This nation has become increasingly dominated by bullies. The president bullies women. The vice president and extreme conservatives and religious fundamentalists don’t want women to have access to birth control or abortions, effectively forcing pregnancy on the unwilling. Many conservatives believe women are secondary to men and must obey and serve their husbands, allowing “Christian” men to do whatever they please. For evangelist Franklin Graham to say that Trump “gets a mulligan” on his sexual misbehavior is shocking use of a golf term to minimize molestation.
The Supreme Court now allows companies such as Hobby Lobby to dictate workers’ sex lives and family size by cutting parts of health insurance they don’t like in their misuse of religious freedom. Many businesses still oppose gay rights (Chick-fil-A, the Salvation Army, etc.).
The NRA buys votes from Republican politicians such as Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and Bruce Poliquin, who espouse the bully NRA line, “the more guns the better.”
The imitation Nazi “alt-right” movement seems to consist of bullies marching around with their guns and tiki torches, trying to scare people.
Women don’t commit mass killings the way men do, perhaps because most women have empathy toward others. Women and sympathetic men marching against immoral behavior and high school kids speaking out against murder in their schools need support.
Men have always controlled government and have made a mess of it. Let’s give women an equal chance to run the country and to try stopping the bullies running roughshod over us.
Ellen Field, New Gloucester
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