Republicans Are Losing with Women Voters

Outside of Republican Women's Clubs - where older women in particular want to bring back the 1950's and perhaps the Jim Crow laws too - women are increasingly fleeing from the GOP.  What had been a growing problem has become a crisis fueled by the always vile Donald Trump whose crudeness, vulgarity and incompetent response to the Covid-19 pandemic is rapidly alienating women voters. If the exodus away from the GOP continues, not only Trump but his enablers within the GOP may face a harsh reckoning come November. A piece at CNN looks at the phenomenon.  Here are highlights: 

The GOP's quest to win back women is not looking promising 100 days before Election Day, a point punctuated by yet another week of sexist missteps -- from a GOP congressman's decision to reportedly call Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a "f**king bitch" on the steps of the Capitol to President Donald Trump's tweet marshaling "The Suburban Housewives of America."

Though the United States is rightly focused on the coronavirus pandemic, last week's events in Washington underscored that two years after women powered the Democrats' 2018 push to flip the House of Representatives, Trump and some members of his Republican Party have not learned their lesson -- and still cannot seem to show that they will treat women as equals and respect the dignity of their work both at home and in the professional realm. As Trump ramped up his campaign to strike fear in the hearts of White suburban voters by arguing that they will not be safe in Joe Biden's America this week, he tweeted out an opinion column in the New York Post praising his efforts to get rid of an Obama-era fair housing regulation. . . . . the Thursday afternoon tweet that seemed straight out of the 1950s, Trump said "The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article. Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better!"
 In another example of his failure to think about the consequences before he speaks, he wished Ghislaine Maxwell "well" during a Tuesday briefing on the coronavirus even though she faces charges for recruiting, grooming and ultimately sexually abusing minors who were as young as 14 as Jeffrey Epstein's alleged accomplice. Trump's tone-deaf tweet about suburban housewives was in keeping with his long record of using demeaning language to describe women and his attempt to win the 2018 midterms for his party by stoking a backlash to the #MeToo movement by calling it a "very scary time" for young men.

Trump has never figured out how to make up lost ground with female voters since 2016 and 2018. And he now stands to lose them by potentially historic margins in the November election.

The President was trailing Vice President Joe Biden by 25 points among women (35% to Biden's 60%) in the recent Washington Post-ABC News poll and by 28 points in the mid-July Quinnipiac poll that showed Biden leading Trump among female voters 59% to 31%. And as CNN's Harry Enten wrote this weekend, this is not an election where the economy -- which Trump has long believed to be his greatest strength — is driving the election. At this moment when the number of coronavirus cases in the US has surpassed 4.1 million and more than 146,000 Americans have died, polls have consistently shown that Americans, particularly women, are more concerned about Covid-19 than any other issue. Voters trust Biden more than Trump to handle the pandemic, and largely because of that, the former vice president has maintained a solid lead in the polls, both nationally and in many of the key battleground states that Trump needs to win reelection. [H]e also undercut his own message by continuing to argue that children must return to school in person -- and falsely claiming that children don't get sick or transmit the virus easily -- even though polls show a majority of parents with school-aged children do not feel safe sending them back for in-person instruction. . . . . Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said Sunday that Trump's claim that governors have everything they need is not accurate. The gendered language of the week, from Trump's tweet to Florida GOP Rep. Ted Yoho's verbal attack on Ocasio-Cortez -- an incident in which the Florida Republican reportedly called the New York Democrat "disgusting" and a "f**king bitch" within earshot of a reporter from The Hill newspaper -- was a reminder that Trump and many of his allies still don't understand how to talk to women, much less about them. In many interviews with female voters of all political persuasions over the past three years, one of the things many of them said they don't like about Trump is his coarse, sexist language and how he has changed the dialogue in America — convincing his followers and allies that they can say whatever comes to mind, no matter how hurtful or offensive it is. 

For Trump and Republican acolytes like Yoho, there are now too many self-inflicted mistakes to count. They are dragging their own party down with them -- and no one will be surprised if women once again rise up in November and deliver a victory to the Democrats.

Trump and Male Christofascists War on Poor Women

Although the Trump/Pence regime has rankled its Christofascist supporters with the alleged effort to decriminalize homosexuality across the globe - personally, I think it is a ruse - it has not failed to thrill the GOP's religious extremist base when it comes to abortion and depriving poor women of access to birth control and basic medical access. Now, in a rule released last week, a prohibition has been put in place that prohibits Title X, a federal family-planning program that serves around four million low-income women, from funding organizations that also provide abortions.  Planned Parenthood is the principal target.  That the organization is the sole source of medical access to many poor women isn't even on Trump or Christofascists' radar. To me, it's a further demonstration of the far right's attitude that poor people simply need to die and disappear even as the "godly folk" park their wide, hypocrisy filled asses in church pews. A column in the New York Times looks at this latest attack on poor women and their right to control their own bodies.  Here are excerpts (for the record, I am not pro-abortion per se, but I believe in medical access for all and that medical decision should not be in the hands of those who cling to Bronze Age myths):

In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Margaret Atwood’s ever-resonant tale of misogynist dystopia, Christian fascism has a sordid, perverse underbelly. On the surface, the Republic of Gilead, Atwood’s imaginary successor to America, is a place of totalitarian religious austerity. But as the book’s enslaved narrator discovers, the society’s leaders also maintain a brothel, Jezebel’s, full of women who couldn’t fit into the new order. It’s the inevitable flip side of a regime that dehumanizes women, reducing them to their reproductive organs.

Donald Trump’s administration turns the Gilead model upside down. Its public image is louche and decadent, with tabloid scandal swirling around the president and many of his associates. This can make it hard to focus on the unprecedented lengths the administration is going to curtail American women’s reproductive rights and enrich the anti-abortion movement.

On Friday, the Trump administration escalated its war on Planned Parenthood and the women who use it. It released a rule prohibiting Title X, a federal family-planning program that serves around four million low-income women, from funding organizations that also provide abortions. Further, the administration instituted an American version of the global gag rule, barring doctors and nurses receiving Title X funds from making abortion referrals to their patients except in certain emergency situations.

The rule is meant to cut Planned Parenthood, which serves 41 percent of Title X recipients, out of the program. But for many women who rely on Title X, there are no alternatives. Planned Parenthood’s president, Dr. Leana Wen, told me that in Wisconsin, as of 2017, Planned Parenthood served 80 percent of Title X patients and was the only Title X provider in seven counties. In Ohio, Planned Parenthood was the only Title X provider in nine counties. “We know that when patients cannot access their provider of choice, they delay care,” or they end up forgoing care altogether, she said.

The new regulation jettisons a requirement that Title X clinics provide “medically approved” family planning services. That means that funds that once went to Planned Parenthood could flow instead to anti-abortion groups that promote so-called natural family planning. Unless the courts halt the new policy, struggling women who need refills on their birth control pills could get federally funded lectures on the rhythm method instead.

This move to turn a lifesaving women’s health program into pork for the religious right should be major news. Instead, it’s been overshadowed by a series of scandals, each offering telling glimpses of the sexual ethics of Trumpworld’s golf-shirted Commanders.

On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that prosecutors working under former Miami U.S. attorney Alex Acosta, now Trump’s secretary of labor, broke the law in the process of making an inexplicably lenient plea deal with the financier Jeffrey Epstein, who’d been accused of sexually abusing underage girls.

Then, on Friday, news broke that the billionaire Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and a close friend of and donor to Trump, was being charged with soliciting prostitution, part of a wide-ranging Florida sex-trafficking investigation. One of the 100 richest men in the country, Kraft was allegedly a patron of a strip-mall massage parlor staffed by women who, according to police, were virtual prisoners, forced to service up to 1,000 men a year. It’s hard to imagine why a man with Kraft’s resources would visit such a place unless the squalor, and the women’s evident powerlessness, were part of the point. (Kraft has denied the allegations; the police reportedly have video evidence.)

 The cruelty and moral bankruptcy of Trump and his Christofascist supporters is stunning.

Virginia Could Soon Place the Equal Rights Amendment in the U.S. Constitution

As the Washington Post is reporting, the Virginia Senate today voted to pass the federal Equal Rights Amendment with seven Republicans joining Democrats on a 26-to-14 vote.  Now the vote goes to the far more reactionary House of Delegates where Republicans hold a one vote majority - at least until the 2019 Virginia elections in November.   The Washington Post looks at the vote:

The GOP-led state Senate voted Tuesday to make Virginia the 38th and final state to ratify the federal Equal Rights Amendment.

The measure passed with bipartisan support, with seven Republicans joining Democrats on a 26-to-14 vote. The measure faces tougher odds in the House of Delegates and beyond, including hurdles related to long-expired deadlines for passage. . . . . The Senate resolution now heads to the House, where comparable House legislation remains in committee.

Advocates hope they have more momentum this year with Republican sponsorship of the Senate resolution. Sen. Glen H. Sturtevant Jr. (R-Chesterfield) sponsored the legislation and joined a bus tour promoting it last year.

A piece in New York Magazine looks at the bigger picture should the House of Delegates likewise pass the ERA amendment.  Here are article excerpts:

For those of us who came of age at a time when the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment seemed as inevitable as it was overdue, the ERA’s sudden revival in the Trump era has been a marvelous development. Today the Virginia Senate ratified the amendment, which means the Old Dominion is halfway through the process of becoming the crucial 38th state — three-fourths of the 50 states — to get onboard since Congress passed the ERA in 1972.

The amendment’s language is extremely simple:

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

Its practical implications may depend on what Congress does to implement it, but in effect, it would serve as a constitutional backdrop to more specific protections of gender equality, and as an ongoing basis for challenging discrimination in the courts.

The ERA was long thought to be comatose, if not dead, after only 35 states ratified it prior to the expiration of a 1982 ratification deadline set by Congress. But inspired by doubts about the constitutionality of ratification deadlines, and perhaps some defiance toward the manifest pigginess of the 45th president, momentum for the ERA resumed, with Nevada ratifying it in 2017 and Illinois in 2018.

Perhaps the big shift toward Democrats in 2017 House elections in Virginia, and the strong possibility that Democrats could take control of that chamber this November, could motivate Republicans to stop their obstruction of the ERA. It’s certainly a good sign that seven Republican senators joined all 19 Democrats in voting for the ratification in the upper chamber.

If Virginia does ratify the amendment, the legal maneuvering will begin, as the New York Times noted last year:

Expect a legal showdown, intense lobbying and constitutional fireworks …

[T]he debate would be interesting, and would offer the Grand Old Party yet another opportunity to recant its abandonment, under the influence of the conservative movement, of an ancient party tradition of supporting an ERA, as Katie Kilkenny observed in 2015:

Republicans installed the first woman in Congress and shepherded the 19th Amendment through a Republican-dominated Congress in 1919. . . . .

And Republicans began putting the ERA into party platforms in 1944, and didn’t definitively begin rejecting the amendment until Ronald Reagan’s ascent to the leadership of the party in 1980.

At a time when women are repudiating Republicans at the polls to a remarkable extent, it would be a good time for the GOP to wake up and embrace equality as sufficiently central to American principles to merit inclusion in the Constitution.

Who would lead the opposition?  Christofascists who want to be able to subordinate women and angry white men fearful of losing even more patriarchy based privilege. 

Women - A Vanishing Breed Among Congressional Republicans

As the base of the Republican Party has become increasingly concentrated among aging whites, Christian extremists, white supremacists and vulture capitalists, something has happened to Republican women in Congress: they are vanishing.  At this time, it appears that only 13 women will be among the Republican caucus in 2019 - down by 10 from the present Congress.   To anyone sentient, the reason should be obvious: women do not like the GOP's racist, male privilege based  agenda and will vote against Republicans even when the Republican candidate is a woman.    Yet the GOP seems shocked and ponders how to regain support from women.  Jettisoning much of the current GOP platform would be an obvious choice if one is in touch with objective reality, but don't hold your breath waiting for reality to set in.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

About a half dozen House Republican women gathered this week for a somber, post-election dinner.

Exchanging thoughts about the brutal results for GOP candidates, they realized something depressing, according to one attendee. That small dinner group represented about half the total number of Republican women who would serve in the House next year.

Just 13 GOP women have won election so far to serve in the next Congress, down from 23 this year. With a half dozen races yet to be resolved, the House GOP — the minority party next year — is all but certain to have the lowest number of women in its ranks since 1994.

That drop-off came amid a national political climate that saw female voters sharply break from Republicans. Women favored Democrats over Republicans for Congress, 59 percent to 40 percent, according to exit polls.

It has set off a debate within the Republican Party about how to address this crisis, both in terms of appealing to female voters and recruiting and retaining women in Congress.
“I think the Republicans have to get off of defense on this issue,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said Friday in an interview.

Cheney was the uncontested winner this week in the race for House Republican conference chairwoman, which puts her in charge of the party’s communications and messaging strategy. She will become the party’s highest-profile woman in Congress, trying to rebuild and rebrand its battered image.

But she does not see any need for course corrections on policies relating to women, arguing that Democrats create silos for female issues that treat women in a condescending way. . . . She said that issues like security and a strong economy cut across gender lines and that if Republicans made that argument better and had more women making the pitch, they would win more support. “We need more women running for office, no doubt,” Cheney said.  Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) could not agree more. . . . . . “Take a look around,” she told the GOP lawmakers. “This is not reflective of the American public.”

Stefanik said she then asked Reps. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the minority leader candidates, what their plans were to recruit and elect more women.  “I was struck that I really didn’t get an answer,” she recalled in an interview Friday.

Just one new Republican woman, so far, will be sworn in for her first term in January.  Yet when Cheney and Stefanik look across the aisle next year, they will see a record number of female Democrats, at least 89.

Trump won two years ago despite more than a dozen women accusing him of improper conduct or sexual assault, charges he denies. After his win, the Democratic Party and liberal activists focused early on recruiting and advancing female candidates. The reaction to the #MeToo movement further encouraged Democratic women, culminating in the clash over sexual misconduct allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and the GOP’s treatment of his accusers.

Kavanaugh denied the allegations. Trump mocked one of his accusers, .  . . Stefanik took a more nuanced view, believing that the terrible standing with women was pretty well baked before last month’s confirmation vote.  “We were having problems with women voters before that,” she said.

Cheney sees her main focus as sharpening the party’s message. She intends to do a lot more than just stand behind McCarthy, the incoming minority leader, to provide a better visual backdrop.

She wants to go after Democrats for supporting a “socialist economic policy” like single-payer insurance and how such a national health program would limit women’s medical choices. “That would be a disaster,” she said.

I'm sorry, but Cheney - a child of privilege who has ridden her parents' fame to success - is clueless on the issue of heath care access.  The more I see and with a background of doing legal work for  hospital system, single payer insurance is the only way all citizens will have equal access to adequate healthcare. 

Virginia GOP in Denial About Election Day Disaster

The Republican Party of Virginia ("RPV") began to reject objective reality and began to dwell in a bubble years ago.  It started with RPV's embrace of Christofascists who were slowly but steadily voted onto local city and county committees and who alienated moderate members of those same committees and the party in general.  Now, with the embrace of white supremacists as best embodied by failed senate candidate Corey Stewart and Donald Trump.  The end result is that Virginia is quickly becoming a "blue state" where no Republican can win statewide office and where the GOP strangle hold on the Virginia General Assembly is greatly weakened and may vanish completely in November, 2019.  Sane people would realize that either the party agenda needs to change oe extinction may be on the horizon.  Not so with RPV as a column in the Virginian Pilot notes.  Here are column excerpts:

ANYTIME a political party gets shellacked on Election Day, it’s useful to ask whether the party has learned anything from the experience, and whether it is willing to fix its problems.

If the post-election message from Virginia GOP Chairman Jack Wilson to the party faithful is any guide, the answer is “not likely.”

Friday evening after the Nov. 6 midterm elections — contests in which Virginia Republicans gave up three seats in the U.S. House of Representatives (two of them in usually Republican territory), and got walloped in Virginia’s U.S. Senate election — Wilson sent an email to fellow Republicans statewide.

“Simply put, this Tuesday’s results were devastating,” acknowledged Wilson. He continued, “While some will want to play the blame game, we as a Party do not have the time to engage in that useless dialogue. Our defeated candidates are not to blame, every single one worked their hearts out and left everything they had out on the field. President Trump is not to blame.”

The contention that Donald J. Trump is not responsible for Republican losses here strains credulity.  Trump and his supporters are in full command of the Republican Party. He promotes a racially inflammatory agenda in place of traditional Republican principles that support free trade, strong ethics and family values.

Trump’s message continues to appeal in rural districts.  But in states with rapidly growing urban and suburban districts, such as Virginia, Trump and Trumpism are political liabilities.

Largely as a result of Trump, Virginia Republicans over the past two years have lost statewide elections in Virginia, lost those three seats in the House of Representatives and almost lost the GOP’s 20-year grip on the Virginia General Assembly in the 2017 state elections.

Statewide surveys show that Trump is deeply unpopular in Virginia, and the Washington Post-Schar School Election Day survey confirmed that Trump was top of mind with voters as they went to the polls.

The Washington Post-Schar School survey showed that 56 percent of women voted for Democrats in hotly contested congressional districts around the country this month. A CNN exit poll in Virginia showed that 64 percent of women voted for Democratic incumbent Tim Kaine in his U.S. Senate contest with Republican Corey Stewart, an unabashed Trump acolyte.

Despite the gender gap, Wilson’s letter makes no mention of urging the Republican Party to do more to appeal to women. That seems odd; women usually outnumber men at the polls.

[A]s long as Republican election officials around the country are regularly accused of suppressing the minority vote, and as long as the president stokes a strident anti-immigrant agenda, it’s doubtful black and Latino voters will soon embrace the GOP.

Some GOP strategists have openly said that as long as Trump is president, Virginia will continue to elect Democrats.

We won’t have to wait long to test that proposition. The Virginia General Assembly is up for grabs next fall. Results from the midterm elections show that Kaine won handily in about a dozen General Assembly districts currently held by Republicans, a worrying sign for the GOP.

But to capitalize on the opportunity in 2019, Democrats will have to motivate voters who seldom vote in low-profile legislative elections.

“Virginia has changed,” says [former Lt. Governor Bill] Bolling, “and the Republican Party is going to have to change if it wants to win again in a state that is much more diverse and much more moderate than it used to be.”  But Bolling is not calling the shots at the Virginia GOP anymore. The Trumpists are.

With luck, RPV will remain in its alternate reality and Democrats will gain control of the General Assembly in November 2019.  Perhaps if that happens, RPV will finally realize that embracing Christofascists and racists is a losing proposition long term. 

Taylor Swift Explained the Stakes of the 2018 Midterm Elections

I have never been a fan one way or the other of Taylor Swift nor one to follow the celebrity gossip of shows like "Entertainment Tonight,"  but I now have a new appreciation of the singer who dared to use her celebrity to perhaps motivate Millennials and others of the stakes the nation facing in the upcoming 2018 midterm elections.  In my view, these may be the most important elections in a generation or more and the results will determine if rising authoritarianism and rule by a toxic minority will continue in this country.  Some may view the previous statement as hyperbole, but I believe we stand at a turning point where either democracy is defended or it will begin a dangerous death.  A column in the New York Times looks at Swift's speaking out and the stakes in these elections.  Here are column excerpts: 

Last Sunday night, Taylor Swift did something she had never done in her stratospheric career as a pop star: She endorsed a political candidate in Tennessee, her adopted home state.

She endorsed two candidates, actually, both Democrats: Representative Jim Cooper, who is running for re-election to Congress, and former Gov. Phil Bredesen, who is running to fill the Senate seat that the Republican Bob Corker is voluntarily, sort of, vacating.

Swift did more than simply endorse the Democrats. In an Instagram post to her 112 million followers, she also slammed Marsha Blackburn, the Republican House member running against Mr. Bredesen: “Her voting record in Congress appalls and terrifies me,” Ms. Swift wrote. “She voted against equal pay for women. She voted against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which attempts to protect women from domestic violence, stalking and date rape. She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples. She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.”

There’s a good reason for any female artist, especially one who got her start on country radio, to think twice about wading into politics. . . . . The Dixie Chicks never recovered.

Here in 2018, something very different is happening to Taylor Swift: People, it seems, are following her lead. By noon on Tuesday, less than 48 hours after she posted her exhortation on Instagram, more than 166,000 people across the country had registered to vote. And while there is no hard evidence, no way to measure how much Swift’s post had to do with the bump, some details were telling: Roughly 42 percent of the newly registered are between the ages of 18 and 24, right in Taylor Swift’s wheelhouse. “We have never seen a 24- or 36- or 48-hour period like this,” a spokeswoman for Vote.org told The Times.

Among the newly registered, more than 6,200 live in Tennessee, and Mr. Bredesen will need every one of them to show up at the polls on Nov. 6.

[T]he state’s two largest cities, Memphis and Nashville, consistently vote for Democrats. And given that Tennessee’s urban population continues to grow even as its rural population shrinks, it stands to reason that a truly progressive candidate — someone charismatic and unapologetically liberal — could bring out young voters and people of color and thus change the whole nature of politics here. Instead, state Democrats got behind Phil Bredesen, a 74-year-old business-friendly moderate who previously served two terms as both mayor of Nashville and governor of Tennessee. It was a savvy move in many ways. Mr. Bredesen won all 95 Tennessee counties when he ran for re-election in 2006, his last campaign, and he still enjoys high name recognition and approval ratings here. In May, Vanderbilt University polled a representative sampling of Tennesseans, rating Mr. Bredesen’s overall favorability at 67 percent.

It’s hard to imagine a candidate better poised to attract disaffected Republicans. If you’re an old-school conservative and you’re alarmed by an erratic president with no functional institutional checks on his most outrageous ideas, the last person you want to send to the Senate on your behalf is a rabble-rousing Trump apologist with a gun in her purse.

For moderate Republican voters, a calm, affable fiscal conservative is an appealing alternative, especially one who has a history of standing up to his own party. . . . . But for Tennessee progressives, Mr. Bredesen represents a tragic lost opportunity.

But the biggest boost may have come from a 28-year-old pop star who pointed out what would seem to be obvious: that our choice is not between a progressive and a conservative. Our choice is between a mild-mannered, business-friendly centrist and a Tea Party Republican who has voted with the president 91 percent of the time, who favors the repeal of Roe v. Wade, who opposes marriage equality and who is in thrall to the Koch brothers and the National Rifle Association. The list of Marsha Blackburn’s assaults on liberal values goes on and on and on.

As she pointed out in her Instagram post, “We may never find a candidate or party with whom we agree 100 percent on every issue, but we have to vote anyway.” In Tennessee, the choice is clear.

The choice is likewise clear across America.  Here in Hampton Roads it means voting for Elaine Luria, Tim Kaine and other Democrat candidates.

Mitch McConnell: Women protesting Kavanaugh Were "Clowns" and It Will "All Blow Over"

If one wants evidence of the contempt that today's Republican Party holds towards women, look no farther than GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the man who other than Donald Trump, has done more to destroy American constitutional government than anyone else.  McConnell in effect has labeled all survivors of sexual assault and women who are tired of GOP misogyny as "clowns" and has suggested that the whole Kavanaugh outrage as something that will "blow over," the inference being that women are shallow, gullible and of short memory capacity.  A piece in Daily Kos looks at McConnell's contempt for women and survivors of sexual assault.  Here are article highlights:

Nothing could exemplify the wholesale contempt the Republican Party has for women than the words of its own Senate Majority Leader, fresh off of successfully installing an accused attempted rapist and hard-right political operative onto the Supreme Court. . . . he considered them useful idiots too. “Harassing members at their homes, crowding the halls with people acting horribly, the effort to humiliate us really helped me unify my conference,” McConnell told the New York Times. “So I want to thank these clowns for all the help they provided.”

There used to be a time in this country when someone in as important a position as McConnell would, after a bitter political fight, attempt to mend fences with his opposition, particularly in a circumstance fraught with such a raw and emotional issue as rape.  There would be some act of simple grace in the acknowledgment of the validity of the other sides’ sentiments, even in defeat. That is the way the U.S. government worked for well over two hundred years, and it is in part what has kept us together as a nation.

More than anyone in the Congress and Senate, Mitch McConnell has worked to undermine those traditions, preferring instead to tear the fabric of this nation in two for the sake of imposing his party’s reactionary agenda on us all. So it’s not unexpected that rather than acknowledging their trauma, even in disagreement, he would instead belittle those rape victims, who protested and painfully told us their stories, as “clowns.”  Donald Trump has now made it acceptable to cruelly mock one’s political opponents, giving no quarter to the fact that they may represent the views of more than half the nation. McConnell’s remarks here simply signal that in the age of Trump the Republican Party has no decency left to spare . . . . .

Even here the undercurrent of misogyny is instructive. Demeaning and diminishing the victims of sexual assault, raising doubts about their truthfulness, was  the GOP’s tactic from the get-go in the Kavanaugh hearings. McConnell’s smug self-assurance that the anger and emotions poured out over the last two weeks will just “blow over” is simply another way of minimizing the experience of those who have had to deal with the trauma of sexual assault and its aftermath. It’s another way of saying that rape, in the end, is really not that big of a deal.

For those women and men who take a different view of sexual assault than that of the Republican Senate Majority leader, November 6 is now [less than] only thirty days away.

Is Trump Driving Women Away From the GOP for Good?

Both of my daughters grew up working on Republican campaigns, doing literature drops, working the polls with me, and going to "victory parties" on election nights.  One happily related to me that she voted a straight GOP ticket the first time she was old enough to vote.  What are they doing now?  Using social media to encourage people to register to vote and voting Democrat in the 2018 midterm elections.  What happened?  Two things, in my view: (i) the take over of the GOP base by Christofascists - and now white supremacists - and (ii) the election of Donald Trump and the mainstreaming of misogyny within the GOP.   Polls suggest that they are unique and some pundits are now wondering if the GOP has lost the majority of women long term.  A piece in Politico Magazine suggests that what my daughters - both Millennials - have experienced is not unique even among much older one time Republican women.   Here are article highlights: 

President Donald Trump has historically low favorability among women, with the Pew Research Center now reporting that 63 percent of women disapprove of how he is doing his job—compared with 30 percent who approve. That might not be surprising, given the range of things that Trump has said and done that might be seen as offensive to women. There’s the famous “Access Hollywood” tape that gave rise to thousands of pussy hats, the 22 women who have publicly accused him of sexual harassment and assault, and the hush money his personal lawyer has admitted to paying to cover up marital indiscretions. There is Trump’s tendency to insult women, from Carly Fiorina to Megyn Kelly to Mika Brzezinski. Most recently, there was his rally in Mississippi, during which the president mocked Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations . . . . 

Trump’s election and performance in office have clearly pushed independent and Democratic women into action, resulting in record numbers of women running for office, and surges of women involved in local political organizing for the first time. But what about Republican women? Is it possible that Trump—and the Republican politicians who enable him—are not just alienating left-leaning women, but are permanently damaging the GOP’s female ranks, driving some splintering portion of women away for good?
 Republican women still overwhelmingly support the president—84 percent of them, according to a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll this week. But that statistic overlooks a broader trend: Fewer and fewer American women identify as Republicans, and that slow migration is speeding up under Trump. . . . . According to pollsters on both sides of the aisle, that doesn’t bode well for the Republican Party either in this fall’s midterms—which are likely to bring a record gap between how men and women vote—or for the party’s long-term future.
 Only more recently did women start actively leaving the GOP. For two decades now, they have been leaking away from the Republican Party, very slowly becoming independents, while independents have been drifting toward the Democrats. In 1994, according to Pew, 42 percent of women identified as or leaned Republican, as did 52 percent of men. By 2017, only 37 percent of women and 48 percent of men still did. In 1994, 48 percent of women and 39 percent of men identified as or leaned toward the Democrats. By 2017, those numbers were 56 percent of women and 44 percent of men.
 Trump’s election put this gender shift “on steroids,” Greenberg says. According to Pew, the share of American women voters who identify with or lean toward the Republican Party has dropped 3 percentage points since 2015—from 40 percent to 37 percent—after having been essentially unchanged from 2010 through 2014. By 2017, just 25 percent of American women fully identified as Republicans. That means that when, say, 84 percent of Republican women say they approve of Trump and his actions, or 69 percent of Republican women say they support Kavanaugh, or 64 percent say they, like Trump, don’t find Ford very “credible,” those percentages represent a small and shrinking slice of American women.
 [W]omen have voted in higher numbers and at higher rates than men for decades. In 2016, according to Dittmar, 9.9 million more women than men voted, and about 63 percent of eligible females voted, compared with 59 percent of eligible males. If more women than men vote in November, women’s shift toward the Democrats is likely to be over-represented on Election Day—especially in an election like this one, in which women are highly mobilized and motivated. The Cook Political Report’s Amy Walters recently noted: “The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal survey found that [white college-educated women] support a Democrat for Congress by 22 points—58 percent to 36 percent.
 “Once you give up that party label, you’re less inclined to easily take it back,” says University of Virginia political scientist Jennifer Lawless. Liam Donovan, a lobbyist and former National Republican Senatorial Committee staffer, notes that the Republican loss of college-educated white women “is not balanced out by a huge spike among white men—on net, that’s a real problem for the Republicans.” Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, of all people, put it more starkly this summer: “The Republican college-educated woman is done. They’re gone. They were going anyway at some point in time. Trump triggers them.”
 In recent weeks, I sought out women who had crossed over from Republican to Democrat, to understand what motivated their shift and how permanent they think it will be. . . . . Some had voted straight-ticket Republican all their lives; others had crossed the line occasionally but remained proud Republicans until Trump. . . . Each woman’s experiences and motivations were different, but some clear themes emerged about their disillusionment with the Republican Party.

First is their dislike of Trump himself, whom these women see as offensive, impulsive and dangerous to America’s standing in the world. “He is just the most amoral person,” said Jennifer Pate, a recently married 31-year-old devoted churchgoer in San Antonio, raised in that city by what she called “very conservative” parents in a church where women still can’t be pastors. “He is everything—I don’t have kids yet—everything I don’t want my kids to grow up to be.

“His honesty is in question,” said Julie Vann, a 68-year-old in Beavercreek, Ohio. She points to Trump’s company’s multiple bankruptcy filings. “That was just his way of doing business,” she says. “And that’s the same way he thinks now. He doesn’t care who gets hurt as long as he wins.”
 Another born-and-raised Republican, Kansas teacher Janea Lawrence, 54, is dismayed because she believes Trump handed out Cabinet positions to unqualified “friends or people who could buy their way in”—because of wealth or, she assumes, campaign donations. She finds that approach shockingly counter to what she calls her Midwestern ethos of working hard and doing right.
 Cate Kanellis Zalmat of Plano, Texas, a 61-year-old grocery store manager and grandmother, has been a Republican since she first voted for Ronald Reagan. “I haven’t felt as angry about politics in my life as Trump makes me,” she told me—angry, among other things, at Trump’s instability, at what she sees as the GOP’s pandering to the religious right, at what she described as Republicans’ anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bias.
 That brings us to another reason these women are disillusioned: Under Trump, they say, many Republicans are peddling intolerance and exclusion. “It’s become normal to be a racist and a bigot, and those are not normal things,” said Jennifer Hackel Thrift, 43, a corporate headhunter in Austin, Texas. She had never voted for a Democrat until 2016—and now compares Fox News to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
 Karen Winslow, 66, a former Navy nurse who now lives in Austin as well, worked furiously at her consulting business after her first husband died so that her three daughters would be able to get excellent educations and travel widely. Now she is appalled at how Trump slanders Latinos—a group that includes two of her sons-in-law—and how the party treats women. In Charlotte, North Carolina, 58-year-old CPA Beth Monaghan said that in 2016, when her state senator, Dan Bishop, helped sponsor HB2, the North Carolina “bathroom bill,” she took it as an attack on the entire LGBTQ spectrum and was furious that the government was “telling my son he’s less-than because he’s gay.” Trump alone didn’t push these women to shed their Republican labels; other GOP politicians’ unquestioning support for Trump did that. Several told me they were angry that an all-Republican government has become the party of fiscal waste, deficits, trade wars and rebates for the wealthy. Zalmat said she is angrier at the “spineless Republicans in the Congress” for “enabling [Trump’s] crazy” than she is at [Trump] the president himself.
 Sentiments like those are telling, says UVA’s Lawless. “If the Republicans had stood up to [Trump], not necessarily on substance, but in terms of style and rhetoric,” she says, the reactions among voters might be, “I’m still a Republican, but I’m not supporting Donald Trump.” Instead, she continues, “because the Republicans have been complicit in a lot of what Trump has done,” many women no longer feel they can consider themselves Republican. And that’s a big step out the door.
 Whether or not their mothers drift away from the Republicans for good, in other words, young women might be signing up for the other team. “If millennials vote three times for the same party, they hold that identification their whole lives,” Lake says. “So, this is a very, very critical erosion. The Republicans could pay the price for decades.”

Personally, I am hoping for a massive Democrat turnout next month.  Similarly, I hope educated women - which almost by definition excludes evangelical women - turn out in force to punish the GOP.  Women, racial minorities, LGBT individuals, and  and Millennils have the most to lose if the GOP doesn't experience a bloodbath at the polls. I will be waiting with baited breath to see the outcomie of the November 6, 2018 vote. 

Republicans Prepare to Ram Kavanaugh Through Using Sham Investigation

The Palmetto Queen with the very vile Mitch McConnell.

Spineless and dishonest Republicans in connivance with the White House appear poised to push Brett Kavanaugh through to the U.S. Supreme Court using a sham investigation that deliberately failed to interview corroborating witnesses as cover for their wrongdoing.  It is beyond disgusting and is all too reminiscent of the ploys used by Adolph Hitler and more recently, Vladimir Putin.  What is perhaps even more frightening is the number of Americans who pretend to be decent people who have bought into the lies, the hate, and the overall misogyny.  At times, I feel I am glimpsing what transpired with Hitler supporters in the early 1930's Germany.  A friend on Facebook summed up - well back before the Kavanaugh lies and gas-lighting began - why I have no respect for these people who have shown their true selves:

“I am not mad at you that Clinton lost. I am unconcerned that we have different politics. And I don’t think less of you because you vote one way and I vote another. No…I think less of you because you watched an adult mock a disabled person in front of a crowd and still supported him. I think less of you because you saw a man spouting clear racism and backed him. I think less of you because you listened to him advocate for war crimes, and still thought he should run this country. I think less of you because you watched him equate a woman’s worth to her appearance and got on board. It isn’t your politics that I find repulsive. It is your personal willingness to support racism, sexism and cruelty. You sided with a bully when it mattered and that is something I will never forget. So, no…you and I won’t be “coming together” to move forward or whatever. Trump disgusts me, but it is the fact that he doesn’t disgust you that continues to stick with me long after the 2016 election.”

Turning to the malfeasance being done by Senate Republicans and their mouth pieces at Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, and similar false news sites, a column in the New York Times describes the feelings that I, and a suspect many, many decent and truly loyal Americans, have as I watch America morph into something very ugly.  Here are column excerpts:

In the end, it didn’t really matter how many women begged them not to do this, how many times women said slow down, stop, please, no. As of this writing, it seems inevitable that Republicans in the Senate are going to shove Brett Kavanaugh down our throats. According to polls, a majority of American women believe that Christine Blasey Ford told the truth when she said Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her. But the United States Senate is run by Republican men, and thanks to them, Kavanaugh will most likely soon be on the Supreme Court, deciding, among other things, how much control women will be permitted over our own bodies.

The restarted F.B.I. background check that seemed, a week ago, like a merciful concession to decency has instead been a cover-up. Agents didn’t even question Blasey or Kavanaugh. It’s not clear if they interviewed any of the more than 20 corroborating witnesses named by Deborah Ramirez, who claimed a drunken, aggressive Kavanaugh thrust his genitals into her face when they were students at Yale. The New Yorker reported that witnesses who tried to contact the F.B.I. were ignored; some ended up submitting unsolicited statements to the bureau.

The behavior of Senate Republicans is not particularly surprising. Time and again, they’ve clucked disapprovingly about Donald Trump’s vulgarity while eagerly carrying out his agenda. What has truly shaken me is the zeal with which Republican officeholders and conservative commentators, some of whom I’d thought better of, have come to Kavanaugh’s defense. Something in the spectacle of a highly credentialed Republican man nearly being denied his life’s goal on nothing but the word of a couple of women has brought out the inner Trump in a lot of people.

[T]here is clear, substantial evidence that Kavanaugh has not been truthful throughout this process. Conservatives, in their anger, won’t reckon honestly with this evidence.

Instead, they change the subject. They act as if holes in a case brought by media-obsessed lawyer Michael Avenatti discredit the stories told by Blasey and Ramirez, whom he has nothing to do with. Or they pretend that Kavanaugh is under attack for his underage drinking rather than for his deception about that drinking.

Well before anyone heard about Blasey’s letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein, Kavanaugh had lied about whether, while working in the George W. Bush administration, he’d received documents stolen from Senate Democrats. He lied when he said he had no involvement in “questions about the rules governing detention of combatants” in the War on Terror. He told senators he’d learned about Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program from The New York Times, when an email appears to show that he knew about it much earlier.

Since Blasey testified, Kavanaugh has dissembled some more. He downplayed his excessive youthful drinking to the point of rank dishonesty. At one point he claimed that references to vomiting in his yearbook stemmed from his weak stomach.

Kavanaugh was even inexplicably dishonest when, flush with self-righteousness, he claimed that he got into Yale without connections, purely by “busting my tail.” In fact, his grandfather went there.

Some conservatives are acting as if, in delving into Kavanaugh’s high school and college antics, Democrats are creating some egregious new precedent. But the youthful behavior of aspirants to high office has long been fair game. . . . . by multiple accounts, Kavanaugh was a mean, rowdy drunk and a sexist bully. After decades of conservative insistence that Bill Clinton’s impeachment was about lying, not fellatio, it’s amazing to see right-wingers arguing that’s it’s O.K. if Kavanaugh shaded the truth under oath to avoid embarrassment.

Some say that anger over Kavanaugh’s treatment by Democrats has unified and invigorated the right, with possible repercussions in the midterms. This may well be true, particularly in Senate races, where the battleground states are mostly red. But don’t underestimate how livid many women are. A spokeswoman for Emily’s List, which works to elect pro-choice female candidates, told me that the group raised more money the day after Blasey testified than on any day in the group’s history.

I’m terrified about the idea of the midterms becoming a referendum on patriarchy and thus awakening dormant Republican energy. For all his chaotic ignorance, Trump has a profound connection to his base’s grievances. He probably knew what he was doing this week when he mocked Blasey and rallied his voters to stand up to the #MeToo Jacobins.

As much as the prospect of Kavanaugh’s confirmation fills me with despair, I’ll be relieved when it’s over and this gutting, squalid chapter in American life comes to an end. But whatever happens, the ugliness of this episode, with its brute assertion of Ivy League male privilege, will leave a mark. Indelible in the hippocampus is the duplicity.

Very, very disturbing.  Right now, part of me wishes I was still in Europe.

The Republican Party Has Abandoned Conservatism

A column in The Atlantic written by a professor at Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies an a former Counselor of the Department of State voices what I concluded some years ago.  Namely, that the Republican Party no longer embraces or embodies true conservative principles.  Rather, it now embraces and is controlled by the bigotry, embrace of ignorance and tribalism of its Christofascist/white supremacist base. Knowledge, science, reason, and logic mean nothing any more.  Viciousness, hatred of others and misogyny now prevail.  Sadly, far too many formerly decent Republicans deliberately close their eyes to the reality of what the GOP has become and pretend - despite all the evidence to the contrary - that the party is still that of their childhoods or young adulthood.  Like myself, the author counts himself as a former Republican.  Here are highlights of the piece that correctly looks at the rise of Trump and now the effort to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as proof of the GOP's abandonment of conservative values:

I have always been a conservative. I voted Republican most of the time, affiliated with the GOP, and served proudly as a political appointee under two Republican presidents. I bitterly opposed Donald Trump’s candidacy and dropped my Republican affiliation once he won in 2016, figuring that the party would soon fall in line. I said as much in public, and my predictions were borne out. But it is only now that I have concluded that the break between conservative beliefs and the party that claimed to uphold them is complete and irreversible. 

Being a conservative has always meant, to me, taking a certain view of human nature, and embracing a certain set of values and virtues. The conservative is warier than her liberal counterpart about the darker impulses and desires that lurk in men and women, more doubtful of their perfectibility, skeptical of and opposed to the engineering of individual souls, and more inclined to celebrate freedom moderated by law, custom, education and culture.  She knows that power tends to corrupt, and likes to see it checked and divided. Words like responsibility, stoicism, self-control, frugality, fidelity, decorum, honor, character, independence, and integrity appeal to most decent people. They come particularly easily to the admirers of thinkers from Edmund Burke to Irving Kristol.

The GOP threw frugality and fiscal responsibility away long ago, initially in the Reagan years, but now on a stunning scale involving trillion-dollar deficits as far as can be forecast. It abandoned most of its beliefs in fidelity and character when it embraced a liar, cheat, and philanderer as its nominee and then as president. But something else snapped this week.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s judicial philosophy as expressed in various statements and conclusions was, for the most part, pretty standard conservative fare, save for one tell-tale element: his ascription of very high levels of immunity and discretion to the executive. In this respect, what passes today for conservatism is anything but. Where traditionally, conservatives have wanted “ambition to check ambition” as Alexander Hamilton put it, Republicans are now executive-branch kinds of people. It is not surprising that Kavanaugh himself worked at a high level in a Republican White House.

It was, however, in the epic clash over the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford that the collapse of conservatism in the Republican Party became most evident. Eleven men, most of them old, hid behind a female prosecutor wheeled in from Arizona because they could not, apparently, trust themselves to treat a victim of sexual assault with consideration and respect. So much for courage. . . . . when they did summon up the nerve to speak (during Kavanaugh’s turn) their questions consisted almost exclusively of partisan baying at the opposition. Genuine conservatives might have snarled initially, but would have, out of regard for the truth, tried to figure out exactly what happened to Ford 35 years ago, and whether the character of the man before them was what it was said to be.

Perhaps the collapse of modern conservatism came out most clearly in Kavanaugh’s own testimony—its self-pity, its hysteria, its conjuring up of conspiracies, its vindictiveness. . . . we should expect stoic self-control and calm from a conservative judge, even if his heart is being eaten out. No one watching those proceedings could imagine that a Democrat standing before this judge’s bench in the future would get a fair hearing. This was not the conservative temperament on display. It was, rather, personalized grievance politics.

Real conservatives have always prided themselves on their willingness to stand up to their own kind in the name of moral principle. . . . . William F. Buckley took on the John Birch Society in the middle of the 20th century, and the anti-Semites in the conservative camp later on. In 1993, when Buckley had to choose between loyalty to Joseph Sobran, his long-time protégé and colleague at the National Review, and rejection of bigotry, principle won and he fired his friend.

During the Ford and Kavanaugh testimonies, Americans watched the cranky maunderings of Senator Chuck Grassley and the spitting, menacing fury of Senator Lindsey Graham. The combination of calm strength and good humor that characterized the modern conservative icon, Ronald Reagan, was nowhere to be found.  . . . [and] has been replaced by the sour meanness of a party chiefly of men, who build walls to keep the world out, erect tariffs to destroy free trade, despise the alliances that keep Americans secure, and sanction the deliberate plucking of babes from their mothers’ breasts in order to teach illegal immigrants a painful lesson. In such a world, decorum and courtesy are irrelevant.

There has always been a dark side to American conservatism, much of it originating in the antebellum curse of a society, large parts of which favored slavery and the extermination of America’s native population, the exclusion of immigrants from American life, and discrimination against Catholics and Jews. Many of us had hoped that the civil-rights achievements of the mid-20th century (in which Republicans were indispensable partners), changing social norms regarding women, and that rising levels of education had eliminated the germs that produced secession, lynching, and Indian massacres. Instead, those microbes simply went into dormancy, and now, in the presence of Trump, erupt again like plague buboes—bitter, potent and vile.

It is impossible at this moment to envisage the Republican Party coming back. Like a brontosaurus with some brain-eating disorder it might lumber forward in the direction dictated by its past, favoring deregulation of businesses here and standing up to a rising China there, but there will be no higher mental functioning at work. And so it will plod into a future in which it is detested in a general way by women, African Americans, recent immigrants, and the educated young as well as progressives pure and simple.

The most we can do is point out the truths as we see them, and cheer on those who can do the necessary work. It is supposedly inconceivable that a genuinely conservative party could emerge, but then again, who thought the United States could be where it is now? And progressives, no less than bereft conservatives, should want this to happen, because the conservative virtues remain real virtues, the conservative insights real insights, and the conservative temperament an indispensable internal gyro keeping a country stable and sane.

48% Of Evangelicals Back Kavanaugh Even If Guilty

After today's testimony by Christine Blasey Ford - who came across as a totally credible witness - and the belligerent response of Brett Kavanaugh, it is unclear whether the Senate Republicans will belatedly uphold decency and have a detailed FBI investigation and delay their vote or give Kavanaugh - who seems cut from the same cloth as some I knew in college who participated in "trains" on incapacitated or inebriated young women - a pass and place him on the Supreme Court.  Regardless of the outcome, Senate Republicans have made it totally clear that the GOP can no longer claim any shred of morality high ground.  Most disturbing is the reality that nearly half of evangelical Christians want Kavanaugh confirmed EVEN IF HE's GUILTY.  After two decades of monitoring evangelicals and "family values" organizations and witnessing the manner in which evangelicals Christians ushered in the embrace of lies and moral bankruptcy overtake the GOP, I candidly am not surprised.  As I have said a number of times, no group lies more or is more filled with hypocrisy than evangelicals who parade around with false piety and while making a mockery of the message of the New Testament.  A piece in Vox looks at the moral bankruptcy of evangelicals.  Here are excerpts: 

Forty-eight percent of white evangelicals say that embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh should be confirmed even if the allegations of sexual assault against him are true.

Marist asked 1,000 respondents from September 22 to 24 whether they would support Kavanaugh if the allegations by Christine Blasey Ford, who says Kavanaugh assaulted her at a high school party decades ago, were found to be true.

Support for Kavanaugh’s confirmation falls along partisan lines with 12 percent of Democrats and 54 percent of Republicans saying yes.

Aside from the 48 percent who said they would support Kavanaugh’s appointment to the court, 36 percent of white evangelicals say they would not support it, and 16 percent did not have an answer. Mirroring the poll results, many prominent white evangelicals have spoken out in Kavanaugh’s defense, characterizing the allegations against him as part of a liberal plot to waylay his nomination. Jerry Falwell Jr., president of the evangelical Liberty University, sent 300 women Liberty students to Washington, DC, to support Kavanaugh during this week’s Senate confirmation hearings.

Likewise, prominent evangelical Franklin Graham has expressed support for Kavanaugh, minimizing the nature of the alleged assault and characterizing it as merely a clumsy come-on, telling the Christian Broadcasting Network, “She said no and he respected it and walked away.”

Yet the Marist poll results suggest that, for many white evangelicals, another factor is at play in their support for Kavanaugh: They don’t think what he did is bad enough to be disqualifying.

Or, as one unidentified woman Trump and Kavanaugh supporter from Montana said, according to MSNBC, “It’s no big deal.” While the woman did not reveal her own religious affiliation, her words are nevertheless indicative of many conservatives’, particularly white evangelicals’, stance on the allegations against Kavanaugh.

Such a perspective fits neatly within the context of evangelical sexual culture, which in recent months has been characterized by a wider suspicion of the #MeToo movement. Within evangelical culture, as I’ve written previously, the idea that women are “supposed” to be the gatekeepers of male sexuality, that male sexual urges are inherently uncontrollable, and the idea that forgiveness is automatically “owed” to any alleged abuser, converge to create a climate in which allegations of sexual harassment and abuse tend to be seen as minor or, at least, forgivable.

Certainly, the evangelical community is already redeeming its own people accused of sexual misconduct during the #MeToo movement. Earlier this month, former Southern Baptist Convention president Paige Patterson — who left his position as president of the Southwestern Baptist Seminary in disgrace after accusations of sexism — returned to public ministry with a pair of sermons that denigrated the #MeToo movement and focused on the problem of false rape allegations.

Today, as Christine Blasey Ford testifies in front of the Senate, GOP senators will be trying to argue that her assault never happened. But what might be even scarier is the idea that, if it did, plenty of Americans wouldn’t even care.

 I cannot undo the reality that I was baptized as a Christian, but I will certainly do all in my ability to distance myself from evangelical/conservative Christians and the toxic moral bankruptcy that they represent.