Right-Wing Dominionists Won’t Stop At Abortion. They’re Coming For Your Condoms And Your Pills, Too.

There’s an old saying that politicians hate sex unless they’re the ones having it. Given the recent Arizona Supreme Court decision on abortion, handed down merely to appease the equally contemptible ghouls responsible for appointing the justices to such a high position, they’re pretty much outing themselves and proving that old saying to be true.

At least in Arizona, voters have the option to oust appointed judges every four years if they’re not happy with their performance. If there was ever a case in which the Arizona Supreme Court needed an overhaul, forcing the entire state to revert to a law that preceded Arizona’s statehood by 48 years would be it. By law, and by judge decree, abortions in Arizona can now only be performed to save the mother’s life. There are no exceptions for rape, incest, crippling genetic abnormalities, or even the mother’s health. Unless of course, you’re rich enough to hop on a plane to Vegas or L.A. with your pregnant mistress, get the procedure done, concoct a story about going to some GOP charity fundraiser, and fly home just in time for your wife to cook you dinner and bob for apples in your in-ground hot tub afterwards. This is the reality for the people who push these medieval pieces of legislation and court decisions upon their subjects. Billionaire donors and media moguls. Conmen politicians desperate for votes who couldn’t win any the honest way if they tried. Repugnant self-righteous control freaks who believe women should be punished for having sex at all. Everyone else, who can’t afford plane tickets or hotel accommodations on a whim, is supposed to just shut up and take it lying face down.

To Hell with that. Arizonans can’t change what the law says or what the Robes say about its constitutionality in the present moment. But they could change how the law responds to their reality, the one that can’t be easily fixed with money and public relations campaigns. Mass noncompliance, sort of like how Hawaii residents treat prohibitions on fireworks, should be Arizonans’ answer to a Legislature and a Court that see them as cattle rather than people. This is easier said than done, since mass noncompliance only works when everyone participates. Healthcare providers are too tied up in insurance-company bureaucracy to continue to provide abortions contrary to what the law says. It would certainly work, since arresting tens of thousands of people for breaking a law no one is happy with is really bad for optics, not to mention state expense accounts. But getting people motivated to do it is another matter.

There is another way that isn’t so defiant or dependent on bureaucratic indolence, but it takes perhaps even more time and effort than the former. Voting. More specifically, voting for anyone and everyone who doesn’t have an R next to their name on the ballot. 2024 could be the GOP’s death rattle, unless we collectively allow it to become their revolution.

As much as Trump and his cohorts love to distance themselves from the monster they spawned, these deflections are akin to spritzing Chanel No. 5 on a mound of shit. While they screech about states’ rights when confronted with their own contradictory statements and hypocrisy, they’re still busy drafting legislation on the backburner for a national abortion ban, ready to be implemented when the stars align just right and Trump’s golden toilet bowl is flushed of all the sticky skidmarks from yesterday’s Big Macs. These wingnuts and opportunists won’t stop there, either. They’re coming for your condoms and your pills, too, but they’ve been trying—quite unsuccessfully, we might add—to be quiet about that part.

So you might be asking yourself, how are tragically deranged public policy measures on the mainland and a kangaroo court in the Southwest in any way at all relevant to Hawaii when said insanity is happening thousands of miles away?

As much as Hawaii residents don’t like to admit it, national policy does affect us here. And if even another inch of power is ceded to GOP lunacy, it will affect us here. Neither our geographic isolation nor our strong Democratic political leanings will insulate us from the far-reaching tentacles of Christian authoritarianism that have strangled federal and state institutions nationwide over the last decade.

This isn’t to say that Democrats are totally devoid of faults. Their messaging is terrible and they too, just like the GOP, have reaped the financial benefits of institutionalized corruption at various points in time. But we shouldn’t let perfection be the enemy of progress. While the Democrats want to at the very least protect a baseline level of civil rights, the Republicans want to take all of those away, and they’ve already started with abortion, not to mention their increasing calls for library censorship, porn bans, doing away with mail-in voting, and dictating what doctors and teachers are allowed to say to their patients and students, respectively.

The state of things right now isn’t great. Day-to-day expenses cost a fortune and well paying jobs are spread thin in spite of what the stock market would like you to believe. In the aftermath of COVID-19 and the resulting inflation that hasn’t been seen since the 1980s, staying the course is going to be a brutal slog. But the alternative on the right side of the political spectrum will make all of this ten times worse than it already is. It’s going to take decades to fix what Republican policy has hollowed out in America. It will take a century if they gain power in 2024. Just ask Arizona.

– Unsigned