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At every turn, the conservative movement is putting women and children in their crosshairs, enabling mass shootings in schools and domestic violence attackers to be armed with guns, at the same time as they are inciting their supporters to threaten violence against people with whom they disagree.
It has gotten so bad it is now identifiable as a voluntary violation of morals.
Moral depravity: “A state of voluntary violation of morals, values, customs, or manners leading to an aberrant style of personality commonly known as antisocial psychopathy.” Also known as the dark rot corrupting the U.S. government from within.
The Right to Life Outweighs the Right to Bear Arms
“The right to life surely outweighs the right to bear arms,” a Sky News reporter pushed a fleeing Tennessee Republican Representative Andy Ogles. There was nothing but silence in response.
The right to life surely outweighs the right to bear arms? No, it does not, in effect.
Nashville Republican Representative Andy Ogles, whose district — thanks to Tennessee Republicans redrawing the district lines last year to gerrymander the red state even further — includes Covenant, the Christian school in which there was a horrific mass shooting just two days ago on Monday March the 27, ran away when confronted by a Sky News reporter (it took someone from the UK to push like this) with the notion:
“The right to life surely outweighs the right to bear arms… Does the right to life outweigh the right to bear arms?”
This confrontation on Tuesday occurred during questioning about Ogles’ obscene family Christmas photo (above), which included his children and wife posed around a tree holding guns with the caption, “"MERRY CHRISTMAS! The Ogles Family," the post reads, adding in quotes: "The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference - they deserve a place of honor with all that's good."
This is the Republican position: Guns deserve a place of honor with all that’s good. Over children.
SKY NEWS TO OGLES: “Do you regret your family gun photo? Why did you take it down from your Facebook feed now?” Rep. @AndyOgles
(R) - who reps the district #CovenantSchool is in - didn’t seem to want to talk about it, but says he doesn’t regret it.
Moral depravity, you ask?
Why yes.
This man, Congressman Andy Ogles, took nearly $25,000 he claimed in a GoFundME was meant for a child burial garden and he won’t say what he did with it. He used the photo of a stillborn child to grift, “promising a place for burial of babies with benches for families, life-size statue of Jesus. It never happened, and he won’t say where money went.”
Contagion of Cowardice
A contagion of cowardice spread among Republican lawmakers like Speaker McCarthy and Andy Ogles on Tuesday as they ran away from the press, loath to answer questions about their anti-safety, gun-fetishizing stances after the mass shooting in Nashville took the lives of 6 people, including 3 children.
The 28 year-old-school shooter legally bought the seven firearms that were hidden at home even though that shooter, Audrey Hale, was under care for an emotional disorder, according to Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy has refused to answer questions about the Nashville shooting and when reporters tried to ask him anything about guns, he ran away.
McCarthy was asked at least two questions about Nashville including, “should there be any gun restrictions at all?” He responded by not even looking at the reporters and walking away. Speaker McCarthy gave the weakest imaginable response to the question.
“Republicans like McCarthy appear to lack the courage to state their belief that sacrificing the lives of young children is acceptable in defense of an unlimited Second Amendment,” Jason Easley wrote in PoliticusUSA.
Moral depravity is the theme
We have devolved into a state of moral depravity due to the dark money corruption that runs the U.S. government. This money attracts lawmakers who have no moral center, people like leader of the Republican Party Donald Trump, let’s say. Or George Santos. Or Andy Ogles. A party led by someone who bragged he could shoot someone and not lose voters does not attract the best people.
These lawmakers are why children are being murdered in their classrooms.
They vote against abortion putting women and young girls’ lives and health at risk, but enable mass slaughter of actual children.
No lawmaker who votes against gun control should be allowed to argue against abortion without pushback from a free press.
It’s absurd and obscene position, given that the leading cause of death for children in the United States is guns, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
This means that guns have more rights than children do, largely because of the party that calls themselves “pro-life.”
The Bill of Rights to the Constitution states in the 14th amendment (why is it that we so rarely hear about any amendments but the second?), “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…”
It’s clear that guns pose a threat to the right to life. Yet an inanimate object has more rights than human beings, including children, in the United States.
Hiding behind concern for fetuses
What kind of movement shields itself under the cover of concern for fetuses, while actively ensuring that dangerous people who have threatened women and children are allowed access to as many weapons as they please?
It’s the same movement that works in the dark, has corrupted our judicial system and is judge shopping to overturn rulings they don’t like, and has seemingly bought off so called “representatives” in Congress.
The violence isn’t an accident
A knife-wielding Trump supporter threatened a woman and her children outside of the Manhattan Criminal Court on Tuesday.
Trump took his authoritarian circus show to Waco, but claimed he wasn’t signaling what a trip to Waco symbolizes. Meanwhile, his followers got the messages he sent, either from his social media postings or his rally rantings, or both.
A Trump supporter was arrested on Tuesday for threatening a mother and children with knife outside the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, which began preparing over a week ago for a possible indictment against the man known for inciting violence.
Angela Rucker, 39, was holding a yellow sign with black lettering that said, “I’m With Trump Are You?” when she got embroiled in an argument with two women, one with two small kids and the other with a child in a stroller, according to Lucien Chalfen, spokesman for the New York State Office of Court Administration.
As the verbal dispute flared up, Rucker whipped out a knife from her hip pocket and started waving it at the woman in a threatening way, the spokesman added.
A letter sent from Florida to the Manhattan DA contained white powder and threatened to kill the DA.
The rally Trump held also glorified violence and elevated people in prison for their involvement in the domestic terrorist attack of January 6th into martyrs.
It’s partisan. But it shouldn’t be.
Basic safety is now partisan.
In the summer of 2022 after mass shootings at a Uvalde, Texas elementary school and a Buffalo, New York supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood, 34 Republican senators voted against the bipartisan gun safety bill, which was itself brought by Republican Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis and Democratic Senators Chris Murphy and Kyrsten Sinema (who is no longer a Democrat).
If some of those names have you side-eying this bill, you wouldn’t be wrong. But in this country, we take the crumbs we can get when it comes to the Right to Life.
Fourteen House Republicans finally got on board with Democrats to pass first major federal gun safety legislation in decades, which did not ban any weapons and was a country mile short of what Americans want in polls and indeed what President Biden and the Democrats pushed for.
While Mitch McConnell and 14 Republican Senators joined Democrats for this watered down barely asking for anything gun safety. bill, over in the House it was a different story.
The top House Republicans whipped members against the bill.
House Republican leadership deliberately tried to obstruct a bill that included millions for school safety, mental health, and other incentives that yes, we need, but are not the root of the problem. Those measures were added because they address what NRA funded lawmakers pretend cause the problem of school mass shootings.
Only 14 found a spine. Fourteen House Republicans managed to vote for the mildest gun safety bill you can imagine.
America’s uniquely lethal intimate partner violence problem
The bill that was so hard for Republicans to vote for made significant changes to the process when someone ages 18 to 21 goes to buy a firearm. Yes, people who aren’t allowed to drink in some states. Those people.
The bill gave Democrats their much pushed for closing of the “boyfriend loophole”—a loophole in domestic violence law that didn’t include intimate partners who didn’t live together, might not share children or be married. This is a pretty big deal because America also has what Everytown calls a “ Uniquely Lethal Intimate Partner Violence Problem.”
Intimate partner violence and gun violence in the United States are inextricably linked, impacting millions of women, families, and communities across the country. Abusers with firearms are five times more likely to kill their female victims,1 and guns further exacerbate the power and control dynamic commonly used by abusers to inflict emotional abuse and exert coercive control over their victims.
The statistics on the prevalence of intimate partner violence with a gun in the United States are staggering: Every month, an average of 70 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner.2 ..
And beyond the daily toll of this problem, in more than half of mass shootings over the past decade, the perpetrator shot a current or former intimate partner or family member as part of the rampage.4 The ripple effects of firearms in the hands of an abuser extend far beyond the intimate relationship—affecting children who witness or live with it and the family members, coworkers, and law enforcement officers who respond to it.
But guess what?
The right to life is not as important as the right to own a gun, according to Trump judge
In February of 2023, following the Supreme Court’s expansion of gun rights in 2022, a US court, that is 5th Circuit Judge Cory Wilson, a Republican Judge appointed by that stellar font of moral authority and deep care and respect for women and children then President Donald Trump, determined that actually, abusers have more rights to own a gun than their victims do to live.
So a Texas man who had been subject to a protection order that banned him from owning a gun, harassing or threatening his ex-girlfriend *AND THEIR CHILD*, had his charges dismissed for being found with guns overturned, as the court struck down a 30 year law that barred people under a domestic violence restraining order from owning guns.
The ban as it applies to this case, Mr Wilson said, was something that "our ancestors would never have accepted".
Stolen justice
That court is also the place where conservatives have “built a pipeline through the 5th Circuit...to ensure they can receive whatever political result they want,” according to Democracy Docket, who also observed with no small amount of panic that conservatives have “seized control of the U.S. Supreme Court.”
The grim, tragic and obscene reality of the “pro-life” movement is backed by dark, evil corporate greed including the Russian asset-acting, tax-exempt “National rifle association,” which provided Russian officials access to political organizations in the run-up to the 2016 election. This organization has had such an incredible influence over Republican lawmakers that it has been able to stop any kind of major gun reform for over a decade.
A Democrat-led report indicates that top NRA officials were aware of Russian agents/former Russian government officials’ “links with the Kremlin even as they sought to work more closely together under the banner of gun rights.”
Evil acts against humanity
Perhaps this is a good time to remind Republicans that Putin is engaging in genocide and has an expansionist agenda that they threaten won’t stop at Ukraine. So any organization involved in pushing his agenda here in the U.S. is associated with evil acts against humanity.
The gunning down of children at their school qualifies. It’s almost as if there is some agenda to destroy western freedom through stochastic terrorism while enabling random acts of terror.
Children are being slaughtered in schools due to the moral depravity of lawmakers who are being gerrymandered into untouchable positions and can be bought off, threatened or simply do not care and so look the other way. Meanwhile, school shootings are becoming so common place that students who survived the Oxford, Michigan school shooting and Newtown, Connecticut school shootings experienced a repeat during a Michigan State mass shooting in February of this year that killed three students and wounded five others.
For our children, for our own souls, for our own morality, we must work at the local level to insist on fair maps, judges who are accountable to justice rather than a partisan agenda for either left or right, and lawmakers who are responsive to The People.
Moral Depravity And The Contagion Of Cowardice