It's not hearsay, I'm just honest

Conservatives have weaponized their personal beliefs. These are not legal scholars. They are unsophisticated and vile.

These originalists don't see the 13th Amendment as the answer to young black girls forced into reproduction in Antebellum America.

The 13th abolished involuntary servitude. It protected young girls from abusive men.

You have to vote in every election. Yes, every election.  Not just the Presidential ones.  You have to vote for Governor, Senator, Congresspeople – all of your state legislatures.  You have to vote for mayor, city council, school board.  You have to do this every single time.  Republicans do this every single time.  You can too.

It takes less time to tear things down than to build things up.  This is why it’s so easy to be a Republican and accomplish Republican goals.  They are destruction artists.  It’s easy to eliminate rights, easy to eliminate social programs.  Building and codifying and establishing these things is really fucking hard, takes time and patience.  This sucks, I know.  It sucks bad.  But it’s just reality.  So when you wonder why Republicans seem to accomplish more of their goals, it’s because their goals are to burn it all down.  They’re not really goals so much as just torching shit.

Mistakes of the past will continue to haunt us and we will have to continue to fight against them.  This really sucks, especially if you weren’t old enough to vote in previous elections.  But we’re all handed what we’re handed in life, and the people who came before us who accomplished real change took what they were handed and did something with it, they didn’t just check out.  And a lot of them fought really fucking hard so all of us could do #1 – VOTE.  Do not spit on the memories of people who literally laid down their lives fighting for the right for all of us to vote by not voting or throwing your vote away.

We can learn a lot from the last generation of activists who accomplished significant change and a lot of those people are still with us, for now.  Civil Rights Leaders still exist in our society, though they’re aging out.  Take a look at what they’re saying, because you know what?  They actually accomplished real change in their lifetimes, under really difficult circumstances.  Believe it or not, there are older people you can learn from.  We ignore the lessons of history to our peril.

I’ve seen a lot of posts about how “well Democrats could have prevented this but didn’t, so they’re just as bad as Republicans and voting is worthless”, and those posts do a massive disservice to all the people who have been fucking trying. Almost every issue I’ve seen people complain about Democrats not preventing, there’s a bill that would’ve fixed it that got stalled by Republicans in the House or Senate. Democrats tried to pass abortion protection just last month but Republicans in the Senate blocked it. Acting like Democrats totally have the power to fix everything and just aren’t doing it is not only blatantly untrue, but it’s massively damaging and spreads a message of helplessness and despair. That’s the last fucking thing we need right now!

You know why evangelicals have so much power despite being a minority of the population? Because they show up. They’re a dedicated, consistent voting block who show up to EVERY election, every town hall meeting, and every PTA meeting, vocally and en masse. And it took them 50 years, but now we’re seeing the results of all that grassroots organizing.

Justice Blackmun, who wrote the Roe majority opinion, had a bullet shot through his living room window. This after years of receiving letters threatening his life. The bullet occurred right after he had received a particularly concerning letter, and was at the end of a year in which DC-area clinics had been subjected to seven bombings. Not threats, bombings.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1985/03/05/shot-fired-through-blackmuns-window/270a0516-2c7f-4c5e-9002-d017515a5131/

My spouse/friends/co-workers:

When I make a genuine attempt at being funny without being mean.

My spouse/friends/co-workers:

So there’s a known thing in the study of human psychology/sociology/what-have-you where men are known to, on average, rely entirely on their female romantic partner for emotional support. Bonding with other men is done at a more superficial level involving fun group activities and conversations about general subjects but rarely involves actually leaning on other men or being really honest about emotional problems. Men use alcohol to be able to lower their inhibitions enough to expose themselves emotionally to other men, but if you can’t get emotional support unless you’re drunk, you have a problem.

So men need to have a woman in their lives to have anyone they can share their emotional needs and vulnerabilities with. However, since women are not socialized to fear sharing these things, women’s friendships with other women are heavily based on emotional support. If you can’t lean on her when you’re weak, she’s not your friend. To women, what friendship is is someone who listens to all your problems and keeps you company.

So this disconnect men are suffering from is that they think that only a person who is having sex with you will share their emotions and expect support. That’s what a romantic partner does. But women think that’s what a friend does. So women do it for their romantic partners and their friends and expect a male friend to do it for them the same as a female friend would. This fools the male friend into thinking there must be something romantic there when there is not.

This here is an example of patriarchy hurting everyone. Women have a much healthier approach to emotional support – they don’t die when widowed at nearly the rate that widowers die and they don’t suffer emotionally from divorce nearly as much even though they suffer much more financially, and this is because women don’t put all their emotional needs on one person. Women have a support network of other women. But men are trained to never share their emotions except with their wife or girlfriend, because that isn’t manly. So when she dies or leaves them, they have no one to turn to to help with the grief, causing higher rates of death, depression, alcoholism and general awfulness upon losing a romantic partner. 

So men suffer terribly from being trained in this way. But women suffer in that they can’t reach out to male friends for basic friendship. I am not sure any man can comprehend how heartbreaking it is to realize that a guy you thought was your friend was really just trying to get into your pants. Friendship is real. It’s emotional, it’s important to us. We lean on our friends. Knowing that your friend was secretly seething with resentment when you were opening up to him and sharing your problems because he felt like he shouldn’t have to do that kind of emotional work for anyone not having sex with him, and he felt used by you for that reason, is horrible. And the fact that men can’t share emotional needs with other men means that lots of men who can’t get a girlfriend end up turning into horrible misogynistic people who think the world owes them the love of a woman, like it’s a commodity… because no one will die without sex. Masturbation exists. But people will die or suffer deep emotional trauma from having no one they can lean on emotionally. And men who are suffering deep emotional trauma, and have been trained to channel their personal trauma into rage because they can’t share it, become mass shooters, or rapists, or simply horrible misogynists.