book at the library - can tell you that a fetus growing in a fallopian tube will rupture that tube. That's massive internal bleeding. The fetus itself won't last long. The fatality rate of U.S. women suffering ectopic pregnancies is around 10 percent, and it's the leading cause of first trimester fatalities.

The guy in Missouri - Brian Seitz - pushing this bill is claiming that an ectopic fetus can get surgically replanted into the uterus, but guess what? He's lying. They tried selling this lie in Ohio when that state passed a similar law, and the doctors still had to explain to them that it's medically impossible.

And yet these Far Right, religiously-pandering, painfully ill-informed if not outright moronic politicians don't care about any of that. All they care about is banning abortion under ANY circumstance, which is why they laugh away rape and incest as a reason for women to need abortion, it's why they ignore the medical reality that pregnancies are high-risk for women in even the most advanced nations on Earth (and the U.S. isn't one of those nations in the first place).

So if a woman in Missouri gets pregnant, and it turns out to be ectopic, growing in her fallopian tube, and the only way to survive is to get an abortion, she can't get it in Missouri. Worse, she can't even leave the state to go to one - Illinois I think would still be pro-abortion in a post-Roe America - because the goddamned wingnuts will arrest her for trying to save her own life.

We saw similar "Can't Leave" laws pass in Georgia and other states a while back, and I think the latest situation about those laws is that they're pending SCOTUS decisions, which again does not bode well.

As I wrote back then, these anti-abortion bills are a replay of the Fugitive Slave Acts, only now geared to punish poor women who can't afford to leave their states to end life-threatening pregnancies. It is horrifying how far these religious assholes want to go to punish women, to the point they are happily agreeing to commit mass murder in the glory of fetuses that won't survive anyway. It's madness, and too many women are going to die because of it.

Rounding out this weekend of Far Right madness is this little gem from one of my state's Senators, Mr. Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott who came out last month with an 11-point plan to take the United States back to 1950 1850 The Stone Age. This counts out to more than 11 items, but I broke up some of Scott's rants into separate talking points to highlight each idiocy:

• It would force schools to not teach about racism or sexism or gender identity or any such "wokeness". It would force universities to stop diversifying their student populations, ending "affirmative action" of any kind.
• It would end "wokeness" or diversity training in the U.S. military, pretty much making life harder for women and gays in the military.
• It would increase prison minimums for both violent and non-violent crimes, and guarantee Qualified Immunity to let police abuse the use of force. All legal reforms to reduce our oversized prison population and any attempt to reduce police brutality, wiped away.
• It will finish donald trump's goddamned Wall that nobody else wanted.
• It will give Presidents a line-item veto on Congressional bills, which honestly requires a Constitutional Amendment that Scott or the Republicans won't be able to push through (because it will honestly break Congress' power and even they are not that suicidal). I also doubt Republicans will want that line-item veto in Democratic Presidents' hands.
• It will impose term limits on Congress (also unconstitutional, and would require an Amendment).
• It will weaken the Internal Revenue Service by cutting staffing in half, and pursue the idea of decentralizing the federal bureaucracy by shipping whole departments out of DC. They tried that with various Agriculture agencies and it turned into an expensive, staff-wasting mess.
• It will promote voter suppression even into Blue States by ending same-day registrations, cutting back on mail-in balloting, and enforcing stricter Voter ID laws everywhere.
• It will ban porn (good luck with that, you busybody idiots).
• It will give religious institutions more power to discriminate, violating everyone else's civil liberties just so Republicans can lie to themselves about us being a Godly nation.
• It will go after private social media companies who "violate" free speech by banning the racist Republicans who violate those companies' own rules.
• It will insist that ALL Americans pay income taxes, even those who are too poor to afford paying federal income tax (and who are already paying at the state and local levels through sales and property taxes). Scott's plan also calls on taxing people living on Social Security, who are fixed-income retirees or those too disabled to work for an income.
• It will end financial aid to foreign allies (just as we're coping with a Russian invasion of Ukraine and threatening our NATO allies!), cut off trade with China (the economic damage of that alone would drive Wall Street to go full Democrat), and "treat our enemies like enemies" (which sounds right now like pushing us into open war with Russia, oh no I'm sorry the Republicans think we're at war with Ukraine).

IMHO: A lot of this is just straight-up pandering on Culture War issues, all the while attacking the poor (and minorities) for "not paying their fair share" and pretty much announcing on loudspeakers that the Republicans hate everybody who isn't Rich White and Male.

To quote Jeffrey Billman at Orlando Weekly:

Most of it isn’t new, per se. What’s new is Scott’s attempt to marry the party’s anti-tax, pro-austerity wing with Trump’s populist, authoritarian wing. On the surface, that seems dubious. To the degree Trump had a policy outlook more sophisticated than “Build the Wall,” it was that he promised everything to everyone — cut taxes and increase spending and cut the deficit — and pretended he never made those promises when they became inconvenient. 

Scott, however, wants to reframe the oligarchical (read: deeply unpopular) aspects of the GOP agenda as an extension of the culture wars: The “woke” left is sending your money to “undeserving” others; you don’t have to squint to see the racial subtext. From start to finish, this is an authoritarian document dressed up in the language of freedom. Like all variants of right-wing populism, it focuses the grievances of its target demo (a loss of cultural primacy) at scapegoats (the wokes)...

To quote Rude Pundit:

There's so much conservative extremist fuckery in here that it reads like porn for the Federalist Society, like a bunch of Hillsdale grads are gonna sit around and circle jerk to things like finishing the stupid border wall and naming it for Donald Trump. "Yeah, that'll own the libs," they'll say as they jizz and then immediately feel shame and then immediately start jacking off again when they read the next line about funding the police.

Look at this savagery in attacking the poor: "No government assistance unless you are disabled or aggressively seeking work" (okay, so are you gonna provide child care?) and "Eliminate federal programs that can be done locally" (sounds good if you're in Massachusetts, scary if you're in Texas) and "All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount" (which is raising taxes on the poor instead of forcing million/billionaires to pay their share). There's fucking nothing in there about poverty other than that "socialism" apparently causes it. Not paying shit wages or corporations dicking over workers in favor of shareholders and executives.

On it goes, just a steaming shit pile that you'd just have to be a sociopath, and a fucking dumb one, to buy into. In addition to essentially ending the federal government except for the military, the paranoia over "cancel culture" bullshit and the outright terror over trans people is bizarrely overwhelming. In a weird merging of "science" and religion, the plan declares "Men and women are biologically different, 'male and female He created them.'" And "No doctor will be allowed to perform irreversible surgical or gender-altering procedures on any minor child," going against the advice of every major medical organization when it comes to gender dysphoria (and it's something Texas is already on board with)...

This maniacal shitpost of a declaration is about a nation that simply doesn't exist except in the heated, phantasmagoric delusions of the most MAGA-broken brains and the political garbage humans who exploit them, no matter the consequences. It imagines a country in flames, repressing true Americans, one where the greatest issue facing us is white people not allowed to say the n-word without consequences. It's hyper-Christian, nationalistic, fascistic, and deranged, ignoring all the real problems in this nation, which, to be fair, are mostly caused by Republicans...

To quote myself: This is what the Republicans have been selling for the past 40 years, ever since the glory days of the Reagan Administration, and trying to pass it off as reforms and benefits to a nation that hasn't seen a steady healthy economy in all that time (the economic boom of the Clinton years did not fix income inequality and was all quickly squandered by Bush the Lesser's tenure anyway). This is all the Republican Party is anymore: A party selling grievance and rage to its voting base and pushing an agenda of cruelty that appeals to far too many angry white folk.

Everything I've wrote here tonight, every last inch of it documenting the cruelty that drives the modern GOP.

Adam Serwer's words should get engraved on top of every Republican officials' tombstones when they pass this mortal coil: THE CRUELTY IS THE POINT.