Over the years, I struggled with what came to be characterized as “major depressive disorder,” and took a cornucopia of medications. Nortriptyline, paroxetine, venlafaxine, buspirone, sertraline, citalopram, pregabalin, mirtazapine. None worked. Optimistically, I tried lurasidone, bupropion, and vilazodone, followed by aripiprazole, amitriptyline, and zaleplon, which also made no difference. Then Restoril, protriptyline, desipramine, escitalopram. Nothing. My psychiatrist began to talk ominously about “treatment-resistant depression.” Nonetheless, I carried on with fluoxetine, temazepam, triazolam, and trazodone.
In the worldview most folks in the anti-abortion movement have, abortion is murder. It’s worse not only in the sense that it’s certain death, but that it’s intentional. From their standpoint, if some women die because they’re refused care, that isn’t a certain death, there isn’t intentionally going to be a death, so that’s the lesser of the evils in that situation.
… we gotta start talking stoooopid “exceptions.” Gag me.
It’s all the fault of that ten year old vixen who made that guy keep raping her. If she’d just quietly hemorrhaged giving birth as God intended, no one would have been the wiser.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.): “It was a quite a gut punch. [Kinda like an illegal abortion, Senator.] Yes, I’m shocked, absolutely shocked. [Guess you’re spending too much time in DC. Maybe you should visit your state occasionally and get to know the people who live there. Or maybe Kansans should vote for a Senator not liable to be totally shocked by lopsided electoral outcomes in the state.] But regardless, I respect the process. .. That’s not what I was expecting, not what I was told the polling showed, and I thought it was gonna be a tight race. But it is what it is. And, again, I respect the process. I don’t have an explanation. [What a telling confession. You really have no explanation at all for this result? … Let’s start real slow for you. Are you able to come up with any explanation at all for why a person might vote in favor of abortion rights? Take your time.]“
[I]f abortion supporters could fare as well as they did in Kansas, they would have a good chance to defend abortion rights almost anywhere in the country. The state may not be as conservative as Alabama, but it is much more conservative than the nation as a whole — and the result was not close. There are only seven states — in the Deep South and the Mountain West — where abortion rights supporters would be expected to fail in a hypothetically similar initiative.
At one level, the Republicans do realize that actually winning the culture war requires them to do what the white South did to post-Reconstruction Blacks: deny their critics the right to vote. That’s become the fundamental electoral strategy of a party that understands that they can’t hold power in an America based on majority rule. But it may be that their racism, sexism, homophobia, assault-weapon infatuation, and primitive religiosity targets so wide a spectrum of Americans that no campaign of voter suppression can encompass all the Americans they’ve threatened, or deter all the enemies they’ve made. It was the good Republican middle-class suburbs of Kansas City that doomed their anti-choice amendment last night. Does the GOP have to keep them away from the polls, too?
You take away Americans’ established rights at your own peril, as Kansans made very clear last night.
