Sanctimonious snowflake-haters are poisoning our politics by attacking and undermining the rights of women and transgender people to do what they want with their bodies and their lives. According to the Human Rights Campaign, as of May 2023, there have been 520 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in state legislatures and 220 bills targeting transgender and non-binary people, both of which are a record. Another record: these haters have passed 70 anti-LGBTQ+ laws between January and May that target gender-affirming care, pronoun usage, and drag queen performances, and which legalize discrimination and censorship.
Meanwhile, according to the Kaiser Foundation, abortion is banned outright in 13 states, and many other states are planning similar bans or bans after 6 weeks, when some women don’t even know they’re pregnant.
As if this isn’t bad enough, politicians on the right are holding up a critical defense bill that makes our country less safe, all so they can attach their little hateful bans on abortion and gender-affirming care. They are holding America hostage on critical issues over their religious and moral beliefs.
This week’s hero to the haters is Alabama Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville. As a potato is a kind of tuber, I like to call him Mr. Tuberhead.
Senator Potato Head (okay, I’m going all in) is holding up military promotions and jeopardizing military readiness, according to U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the nominee for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General C.Q. Brown. (Yeah, that’s right: 2.5 years into Biden’s administration, and we still don’t have a Chairman in place, thanks to fringe Republicans.) Senator Potato Head thinks it’s perfectly fine to hold this bill hostage so he can attach anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ to a bill that has absolutely nothing to do with such matters.
Senator Potato Head already represents a state where abortion is banned, so it’s clear his allegiance to state’s rights means he wants the right to determine what should be law in the entire United States.
Once again, very real threats are ignored in favor of made-up threats created by theocratic haters. This time it’s threatening our military readiness, which you can add to ignoring the fact that guns are the biggest killers of children, that our kids have to participate in lockdown drills, while apparently in the minds of potato heads, the real threat to the lives of our children is coming from drag queens and books that teach there are people who are different than they are, people who have been historically marginalized, abused, and murdered simply because of who they are.
Potato heads call this a culture war, but the truth is they started it. Anything that goes against their holier-than-thou beliefs is a target for attack, and those attacks have generated a rise in hate against their fellow Americans that has grown more and more toxic since their standard-bearer and hater-in-chief became president. Senator Tuberhead even had trouble saying white supremacists were racist and a threat to America last week until someone must have had a come-to-Jesus talk with him. (He said another name for them was “Americans.” 🤦🏻♂️)
These potato heads don’t understand that they’re being used by the most cynical of politicians to vote against their economic interests, and this has been going on for some time. The George W. Bush administration called evangelicals “ridiculous” behind closed doors, and W’s Deputy Director of Faith-Based Initiatives, David Kuo, wrote a book about how the religious right was being used mainly for political expediency. The right has duped a lot of people with this hateful nonsense, while it has done nothing to put bread in the pockets or bread on the tables of Americans. Meanwhile, the poor and middle class are being squeezed, rich billionaires get all the tax breaks they ask for, and our nation has become a plutocracy. Way to go, haters!
The tide has turned in the wrong direction. It used to be that these cynical politicians simply used the American people to win votes, but after so much time creating this culture war, the GOP has devolved to a point where these politicians actually believe their own nonsense. And so you get politicians like Tommy Tuberhead, a Vice President like Mike Pence who calls his own wife “mother” and can’t sit at a table for lunch with another woman, Missouri Senate Candidate Todd Akin who years ago said “legitimate rape” is not a problem because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” and the State Rep from Ohio who said rape is an “opportunity” for the victim.
Gallup polls show 71% of Americans favor gay marriage, and an AP-NORC poll shows 64% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. (Admittedly it gets murkier as you approach the halfway point in a pregnancy.) So we can only hope time is running out for these haters, especially with younger generations who are joining the fight to protect women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. But the fight needs to be taken to the haters now. We need to stand up for all people, and that means standing against people like Tommy Tuberhead.
