Two months ago, Wife Kay and I welcomed our first child into the world. A daughter.

I really wish this could be a celebratory post. It isn’t.

I look at this tiny, perfect, frail innocent little being, with so much love that it tears my shriveled little grinch heart in two, and I fear for her future.

You fucking know why.

The Republican party has always been a boringly evil organization, in a “let me get mine before you get yours” kind of way, but in recent years it has transitioned toward cartoonish levels of supervillainy, as if the monstrously insane inhabitants of Batman’s Arkham Asylum had escaped Gotham into real life, and immediately started campaigning for political office with a big fat R next to their name. How else do you explain ::gestures broadly:: just all of this? Every bit of it?

In the past few weeks, Texas has threatened to secede, conservative states have attacked innocent gay kids, and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court have made moves to hamstring the EPA, further expand gun rights, weaken the essential wall between Church and State, and overturned Roe vs. Wade, the long-standing constitutional right to abortion which has stood for nearly half a century. Why did they do these things? Because they’re evil.

How did they do these things? Because they’re evil liars who lie.

We wouldn’t even HAVE a conservative super majority on the Supreme Court if Republicans weren’t hypocritical lying liars. In 2016, when Justice Antonin Scalia died, Republicans in congress refused to hold a hearing for a replacement, arguing that a sitting president could not elect a Supreme Court justice in an election year. This prevented President Obama from electing a progressive justice and allowed President Trump to elect a conservative justice when he took office the following year. Then, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died – in an election year – Republicans immediately moved to allow President Trump to choose another conservative justice, completely proving their prior arguments about a sitting president being unable to elect a supreme court justice in an election year to be nothing but baseless lies and political maneuvering. If that wasn’t frustrating enough, because you just know hypocritical Republican voters would be out for blood if the Democrats had pulled a stunt like that to pack the court with progressive justices, the conservative justices on the Supreme Court, who in the past have all intentionally made statements implying that they would never attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade in order to placate a rightfully suspicious congress, swiftly went back on their word when an opportunity arose and gleefully stripped women of their guaranteed right to bodily autonomy and set America back by several decades, because as soon as the Supreme Court overturned Roe Vs. Wade, multiple shithole red states immediately instituted abortion bans, all while spouting disingenuous manipulative language about safeguarding the sanctity of life.

But WHY? For one thing, abortion rates have been steadily falling over time in the United States for the last 40 years. In fact, Abortion rates are lower now than they were before Roe v. Wade first passed, so it’s not like there has been a huge surge in abortions since 1973 due to Roe v. Wade, so why bother to overturn a ruling that was supported by 70% of the American population?

Ah yes, the evil.

We KNOW how to reduce abortions. We KNOW that comprehensive science based (non-religious) sex education reduces unwanted pregnancies. We KNOW that easy access to contraceptives reduces unwanted pregnancies. We KNOW that affordable and accessible healthcare reduces abortion rates. We KNOW that a robust welfare net which protects vulnerable people enough so that they don’t have to make a hard choice for financial reasons reduces abortion rates. These are all PROVEN ways to reduce abortion. We also KNOW that conservatives will never do any of these things, because their goal was never actually to help people or prevent abortions. It was to punish women.

We KNOW that making abortions illegal is actually class warfare, because wealthy (white) people will always be able to afford to travel somewhere where abortions are available.

Vulnerable populations of mostly black/brown/immigrant people will be the most affected by abortion bans, and this is BY DESIGN.

We KNOW abortion bans lead to more crime, not just the “crimes” of desperate women trying to obtain abortions and healthcare professionals dedicated to the well-being of their patients performing them, but also subsequent crimes as people with more kids than they can afford turn to law breaking to get by, and later still as these unwanted kids grow up poor, abused, abandoned, and without hope or prospects and turn to crime themselves.

20 years after Roe v. Wade first passed, statisticians noticed a significant drop in crime, and determined that it was due in part to the undesired babies that unfit or undesiring women would previously have been forced to give birth to not being born. It turns out that if only wanted babies are born, those babies are less likely to grow up poor, abused, and unloved, and are less likely to turn into criminals. Go figure.

So why do conservatives want additional poor, black, brown and immigrant babies? Don’t they hate the poors who don’t vote conservative? Well yes, but you see, they also need those criminals.

The war on drugs was never about drug use, it was about arresting “undesirables,” such as counter-culture hippies and black/brown/poor individuals to feed our unforgivable for-profit prisons and increase the modern-day domestic slave labor pool. Rich white people could always obtain and use all the drugs they want without consequence after all (just like abortions).

Since public opinion has turned enough that marijuana is being legalized across the country, and usage of other drugs is being decriminalized, conservative capitalists needed to find another avenue to pipeline people into the prison industrial complex. So they overturned Roe vs. Wade.

First, because cruelty is fun for them, and they hate women as a hobby, but also because it benefits them in concrete ways.

Abortion bans mean women are forced to give birth to unwanted kids. Those unwanted kids then grow up in poverty and receive a bad education thanks to conservative GOP’s concurrent crusade against secular public schooling. Best case scenario for the GOP, the public school system collapses and kids are then forced to go to weird Christian religious indoctrination “schools” that teach creationism and other demonstrably false lies, schools which are somehow paid for with taxpayer money thanks to additional GOP shit-fuckery, thus creating more brainwashed future GOP voters.

Even if the GOP doesn’t get the eventual increase of religious extremist voters that they hope for, they win anyway because they still get more future criminals and subsequently more legal modern slaves, PLUS if they can get any felony convictions to stick to the women who receive abortions or the medical professionals who perform them, they don’t have to worry about those people voting Democrat in the future, which they would likely do, you know, thanks to the cruelty and evil they experienced at the hands of conservatives, because felons often can’t legally vote. Either way, it’s a win-win for the conservative Christo-fascists.

Once again, we KNOW how to reduce abortion rates. We KNOW how to reduce crime. If this was about helping people or saving “babies” we would be doing those things (healthcare, contraceptives, education, social safety nets, unions, minimum wage increases, reducing income inequality, etc.)

Since we’re NOT doing ANY of those things, we KNOW what this is really about. Control by a regressive white “Christian” minority and Hurting people to benefit rich elites.

This is NOT what the vast majority of the country wants. 70% of Americans support abortion access and a woman’s right to choose! Meanwhile, a Supreme Court illegally packed with liars due to the actions of hypocrites is making decisions that go against the wishes of most of the American people for the benefit of a violent minority. Is that fair?

Again, if this was about reducing abortions or protecting babies, we KNOW the ways to do that, and this is not one of them. This is just about control. This is about what happens when you say you’re for “small government” and “individual freedoms” while hypocritically supporting big government infringing upon individual freedoms.

Federally protecting a woman’s right to make informed decisions about her healthcare and protecting the right to abortion access is freedom. You never have to get an abortion if you don’t want one.  That’s freedom. Taking away somebody else’s right to make the choice for themselves and enforcing your beliefs on somebody else’s body is not “small government”. It is not “freedom”.

I am 36 years old. My wife is 35. We are not young. We have been together for almost 15 years. We are college educated. We come from supportive, financially stable families. We own a small house. We have both been gainfully employed full-time for as long as we have been together. Our needs are modest, and our lifestyle is simple. We are doing far better than most, and we are just now barely able to afford a child. No wonder birth rates have fallen significantly in the US, and the average age of first-time parents has risen dramatically. With housing costs, healthcare costs, education costs, and every other cost rising exponentially year after year, and salaries remaining stagnant for everybody except CEOs, children are now literally unaffordable in this country.

The thought of forcing someone who isn’t in a good position to incur the devastating, ongoing expense of raising a child in America’s current economic reality is sickening. The inevitable result will be to sentence yet more American citizens to inescapable poverty and desperation, which of course the conservative GOP is just fine with, since it creates more bodies to toil under the tyrannical yoke of unfettered capitalism. Blood for the Blood God, skulls for the skull throne!

The forced-birther monsters on the Supreme court clearly don’t care about our well-being. They just want to force American women to crank out more babies to feed the machine, but doing that without doing anything to improve the economic and social conditions that are leading to lower birth rates in our country is an eminently cruel endeavor.

Of course, conservatives don’t go out and say that’s the reason. They don’t admit that wanting a larger population of wage slaves (or actual slaves) is the driving reason behind their appalling actions. They instead explain that their actions are due to their personal religious beliefs or a desire to protect the sanctity of life, as if their religious beliefs are in any way relevant to a free and equal secular society, and as if we don’t know how to actually reduce abortion rates by helping people instead of punishing them.

America is supposed to be a home for everybody, a magical mixing pot of cultures and creeds where every individual can experience a life of freedom, equality, opportunity and safety.

So tell me, why are we allowing it to be taken over by a violent minority of fake Christian fascist assholes intent on dragging us back to the dark ages? Why is a political party that has been infiltrated by racists, bigots, nut jobs, conspiracy theorists, and anti-intellectual dumbasses, and who hasn’t won a presidential popular vote in over 30 years, and who can only win state and local elections through lies, demagoguery, voting restrictions, and blatant gerrymandering, able to consistently stop good legislation, and push through unpopular legislation against the will of most of the American people? Does that seem fair? Or desirable?

I am not being alarmist; the conservative GOP have admitted their goals! They have admitted that abortion is just the beginning, and that they want to outlaw contraceptives and gay marriage next. If you don’t think outlawing interracial marriage and further reducing other freedoms and rights follows, then you are a fool. The modern GOP has explicitly and repeatedly admitted that they want to remove the separation of Church and State and effectively create a Western Christian Theocracy. We should not be promoting “Christian” values in a secular nation, and we should not be making supreme court decisions based on religious “morals”. Even if you are Christian, you should not be pushing for your religious beliefs to be forced upon your non-Christian countrymen. If you would be uncomfortable or angry by having a different religion’s tenets being forced upon you, then don’t be hypocritical. Realize that your beliefs can govern your decisions and your way of life, but not other people’s decisions or ways of life. Forcing your beliefs on others is completely counter to the entire idea of our Nation. Other religions allow abortion. Hell, even Christianity allows abortion according to the bible, this is just about control of women by a small amount of evil assholes who have decided to interpret the teachings of their faith in a way that benefits them exclusively and harms others.

Forced birth is evil. It’s regressive and wrong. Especially because WE KNOW HOW TO ACTUALLY REDUCE ABORTION RATES, and it isn’t by using legislation to strip rights away from women. We know that making abortions illegal doesn’t stop abortions, and that making abortions unnecessary does. So, what’s the point of banning abortions if it doesn’t actually stop abortions, and there are far more effective ways to stop abortion that actually help people? Evil is the point. Control is the point. Criminalizing the most desperate and vulnerable members of our society is the point.

So yeah, I’m worried for the future my little girl will grow up in to. By the time she is an adult, will she still have any rights at all? Will she be able to make her own informed decisions regarding her healthcare? Or love who she wants? Or drive? Or vote? Or have a bank account? Or will she be seen as a possession, to be sold into chattel slavery or owned and controlled by a man thanks to some regressive “Christian” extremist fucks who are doing everything in their power to destroy everything our non-Christian, non-religious and Deist Founding Fathers created?

Happy Fucking 4^th of July or whatever.