The firehose of negative news that we awaken to every morning–the “flooding the zone with shit” tactic adopted by this administration–has buried news of a maddening recent vote cast by the United States at the United Nations.
The United States was the only country to oppose adoption of “agreed conclusions” of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). It was the first time in 70 years that the usual consensus was broken.
As Health Policy Watch reported, the U.S. had proposed eight amendments to the text– amendments that would have removed “controversial social issues” from the document, including “ambiguous language promoting gender ideology”, “vague, unqualified commitments to sexual and reproductive health that can be interpreted as implying abortion rights”, and “censorship language on regulating artificial intelligence.”
More specifically, the U.S. objections centered on language promoting universal access to sexual and reproductive health services, and language about that “woke” recognition of diversity, inclusion and intersectionality, which the U.S. dismisses as “gender ideology.” The U.S. also opposed language referencing the effects of climate change on women, the regulation of artificial intelligence, and inclusive definitions of gender.
The U.N. Commission on the Status of Women was established in 1946; it is the main global intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality–to the rights and empowerment of women. In prior years, the annual “agreed conclusions” have been routinely adopted.
This year’s theme was “ensuring and strengthening access to justice for all women and girls,” a goal to be achieved by eliminating discriminatory laws, policies, and practices, as well as structural barriers to justice–to “seek to create justice systems that work for everyone equally.”
Evidently, that goal was a non-starter for the defenders of “Christian” patriarchy who currently control the U.S. government. As a co-convenor of the Young Feminists’ Caucus told a media briefing on Tuesday, “The decision to break consensus and proceed to a vote underscores how deeply contested commitments to gender equality, human rights and access to justice remain in this current geopolitical moment.”
It is the policy of the United States to recognize two biological sexes, male and female. To achieve this, we use clear and accurate language that recognizes women are biologically female and men are biologically male. Sex is not interchangeable, rather it is irreplaceable. The differences between male and female should be celebrated, appreciated, and respected…
There has unequivocally never been an international commitment on “sexual and reproductive health and rights,” and we strongly oppose the use of this terminology. The Trump Administration is committed to supporting families, promoting women’s health, and protecting children at all stages of life and reaffirms there is no international right to abortion.
The Commission on the Status of Women’s latest session was the most contested ever. For the first time, its outcomes were put to a vote, with the USA voting against. The US government also tried to push through amendments targeting reproductive health and a resolution that would have imposed a highly restrictive definition of gender. The Trump administration has eliminated US$60 billion in foreign aid, withdrawn from UN Women and helped set in motion a proposal to merge UN Women with the UN Population Fund. Over 4,600 civil society delegates at the meeting held firm, but the human rights commitments they defend are under rising threat.
The United States withdrawal from UN Women and its executive board cited opposition to ‘gender ideology’ and the “promotion” of abortion, a clear echo of the far-Right ideologies of MAGA and Project 2025. The assault on gender equality is part of the administration’s broader campaign against international recognition of human rights– ending funding for the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), and attempting to dismantle global support for sexual and reproductive health rights.
At the Munich Security Conference in February, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio defined western civilisation as bound together by Christian faith, shared ancestry and cultural heritage, an ideological approach that treats women’s equality, reproductive rights and LGBTQI+ rights not as human rights but as ideological impositions to be rejected.
The termination of USAID shut down global clinics, and discontinued distribution of HIV medications and contraceptives. The US has also reinstated its global gag rule, blocking US funding to any organisation providing abortion services, referrals or counselling.
We cannot allow information about these unremitting attacks on women’s autonomy and human rights to be buried in the “flood of shit” that is the Trump administration.
When women assert that bans on abortion are part of a wide-ranging war on women, the pious “Christian” activists behind these bans are deeply offended. They are simply trying to protect innocent pre-born babies with those bans! (If a few women with problem pregnancies die as a result, their pro-life beliefs evidently aren’t implicated.) They have no response when we point out that an actual concern for babies would be accompanied by concerns for the well-being of those babies once they emerge from the womb–and that no such concern is being evidenced.
But abortion bans and urges to revert to a “tradwife” existence aren’t the only evidence of a war on women. Christian nationalists keep trying to curtail access to birth control, and there is a little-noticed movement to keep women from leaving abusive marriages.
Research shows that in the wake of no-fault divorce, which allows women to leave marriages without having to prove adultery or abuse, domestic violence dropped 30%. Female suicide dropped 16%. Incidents in which women were killed by their husbands or domestic partners dropped 10%.
Lincoln Square looked at the data from Texas, which is considering legislation to repeal no-fault divorce. It found that 99% of Texas divorces are no-fault, and 70% of Texas divorces are filed by women. Under the proposed new guidelines, any woman who filed for divorce would have to be “approved,” and in many cases, the law would require both people in the marriage to agree to the divorce. As the author wryly notes, “Yes. That’s right. A man can abuse his wife, and then block her from leaving the marriage so that he can continue abusing her.”
In January, Oklahoma Republican Sen. Dusty Deevers introduced legislation that would have removed married couples from filing for divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. Deevers backed the bill after writing a piece declaring no-fault divorce was an “abolition of marital obligation.”
Similarly, in South Carolina, two Republican lawmakers in 2023 filed a bill that would have required both spouses to file for a no-fault divorce application rather than just one. And in South Dakota, a Republican lawmaker has attempted to remove irreconcilable difference as grounds for divorce since 2020.
None of the sponsors of these bills responded to interview requests from The Associated Press. All are members of their state’s conservative Freedom Caucus.
California was the first state to adopt no-fault divorce in 1969, and other states soon followed. Before that change, anyone wanting a divorce had to prove that their spouse had violated one of the enumerated “faults” recognized by their state. Faults that qualified varied from state to state, but usually included infidelity, incarceration or abandonment.
The system was a particular burden on domestic violence victims, often times women, who could be stuck in dangerous marriages while they try to prove their partner’s abuse in court through expensive and lengthy legal proceedings.
Christian F. Nunes, then-president of the National Organization for Women, became “extremely worried” about the movement to repeal no-fault divorce when Trump won the 2024 election, and Republicans gained control of Congress and trifectas in a number of states.
“With so many states focusing on a misogynistic legislative agenda, this will turn back the clocks on women’s rights even more,” Nunes said in a statement. “This is why removing ‘no fault’ divorce is another way for the government to control women, their bodies, and their lives.”
Those concerns about the administration’s agenda have grown, as Vice-President Vance has moved steadily to the Right; in a speech in 2021, he lamented that divorce is too easily accessible and criticized laws allowing people to “shift spouses like they change their underwear.” And among the lesser-known proposals in Project 2025–many of which the Trump administration is pursuing–was ending no-fault divorce.
The only consistent through-line of the Trump agenda is its racism and misogyny. The War on Women is only one reason to Vote Blue No Matter Who in November, but it’s an extremely important one.
We recently passed the four-year anniversary of Samuel Alito’s contrived and dishonest Dobbs decision, overruling Roe v. Wade and telling state lawmakers that they could make reproductive decisions for the women who resided within their borders.
As I have repeatedly pointed out, the issue is not whether a given woman should or should not terminate a pregnancy–the issue, properly defined, is: who has the right to make that decision, the individual woman or the government?The Dobbs decision took that decision-making authority from women and gave it to government.
In the wake of the decision, 41 states have restricted abortion to a greater or lesser extent. That includes 13 states like Indiana, that impose total bans. As the essay notes, these restrictions have not substantially reduced the number of abortions because, although difficult, women still have access to medication abortions–a situation that accounts for the current relentless attacks on mifepristone.
However, access to medication abortion–while it lasts–can’t obscure the amount of real damage that Dobbs has done.
As the Contrarian reports, women who require in-person abortion care face increased travel costs and delays, while government “surveillance of pregnancy outcomes and outright criminalization for miscarriages and stillbirths, long a reality for women of color in this country, are also escalating.” Prosecutors in anti-abortion states are intimidating people “by leveraging unrelated statutes for child endangerment, homicide, or abuse of a corpse.” Women with non-viable pregnancies are forced to wait to receive care, as their health deteriorates, because medical professionals fear that their judgment will be second guessed.
A number of women experiencing pregnancy emergencies have died. While statistics are difficult to come by, an earlier attempt by researchers from Johns Hopkins and UCLA suggested that 68 women had died between the time of the Dobbs decision and the end of 2023. (I guess being “pro life” doesn’t extend to women’s lives…)
There have also been other, presumably unanticipated consequences for states like Indiana. Abortion bans have made it much more difficult for businesses to recruit workers, for example–many women (and men) in families of child-bearing age are unwilling to risk the consequences of possible emergencies. Former colleagues at the university tell me that fewer young women are applying to universities in states with bans.
The linked article focused on what it called another “under-reported outcome” of Dobbs–the growing number of individuals and families losing access to all healthcare thanks to a rise in medical deserts.
Medical deserts, defined as areas with insufficient supply to meet demand, can be caused by hospitals shuttering; a shortage of doctors and other health professionals, leading to appointment wait times that are prohibitively long; or too few pharmacies. In abortion-ban states, deserts are also produced by a climate of fear, as reported by TIME Magazine: “Doctors, nurses, and pharmacists fear they will be arrested, jailed, fined, or lose their licenses for providing care, and patients fear getting in trouble and hesitating to share everything with doctors.”
States with the most restrictive abortion laws, like Indiana, are most acutely affected by these shortages.
According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, 42 percent of surveyed clinicians who provide abortions in states with near-total or six-week bans relocated to another state, nearly all of whom went to states with no ban; just 9 percent of those who practiced in a state that allowed abortion relocated. That’s just common sense. There is no reason for highly mobile professionals to remain in places where they find themselves, increasingly, facing the prospect of personal risk for practicing medicine….
Over 5 million women now live in U.S. counties with limited or zero access to maternity resources such as hospitals, birthing centers, or obstetric care….Women in maternity deserts have an increased risk of preterm birth.
As the Contrarian notes, the impact of Dobbs on America’s terrible maternal and infant mortality rates can hardly be overstated. We have the highest maternal mortality rate of any wealthy country, and while rates worldwide are dropping, they’re climbing here. (America’s racism comes into play as well, with Black women more than three times more likely than white women to die in childbirth.) And in states that enacted abortion restrictions since 2022, infant mortality has climbed–again with impacts worse among Black infants.
Dobbs is part and parcel of the Christian nationalist backlash against personal autonomy–especially for women. It’s part of a movement toward autocracy–supported by our corrupt Supreme Court– that gives government ever-increasing control over the individual.
That control was what the Bill of Rights was expressly passed to prevent.
In the wake of the Charlie Kirk slaying, Micah Beckwith–Indiana’s Christian Nationalist Lieutenant Governor– reportedly said “From the history of mankind, there’s always been truth-speakers who have been speaking God’s truth and the enemy comes at them – the devil and his lies. They’ll try to silence those people. Charlie was one of those people. He was speaking truth and the enemy, the devil and his minions, try to silence him. I think what’s happening is actually the exact opposite effect. I think what you’re going to see is that there are going to be many more like him that are now going to rise up and start speaking where he left off. There’s a saying in the church throughout Christendom, ‘The blood of the martyr is the seed of the church.”
I was heartened by a recent poll (paywall) that pegged Beckwith’s support in Indiana at a robust 9%. Still, I think it’s worthwhile to examine some of the “truths” that Beckwith thinks Kirk was speaking.
Kirk was a counterrevolutionary, a revanchist, who deftly exploited a vision of a lost American gender ideal and the accompanying feelings of dislocation and humiliation on the part of men. Specifically, he wanted to reverse what Claudia Goldin (winner of the Nobel in Economics in 2023) has called the “quiet revolution” in women’s role in American society that occurred between the late 1970s and early 1990s.
Krugman points out that Goldin’s “quiet revolution” didn’t refer to the increasing numbers of women in the paid labor force, a trend that had begun in the 1940s, and had mostly culminated by the late 1970s. Rather, it referred to a radical change in the nature of the kinds of jobs that American women held.
While many women held paid jobs by the early 1970s, young women still tended to see work outside the home as occasional and provisional, as a way to earn modest amounts of money rather than as a fundamental part of their identity. The revolution, according to Goldin, happened when young women began to think about jobs in the same way young men always had — that it wasn’t simply “work” but a career.
As a result, women lived their lives differently. And as Krugman notes, that change has had large ramifications for men.
The changes in women’s status were results of access to contraception and the passage of anti-discrimination laws, and what Krugman describes as a “multiplier effect”— the more that women delayed marriage and childbirth, the more they trained for careers, the easier it became for others to do the same. And as he also pointed out, “rising divorce rates led many women to doubt whether marriage was a safe haven that obviated the need for an independent career.”
Charlie Kirk argued strenuously that this was all a mistake and should be reversed. Krugman quotes him: “Having children is more important than having a good career.”
Kirk was calling on America to stop being the society it is and go back to being the kind of society it hasn’t been for generations. Or, rather, he wanted us to enact his fantasy about what our society once was like. If you imagine that America before the quiet revolution was a nation in which all marriages were happy and all stay-at-home wives were contented, you should read Betty Friedan — or the novels of John Updike.
Krugman and others have pointed out that Kirk never bothered to offer serious policy proposals. But his hostility to women’s equality clearly resonated with many young white men — “men who resent their status in modern America and believe that their lives would be better if we returned to an older social order.”
Krugman concluded by recognizing that, in today’s America, we have “a society that appears to be problematic for many men.” There is a reason Kirk’s revanchism grew his support among them.
Appealing to resentments is the whole strategy of MAGA, Trumpworld and Christian Nationalism–not by suggesting ways to ameliorate unsatisfactory situations, not by advancing policy proposals that might mitigate such situations, but by the far simpler tactic of finding some “other” to blame.
It’s a strategy that evidently works with a significant number of Americans, and it explains the rise of “religious” zealots like Micah Beckwith and clever grifters like Charlie Kirk–opportunists who wage war on women, immigrants, gay people and people of color…
Yesterday, I was honored to keynote NOW’s state convention. Here’s the message I delivered. (And yes, it’s another long post. Sorry…)
__________
These really are the times that try women’s souls.
I don’t need to tell this audience how long and hard women have fought to be treated like human beings entitled to the Equal Protection of the Laws. And I don’t need to explain to anyone here why this is an incredibly dangerous, pivotal moment—not just for women’s rights, but for the entire American experiment.
As I wrote in a recent book, we are living in a time when the defenders of patriarchy are arguing for a return to traditional family roles; a time when the US Supreme Court is dominated by rogue justices who are overprotective of claims that women’s rights are inconsistent with religious freedom and who are dramatically under-protective of women’s basic civil liberties. We live in a time when a once-respectable political party has morphed into a profoundly racist, misogynist Christian Nationalist cult with retrograde beliefs about “women’s place.”
All of these efforts are part and parcel of a hysterical resistance to the social changes that have accompanied modern life– resistance to America’s growing diversity and especially to the progress of women and minority groups—a resistance led by men (largely but not exclusively White men) who resent the loss of the automatic social and legal dominance they once enjoyed simply by virtue of their skin color and gender.
So—how did we get here? Specifically, how have women gotten here? How have we advanced, and how threatening is the current, massive opposition to our hard-won status as almost-equals?
Let me begin by suggesting that there’s a very good reason that those waging a war on women have focused so single-mindedly on reversing our reproductive rights. It is impossible to overstate the effect that reliable birth control—control of reproduction—has had on women’s fight for equality.
The original longtime subservience of the female gender was the result of two major biological facts: first, women, on average, have less brute strength than men on average; and second, we get pregnant. During the many decades that workforce participation largely required brute strength, men were advantaged. And when any sexual encounter could result in pregnancy, women were disadvantaged; as a result, for generations, the female of the species was largely confined to childbearing and child-rearing.
Both of those things have changed.
Over the years, as technology has advanced, fewer and fewer jobs have required physical strength—instead, today’s work world overwhelmingly requires education, intellect and a variety of specialized skills, qualifications that are distributed far more equally between the sexes. I don’t want to minimize the importance of that changing work environment–as a result of those changes in the economy, women have been able to enter the workforce in ever greater numbers.
But by far the most important advance—the development that has allowed millions of women to navigate the economic waters—was the birth control pill and other associated innovations that gave us the tools to control our own reproduction. Before the advent of reliable birth control, every sexual encounter carried the risk of pregnancy, and pregnancy generally meant the end of women’s economic independence.
A pregnant woman was almost always unemployable, and so was a married woman in her childbearing years, since there was always the threat of pregnancy—and childcare was seen (and let’s be honest, is still largely seen) as a uniquely female responsibility. As a result, most married women were entirely economically dependent upon their husbands. If the marriage was unhappy—or worse, violent—a woman with children was literally enslaved. Since she was unable to enter the workforce to support herself or her children, unless she had independent means, she was totally dependent upon her husband, no matter how abusive or otherwise inadequate that husband might be.
Once women had access to reliable birth control, the whole world changed. If women could choose when to procreate, we could also choose when NOT to procreate. We could schedule our reproduction around educational and career opportunities. And even beyond the economic tsunami caused by the availability of birth control, the widespread use of contraception coupled with Supreme Court decisions in Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade accompanied significant changes in social attitudes that led to legal changes advancing women’s ability to participate not just in the economy, but also in America’s political and civic life.
Those changes that benefitted women, however, ran headlong into fundamentalist religion and Christian Nationalism. And if you think these fanatics simply oppose abortion—that their opposition to birth control has moderated—be disabused. Let me share just two examples of the zealotry with which the Right is attacking not just abortion but contraception. A bill recently introduced in South Carolina would criminalize hormonal contraception, defining birth control as abortion. The “logic” of the bill comes straight from fetal personhood dogma, which is a theological rather than a scientific concept, and it isn’t limited to South Carolina. There are plenty of other Red state legislators—including here in Indiana—who support legislating that theology into state law. And just last week, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration had destroyed ten million dollars’ worth of birth control pills and other contraceptives that had been destined for people in low-income countries. The administration also announced that the U.S. would no longer fund the purchase of birth control products for low-income countries. What is even more egregious, the government was determined to destroy these contraceptives despite the fact that several international organizations, including the Gates Foundation, had offered to buy them, which would have allowed the government to recoup taxpayer funds. Instead, the administration was willing to spend $167,000 to destroy them and make sure no one used them. Interestingly, after the media reported the destruction, officials in Belgium reported that they were holding them in a warehouse and trying to facilitate their sale so that they could eventually be used in low-income countries. So far, it’s a standoff with the Trump administration continuing to insist that they be destroyed.
They’re coming after contraception, and they haven’t reduced their focus on abortion. Despite the deeply dishonest rhetoric of Justice Alito in Boggs, that opposition is historically relatively recent; state laws forbidding abortion were scarce until the late 1800s. After their passage, however, women could only end unwanted pregnancies in overwhelmingly dangerous and unsafe ways. As officials at Planned Parenthood like to remind us, Roe wasn’t the beginning of abortion; it was the beginning of medically safe abortions.
Together with ready access to birth control, the ability to obtain safe, medically appropriate abortions empowered women to control their own lives to an extent that had previously been unthinkable—and I would suggest to you that it is women’s increased ability to exercise personal autonomy that really powers the forced birth movement.
Even though public opinion is strongly opposed to the ruling in Dobbs, what is not widely recognized is that the forced birth movement that finally toppled Roe did not grow out of genuine religious sentiment, as most people assume, but out of resistance to racial integration.
As noted religion scholar Randall Balmer has reported, America’s anti-abortion movement began in 1979—a full six years after Roe v, Wade was decided. Evangelical leaders, goaded by Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion as a rallying-cry in what was actually a segregationist effort to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term—an effort that was in reaction to the passage of civil rights laws during the Carter administration. Objecting to abortion—talking piously about “baby killing”– was seen as “more palatable” than what was really motivating the Religious Right at the time, which was protection of the segregated schools they had established following the decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
Both before and for several years after the decision in Roe, evangelical Christians had been overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject of abortion, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.
As Ballmer and other historians have reported, what really prompted Evangelical participation in politics was anger at tax and civil rights laws aimed at their segregation academies. Falwell and Weyrich decided to tap into the ire of the racist evangelical leaders who had established those schools, but they were savvy enough to recognize that organizing grassroots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would probably be a non-starter. The anti-integration message worked for evangelical leadership, but they needed a different issue to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale. Abortion fit the bill.
In short, historians agree that the catalyst for the Christian Right’s political activism was not, as often claimed, Roe v. Wade and opposition to abortion. The real roots of Christian Nationalism are found in the movement’s racism—and in the furious resistance of White males to the social changes that had allowed women, gay citizens and people of color to exercise increased autonomy and to compete with straight White men on an increasingly level playing field.
As Morton Marcus and I wrote in our recent book on the women’s movement, the Dobbs decision was nothing less than a frontal assault on human liberty. The decision is generally—and accurately—seen as an attack on women’s right to self-determination, but we need to recognize that it was much, much more than that. It was the expression of the growing, profoundly anti-liberty worldview that permeates Project 2025 and poses an existential danger to America’s constitutional values.
What Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade had recognized was the importance of a constitutional doctrine called substantive due process. Dobbs was a frontal attack on that doctrine, which we often call the “right to privacy.” Substantive Due Process, or the right to privacy, confirms the American principle that certain “intimate” individual decisions—including one’s choice of sexual partners or the decision to use contraception– are none of government’s business.
Most constitutional scholars agree that the individual’s right to personal autonomy has always been inherent in the Bill of Rights, but it was explicitly recognized in the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut. Connecticut’s legislature had passed a law prohibiting the use of birth control by married couples. The law prohibited doctors from prescribing contraceptives and pharmacists from filling such prescriptions. The Supreme Court struck down the law, holding that whether a couple used contraceptives was not a decision government is entitled to make. (Fortunately, Samuel Alito wasn’t then on the Court..)
The court’s majority recognized that a right to personal autonomy—the right to self-government—is absolutely essential to the enforcement of other provisions of the Bill of Rights. Justices White and Harlan found explicit confirmation of it in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment—which is where the terminology “substantive due process” comes from. Wherever it resided–in a “penumbra” or the 14th Amendment—a majority of Justices agreed on both its presence and importance.
The doctrine of Substantive Due Process draws a line between decisions that government has the legitimate authority to make, and decisions which, in our system, must be left up to the individual. I used to tell my students that the Bill of Rights is essentially a list of things that government is forbidden to decide. What books you read, what opinions you form, what prayers you say (or don’t)—such matters are far outside the legitimate role of government. The issue isn’t whether that book is dangerous or inappropriate, or that religion is false, or whether you should marry someone of the same sex, or whether you should procreate: in America, the issue is who gets to make that decision. And in America, it is the individual, not the state.
Enabling autocracy–destroying our current system of a democratic majority restrained by the Bill of Rights—rather obviously requires eliminating substantive due process. The decision in Dobbs thus opened a pathway to an enormous expansion of government power, and that expansion threatens everyone—especially women, but also gay folks and racial and religious minorities.
So much for where we are. The obvious question—the important question—the question with which we are all struggling—is what can we do? What can an individual do in the face of this retrograde MAGA attack on the most foundational principles of the nation?
We can certainly participate in the growing number of protests being organized by groups like Indivisible and others. (The next “No Kings Day is October 18th. I hope to see you all there.) Don’t dismiss the efficacy of these events; there is scholarship showing that non-violent protests by a sufficient percentage of the population have succeeded in overcoming autocracies elsewhere. That research pegs a “sufficient percentage” at 3.5% of the population. In the U.S., that comes to just over 11 million people. Estimates of the turnout for the first “No Kings Day”—the first big protest– ranged from five to six million participants.
We can also come together with like-minded citizens who understand what is at stake. For example, it is encouraging to note that genuine Christians are finally challenging the White Christian Nationalists. Christians Against Christian Nationalism was formed in 2019, and in a very welcome response to ICE and its efforts to rid the country of Black and Brown people by categorizing them as “illegal immigrants,” a network of 5000 churches—many of them Evangelical– has organized to protect immigrant worshippers and frustrate ICE.
There is also the emerging Resolutions Project, patterned after a mechanism that helped build support for the American Revolution. In the runup to that conflict, those favoring Revolution in towns across the colonies introduced, debated and passed so-called “resolutions of condemnation” that focused on the gravity of the “injuries,” “abuses” and “usurpations” of Mad King George III. Those resolutions helped build support for the Revolution by creating local ownership of their big arguments in the fight for independence. As we speak, there are at least 75 resolutionsthat have either passed or are moving in 23 states + the District of Columbia.It’s an effort that NOW and other pro-democracy Indiana organizations should join!
Longer term, we desperately need to restore civic education and accurate history instruction, and we need to confront the collapse of responsible journalism and the exponential growth of internet propaganda and conspiracy theories. (Don’t ask me how we do that…)
Of course, unless we can stop Trump’s march to dictatorship, we may not have a “long term.” So that brings me to our best chance of derailing the not-so-slow-moving coup we are all watching in real time. That opportunity will come with next year’s midterm elections.
As you all know, more Americans failed to vote in 2024 than voted for either candidate. Getting the rational citizens among those non-voters to the polls next year has to be job number one. In Red states like ours, that means Democrats running a candidate in every district so that disaffected Republicans and apathetic Democrats have someone to vote for. It means a massive effort to increase registration and get out the vote of people who—for whatever reason (but especially the gerrymandering that’s convinced them there’s no point) haven’t been casting ballots; and it means developing messaging that will resonate with them, messaging that will give them both a reason to vote and a reason to believe that their vote will make a difference. And in most parts of the state, it really will make a difference! Let me explain why.
Indiana has long been gerrymandered, but over the years, our rural areas have been steadily emptying out, meaning that the margins enjoyed by Republicans in those “safe” districts have been thinning. That’s one reason. But there’s another. Gerrymandering’s biggest effect is voter suppression. Belief that their district is safe for the GOP, non-voters who might vote for Democrats or Independents have been convinced that there’s no point, so why bother. (When the Democrats fail to run a candidate, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.) In reality, if turnout improved significantly, many of those districts wouldn’t be safe. It isn’t only the demographic shifts; in many districts, there are substantial numbers of Democrats and Independents who have previously failed to turn out. Gerrymandering requires the line drawers to begin with data from prior elections. The failure of discouraged Democrats and Independents to vote has skewed that data by artificially inflating the Republican advantage. We need to take that message to discouraged Indiana voters.
Just let me conclude with the bottom line:
If there has ever been a time for political activism, this is it. If there has ever been a time for all people who oppose the cult that has replaced the Republican party to come together, to abandon our policy differences and work in concert to save the Constitution and Bill of Rights, it’s now.
I know the people in this room will do that work. We just need to encourage the citizens who have been apathetic to join us—and thanks to the daily, unconstitutional, anti-democratic and absolutely horrific behaviors of the Trump administration, a lot of those citizens are no longer apathetic. We can do this.
