Doug's Darkworld

So much in the news about the left’s so called “cancel culture.” Much hue and cry about it from the right. What, exactly, is the left cancelling? I’m not exactly sure, the examples in the news are generally trivial, misrepresented, or both. A few old books that no one reads anymore are pulled from publication? A few people who have said horrible things have lost their jobs? I guess some speakers have been discouraged from speaking at some colleges? How, exactly, is this impacting the lives of people on the right? As far as I can see, other than being outraged by what Fox news and others tell them, it doesn’t seem to affect the average American in any way. It’s like the so-called “war on Christmas,” there’s no there, there. Americans remain completely free to celebrate Christmas any way they like.

On the other hand, there are things the religious right is working assiduously to cancel. They want to cancel about a million marriages for starters. They want to wreak havoc in a million households, imagine being married, and the government simply outlawing your marriage. To say that would impact people’s lives negatively is an understatement. I don’t see anyone on the left calling for conservatives marriages to be annulled, let alone actively pursuing that goal in the courts.

The evangelical right not only wants to cancel women’s access to health care, they are doing a good job of it. And doing a good job of it by closing down Planned Parenthoods’, appealing to the Supreme Court: Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, 573 U.S. 682 (2014,) and fighting against birth control and sex education. Yes, they want to cancel the very things that prevent abortions, so this isn’t about saving babies, it’s about cancelling lifestyles they don’t approve of. Hell, rafts of bills designed to prevent women from accessing health care, sex education, and birth control are passed by the GOP regularly.

And of course they want to cancel transgender people. They did manage to cancel them in the military, though Biden has reversed that. They have done everything they can to prevent them accessing health care, participating in society, etc. The fact that transgendered people have always existed and always will exist because human’s biological gender/sexuality exists over a broad spectrum doesn’t matter to the evangelical right. Male/female dichotomy, heteronormality all the way for them.

Hell, not just women having their access to health care cancelled. The evangelical right wants to give health care providers the right to refuse to treat people because they don’t want to treat certain people whose lifestyles/identities they don’t approve of. Imagine telling firemen they could refuse to fight a fire if they didn’t like something about the owners/occupants of a building. Again, no one on the left has proposed anything like this, let alone made it central to their political philosophy.

Speaking of political, they also want to cancel people’s right to vote. The GOP has been passing “New Jim Crow” laws for decades now, bills designed to make it harder for poor and black people to vote. Or democracy itself in the case of rampant GOP gerrymandering. And lately it’s getting worse, a law has been proposed in Arizona to allow the legislature to simply overturn the people’s vote for president! All in the name of fighting non-existent widespread voter fraud. And if there was widespread voter fraud, making it harder for people to vote isn’t fighting it, it’s making it harder for people to vote. There is no logical connection here.

Still, America is a country where huge numbers of people accept that killing 200,000 old men, women, and children “saved lives.” No one has ever explained to me how that works without the use of magical thinking. Moving right along, some on the right have followed this type of thinking to its “logical” conclusion, and simply want to cancel Americans who disagree with them. Yes, they are making the case that Biden voters “aren’t real Americans.” New Claremont essay reveals how Republicans are rejecting America:

“Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term,”Glenn Ellmers, the essay’s author, writes. “They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.”

So many things sick and wrong with that sort of thinking, I don’t know where to start. Crazy times. Have a safe Easter Weekend everyone, celebrate it (or not,) as you want. It’s still a free country. Sort of. #StaytheFHome #WearaDamnMask #FelesRegula #dearMoonCrew

Copyright © 2021 Doug Stych. All rights reserved.

(Image: A forest in Indonesia cancelled by a volcano, public domain image from Wikipedia. I hope it doesn’t come to that in America, literally or metaphorically.)