More Post-Election Thoughts, and An Announcement

a new feature for paid subscribers

Announcement: Adding a New Feature

I’m finding myself writing a lot lately — partly in an attempt to deal with wintertime depression having found me early, partly in trying to make sense of childhood memories (bad ones, certainly, but also good ones) that mean something new or different to me as a result of my work in therapy (or, perhaps, just growing up).

I’m also trying to let myself do more creative writing. I’ve written a few poems lately, a few descriptions, a few stray thoughts, a scene or two of fiction.

I’m going to start publishing some of these things here. Many of you signed up for the essays about cultural and political issues and these will not be of interest to you, so I’m going to make it easy for you to avoid them. I found this image on a google search for “creative writing”:

That will be the featured image on all issues that are editions of the new feature. I will also try to remember to subtitle them “a creative writing edition”. That way you can avoid them easily if you’d like.

The first one, which will post tomorrow sometime, is about the Christian comedian and singer, Mark Lowry.

Here’s a YouTube video to whet your appetite of him doing the solo of his song “Mary, Did You Know” in an absolutely gorgeous performance with Voctave.

More Post-Election Thoughts, Mostly About Abortion

I’m going to piss everyone off again. The left because I’m in favor of some restrictions on abortion, the right for other reasons.

I’ve gotten a lot of comments and a shocking amount of email (if you’re waiting on me to reply, I apologize) from my issue with initial post-election thoughts and my prediction of a viable path for Kamala Harris to win outright in 2024.

I hope that Harris won’t be the nominee for obvious reasons, but I strongly suspect she will be. How is the Democratic Party going to justify not promoting the woman of color sitting VP when their entire philosophy is all about the need to center and elevate the voices and lived experiences of women of color? What coherent narrative allows them to not nominate her, assuming she runs? I see only two.

1) They confess that they’re under the sway of misogynist white supremacists (which is the only interpretation that their philosophy allows for not liking Harris) and willing to let those terrible people choose their nominee.

2) Someone with more victim points runs. At this point, that would take a transwoman of color. I’m not aware of any highly placed transwomen in Democratic politics other than Rachel Levine — am I forgetting someone?

Otherwise, what I’m seeing mostly indicates that the right hasn’t learned a single thing.

If it were me and I had every possible advantage — economy in the toilet, highly unpopular President, crime on the rise, etc. — and I underperformed this badly, I would say to myself:

Self, the job of a politician/political party is to earn votes. Why am I doing such a bad job? Then I would try to figure out how to either change my policy positions (if most voters dislike them) in ways that conform to my principles, change my presentation/campaign/storytelling (if most voters liked my policies but voted against me anyway), or do a much better job of persuading people to change their principles to match my own.

The right mostly seems to be proposing ways to allow fewer people to vote, including advocating to repeal the 19th amendment. Some are jokes, yes, but some aren’t. And that one always amazes me.

Other groups vote for Democrats in much greater numbers than women, but you never see calls, even joking ones, to take the vote away from black Americans. Why is that? If you have any ideas, please leave a comment or reply.

Further, they’re citing everywhere a statistic indicating single women went for the democrats by 37 points. This is a great example of a causation/correlation error. I know it’s hard, folks. I love to grab onto statistics that seem to confirm my prior beliefs and biases, too. But guess what being a single woman is also correlated to?

Being young, poorer than average, less white than the general population, more heavily educated than the general population (and thus under the direct influence of college professors and peers at universities), and less religious than average. All of those factors also skew heavily Democratic for voting patterns. Marital status (the stats I’ve seen equate “single” and “unmarried”) may be an important factor here. It may not. Stats would have to control for all of these factors for us to know that.

Real Talk

As long as the Republicans make abortion an issue on which they are totally intransigent, they will lose close elections. Americans are comfortable with a middle ground here — a 15-week limit with exceptions for maternal or fetal health calamities, like Florida has, is what political will exists for and what is achievable. Politics is the art of the possible.

An Imperfect Analogy

Here’s an analogy. Not a perfect one, but one that ought to answer some of the questions I’ve seen in my email.

Why do some people own a gun? For self-defense. So that in a last-ditch, desperate situation, if they have to use it to defend their life, physical safety, or property, they can.

As a woman who has been raped, both as a child and an adult, that is highly analogous to how I view abortion. If I am ever raped again, I will not be forced to have a baby for the psycho, nor to share custody with him (which, yes, is a thing in some US states). The prospect of having to get on a plane and go “visit friends” in that situation (as is currently the case for women in some red states) would make it very clear to me that I was not a fully functioning agent who lived in a free country that respected my rights as an adult human being.

I would feel infantilized, enraged, and oppressed to roughly the same extent that gun lovers would feel that way if they had to get on a plane every time they needed to buy a new gun or more ammunition.

Many women (and men who agree) will not consider voting for the Republicans because of this. Bodily autonomy on this is their single issue just as gun rights (which, to my thinking, boil down to bodily autonomy via self-defense) are for many on the right.

It’s not a perfect analogy, as I said. But knowing that if I have to exercise that right to regain full control of my body, I can, is a source of enormous anxiety relief to me. It doesn’t mean that I, or other women who oppose full abortion bans, are salivating monsters who want to murder babies — any more than you gun owners cackle and twirl your mustaches every time there’s a school shooting because you just love, love, love the idea of dead elementary kids.

Yes, I am aware of the Montana “born alive” infants measure that passed. From what I read, there was concern that parents with terminally ill children would no longer be allowed to choose palliative care only, and many voted based on that basis. National Review has a good article that explains why it was easy to misinterpret (and therefore badly worded for its intended purpose).

In 2024, the Dems will put abortion on the ballot in every state where they need to drive turnout. And it will work. Kansas, Kentucky, Vermont, California, Michigan — when abortion is on the ballot, voters support it. And some of those measures will be much broader than I am comfortable with, as a direct result of voters feeling the need to push back against the GOP on this.

It’s almost like human nature is a thing and responses when rights are removed are in fact entirely predictable.

Another Prediction

I personally think the Right is highly unlikely to bend at all, because they’d rather virtue-signal than win elections. If you give them 100 opportunities to choose between virtue-signaling and winning an election, they will choose the former at least 99 of those 100 times.

I also think that many of them are committed to opposing abortion as part of a social and community identity and not because they really believe their own rhetoric fully. If they really and truly believe that very early pregnancies were full human beings in exactly the same way as born children, ask yourself this question: why have you never been to, or even, most likely, heard of, a funeral or memorial service after a miscarriage?

I grew up in a church so fully engaged in the abortion war that I carried a sign bigger than I was when I was four or five years old, picketing outside a clinic. Our pastor’s wife had at least three miscarriages. Unlike the two times when children in our congregation died, there was never a funeral or memorial service, not a name announced, nothing, and they do not refer to themselves as having six children, not even with something like “…are the parents of six children, three in heaven.”

The path to preventing abortion is making it less financially and logistically punishing to carry to term. Women who know that if they end up on bedrest with pre-eclampsia, their other children won’t starve (or lose their health insurance), that their employer won’t dare discriminate against them and their job will be waiting when they get back — those women abort in lower numbers than poor women. (No, I am not asserting these to be the deciding factors 100% of the time. Yes, I am aware of Christians who do not fit the description I have written. Supply your own #notalls, please.)

There are also over 114,000 adoptable children in US foster care, which, if I were pregnant, is a fact that would strongly push me towards termination. I’m alone in the world. If I had a child and something happened to me before my child was an adult (which is more likely than average—my childhood has resulted in some odd health issues and a higher risk for more of them), my kid would end up in foster care.

Where, based on current numbers, our allegedly Christian country with an alleged silent majority that allegedly loves children would be highly likely to let them stay, bouncing from home to home, until they aged out.

Of course, working for these sorts of changes would require harder work than clicking RT on twitter.

But losing elections and clucking their tongues over how tragic it is that those stupid sluts want to cackle evilly as they murder babies to please Moloch? That’s easy, and it’s great social currency.

Hell, it’s even kind of fun. (Remember, I left Twitter because I didn’t like the person it turned me into. I am inconsistent in many ways, sadly, but not this one.)

Reminder of the Christmas Contest

On December 1, 2022, I will draw five winners from a list of paid subscribers. Three will win 11x14 framed versions of this photo from my October 2022 Vermont foliage collection. The other two will win other foliage pictures from my collection. If you are a paid subscriber by 7am Eastern on December 1, 2022, you’ll be entered automatically.

Housekeeping: Comments are open for paid subscribers. Email hollymathnerd at gmail if you want to participate but can’t afford a paid subscription. I’m no longer on any social media, so your spreading the link to anything you enjoy reading here is helpful and appreciated. Thank you!