Republican leaders seem to think one of the major threats to the United States are people who support the rights of LGBT persons to live peacefully in our communities.
Republican legislative priorities increasingly seem to target transgender people for harassment, since lesbians, gays and bisexuals have become more accepted in society. We think the GOP is showing its backside and should pay more attention to the damage done by their own ammosexuals.
When the Florida Legislature in March 2022 was considering the “Parental Rights in Education” bill, which threatens criminal penalties for primary school teachers and librarians who expose students to information about gender identity or sexual orientation, Christina Pushaw, press secretary to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), accused Democratic critics of the bill, better known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, of supporting pedophilia. She said it would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill.
Other Republicans took up the talking point that Democrats were groomers for pedophilia, echoing the far-right fantasies of QAnon, which claims a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophile power players control the government.
We think the Republican claims of Democrats promoting pedophilia are an attempt to distract from the ammosexuals who are a substantial portion of the base of the Greedy Oligarch Party. Our definition of “ammosexual” is “Someone who loves his or her guns more than they love their children.”
In the face of gunmen attacking schools, Republicans have offered thoughts and prayers but resisted practically all attempts to pass gun reforms since Democrats in 1994 passed the assault weapons ban, which prohibited the manufacture for civilian use of semi-automatic firearms that were defined as assault weapons, as well as high-capacity ammunition magazines. That ban expired in September 2004, and mass shootings and their death toll have risen since then.
In 2022, the US experienced 647 mass shootings, in which at least four people were killed or wounded, and more than 44,000 people died due to gun violence. The Gun Violence Archive has tallied 81 mass shootings this year through Feb. 21.
Everytown for Gun Safety has noted that one in three mass shooters were legally prevented from possessing a firearm at the time of the shooting, but they were still able to get their hands on a gun. When assault weapons are used in a mass shooting, more victims are shot.
Until Republicans get their ammosexuals under control, there is little chance of making schools and public spaces safe. And we’re starting to see mass-shooting survivors exposed to new mass shootings. On Feb. 13, when three students were killed and five were wounded at Michigan State University, two others had flashbacks.
One of the MSU students who was near the classroom invaded by the gunman was Jackie Matthews, now 21, who had been an 11-year-old student in a classroom in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, when another gunman killed 26 students, teachers and staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary. Matthews on TikTok recalled sitting crouched in an adjoining classroom when a gunman shot and killed kindergartners, Fox2 in Detroit reported. “The fact that this is the second mass shooting I have lived through is incomprehensible,” she said.
Emma Riddle, an 18-year-old freshman who with her roommate barricaded their dorm room at Michigan State, was a senior at Oxford High School near Detroit during a shooting that killed four students in 2021. “We just went through this 14 months ago. What is happening?”
Two days after the Michigan State mass shooting, one person was killed and three were wounded Feb. 15 in the Cielo Vista shopping mall in El Paso, Texas. Two men were arrested. The shooting was across the parking lot from the Walmart where 23 people were killed in a racist attack targeting Latinos in 2019.
Among those at the mall was former White House staffer Olivia Troye’s aunt, who also happened to be shopping in the Walmart when that shooting occurred, Troye tweeted after the shooting. The aunt was in hiding after the latest shooting. “She survived the 2019 Walmart El Paso shooting thanks to someone who pulled her to safety. What is it going to take to enact change?!” Troye wrote in a post cited by the El Paso Times.
In June 2022, after mass shootings at the Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which provides assistance for health services, school security and crisis intervention programs. It did little to expand background checks to stop mentally disturbed people from getting guns. Semi-automatic AR-15-style assault rifles remain available. But Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) still came under heavy criticism from ammosexual Republicans for co-sponsoring those light gun reforms.
Republicans must do better.
Ukraine military forces have been fighting off Russia’s invasion for one year, as of Feb. 24. Ukraine has survived at least 362 days longer than Vladimir Putin anticipated when he ordered Russian armored forces to cross the border into the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Putin hoped to take Kiev/Kyiv in three days and return Ukraine to the Russian embrace, as he seeks to rebuild the Russian empire. But Putin’s imperial ambitions were delayed, if not denied, by Ukrainian defenders, using armaments from the United States and other NATO member countries rallied by US President Joe Biden. The Russians invaders were stopped short of Kyiv and Ukraine defenders forced the Russians to retreat to the Donbas region.
Some of our readers might consider us to be dupes of the US military-industrial complex in the service of capitalist imperialism, for supporting US aid to Ukraine. We realize that much US foreign policy is dictated by capitalist economic interests. But Ukraine and Russia both are at least nominally capitalist countries served by McDonalds restaurants. And Russia attacked Ukraine.
The US is rightfully helping an embattled nation, which has a relatively free press and a freely elected parliament, defend itself against a neighboring dictatorship. Putin has locked up a political rival after attempts to poison him failed. The Russian parliament has made it a criminal offense to publish “fake news” that does not conform with official government sources. Russia jails protesters and has shut down critical media organizations. It also bombs Ukrainian cities, including residential neighborhoods, with missiles and drones, and threatens use of “tactical” nuclear weapons if all else fails.
(For the record, we opposed the US invasion of Iraq, which was a dumb idea even before it arguably became a war crime.)
We hope for a quick resolution of the war in Ukraine. Russia, which lost an estimated 200,000 soldiers killed or wounded, as of early February, can end it at any time by withdrawing from Ukraine. Until then, as long as Ukrainians put up their own fight, the US should keep sending them arms until Putin eventually falls out of a window. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2023
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