What the Wingnuts REALLY Want: Control of Women, Control of Science, Control of Everything

You would think the so-called "pro-life" movement would be thrilled to support something like in vitro fertilization (IVF). After all, IVF should be a good thing: It's the active choice to get pregnant and have a baby in spite of various health or physiological factors that were preventing couples (or women) from natural reproduction. It's expensive, and painful, and not always successful: but thousands of people choose it because they want to be good parents. In the opposition to abortion - that it's "baby-killing" or "ending God's gift" - the choice of IVF would reflect that positivity of life.

And yet, those anti-abortionists - you can't call them "pro-life" in most respects now they're not even "pro-fetus" - are perfectly happy nuking from orbit IVF as a medical option, just like they did in Alabama's Supreme Court ruling earlier last week.

It has to do - mostly - with how it's done: Harvesting multiple ova and fertilizing each one, freezing the embryos until one is needed, implanting it, and hoping it works. All those extra harvested eggs become troubling to the "pro-fetus" believers because in their world-view those embryos are now persons, and any potential destruction of those embryos would be an act of abortion. There's also the problem that an implanted ova may not take, which becomes in their minds an abortion as well.

I'd also argue the "pro-fetus" people are annoyed - jealous, really - by how instead of relying on God for the miracle of childbirth, people can rely instead on Science and fertility doctors to get it done.

There's also the rage against feminism, the fear that single women would choose IVF with a random sperm donor and avoid the emotional - and oft-times physical - complications dealing with men. God forbid the Patriarchy - "OBEY your husbands, ladies" - be denied or disturbed in any way.

But it all boils down to what these wingnuts REALLY want. They want control.

I mentioned before how I've seen them in-person protesting at clinics, driven by rage and shilling fearmongering images of bloodied fetuses. Eager to pass "moral" judgment on women and families they didn't know, just so they could have some insane level of control over how the world around them truly works.

In the Religious Right's obsessive need to end abortion as a choice, they will tear down everything else to impose their religious views - their control - on everyone else. They will deny rape and incest as a problem to ensure women can't get abortions from unwanted pregnancies. They will obscure the reality that pregnancies are not 100 percent safe, and deny how miscarriages, stillbirths, and ectopic pregnancies can happen in "God's perfect world." They will demonize women who suffer miscarriages and seek to jail any doctors foolish enough to provide any kind of prenatal care in these Red States under theocratic misrule.

The Religious Right are going after IVF because it's still a choice, one they can't control and one that dares question their foundational belief in personhood for embryos.

The Religious Right are going after birth control - something that actually stops fertilization, so it shouldn't affect "personhood" - because these wingnuts want their control over the reproductive act for every woman, even the ones - liberal Christians, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim - who don't subscribe to their religion.

The Religious Right will bust down the doors of every house in America to check on your uteri, women, never mind your personal rights. These same enforcers won't lift a finger to go after men who commit onanism and waste all that sacred sperm.

These same Religious Right will deny you any chance to get pregnant and have families on your own terms, through IVF or through personal use of contraceptives until you're ready - emotionally and financially - to have children. Because they want to control that part of your lives as well.

As much as they'd love to control your souls, and demand your fealty to their Church (not their God, because they will deny other Christians any say in what God truly is), they know in the end they truly can't. So they want control - political, physical, public - of everything else just so they can make themselves superior to the rest of us. 

The Religious Right are doing all of this so they can sit themselves atop a throne to look down on the rest they view as sinners and un-persons. 

Doing all this so they can judge us, before God judges them for the damage they've done to their neighbors.

God DAMN them, and for the Love of a true and just God drive every one of these Christianist absolutists out of our elected offices and courtrooms.

A Saturnalia Wish Come True: Some Sanity From the Alabama Special Election

So I just wanna make sure that this is real and that enough Alabama voters turned out to elect Doug Jones over alleged human skeeve Roy Moore:

In a major upset, Democrat Doug Jones won the Alabama Senate special election on Tuesday to fill the seat previously held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The last time Alabama sent a Democrat to the Senate was in 1992.

The Associated Press called the race for Jones just before 10:30 p.m. eastern.

Alabama is a deeply conservative state. But the race unexpectedly became competitive after multiple women came forward to allege that Republican Roy Moore had made advances toward them as teenage girls, including groping and assault. The result was a stunning victory for the Democratic Party, which has been locked out of power in Washington after the 2016 presidential election.

Insert Happy Dance Here.

Some rough observations in the wake of good tidings and cheer:

• Voter turnout remains the thing that Democrats have to work on. For these midterm-type elections outside of the Presidential cycle, turnout is shockingly low. But this election where the turnout was expected to be around 25 percent, the state GOTV efforts bumped the turnout to 38 percent (still bad, but SO MUCH BETTER than expected).
  Jones' victory - pushed by a ground-game that learned from their failures in 2016 and adapted to a more aggressive effort - alongside the earlier results in Virginia and New Jersey proves the 50-State Strategy can (and SHOULD) work.
• Black voters were the major contributors to Jones' win. It helped that the Republican candidate Roy "Banned from the Mall" Moore was an unrepentant scuzbucket on racial and sexism issues. When Moore was caught at a speech praising how "great things were when we had slavery, even for the slaves" that was just one more motivator among African-Americans to GET TEH DAMN VOTE OUT. Most Blacks are, for what I know, very spiritual and religious in that state but NOT evangelical, meaning that they weren't buying the snake oil from the local White Evangelical pastors who proclaimed Moore a perfect God-inspired candidate.
  And this was IN SPITE OF a massive voter suppression effort committed by the State-level Republicans in charge of the electoral process. For every Black voter who had to fight over getting illegally shunted to INACTIVE Voter status, for every Black voter who had to march past county sheriffs parked illegally outside polling places as intimidation tactics, for every Black voter likely lied to about whether their votes mattered... YOUR VOTES MATTERED, and THANK YOU.
  This should also be a reminder to the Democratic Party at the national level that YES, the Black Vote is a key foundation of their support. The ongoing media chatter about "changing" the party message to attract "Working Class Whites" - AKA Racists who flipped to trump - should go away. Democrats need to focus on the voters they HAVE and just need to get to vote, and make themselves attractive to the Independent voters who aren't lost to a haze of racial hatred. You're not getting those trump voters back, Dems. They're lost. Get the voters - the moderates, the pragmatists, the ones who want government to WORK - who matter. The 50-State Model of nationwide campaigning worked in 2006, and it can work in 2018. Jones' win proves it.
• This is a big blow to the Republican election schemes. For the past four decades, they've plotted out a game-plan of winning thanks to Geography and Demographics, using both to carve out Congressional gerrymanders to win the House and then using the small-population (and more conservative) states to garner enough control of the Senate. While a Senate election can't be gerrymandered, the state of Alabama was so Social Conservative for decades that it had become a "Safe" seat for any conservative candidate, effectively gerrymandered for the Senate.
  No more. The Demographics are starting - finally - to turn against the Geography of Elections. Voters under 40 leaned Democrat for Jones and in the earlier off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey the youth voters went Democrat by around 70 percent. That will be the largest voting bloc - bolstered by a Millennial age group that's more politically involved than the slacker Gen-Xers - in the 2018 Midterms.
  And given the large-scale efforts Republicans are attempting to pull with voter suppression, they're failing at that: voter turnout was higher than normal (which sucks) for non-Presidential cycles, and that overwhelms any attempt to deny voters from their access to the ballot box. The GOP running the elections offices can come up with a lot of ways to stop (minority and youthful) voters, but they can't stop all of them.
  Granted, it took a candidate as evil as Moore to shake things up, but when you look at how close the results were the GOP STILL LOST in otherwise "safe" Alabama. If this had been a special election in a state that wasn't normally +30 or more Conservative/Republican, say a state like Florida that leans Democratic but still has Republicans winning by +2 or so, the Democratic candidate could have snagged a larger win percentage.
  There may be "safe" Red States like West Virginia and Utah and Wyoming out there, but given the voter anger there's no guarantee anymore. The unsafe "competitive" Purple states are now going to be massive fights that the Dems can win. And too many states that were once reliable Red States - hi, Texas! hi, Georgia! hi, Kansas - aren't going to be reliable anymore.
• Following on that point, this is why this should bother Republicans: THEY ARE RUNNING OUT OF NOT-EVIL CANDIDATES TO NOMINATE. Their ongoing purging of moderate, centrist candidates in lieu of extremist, ignorant demagogues - who turn out to be crooks, perverts, or worse - is getting to the point where they can't win in "Safe" seats with such candidates. Any attempt to run a rational lower-case conservative is going to get stomped during the Primaries by the Fox Not-News fueled voter base that bought all in on trump and his ilk. Alabama HAD a sane candidate in Luther Strange, but the primary voters choose Roy Moore whose history of inflamed rhetoric, unhinged religious views, and outright anti-Establishment positions appeased the Far Right but horrified everyone else.
  Granted, if the sexual assaults never went public - which tells you how important it is for actual media like the Washington Post to dig up these things - Moore could have eked out a win. But given his nature, SOMETHING else could have come up to make enough general voters recoil in horror. The man was a walking disease.
  And the Republican leadership has to realize that Moore is the only kind of candidate that can win their Primaries anymore. They need to rethink their need for ethical standards in candidates if they hope to retain the "safe" seats they got. But going that route - bringing in more moderate candidates - will outrage their base anyway and they'd get primaried by Moore-type whackos. They've fallen into a particularly nasty Catch-22.
• Speaking of extremist, ignorant demagogues, this election was as much a referendum on trump as it was on the Republican Party.
  The evidence is there: trump is a drag on the GOP. Both times he went into Alabama to campaign for "his" choice - first for Strange, then for Moore - and both times "his" choice lost.
  While trump wasn't noticeably toxic in Alabama - his approval/disapproval balanced out at 48/48 - he still wasn't any help. In other Red States, trump's disapproval is worse.
  Any idea that trump voters will be there for other Republican candidates in the midterms should be laughed off. As of right now, the Republicans are on their own. Bringing in trump to campaign for you might actually lead to your defeat.
  But the Republicans can't ignore trump either. They're stuck, tied to a blowhard liar whose popularity numbers ought to be lower than the 32-33 percent he's at right now. trump may be enormously popular with the Far Right base, giving him control of the Republicans... but the number of self-described Republicans is dropping, meaning at the broader level of GOP-Indy-Dem the GOP is going to be a superminority party by the time 2020 rolls around. We're getting to the point where gerrymandering and fearmongering isn't going to be enough to bully the Republicans to victory.

What now, mad cow?

Right now, trump is behaving like he never really backed Moore in the first place. his ire towards the rest of the GOP making him look bad is going to create greater divide between him and the party leadership.

Right now, there's a large number of Alabama voters quietly taking their Roy Moore bumper stickers off their coal-roller trucks. There may be a lot of hard Right voters who'll still proudly claim their bona fides, but even they have to feel some shame in having sided with a goddamn pedophile.

Right now, the Congressional Republicans are trying to finish up their conference tax cut bill before their own internal deadlines and before Jones can show up to become a bigger stumbling block. They didn't have much room to maneuver their massively unpopular tax cut for the rich bill before, to where three Republican Senators could say "no" to a bad bill like they did to stop the "Kill Obamacare" bill. Now they're down to two GOP Senators who can say "no"... and there are enough Senators in vulnerable elections who may be more interested in saving their own skins with voters back home (or have already pledged to retire and thus have nothing to lose).

Right now, the Democrats need to take the strategies they had for winning in Alabama and weaponize it. They need to go back to the Fifty-State Strategy that worked so well in 2006 and 2008. They need to push a unifying Get-Out-The-Vote effort to ensure large turnouts that benefit them. If they can win in Alabama (albeit in bizarre circumstances) they can win ANYWHERE.

Know hope.

A Letter to Alabama Today

To the state of Alabama:

Today is a special election to fill the US Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions when he got picked to f-ck up our nation as Attorney General under trump.

This election is a very simple choice.

Alabama voters must choose between The Democrat or The Goddamn Pedophile.

A quick word from the YouTuber known as Liberal Redneck:

Everything known to date about Roy Moore is that he's a showboating, twice-exiled ex-judge who deems himself God's Chosen while violating many of the rules and requests of the Lord and of Jesus. Topping that is the recent revelations that Moore is a known skeeve who stalked after teenage girls at shopping malls and their high schools while he was in his 30s. In one case actively violating Alabama's Statutory Rape laws by seducing and groping a 14-YEAR-OLD GIRL while serving as a state prosecutor (he cannot argue ignorance of the law: the SONOFABITCH was supposed to be upholding it!).

Roy Moore represents EVERYTHING that is wrong with today's Southern region of the United States: an arrogant, self-serving hypocrite who espouses racist and sexist ideology that fights to keep the Deep South states mired in the mindset - and the economic backwardness - of the 1850s.

Doug Jones the Democrat is, well, a Democrat. He's stood for civil rights and fought the KKK, convicted those who bombed a Birmingham church killing four girls back in 1963 (the case finally got prosecuted by 1998, which tells you how hard it is to get justice in the South when it comes to civil rights). He's been described as "middle-of-the-road" on his politics, meaning he's no Bernie Sanders.

And yet there are still Alabamans who think that makes Jones WORSE than a GODDAMN PEDOPHILE.

This is your choice now, Alabama. Your vote for Doug Jones will send a practical, level-headed, scandal-less Democrat to the US Senate to represent you and your state. Or you can vote for the GODDAMN PEDOPHILE who will proceed to embarrass you and your state for another 100 years. You vote for Moore and you will NEVER live it down: Every nasty stereotype of southern assholery will be confirmed for now and all the years to come.

You wanna spite the rest of the nation and the world by voting for the GODDAMN PEDOPHILE. Go ahead. You will mark yourself as standing with the monsters that condemn and assault your own communities forever. Hell of a bargain, as the Devil would tell you.