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If the Democratic party is considered progressive, then surely the Maine Republican party must be considered regressive.

The photo on the front page of the Portland Press Herald April 30th reflects part of a slogan that presumably reads: Move Maine Forward. Yet the platform presented at the GOP convention is anything but forward-moving; e.g. banning teaching of sex education through high school, discussion in schools of transgender identification or critical race theory. If this platform were to be instituted by successfully elected Republican candidates for the Maine Legislature, Maine society would be put squarely back in the Puritan era of the 17th Century.

What truths are Republicans so afraid of that they continue to want to force American voters to bury their collective head in the sand?

Warner PriceHarpswell

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Letter to the Editor: Republicans would take us backward - Press Herald

January 21, 2017 Womens March Washington DCPhoto: Shutterstock

Congressional Republicans have introduced a resolution creating a Womens Bill of Rights that mentions just one right, but only for cis women: the right to not see trans women in a public restroom. The rest of the Womens Bill of Rights is about definitions and the governments powers.

The Democrats are erasing women and the spaces that are uniquely ours, Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ), who is trying to get the resolution passed in the House. Despite leading Republicans on the Womens Bill of Rights, she has been endorsed by Arizona Right to Life and the Susan B. Anthony List because of her staunch opposition to reproductive freedom.

Related: GOP lawmaker has meltdown in public & screams at voters

The House version of the resolution has 11 co-sponsors and the Senate version was introduced by Sens. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MO), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), who just got booed last week for mocking transgender people at a commencement speech and then lied about what she said, getting booed even more.

The Republicans say that their resolution, called the Womens Bill of Rights, even though it does not include important rights women have fought for decades to obtain, like reproductive freedom, equal education, anti-discrimination protections, or the vote.

The resolution lists six points that it affirms. The first three are definitions. The fourth is about the right of cis women to not see trans women in certain spaces. And the last two are about the governments actions, not womens rights.

The resolutions first point says, for purposes of Federal law, a persons sex means his or her biological sex (either male or female) at birth, without saying exactly how that should be determined. While several physical aspects of peoples bodies are associated with gender, like chromosomes, genitalia, and hormone levels, they dont necessarily align and have often been used to tell some women especially women of color that theyre not really women.

The second and third points add more gendered terms and say that they too are defined according to biological sex. They do not mention any rights.

The resolution moves on to more substantive matters, saying that there are important reasons to distinguish between the sexes with respect to athletics, prisons, domestic violence shelters, restrooms, and other areas in its fourth point. Forcing trans women to be sheltered with cis men in many of those situations, though, has led to violence against trans women.

The fifth point gives the government the right to distinguish between the sexes, which isnt at all a right for women.

The sixth point is about data collection, saying that federal, state, and local governments are required to base such data on the biological sex of individuals at birth, which, depending on what the data is about, could lead to inaccuracies in order to advance the Republicans political agenda.

All told, the Womens Bill of Rights only protects one right for women: the right to be in a womens prison (or shelter, etc.) with trans men but without trans women.

Several weeks ago, a leaked Supreme court decision several weeks ago in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization which could overturn Roe v. Wade and end the federal right to an abortion in the U.S. made abortion one of the most talked about issues in the U.S., so its hard to see how Republicans could have simply forgotten to include it in their Womens Bill of Rights.

The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is an international treaty adopted by the U.N. that is often described as an international womens bill of rights. It includes 30 articles describing rights that member states agree to protect for women, ranging from taking measures to end human trafficking to citizenship rights to ensuring that women can freely choose a spouse.

While the U.S. signed the CEDAW, its the only country that signed it without implementing it. The Republicans backing the Womens Bill of Rights could have looked to that landmark treaty for guidance but apparently, their motives were not to actually improve womens lives.

The radical Left has launched an attack on biology because they want to put themselves above God and they want to brainwash our daughters with their woke-ism, said Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL), another Congressmember leading the resolution.

The Republican resolution is another in a long line of cynical attempts by anti-LGBTQ extremists around the country to erase transgender and nonbinary people from our communities, said Olivia Hunt of the National Center for Transgender Equality. More than a century of science has shown us that biology is far more complicated than what the authors of this resolution describe, and that trans and nonbinary peoples genders are just as real and just as valid as everyone elses. Science simply doesnt support this attempt at making our existence a culture war.

Read this article:
Republicans introduce Women's Bill of Rights that includes only one right for women - LGBTQ Nation

In the midst of a full-blown crisis for parents who need formula to feed their children, more than 90% of House Republicans decided on Wednesday that the shortage that has led to panic and despair is not actually that big a deal, with 192 (out of 208) GOP lawmakers voting against an emergency spending bill meant to address the terrifying situation. Sorry, babies! Thems the breaks.

While the bill, H.R. 7790, ultimately passed, it was no thanks to the cartoonishly evil Republican lawmakers, whod reportedly been urged by House minority whip Steve Scalise to vote nay, having claimed that Nancy Pelosi pushed the bill in hopes of covering up the administrations ineptitude by throwing additional money at the FDA with no plan to actually fix the problem, all while failing to hold the FDA accountable.The legislationwhich was voted on the same day the White House said that Joe Biden hadinvoked the Defense Production Actto expedite the production and delivery of formulaprovides $28 million in funding to the Food and Drug Administration for inspections of formula manufactured at foreign plants and to prevent shortages stemming from supply chain disruptions. Among those shooting down the bill? Florida representative Kat Cammack, who last week tweeted a photo of formula at a U.S. border detention center and decried the fact that babies of migrants detained by the U.S. government were being fed, as is required by law. Cammack, of course, is just one of many Republicans, including the famously shameless Tom Cotton and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who have been more than happy to highlight the formula shortage and blame Biden for itwhich, based on Republicans actions on Wednesday, was apparently purely for show.

But H.R. 7790 wasnt the only formula bill voted on yesterday that a contingent of Republicans tried to stymie. There was also H.R. 7791, which passed with 414 yes votes despite the nays of GOP representatives Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Greene, Andy Biggs, Thomas Massie, Clay Higgins, Chip Roy, Paul Gosar, and Louie Gohmert. The legislation, introduced by Representative Jahana Hayes, helps poor women access more formula through the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, which is apparently a bridge too far for these supposedly pro-life conservatives. The formula crisis comes amid the news that the Supreme Court is likely to overturn Roe v. Wade, a move Republicans have cheered, which fits with their long-time m.o. of only caring about the sanctity of life up until that life exits the womb, after which its on its own.

The bills will now go to the Senate, whereat least some Republican lawmakers have preemptively made clear they dont know how supply and demand, among other things, work:

On Thursday, Pelosi blasted her colleagues across the aisle, asking, Whats the objection? That we dont want to spend money on babies who are crying for food? Ok, lets have that debate.

Read the rest here:
192 Republicans Decide Theyd Like Formula-Seeking Parents to Keep Suffering - Vanity Fair

The National Republican Coalition for Choice participates in a pro-choice demonstration in Washington, D.C., on April 1, 1992. Photo: Viviane Moos/Corbis via Getty Images

Last week, the Womens Health Protection Act, which would have codified abortion rights, died in in the Senate by a vote of 51 to 49. All 210 House Republicans and all 50 Senate Republicans voted against the legislation. This surprised no one, but its actually odd in several ways. When Roe v. Wade came down in the early 1970s, a majority of the GOP was pro-choice. It took decades for Republican officials to become almost monolithically opposed to abortion rights. But pro-choice Republican voters didnt entirely cease to exist, and this could become a problem for the party if, as expected, the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the right to abortion at the end of this term.

Though polling on the issue is notoriously slippery, our best guess is that a little over a third of Republicans disagree with their party on whether to outlaw abortion (while about one-quarter of Democrats disagree with their party on the topic). These Americans have virtually no representation in Congress with the limited exceptions of Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Though both GOP senators support some abortion rights, they still opposed the WHPA and are against dropping the filibuster to preserve abortion rights.

Ironically, abortion rights as we know them are, to a considerable extent, the product of Republican lawmaking at every level of government. The most obvious examples are the two Supreme Court decisions that established and reaffirmed a constitutional right to abortion. Of the seven justices who supported Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that struck down pre-viability-abortion bans, five were appointed by Republican presidents, including the author of the majority opinion, Harry Blackmun, and thenChief Justice Warren Burger. All five justices who voted to confirm the constitutional right to pre-viability abortions in 1992s Planned Parenthood v. Casey were appointed by Republican presidents as well.

These pro-choice Republicans werent just rogue jurists (though their alleged perfidy has become a deep grievance in the anti-abortion movement). Todays lock-step opposition to abortion rights among GOP elected officials took a long time to develop. Indeed, before Roe, Republicans were more likely to favor legal abortion than Democrats. In New York and Washington, two of the four states that fully legalized pre-viability abortions in 1970, Republican governors Nelson Rockefeller and Daniel Evans were at the forefront of abortion-rights efforts. They werent fringe figures; Rockefeller went on to become vice-president of the United States under Gerald Ford. Pre-Roe, various other Republican officials supported more modest efforts to ease abortion bans; among them was thenCalifornia governor Ronald Reagan, who signed a bill significantly liberalizing exceptions to an abortion ban in 1967.

The anti-abortion movements strength in the Republican Party grew steadily after Roe in part because of a more general ideological sorting out of the two major parties as liberals drifted into the Democratic Party and conservatives were drawn into the GOP. To put it another way, there has always been ideological polarization in American politics, but only in recent decades has it been reflected in parallel party polarization. But that doesnt fully explain the GOPs shift on abortion policy.

Beginning in 1972 with Richard Nixons reelection campaign, Republicans began actively trying to recruit historically Democratic Roman Catholic voters. Soon thereafter, they started working to mobilize conservative Evangelical voters. This effort coincided with the Evangelicals conversion into strident abortion opponents, though they were generally in favor of the modest liberalization of abortion laws until the late 1970s. All these trends culminated in the adoption of a militantly anti-abortion platform plank in the 1980 Republican National Convention that nominated Reagan for president. The Gipper said he regretted his earlier openness to relaxed abortion laws. Reagans strongest intraparty rival was George H.W. Bush, the scion of a family with a powerful multigenerational connection to Planned Parenthood. He found it expedient to renounce any support for abortion rights before launching his campaign.

Still, there remained a significant pro-choice faction among Republican elected officials until quite recently. In 1992, the year Republican Supreme Court appointees saved abortion rights in Casey, there was a healthy number of pro-choice Republicans serving in the Senate: Ted Stevens of Alaska, John Seymour of California, Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, William Cohen of Maine, Bob Packwood of Oregon, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, John Chafee of Rhode Island, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, John Warner of Virginia, and Alan Simpson and Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming. Another, John Heinz of Pennsylvania, had recently died.

Partisan polarization on abortion (which, of course, was taking place among Democrats as well) has been slow but steady, as Aaron Blake of the Washington Post recently observed:

Ina 1997 study, Carnegie Mellon University professor Greg D. Adams sought to track abortion votes in Congress over time. His finding: In the Senate, there was almost no daylight between the two parties in 1973, with both parties voting for pro-choice positions about 40 percent of the time.

But that quickly changed.

There was more of a difference in the House in 1973, with Republicans significantly more opposed to abortion rights than both House Democrats and senators of both parties. But there, too, the gap soon widened.

Including votes in both chambers, Adams found that a 22 percentage- point gap between the two parties votes in 1973 expanded to nearly 65 points two decades later, afterCaseywas decided.

By 2018, every pro-choice House Republican had been defeated or had retired. The rigidity of the party line on abortion was perhaps best reflected in late 2019, when a House Democrat with a record of strong support for abortion rights, Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, switched parties. Almost instantly, Van Drew switched sides on reproductive rights and was hailed by the hard-core anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List for voting consistently to defend the lives of the unborn and infants.

With the 2020 primary loss by Illinois Democratic representative Dan Lipinski, a staunch opponent of abortion rights, theres now just one House member whose abortion stance is out of step with his party: Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar, who is very vulnerable to defeat in a May 24 runoff.

If the Supreme Court does fully reverse Roe in the coming weeks, making abortion a more highly salient 2022 campaign issue, the one-third of pro-choice Republican voters may take issue with their lack of congressional representation. Will the first big threat to abortion rights in nearly a half-century make them change their priorities? Or will they still care more about party loyalty and issues like inflation? Perhaps nothing will change for most of these voters. But in close races, the abandoned tradition of pro-choice Republicanism could make a comeback to the detriment of the GOPs ambitious plans for major midterm gains.

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How the GOP Abandoned Pro-choice Republicans - New York Magazine

Also in The Atlantic, David Graham pondered the different vibes projected by Representative Conor Lamb, who lost the Democratic Senate primary in Pennsylvania, and John Fetterman, who won: Lamb seems like a candidate created in a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee lab: Hes young, Kennedy-handsome, a Marine and former federal prosecutor who looks born to wear suits. By contrast, Fetterman looks like he was hacked together from spare parts in an oil-streaked Pittsburgh chopper garage. (Jeannie MacDonald, Portsmouth, N.H.)

In his Esquire newsletter, Charles Pierce responded to the revelation that hundreds of Native American children had died in government-sponsored schools by writing: Sooner or later the angry angel of history was coming to our door. (Louise Machen, Cody, Wyo.)

In The Times, Ross Douthat assessed Elon Musks messy and unresolved ascent toward ownership of Twitter by alluding to Icarus: Sometimes you leap and have a birds wings to bear you upward. Sometimes, though, all you have is its disintegrating feathers or, still worse, not its plumage but its tweets. (Pete Andrews, Chapel Hill, N.C.)

Bret Stephens wrote: The problem the G.O.P. has had for some time now is that in many states and districts, not to mention the presidential contest, the candidate most likely to win a primary is least likely to win a general election. Republican primaries are like holding a heavy metal air guitar contest in order to compete for a place in a jazz ensemble. (Jeff Merkel, Fairbanks, Alaska, and Paul Spitz, Cincinnati, among others)

And Vronique Hyland rhapsodized about a fashion dump of discarded garments and accessories that were there for the taking: When I walked into curated, antiseptic boutiques, I felt starved for novelty. Surveying the Swap Shops jumble, I saw infinite possibilities. Even the most dated clothes seemed ready to spring to life, like actors of a certain age waiting to be rediscovered by Quentin Tarantino. (Jeannie Naujeck, Durham, N.C., and Pam DeAngelus, Cedar Grove, N.J.)

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Read more from the original source:
Opinion | Republicans Are Officially the Stop the Steal Party Now - The New York Times