Amanda here. I'm a 28 year old lesfem (lesbian feminist) from Massachusetts. I like older women a whole lot. Pink is my favorite color, and every dog is my best friend. ENTP. "Political lesbians" are not welcome here. Self-appointed commander of the Laura Palmer Defense Squad. Molly Solverson is the queen of my heart. Bedelia Du Maurier lives. RAVENCLAW
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This is very well written and discusses what the trump administration will be capable of- It’s scary- but It’s important to know so we don’t get surprised by it later, and we realize that it’s going to be a tough fight.
When Donald Trump repeals Obamacare, people are going to die. When Donald Trump defunds Planned Parenthood, people are going to die. When Donald Trump refuses to pass gun control laws, people are going to die. When Donald Trump implements crazy border control policies, people are going to die.
If you didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton because she’s “still bad,” fuck you. There are no other words to say: FUCK. YOU.
The white supremacist alt-right celebrated on Wednesday — and it was terrifying
On Wednesday morning, the emergent community of white nationalists and right-wing internet trolls learned their “god-emperor,” Donald Trump, had won the presidential election. They took to their old stomping grounds (Reddit, /pol/, Twitter replies) to celebrate, hurling Nazi memes and racial slurs like gobs of shit. But make no mistake, it’s not just memes and tweets — it’s in the real world across the country, too.
To the uninformed observer, Pence seems uninteresting and bland. Not true. Don't believe it...
“Pence is no Uncle Joe.His record as governor indicates that he is willing to completely undermine the core values of a free country in order to impose his own vision of theocratic control.
While Donald Trump is a bumbling political idiot, Mike Pence is actively against the people and possibilities that we need to help America to have a strong future. His career has been built on hateful exclusion, not intelligent inclusion.
Here are some things that every voter should know about Mike Pence:
- Science and invention helped build America, but Mike Pence is 100% anti-science. He chooses not to accept the preponderance of evidence that supports anthropomorphic climate change, and he thinks schools should be required to teach Christian “creationism” mythology alongside evolution in science classrooms.
- Mike Pence is anti-environment. As governor, he has vetoed every piece of environmental regulation that has crossed his desk. He doesn’t want the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, and he does want to open up pretty much every part of our country to oil and coal companies. No more wildlands under Pence. He is one of those irresponsible extremists who think that God gave us the world so we could just use it up, and when it is all used up the second coming will occur. There is no Biblical basis for this belief.
- Females make up more than half of the American population, but Mike Pence is anti-woman. He has said the Disney movie “Mulan,” which was based on a centuries old Chinese poem, was the work of a “mischievous liberal” trying to groom young children to accept women in combat. “Despite her delicate features and voice, Disney expects us to believe that Mulan’s ingenuity and courage were enough to carry her to military success on an equal basis,” he wrote on his radio show’s website.
- He obsessively pursues a personal vendetta to take Title X funding away from Planned Parenthood because Planned Parenthood provides abortion services. Title X money CANNOT be used for abortions. Abortions are paid for by the recipient or through private, tagged donations. Taking away Title X will not impact abortion services, but it would leave thousands of women without access to cancer screenings or birth control.
- Speaking of birth control, Mike Pence once again revealed his historical ignorance in saying that condoms are “modern” and “liberal.” He thinks all women should be pregnant unless they can’t afford a baby, in which case they should abstain from sex, even if they are married. That’s right: sex is only for procreation in PenceWorld. If you can’t afford the diapers, then hubby should be sleeping on the couch.
- Mike Pence is also anti-gay, to the point of denial. He doesn’t want the government to pay for cancer screenings, but he does want the government to pay for abusive “conversion therapy” programs that systematically undermine the victim’s self-esteem, and then indoctrinate them into robotic gender-appropriate behaviors. He has signed into law a bill that allows discrimination against LGTBQ customers based on religious belief.
- As governor of Indiana, Mike Pence was personally responsible for an outbreak of AIDS when he refused to allow clean needle exchanges for drug addicts. Instead, he asked people to pray for the addicts.
- Mike Pence is racist. He thinks there is “too much talk” about institutional racism in law enforcement because “police officers are human beings.” His solution is unity through “faith.” The Indiana governor has tried to prevent Syrian refugees from settling in his state because the “pose a threat to safety of residents.” Pence argued that his policy was based on fear, not race, so it wasn’t discriminatory. A Federal Appeals Court dismissed his racist arguments on October 3, 2016.
- A Federal Court also had to block his bizarre anti-abortion law that required burial or cremation for fetuses, whether miscarried or aborted, no matter how far along the pregnancy had progressed.
- Mike Pence is pro-birth, but not pro-life. He once funneled $3.5M dollars from Temporary Assistance to Needy Families into programs that counsel against abortion. He wants those women to have those babies, but he doesn’t care if the kids starve or live on the streets afterward.
- Mike Pence has refused to comply with federal guidelines aimed at reducing prison rape.
When you add it all together, you can see that the most dangerous part of the Trump-Pence ticket is …that calculating quiet man who will be leading the charge from behind. Mike Pence is basically against anyone who is not white, conservative, Christian, and male.
When Mike Pence was a young lawyer on the rise, he challenged a longtime Democratic congressman for a seat in a Republican-leaning Indiana district. He seemed to have it in the bag until voters were stunned to learn that he had been using political donations to pay personal expenses including the mortgage on his house, his credit card bill, groceries, golf tournament fees, and car payments for his wife.”
The electoral college does not vote until December 19th. We have 40 days.
What does this mean?
Right now, the presidential election results are only a PROJECTION of the election outcome. They are PRELIMINARY RESULTS. A candidate still needs to earn 270 electoral votes to win. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, which means that more than 50% of the voters wanted her for president. The electoral college shouldn’t guarantee an override of the public’s opinion– and it doesn’t have to.
There are 21 states that do NOT restrict which candidate the electors vote for. Out of these 21, Hillary lost the following:
As you can see, these states are worth 166 electoral votes. As it currently stands, Hillary Clinton is projected to receive 232 votes. Trump is projected to win 306. This means that 37 votes need to be taken away from Trump to bring him down to 269. Hillary Clinton needs 38 votes ADDED to win 270. These electoral voters can also abstain, which means that they can refuse to vote for either candidate. If 37 of the voters within these states abstain then no candidate will have reached the required 270. In this case, the vote would be taken to the House.
Trump won Pennsylvania, a state that typically votes blue, by less than 100,000 votes. While it is highly unlikely to get all 20 electoral voters to cross party lines and vote democrat, it also isn’t impossible to convince a few of them to be “faithless electors.” We only need to convince 38 out of the 166. That is 23%. There are SIXTEEN states we need to focus our attention on.
A move like this would be unprecedented. However, as we all saw on November 8th, odds don’t guarantee reality. Trump had a less than 20% winning, yet given the circumstances, enough people came together and made it happen. We can make this happen.
Ask yourself this: What do we have left to lose? We can stay complacent and accept that this country will be run by a racist, sexist, islamophobic, homophobic, ablest bigot, or we can at least try.
How?
SPREAD THE WORD. Trend #NotMyPresident to let people know that we do not accept being led by a man who does not care about our wellbeing. Email your professors, email the dean of your colleges. The last thing a university wants is negative press. Millenials can take a stand, but that doesn’t mean we have to be the only ones. Church-led events helped bring a lot of disillusioned voters to the polls. Spread the word in any way possible, whether it be on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or even in person. Stage a peaceful protest. Hand out flyers. Let the people around you know that you don’t accept this man as your leader when he won’t even accept you as a citizen with your designated rights.
These 166 people need to face the consequences of electing this man.
Do this for the people who couldn’t vote. Do this for the people who live in the very real fear of being deported. Do this for the people who will have to face the rise in hate crimes. Do this for the people who have a very real possibility of losing their rights. Do this for the people who will no longer afford necessities.
And remember, if you see folks with tattoos, car decals, or flags of these symbols or any other recognized white supremacist/neo-nazi/fascist symbols, GET PHOTOS OF THAT SHIT. I really cannot stress this enough. Make their faces and vehicles known.
I’m certain we’ve had politicians with worse opinions than Trump. I’m sure we have people in office right now who carry more vitriolic hatred than Dump grooms into his soggy spray-tan perm every morning. But no other politician is quite to overt, so loud, so heard. Every other competitive politician was taught to play it close to the vest. They learned the way to win support was save the crude, crass, vile, shameless talk for private conversations. Trump did not do that. And horrifically, America liked it.
Now every hateful person, who’s been taught to “act PC” in public, has a glorious new example to follow–because everyone’s supposed to follow the president.
Who needs the classic prefixes anymore to voice hatred?
No more “Controversial opinion, but”
No more “I’m not racist, but”
No more “Now I’ve got a wife and daughters, but”
Now it’s
“I support the president when he says”
“I’m a patriotic citizen, and I agree that“
“The White House made a good point today to”
Trump thinks Mexican immigrants are rapists. He thinks women are things to be grabbed and owned and defiled. He thinks Muslims need a registry. He thinks the appropriate way to debate is to mock looks, marital history, menstruation.
But now these opinions aren’t just the opinions of Donald Trump. They’re the opinions of the president, of America.
And if you disagree, that’s un-American. That’s unpatriotic. You, “some POC”, “some immigrant”, “some queer”, “some woman” are being un-American.
This kind of attitude was used heavily against people who did not support invading Iraq back during the Bush presidency. Celebrities were blacklisted. Politicians were verbally attacked. Because it was not about what their real opinion was–it was about how unpatriotic it was.
Truly, I don’t think any of you understand how detrimental trump being president is for gay people. I’m talking the perpetuation of conversion therapy, the overturning of same sex marriage, and further passing of religious freedom protection laws which condone discrimination. That’s like not even all of it…
If anyone doubts this: the GOP congressional republicans have outright stated they’re only going to accept a nomination for Supreme Court justice from a republican president.
Conservative justices = an overturning of all progress we’ve made. All of it. Gone. Just… gone.
yes it’s true he’ll get some scotus justices but they can’t overturn things just because they feel like it. it’s unlikely any already established cases (like same sex marriage) will be overturned. just that any decisions going forward might have a conservative majority. things are bleak but let’s not make them bleaker than they actually are.
Same-sex marriage legalization is consistently being proposed to the Supreme Court. There are active anti-gay groups in which this is their sole cause. If a conservative majority takes over, and one of these groups gets a case in front of the Supreme Court they will vote in favor for traditional values. Don’t pretend that the Republican Party doesn’t have an agenda actively against gay people.
“In 1981 with the emergence of the AIDS epidemic also came the emergence of the Christian Right, who which Reagen ushered into power and disgustingly seized the moment as a sign of God’s abhorrence for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Reagan, who saw the first signs of the AIDS epidemic in 1981, his first year in office, . said “maybe the Lord brought down the plague because illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments.”
AIDS research was chronically under-funded. When doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health asked for more funding for their work on AIDS, they were routinely denied it. Between June 1981 and May 1982 the CDC spent less than $1 million on AIDS and $9 million on Legionnaire’s Disease. At that point more than 1,000 of the 2,000 reported AIDS cases resulted in death; there were fewer than 50 deaths from Legionnaire’s Disease. This drastic lack of funding would continue through the Reagan years
In 1986, Reagan ordered Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to prepare a major government report on AIDS. Critics attacked Reagan for ordering the report on the same day he submitted requests to reduce the AIDS budget, according to the Globe. Koop’s report called for mandatory sex education for children as early as elementary school, but Reagan’s education secretary, William Bennett, and his undersecretary of education, Gary Bauer, strenuously opposed those efforts, calling for abstinence-oriented education.
But Reagan still remained silent to the public
Finally near the end of 1986 Reagan requested $85 million for AIDS research, but Congress horrified at the low number bumped that figure up to $244 million only to have Reagan then unsuccessfully try to rescind $50 million of that figure, according to the Boston Globe, he ultimately agreed to Congress’ figure. In 1987, Reagan proposed cutting the research budget for AIDS down to $214 million. Congress again responded dramatically against Reagen by raising it to about $400 million.
It would not be until 1987 when pushed that Reagan would publicly speak about the AIDS epidemic in a major policy address. By the end of that year, 59,572 AIDS cases had been reported and 27,909 of those women and men had died. He and his administration did almost nothing during the first seven years of the epidemic. AIDS research was chronically underfunded. Community education and prevention programs were routinely denied federal funding and would have been even more so if Regan had had his way. Only when pushed did Reagan offer any assistance.”
Not to mention, when Reagan finally said the word “AIDS” out loud for the first time, it was in response to questions about banning inclusive sex education, which promoted use of condoms, in public schools. Which he was in favor of.
Straight people might have survived Reagan, but gay people most certainly did not. Imagine how much louder and stronger our community would be, had hundreds and thousands of our elders not been eradicated in the largest willful mismanagement of a public health crisis, in the history of this country.
Reagan began a war on the gay community, one fueled by systematic oppression in rapid pace. And that war continues to be passed down as the office has continued. Luckily a lot has improved, but unfortunately our government won’t give us enough dignity to make our rights innate, instead of given.
