"When Republicans said that they would undo women’s reproductive freedom, we should have believed them the first time — beginning in the late 1970s. Instead, for too long, too many folks took the GOP’s anti-abortion stance as nothing more than a political ploy to keep the small donations rolling in and to rally the rubes behind their real agenda of endless tax cuts for the rich.
"Somehow, too many of us remained in a state of denial even as Ronald Reagan hopped in bed with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. As Pat Buchanan told America in 1992 that 'there is a religious war going on in this country.' As the dangers of minority-mob rule took shape in the 2000 election with the Brooks Brothers riot. As George W. Bush and Donald Trump, both guys with the fewest votes from Americans, named five of the nine justices on the High Court, some of them confirmed by senators also representing a minority of Americans. And as Mitch McConnell plowed through the guardrails of democracy to steal one of those seats. Too many of us refused to believe this was where it was all headed." -- Will Bunch, in today's The Philadelphia Inquirer, on the long road that's led us to this point -- living in a country that is "no longer the America we grew up in." The radical Republican Christofascists' decades- long efforts to take away rights they don't consider "deeply rooted in this Nation's [Christofascist] history and tradition" -- today, abortion rights and voting rights; later, LGTBQ rights -- have been successful not because of popular mandates (they have none), but rather due to the exercise of raw, norm- busting power. There have been no rules for some time now, and Democrats must act accordingly, with the same ruthless energy and sense of purpose the radical Republican Christofascists have deployed.
