The Den of Debauchery's Subannex

First a couple of links:

20 Ways Being Liberal has made my life better.
1)  Since 1932, Democratic Presidents have created 73.4 million new jobs, Republicans have created only 34.8 million. Thus, Democrats created more jobs, lifting my standard of living. (Source: International Business Times | Bloomberg)

Cultural Antietam
"I’m sure Pat is aware that Antietam was not some one-sided Civil War battle, but a bloody nightmare that led to the end of the war only because the Yankees could better afford shocking casualities."

Yeah, that's what worries me. 75% of the country is Christian and 40% is Republican. 10% (tops) is gay. There are those who fence-sit between those three categories, but in the end, they'll end up under the 3 story high pile of rocks with the rest of us.  (in The Eight Thrones universe, all the gays in Memphis are taken to Cooper-Young, herded into a corral at gunpoint and dumptrucks bury them under tons of rock. The Cleansing Monument is considered one of Memphis' cultural achievements)


Fringe to Mainstream:

In the mid-late 80s and early 90s, Mudd and I were involved in a certain church.
They were early homeschoolers, early quiverfull. And a book went around among the ladies.
The Way Home: Beyond Feminism and Back to Reality.  And it changed everything.

I gave my pastor's wife her copy back, a bit dented from being hurled at the wall. And I felt dented and judged and inferior. The way i feel around nuns or the Amish. As if my faith was not strong enough, or I was just a weak, bad person who wasn't a Christian at all, because I couldn't indulge in Christian Brand Behavior. (I know now, that no matter how many prayers I sent up, regardless of my salvation experience, the latter was the truth.)

This book fed the idea that not only is abortion bad, birth control is bad too.

Even Operation Rescue wasn't anti-birth control in the late 80s. Even they realized more BC meant fewer abortions.
Then came abstinence-only sex ed. And talk about the failures of birth control.
I sounded the alert that Roe was teetering and Griswold was in the crosshairs. Everyone said I was nuts, I was overdramatizing.

This year, ALL the major Republican candidates came out AGAINST BIRTH CONTROL!

Twenty years from lunatic fringe to mainstream political endorsement.
Think about that.
And think too, there are lunatic fringe voices now calling for the disenfranchisement of women. They want to take my VOTE!

Twenty years from lunatic fringe to mainstream....



Yet we seem to be moving away from sanity on the other side of the aisle, letting the Rightists pull us farther to the right. Pull us so far, in fact, that they are able to call a health insurance plan PROPOSED BY REPUBLICANS in 1992 "Socialism" with a straight face, because no one will remember. So far to the right that a center-rightist corporate schill can be considered a commie-socialist and called the worst president ever for business, even with the bail-out to Wall Street in plain view.

We are trailing the rest of the industrialized world in every measure.

Our manufacturing and infrastructure are in sorry shape.

Our public educational system is under systematic attack by those who wish to destroy it.

Our elected officials take bread from the mouths of hungry children, because it will make them develop a work-ethic.

Our few remaining advances from the Great Society and New Deal are on the chopping block. (Vouchers for Medicare? Really, Paul Ryan, you zombie-eyed granny-starver?)

The idea of a Guaranteed Annual Income, floated by NIXON, a Republican in the early 70s, seems ludicrous to consider now.

The Theocrats and Corporatists have been very effective in getting their message out.
We've become "Who would Jesus downsize and then yell at about bootstraps?" rather than "As you do for the least of these."


We're too far gone, I think.
Reality is supposed to be less evil than my dystopias.
Yet, I can see, even in the 5.5 years since I wrote NIKOLAI, the seeds of everything I wrote sprouting and putting out leaves.
It's going to be a poisonous harvest our kids and grandkids reap.