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America is a Christian Murderbox With No Escape

By Mike Redmond | Politics | November 9, 2018

thousand-oaks.jpg
Header Image Source: Getty

Two events unfolded in the past 24 hours that, on the surface, couldn’t seem further apart. One involves a gruesome mass shooting, an all-too-common occurrence, while the other involves a Christian agenda inside the Department of Health and Human Services that just made a clandestine move to restrict women’s access to birth control and/or abortions. And if you’re already starting to see the connection, it’s that these events are all part of the Republican design for America:

Religiously mandating that infants be born into a gun-slathered murderhole.

But don’t take my word for it. Just listen to recently elected Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn who proved that not even Taylor Swift can stop a candidate with a full $1 million endorsement from the NRA. When asked how to prevent another incident like the Thousand Oaks shooting, get a load of the very first words that flew out of Blackburn’s mouth.

From The Daily Beast:

“What we do is say, how do we make certain that we protect the Second Amendment and protect our citizens.”

Jesus Christ, lady.

Then again, it is refreshing that a Republican official just said “F**k it” and made it clear right upfront that she’s not going to do a goddamn thing to stop mass shootings. Sure, Blackburn eventually said some bullshit about mental health, but she currently supports a president who’s letting the penny-pinching CEO of Marvel Comics run the VA like a business out of Mar-a-Lago. So it’s only a matter of time until another Ian Long goes off, and when he does, well, the important thing is the government saved a few bucks and guns are so f**k-ass everywhere that it’s a miracle any of us survive brushing our teeth in the morning.

So with that information in hand, it’s always fun to be reminded that Republicans are the “pro-life party,” provided that life hasn’t vacated the vagina yet or even made it to the whole sperm meets egg part. Which brings us to the Trump administration’s continual gutting of birth control access that I can only assume is a special thanks to brainwashed evangelical assholes who stuck to their programming and voted Republican in the midterms.

Via Rolling Stone:

Under the Obama administration, only certain churches and religious organizations were exempt from an ACA provision requiring employers to offer insurance plans with coverage for birth control. The new rules, set to take effect in January 2019, would make it much easier for any organization to deny coverage — all they have to do is claim they have “sincerely held religious beliefs” or “non-religious moral convictions” against birth control. The new rules make any coverage, essentially, voluntary: “Entities that object to covering some, but not all, contraceptive items would be exempt with respect to only those methods to which they object.”

Just so we’re all clear, actual lives are being ended by a murderously gratuitous amount of guns in America, but the Republican Party’s top priority is making sure that if two people bone, a baby pops out, and then that baby is exposed to the gauntlet of a minimal to non-existent social safety net and all of those guns I just mentioned. Nope, nothing contradictory there. In fact, it’s right in line with the Christian, life-affirming practice of hurling the United States military at a caravan full of families trying not to get murdered by drug lords that our government either directly or indirectly created.

It’s f**king maddening, right? How do you combat a worldview that sees nothing wrong with the rampant bloodshed from unfettered gun access (or letting whole families die because they look Mexican-ish) but everything wrong with people deciding it’d be neat to have sex without a kid falling out of them? Because that’s the mindset that shows up in droves to actively elect Republicans. And that’s not about to end anytime soon.

We’re trapped in a Jesus-y Bulletdome of Death, and short of a whole lot of Americans suddenly accepting that a golden mansion waiting for them in the clouds is right up there with believing in Santa Claus, I don’t know how to get us out.