Dispatch #94 White Lesbian Age 69 Considers White Christian Nationalists and the Power of Their War on Women

April 10th 2022  

444 Days Since Inauguration of First Woman Vice-President

651 Days Until the 2024 Presidential Primaries Begin 

Note to the Washington Post: SHAME ON YOU for characterizing the Supreme Court Hearings as a ‘typically partisan’ affair. Really!?!? Relentless accusations of being soft on pedophiles are typically scurrilous Republican behaviors. With this equivalence trope, the effect of your reporting is to normalize the public degradation of a highly accomplished black woman/nominee to the Supreme Court. 

Yup, the War on Women’s Human Rights is raging, with the treatment of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson representing the latest reminder from the patriarchy – this is what will be done to women who presume to ignore the rules of institutionalized misogyny. The political prominence of White Christian Nationalists provides the cover for this war.

In their New York Times article titled The Growing Religious Fervor in the American Right: ‘This Is a Jesus Movement’ Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham discuss how the rituals of Christian worship have become embedded in conservative rallies, as praise music and prayer blend with political anger over vaccines and the 2020 election. Christian beliefs replace political positions with ominous results: 

With spiritual mission driving political ideals, the stakes of any conflict, whether over masks or school curriculums, can feel that much larger, and compromise can be even more difficult to achieve. Political ambitions come to be about defending God, pointing to a desire to build a nation that actively promotes a particular set of Christian beliefs.

“Now God is relevant,” she said. “You name it, God is there, because people know you can’t trust your politicians, you can’t trust your sheriffs, you can’t trust law enforcement. The only one you can trust is God right now.”  

Shaun Frederickson, one of the organizers who called the San Diego municipal government’s Covid response propaganda, said it was wrong to understand the event simply as protesting Covid-related mandates. It was about something deeper, he said in an interview: the idea that Christian morality is the necessary foundation for governance in a free republic. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/us/christian-right-wing-politics.html 

These Christian beliefs are driving/enabling state legislatures to enact new restrictions and heavier criminal penalties on medication abortion.  In advance of a Supreme Court decision, states are now targeting abortion pills, once seen as an acceptable workaround, as a murder weapon. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/us/abortion-pills.html

Yeah, and lest we forget how white Christians found support in their beliefs for slavery, Nation columnist Elie Mystal notes in his article -- titled Anti-Abortion Politicians Are Now Taking Inspiration From the Fugitive Slave Act -- that an amendment to a Missouri anti-abortion bill would make it a crime to help a pregnant Missourian get an abortion outside the state.   

The Fugitive Slave Act was repealed in 1864, and the constitutional language mandating slave recapture was excised with the 13th Amendment’s prohibition on slavery. But now, nearly 160 years later, some Republicans seem eager to bring back these kinds of laws. This time, their goal is not the recapture of enslaved people but the recapture of women. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/abortion-missouri/

Remember when Hitler and his henchmen took inspiration and direction from US slavery laws and segregation practices to inform their strategies to segregate and exterminate the Jews?  

A Grateful Shout Out to Doris Derby, Civil Rights Era Photographer, who passed at 82 on March 28th. Dr. Derby was an artist studying anthropology when she became an activist in the civil rights movement and a rare woman to document Black life in photos. 

In hundreds of images, Dr. Derby captured Black people engaged in the kind of civic life that had long been denied them in the American South. Her photos presented a detailed history of the civil rights movement’s grass-roots efforts to empower Black people in all areas — economically, politically, socially and physically.

She was also an indefatigable foot soldier of the civil rights movement, working first as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to develop an adult literacy program. Dr. Derby went on to co-found a repertory theater, research the educational outcomes of Black and white students, seed and oversee Head Start programs and lead the development of cooperatives. 

Late in her life, Dr. Derby took note of the lack of real progress, despite the energy of the civil rights movement, in places like Mississippi. 

There were few clear-cut gains, just as gains were uneven all over the South. Now is a continuation of then. We are seeing repeats of what we saw back then, like voter suppression and police brutality. When you make strides, the enemy takes steps to block your achievements, and you must do something else. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/arts/doris-derby-dead.html