I’d apologize for all the “get your ass out there and vote” reblogs, but as a disabled (queer) woman who can’t vote yet due to my migrant status, I’m relying on others to do the right thing and use their vote on November 6th to get out there and turn this train wreck into a rescue mission.
And allow me to make it abundantly clear, if you are able to vote in this election and you choose not to for false equivalency “but they’re all the saaaaame” nonsense, you are complicit in the evil that is about to unfold, and I’ll see you in hell.
I am in a liberal county in California. It’s overwhelmingly Democratic. My vote for senate might not “matter,” but I don’t care.
I’m still voting. Why?
Because “down-ticket” votes matter, too.
Look into your school board. They set the textbooks that set the tone for your region. They educate future voters. They matter. Look into the city level, and county level. They set local ordinances that can change things. Look into your state propositions, those can make a huge difference. Look at your representatives. Even if you can’t vote someone out of office, vote against them if they’re a piece of shit. Make them realize they’re not loved.
Fuck.
People fought and died for our right to vote.
It’s a right. It’s a responsibility.
VOTE.
I don’t care if you hate the system. I hate it, too. I don’t care if you’re “only voting for the lesser evil” they’re still less evil. I don’t care if you want a revolution. Vote, and then get back to planning that revolution.
VOTE.
Here’s what a nice older hippie I used to work with told me:
She said that when her daughter turned eighteen and complained that “voting doesn’t matter anyway”, she looked at her child and she said in her firm Mom Voice
“Even if you don’t vote, you go to that polling site and you go and stand in that voting booth. You show up out of respect for everyone who has ever fought to give you that right that you want to throw away.”
fuck every democrat who says the issue of trans rights is a “distraction.” fuck every single liberal who say that the threat of stripping every trans person of legal recognition is a red herring or a losing issue and if we focus on it too long we’ll throw the election. we’re talking about human rights, access to medical care, sex education, discrimination, citizenship, and a whole lot else, for millions of people.
trans people aren’t a “distraction.” we’re human beings. the fact that so many liberals turn their backs on trans people is fucking despicable.
Okay…but this, right here? This is exactly what the Republican party wants. Young voters turning against the Democratic party and either not voting at all, or voting in favor of some third party candidate that has literally zero chance of pulling in enough votes to win. They want division among the ranks. They want to split our vote.
In political terms, calling something a ‘distraction’ means it’s a distraction tactic, not that the issue itself isn’t important. The Republican party has a very longstanding history of dropping hints of major policy changes right before big elections in the hopes of getting the “hot-headed liberals” all fired up about it so we start bickering among ourselves. They deliberately drop issues that they know are hot-button topics because these are the topics that have the potential to be the most divisive.
They’re awful but they’re not dumb. They know trans rights is an issue that could potentially split the democratic vote. It’s an issue that’s very heavily weighted toward the younger side of the party, which again, was a deliberate move on their part. If they can convinced you that the “big bad Democrats don’t care about you little trans and nonbinary kids so why bother,” then they’ve effectively won the election in a walk because the democrats went in divided–again.
Look, the democratic party isn’t perfect. Not by a long shot. But it’s literally the only party that has a snowball’s chance in hell at overtaking the republican majority right now. If we as trans and nonbinary individuals ever want our identities respected and protected, it’s the only party that’s going to be able to get us there, because it’s the party going in the direction we need to go. If you want to vote in favor of our rights, then vote Democrat. No number of videos with pennies is going to change the fact that right now, in this political climate, third party candidates are not going to have enough power to effect the changes we want.
Warning against something being a distraction doesn’t mean “don’t look at it or worry about it,” it means, “hey, I know this is majorly upsetting, and absolutely something needs to be done, but don’t let it divide us.” It’s literally because the issue is so important that democrats are warning against it as a distraction tactic–if we want to prevent that kind of change from happening under republican rule, we have to keep our heads and not let them keep us from voting as a unified party.
Please don’t let the political rhetoric make you think that the democratic party isn’t going to be fighting for us and our rights. That’s kind of exactly what the Republican party wants you to think. It’s a division tactic. Don’t fall for it.
The Republican party has a very longstanding history of dropping hints of major policy changes right before big elections in the hopes of getting the “hot-headed liberals” all fired up about it so we start bickering among ourselves.
THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS
I’ve been voting since 1998. This is what they do every single election.
Wait but what are the democrats doing about this again?
Well, they can’t do jack shit unless they get a majority in either the House or the Senate, preferably both.
But in case you forgot, Democrats made it legal for trans people to change their gender on their passports. Democrats lifted the ban on trans people in the military that had been in place since the 1960s. Democrats have nominated a trans woman for Governor of Vermont.
STOP WITH THE “BOTH PARTIES ARE THE SAME” RHETORIC!
Are Democrats doing enough? Probably not. But they’ve done something and unlike Republicans aren’t trying to actively roll back the things they have done.
Every Republican is a little hall-monitor-ass wuss. Jesus, this guy didn’t get shoved into nearly enough lockers as a kid.
Like honestly, this is the most earnest, cute, delightfully juvenile, fun-for-the-whole-family, non-partisan sign vandalism I’ve ever seen. Who could possibly be mad at this? This fucking roaster is fuming mad about “political violence”. It’s fucking hilarious.
Democrats everywhere finding pipe bombs in their mailboxes but googly eyes are political violence.
This week’s current issue in mental health: the price of medication. With numerous people sharing stories about how medication was the first step when they were getting help, we wanted to point out how the cost of these treatments is prohibitive especially for people without insurance.
Wait , over 500 dollars for propananolol?! I got that for free? What is wrong with your country?!
Woke up to this. If you are unaware, Nationalist is code word for Nazi. White Nationalists are Nazis with a different name. They are for “ethnic cleansing” which means Genocide. Nazi announces he is a Nazi.
And he wants to get rid of trans/non-binary folks. The same thing first happened back then when Nazis took down the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Science of Sexuality). They had so much data about trans folks in general and Nazis burnt it down with all the records and data. This is how a fascist regime starts.
Since the 2010 election, 24 states have implemented new restrictions on voting. Alabama now requires a photo ID to cast a ballot. Other states, like Ohio and Georgia, have enacted “use-it-or-lose” laws, which strike voters from registration rolls if they have not participated in an election within a proscribed period of time.
Mother Jones journalist Ari Berman, author of Give Us the Ballot, says that many of the restrictions are part of a broader Republican strategy to tighten access to the ballot — an effort that was bolstered in 2013 by the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holderruling.
“[That] decision,” Berman explains, “said that those states with the longest histories of discrimination no longer had to approve their voting changes with the federal government.”
As a result, Berman says, “You’re seeing a national effort by the Republican Party to try to restrict voting rights, and it’s playing out in states all across the country.”
Many of the new voting restrictions are occurring in states like Georgia, North Dakota and Kansas, which have critical races in the 2018 election. Berman says that it’s still unclear what the impact of the restrictions will be on the upcoming election, but he remains hopeful that the tide might be shifting on voter restrictions.
Berman points out that an amendment to Florida’s 2018 ballot would restore voting rights to more than 1 million former felons who are currently disenfranchised in the state.
“The 2018 election could go in two different ways,” he says. “It could be tainted by voter suppression, or it could be remembered as an election in which voting rights were expanded for millions of people.“
Photo: Voters cast ballots during early voting last week at C.T. Martin Natatorium and Recreation Center in Atlanta. Georgia has blocked approximately 53,000 voter registrations. Jessica McGowan/Getty Images
wupacing 