I'm a gun owner. I'm a concealed carrier.  But I refuse to count myself as part of such a selfish, ignorant, myopic community as the one that has formed around guns and gun ownership.

We can still get along.

My friend and I were talking politics and a question arose:

What can Republicans do to help repair the bridges they've burned?  How could they reestablish the lines of communication and cooperation that they've deliberately cut by treating everyone who doesn't share their ideology as their MORTAL ENEMY?

I've made a list of a few simple things Republicans can do that would very quickly get the country and the relationship between our two parties fully back on track.

(Not that they'd ever actually do any of these things...)

Corporate crooks like Kevin McCarthy pander to the prejudices of people like Lauren Boebert in order to use them as both their attack dogs and as a distraction.  That's a dangerous game to play, especially when someone like McCarthy forgets that while the bigotry and hatred is just an act for him, people like Lauren Boebert truly believe in the their twisted MAGA ideology.

When he spoke out against Trump's insurrection on 1/6, his mask slipped.  And the True Believers, like Lauren Boebert....they noticed.

"Hurt people hurt people. Praying that those who committed this hate crime can one day accept the love of Jesus."

Anthony Huber's only brush with the law came as a result of getting in a fight with his brother when he was 18 years old. Kyle Rittenhouse's supporters have twisted that event into a series of charges that make him look like Hannibal Lecter.

The truth: after that one spot of trouble he had as a teenager, he became a productive citizen, charismatic, energetic, and a passionate civil rights activist.

Gaige Grosskreutz, a trained EMT, was briefly held for burglary and released in light of additional evidence and suspects emerging. He also once paid a small fine for being over the legal limit for alcohol while carrying his CCW. Supporters of Kyle Rittenhouse have twisted those incidents too, portraying him as a habitual violent felon who robs people and carries illegal weapons.

The truth:  while Kyle Rittenhouse styled himself as a medic, Gaige Grosskreutz is the real deal, a trained EMT and also a passionate civil rights activist who was LEGALLY carrying a concealed handgun, treating approximately 10 people in Kenosha that night for wounds sustained from rubber bullets, pepper spray, and beatings from batons.

Two decent, compassionate human beings who are constantly demonized by the absolute biggest piles of human excrement in the entire right wing: 

Kyle Rittenhouse supporters.

Like every lgbtq kid raised in a fundamentalist Christian/Catholic household, I was relentlessly, brutally GROOMED to  be straight.

No one has switched off of trump or trumpism. We're just seeing greater turnout on the anti-trump side in the first national election since the attack on January 6th. Everyone who was a Nazi before is it Nazi now. Everyone who was against Nazis before is against Nazis now. Every single campaign Dollar on these midterms was wasted. Everyone loaded exactly the way they were going to vote before any of the rally's, ads, debates, and everything else campaigns ran to try to convince people to vote for their candidates. If you look at Social media, you will see that Republicans are now talking about using violence rather than engaging in the electoral process because they realized that the electoral process does not work for them anymore. People don't want to elect candidates whose agenda is to deprive people of basic human rights. The Republican party wants to be seen as and function as a serious political party while also doing the things that make that impossible, such as removing people's basic human rights, as in their efforts to overturn Lawrence V Texas so that the 11 states with laws that make it illegal just to be gay can start enforcing those laws again. You can't have both, it has to be one or the other and they will not choose to be an actual serious political party. They will lean hard into Nazism.

We (rightfully) accuse Republicans of failing to empathize with us on every issue, all the time. But when it comes to this issue, guns, we are failing in exactly the same way to empathize with people for whom guns are inextricably linked with their identities not just as americans, but as human beings. People who would not have protein in their diet if they couldn't HUNT for it. People who put their life on the line in military service and came away with no skills other than firearms and have used those skills to make a living. People who live in wild hog country and could easily be killed by them if limited to only bolt action rifles or pistols. People who normally would be on our side on gay rights, black lives matter, abortion rights, and they even voted for Joe biden, but in state and local elections they vote for Republicans because of our inability to empathize with the fact that Firearms are integral to their daily lives.

 We have to do better. 

We could take a very large piece out of their voter base and be able to enact the kind of policies that would actually address the root causes of mass shootings rather than just putting a Band-Aid on them by Banning certain guns or all guns entirely.

Absolutely hate making their argument for them on this, but guns are not the root cause of mass shootings. We have, by far, the largest income inequality Gap in the first world. Direct result of this government the suicide rate is gone up in the past from one in every 8,000 people to one in every five, which works out to about 40,000 suicides each year. And as more unstable people get swept up in the 53%, and rising, of Americans who don't even make basic cost of living, those suicides are increasingly going to come in the form people who want the world to burn, who want to take as many people as possible as the price they see themselves exacting for them being condemned to a hopeless future.

Just as I give them that, I also have to emphasize that it was the Republican Party who has helped corporations kill organized labor for the past Century so that we have no recourse to negotiate for a living wage. Just in the past couple decades, the increase in cost of living has outpaced wage growth by 392% for those of us who are below the corporate upper management level.

This means that for almost the entire time during which the Old Testament took place, the Israelites didn't even worship the one God that was the main character at the center of every story in the Old testament.

Remember the story about the Israelites losing faith in God and instead worshiping Baal, the golden calf?

The fact that they were polytheists from the beginning all the way up to their arrival in Jerusalem completely invalidates the entire narrative thrust of this event and every other event in the Old Testament whose moral revolves around adhering to their faith in Yahweh, the One True God. 

The Old Testament was written around 721 BC. The locations around that time frame were basically correct, but the further back the author went, the less accurate the places and chronology became. The locations from the later part of the Book of Genesis didn't actually exist for another Thousand Years After those stories supposedly took place.

The Israelites were never slaves in Egypt. Egypt was actually conquered and ruled by another nation of people for about a hundred years right smack in the middle of the time when the Israelites were supposedly slaves there. The Egyptians also kept impeccable records of who they did keep as slaves. The Israelites were never part of that and were proven by historical records to live in a completely different part of the world at that time.

The story of Moses being placed in the basket as a baby and floated down the river was lifted entirely from a religious myth invented by a completely different nation of people.  This is just ONE of many other stories in the Bible that were also borrowed from the religious mythologies of other nations. 

The Bible is ENTIRELY contradicted by historical record, yet it has been used by its devotees as justification for ruining COUNTLESS lives, spilling OCEANS of blood, and generally being LITERALLY THE WORST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD.

Time to wake up, MAN up, and stop blaming your atrocities on a myth.   

In one browser tab, they fat shame anyone with a larger size body and anyone who promotes body positivity and fat acceptance.  Their other browser tabs are occupied by a whole lot of big girl porn.  

Out of all those browser tabs, the only one they should be ashamed of is the one where they are pouring a disturbing amount of energy into their effort to make people with larger bodies feel as bad about themselves as possible.  

Yet the other tabs are the ones they would never confess to opening.

The should be no shame in being attracted to BBWs.  They're big.  And they're beautiful.