After 21 people were killed, the Republican party’s newest enemy is doors | Arwa Mahdawi – The Guardian

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It can be hard to get your head around what rightwingers in the US actually believe. On the one hand, they claim to love babies; on the other hand, theyre against government funds going towards helping to feed babies. They claim to love freedom and hate government meddling, but then theyre frenetically trying to pass bills that would take away a womans freedom over her own body and allow the government to meddle in intimate reproductive choices. Like I said, theyre a complex bunch! Still, Ive mapped their moral compass as best I can, and compiled this handy cheatsheet to help understand where conservatives stand on various issues. Here you go.

Essential to life, liberty and the pursuit of freedom; should remain freely available and shouldnt be controlled:

Highly dangerous and must be banned or tightly controlled:

Yep, you read that last item right: it seems doors are the newest enemy of the Republican party. In the wake of the horrific elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas where 19 children and two teachers were killed by a teenager with military-grade weapons some Republicans are choosing to channel their energy towards the important question of door control.

You want to talk about how we could have prevented the horror that played out across the street? the Texas senator Ted Cruz said on Wednesday, while standing outside Robb elementary school. Having one door that goes in and out of the school, having armed police officers at that one door.

An ordinary person would have paused for a second after saying something so patently ridiculous and then, hit by the realization that they had just blamed the massacre of school children on the problem of too many doors and not enough guns, curled up into a little ball of shame. Not Cancn Cruz, though. Cruz has demonstrated time and time again that he is incapable of shame. No, instead of realizing hed said something inane, Cruz just doubled down on it; he was so pleased with the concept of door reform that he repeated the idea later that day on Fox News.

Cruz isnt the only Republican waging a war on doors: the issue has long been a favourite talking point among conservatives trying to deflect from the idea of gun reform. After a 2018 shooting at a high school in Houston, for example, the Texas lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, blamed the massacre on doors. From what we know, [the shooter] walked in with a long coat and a shotgun under his coat, Patrick said during a news conference. Its 90 degrees. Had there been one single entrance possibly for every student, maybe he would have been stopped There are too many entrances and too many exits to our over 8,000 campuses in Texas.

It probably wont surprise you to hear that the National Rifle Association (NRA), who bankroll a long list of Republican politicians, including Cruz, are the ones responsible for coming up with the too-many-doors talking point. In 2013, in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, the NRA assembled a taskforce to come up with a school safety proposal that didnt involve meaningful gun control. The result was a dystopian 225-page report that included recommendations like: arm teachers; build bigger fences; get rid of trees; design windows, framing, and anchoring systems to minimize the effects of explosive blasts, gunfire and forced entry. These are recommendations, let me remind you, for schools. Not for maximum security prisons for schools. The report also contains pages and pages of recommendations about doors, including the idea that there should be a single, controlled entry point and that doors should have ballistic protective glass.

Many of the NRAs recommendations, it should be said, had been implemented by Robb elementary. In 2020, the Uvalde school district received $69,000 in state grants to enhance physical security in Texas public schools, which included installing exterior doors with push bars and door-locking systems. None of that stopped the shooter. It shouldnt need to be said, but doors are not responsible for school massacres. Guns are.

To be clear: Cruz and his buddies in the NRA may be morally bankrupt but they are not entirely stupid. They know very well that guns are dangerous. Thats why guns were banned from Donald Trumps speech at the NRA conference on Friday. It seems that they decided door control wouldnt quite cut it in that particular situation.

Perhaps you saw this headline and thought it probably referred to something that happened a very, very long time ago? Nope. The Chilean state has just apologized to a woman who was forcibly sterilized by doctors in 2002 because she was HIV positive. This wasnt a one-off: according to a 2004 study of the 23 women who were sterilized after learning they were HIV-positive, 50% did so under pressure or had been sterilized without their knowledge. Theres also, of course, a very long history of sterilization being forced on Indigenous women around the world. Rather than being a thing of the past, it still happens in places like Canada today.

For years Anthony Dixon was considered Britains most influential pelvic surgeon. Now a government inquiry has found that more than 200 women were harmed after he carried out unnecessary procedures on them.

I bloody hope so.

The bill makes it clear that silence or passivity dont equal consent.

Three hundred and twenty-nine years ago a woman called Elizabeth Johnson Jr was accused of witchcraft and sentenced to death. By some sort of witchery she managed to escape being hanged but was still branded as a witch. And shed still be considered a witch to this day if it werent for a bunch of meddling kids: in 2021 a group of middle-schoolers in Massachusetts took on her case and have finally cleared her name. Shes the last of the Salem witch trials convicted to be cleared.

After 19 years on air, Ellen DeGeneres has walked away from her famous talkshow. The last few years havent been great for DeGeneres: shes faced accusations of being one of the meanest people alive and presiding over a toxic workplace. Still, while shes very far from perfect, its important to remember that Ellen has done an enormous amount for the LGBTQ+ community. As a gay woman, Ill never forget the impact of her bravely coming out in 1997.

In a plot twist that everyone could have seen coming the romance novelist who wrote an essay titled How to Murder Your Husband has been found guilty of murdering her husband. You might be wondering if he was murdered with a door seeing as how deadly those things are? No, weirdly enough, it was a gun.

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After 21 people were killed, the Republican party's newest enemy is doors | Arwa Mahdawi - The Guardian