Sure, Loving v. Virginia is 50 years old but plenty of people still hate black/white marriages (and other “race mixing”). One-quarter of Republicans opposing mixed marriage doesn’t surprise me. Like abortion, contraception and gay marriage, it’s the kind of personal decision right-wingers don’t think people should be able to make — and the logic behind the Dobbs decision could easily extend that way.
It’s also not surprising that the CPAC right-wing conference had no problems with Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban condemning mixing the races in a recent speech. They’re not disinviting him to speak; I suspect it’s one more reason for them to love him.
Meanwhile the Supreme Court’s ruling about the high school coach who led his team in prayer has unsurprisingly encouraged other Christian conservatives to impose more prayer. For all the whining about how prayer has been pushed out of the schools, it hasn’t; federal law solidly protects the right of children to pray. And curiously, the same conservatives who complain that even talking about “gay” in schools takes away parents rights are fine with ignoring parents who don’t want organized, coercive school prayers.
Even before Don’t Say Gay, the religious right claimed comprehensive sex ed grooms children. You can make a better case for abstinence only sex ed grooming kids because it ignores consent. As Elizabeth Smart said at the link, her classes taught her having sex made her worthless, so after her rape/kidnapping what was the point in escaping? She was damaged goods. The right wing preaches the issue with date rape isn’t coercive sex, it’s that the slut had sex. Nothing makes kids (or adults) more vulnerable to consent than teaching that consent is irrelevant.
And while the forced-birth movement insisted for years that they would never punish women for getting abortions, now that they’ve gotten Roe overturned, criminal penalties for women is looking good. North Carolina Republicans want the death penalty for women who get abortions. Oh, and remember how post-Dobbs the right wing insisted there was no risk to contraceptive rights? About that … Matt Gaetz tries putting lipstick on the pig by explaining he votes against the right to contraception because he’s so very pro-birth control. As Jennifer Rubin says, they aren’t pro-women and they aren’t pro-life. As witness one woman says after her Texas miscarriage it took two weeks to find a doctor who’d remove it.
Irin Carmon sums it up: everything the left predicted would come to pass if Roe fell has happened, and things we didn’t anticipate.
To put that in perspective, the right-wing predicted a string of nightmare scenarios if gay marriage became law (they still do). Straight marriage would collapse. Anti-gay preachers would be silenced! The Boy Scouts will have to shut down rather than admit gay scoutmasters (given subsequent scandals, that one really hasn’t aged well). None of that happened. Our prophets are better than theirs.
So are our historians. Northier Than Thou looks at a gun-lover who cites the US interning Japanese-American citizens as proof we need guns to defend ourselves against government. As the post points out, if Japanese Americans had fought back, or even showed their neighbors they were armed and ready for trouble, they’d be dead. Ditto civil rights activists, gays fighting for their rights, women marching for equal rights, etc. Heck, South Carolina prosecutor Culver Kidd has specifically claimed women can’t claim stand your ground if they kill an abusive partner in self-defense.
“In many of these instances,” the post goes on, “gun owners were actively involved in the very repression suffered by those in question. Since the founding of the country, gun violence has played a far greater role in the repression of civil rights than it has in protecting them. There are exceptions to be sure, but this narrative is not built on the exceptions. It is built on a fantasy that skips any active consideration of how these things actually work.”
Fraser Sherman's Blog 