The Mason Missile, January 30, 2023

Greetings, Americans! The decline of the Republican Party continues—will it bring the nation down with it? They are NOT at ALL the majority of Americans, but their placement in Congress and state governments gives them power to inflict damage on our freedoms. The whole sad-ass drama around Kevin McCarthy’s election as Speaker of the House—after 15 votes!—is a case in point. McCarthy kept making one concession after another to the House Freedom Caucus (The far-right gang in the House), including making it easier for ONE whole member to demand that the House take a vote to remove the Speaker, along with placing some of their craziest members in key committees. Jim Jordan (allegedly) of Ohio is now Chair of the Judiciary Committee, as well as the Chair of this new committee tasked to investigate the “weaponization of the federal government.” Conservatives love to portray themselves as some oppressed demographic group, as the try to legislate the repression of REAL minority groups. Can you imagine these lunatics going over classified documents, along with the criminal investigations of Donald whatshisface? Abortion, one of the right-wing’s favorite targets, is again on the verge of being illegal again, after the over-turning of Roe v. Wade. (https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/23/politics/garland-gupta-abortion-state-legislation/index.html) However, that was not always the case. Up until the Civil War, according to a report by NPR, abortion was a common practice, and perfectly legal. But in 1860, a member of the American Medical Association, (then newly-formed.), Dr. Horatio Storer, began a campaign to have abortion criminalized, and sent a letter to every state governor on behalf of the AMA. Storer introduced the idea that life began at conception, and he played on the fears of the era around the decline of White Protestant babies’ births and the growth in the populations of Asian immigrants, freed African-American slaves, and Catholics. (https://www.npr.org/2023/01/19/1149924325/abortion-was-once-common-practice-in-america-a-small-group-of-doctors-changed-th). In Storer’s plan, White Protestant women would be forced to produce more babies, and every other group would be subject to sterilization programs, under the then-growing nonsensical “field” of “Eugenics,” built around the decreasing of non-white populations, so that they don’t out-populate the White Protestant population. Plus, Storer used this campaign to eliminate midwives as the ones helping the woman through birth, with propaganda calling midwives immoral and unsanitary. Storer, in his crusade against abortion and midwives utilized the words of morality, saying that killing anyone, even just before birth, was “murder;” and the language of male dominance over women, saying that women just don’t know the sensations going on in their OWN DAMN BODIES. To this say, anti-abortion activists use the same words Storer used, about the “immorality” of the “killing of babies in the mother’s womb.” But are they aware of the racist origins of their movement? Of the fears that White people would be out-populated, and f the targeting of non-white people to be depopulated, in the name of “racial improvement?” Racism is close at hand in right-wing thinking. And they throw in the “morality” about the subject, be it marijuana, abortion. LGBTQ+ rights, what have you. Let’s continue to do the research on these topics; let us learn the REAL history of these right-wing crusades. And let’s stay strong against the new power of the Republicans, with the way the trump element has taken it over and corrupted it. We can defeat them, just as we have been. Stay safe, stay strong, and stay united! Slava Ukraini! America will be free! Bye!