Category Archives: Abortion Rights

Connecting the Dots

Political polls have waned in recent years as reliable measures of public sentiment. The complex world of cyber communications has rendered accurate assessments nearly impossible to measure. Apart from the unexpected twists and turns of daily events, the American public seems to have decided their choices well before election day. The 2024 choice for chief executive began in the fall of 2016 with the release of the Hollywood Access clip between host, Billy Bush and guest, Donald Trump.

The vulgar misogyny revealed in that tape offended every thinking woman across the country. Following Trump’s surprise victory outrage spilled over as women from every point across the nation protested that an unfit and unacceptable man had reached the highest office in the land. Two months later approximately 500,000 women traveled to Washington DC to protest Trump’s ascendence to office, while sister marches gathered across all 50 states, with more around the world, numbering somewhere around 4 million women.

Not long after this historic march the “Me Too” movement gathered momentum. From prominent celebrities such as Mira Sorvino and Ashley Judd, to everyday women, all shared their #MeToo story across the internet. Clearly sexism and predatory male behavior had touched all of our lives, at one point or another, and women were through with bad behavior.

A flurry of political activity followed the March as well. According to Time Magazine women seeking elected office jumped to a 350% increase from 2016, with many winning seats in state legislatures, governorships, and federal offices. Vice President Harris was not the first woman to seek the vice presidency, but she is the first elected to office. Other women came forward with stories directly linked to Trump. E. Jean Carrol, and Stephanie Clifford, among others, spoke out to expose the neanderthal behavior of the 45th president. From their courage Mr. Trump has been convicted of sexual assault and financial fraud.

Not long after his election Trump packed the Supreme Court with inexperienced and disingenuous judges who overturned hard-won medical protections for American women. In 2022’s Dobbs V Jackson Women’s Health Organization fifty years of reproductive rights were gone almost at once. Roe V Wade died, along with an increased number of women and girls, especially in those states with new draconian medical restrictions. The viability of fetuses, life threatening complications for the mother, and victims of incest and rape found no physician willing to risk medical assistance.

More than Trump’s kissing up to tyrants like Putin, more than the January 6th coup attempt, more than inflation or immigration, or his serious legal problems, none have impacted more Americans than predatory male offenses and the right for a woman to direct her own life.

No poll can measure the deep-seated outrage women collectively feel at this moment, two days before the 2024 presidential election. To examine each episode separately from 2016 to now doesn’t fit a pollster’s brief questionnaire—but linking them together over a period of time does, much like connecting the dots on paper reveals a persuasive picture. 

Outside of some fluke or other Trump antics, Kamala Harris will prevail on Tuesday.

Postscript, 11/9/24. Little did we realize the number of women suffering from Stockholm syndrome across America.

Gail Chumbley is a history educator and writer.

They Were Wrong

“Slave owners and white racists were afraid that the world they had always known was slipping away from them. Fear was a great motivator—fear of change, fear of losing power, fear being that they were wrong. The roots of white anxiety over threats to enslavement and to legalize white supremacy ran deep.”

John Meacham, And There was Light. Random House, 2022, page 55.

The power of this passage left me stunned. A whirlwind of thoughts rushed all at once, promptly crystallizing into one central truth; the power of privilege and racial superiority in America has not changed in 250 years. Not. One. Bit.

Meacham’s book, a biography of Lincoln, focuses on the shaping events that made Lincoln arguably America’s greatest President. However, those same circumstances left the Southern slave power deeply offended, seething with hate and lethally dangerous. The metastasizing rancor simmered and boiled until the hate ultimately exploded into Civil War, and to Lincoln’s 1865 murder.

An 1820 law, the Missouri Compromise, sounded the first alarm below the Mason-Dixon Line. That slavery could be limited through any federal legislative act left the ruling Planter class touchy and suspicious. Sensitive to any criticism of Southern honor  and way of life inspired bitterness and fury.

Congressmen and Senators frequently squared off years before the crack of gunfire and the clash of steel. A Massachusetts Senator, Charles Sumner, endured a severe beating on the Senate floor for a fiery anti-slavery address. So volatile became the rhetoric that the House chamber adopted a “gag rule” that prohibited any mention of slavery in any form. Censorship abounded in Dixie, as well. Any abolitionists tracts, or books, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin quickly landed in the trash bin, tossed out by Southern postal officials.

As Northern abolitionists grew more strident, Southerners grew more militant. The right to oppress and engage in human trafficking was viewed as part of the Southern landscape, and auction blocks proceeded to conduct commerce in human flesh. For victims of this trade, violence, rape, and fear remained the unquestioned prerogative of the planter class.

For abolitionists and Southerners a flash of arms became only a matter of time.

The politics of slavery entered houses of worship where politicized clergy twisted the Bible inside out to condemn or justify the right to own another person. Today’s Southern Methodist and Southern Baptists churches are enduring relics of the ecclesiastical war before the shooting war.

After four bloody years, as the guns finally silenced, the era of Reconstruction began in the hopes for a new America. Emancipated freedmen under the protection of Yankee occupiers began exercising their right to vote, enter into civil marriage, attend schools through the Freedman’s Bureau, all through the efforts of the Federal Government. However, Southern whites, still simmered and bided their time, determined and unrepentant. The shooting may have stopped, but the war was not over.

To instill compliance a guerrilla campaign of terror suppressing former slaves emerged. The Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia, and the White League galloped through the night, masked and menacing. These former Confederates spread fear and committed murder against any person of color who dared claim the blessings of American Liberty. 

Today, in the 21st Century, strikingly similar dynamics have reemerged.

The moment in 2008 as Barack Obama became 44th President of the United States, white power interests again reared up.

For many of us this election appeared to be proof that America had turned a positive corner in race relations, But almost at once border state Senator, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky quickly reacted decreeing “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Not long after Congressional Republicans sunsetted a vital clause in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The provision protected black voters from acts of discrimination at the polls. McConnell’s handy work placed the onus, once again on the voter to prove they were illegally denied. (Much like the old Jim Crow poll taxes and literacy tests.)

Then Trumpism arrived.

This time the violence on Capitol Hill came in the form of a coup. On January 6, 2021 white supremacists stormed the halls of Congress to stop the counting of the 2020 Electoral Vote. Back in the 1860’s, during the Civil War, no such invasion took place because the Union North stood fast against rebellion.

Human trafficking once again is considered acceptable as long as conducted by rich and powerful whites. For example, Ghislaine Maxwell, a prolific procurer of young girls for the Epstein Pedophilia Ring quipped “these girls, they’re nothing,” so reminiscent of the 19th Century.

Christian Nationalism again warps American churches. Forgotten is the example set by Jesus, and the message of his life. These same “Christians” now take pleasure in the brutality and suppression of others, willfully turning a blind eye to racism, pedophilia and misogyny, as long as the rhetoric is that of white exceptionalism.

Fearing their alpha-position slipping away, white nationalists, too, are simmering and lethally dangerous. Though hate group names have changed, the mission remains the same: fear and suppression. Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, neo-Nazi’s, MAGA, and Christian Nationalists today gallop through cyber space, surfacing for violence as was done on January 6th. Federally sanctioned ICE agents, masked and anonymous, menace American cities day and night terrorizing the weak and vulnerable and violating due process and legally obtained warrants.

The same dynamics are in play, fear of a changing America, fear of being wrong, and fearful of losing control.

Those who witnessed the dissolution of the Union believed their blood-soaked sacrifice settled for all time the issue of race and power in America. But that is clearly false.

But then is now. Now is then. Eras are intricately and forever intertwined. This nation has remembered nothing and again fallen for the same old hate and boastful ignorance of their infamous forefathers.

And they are still wrong.

Chumbley is the author of the two-part memoir, River of January, and River of January: Figure Eight. She has penned two stage plays, “Clay,” exploring the life of Henry Clay, “Wolf By the Ears,” a study of racism in America, and “Peer Review,” where 47 is confronted by four past presidents.