Republicans bad-mouthing the League isn’t new. Refusing to participate in League sponsored or moderated debates is not new. Declining to answer questions for the League’s wildly popular Voter Guides is not new. All these have been going on for at least 20 years now in New Mexico.
I have been with the League of Women Voters and part of the team that puts out the Voter Guide in New Mexico. Many Republicans and their country cousins, the Libertarians, often don’t bother to respond to our requests to answer questions for the VG. A few even whine that the League is a “librul” organization, so they won’t participate, even though it gives them a free (FREE!) platform to air their positions.
Sure, the concept of women voting is pretty liberal. As is the concept of government for the people, by consent of the governed. Republicans are saying that all these things are now wrong.
It says something about our society and the political landscape that some of the issues championed by the LWV were once considered nonpartisan and widely supported.
Have you ever heard a moderate or more liberal / progressive person bemoan:
granting non-landowners the right to vote
granting non- whites the right to vote
granting women the right to vote
taking steps to make voting more convenient in terms of hours or location.
Nope … but there are documented instances of right-wingers losing their minds raging in opposition to these.
And there are volumes of strident propaganda talking points that these right-wingers have at their fat cut&paste finger tips that attempt to MAGA-'SPLAIN that the USA is a “Republic” … was never meant to be a “Democracy” … that mostly argues for voting to be more related to acreage instead of pure population.
For me, I think the real divide is based on whether you care about facts and analysis and democracy. True democracy is based on everyone having a voice, not just the people whose views aren’t too far from yours.
Thirty to forty years ago when I was growing up in a conservative county in a purple Florida that hadn’t steered pure fascist, the league of women voters had a most decidedly center-right complexion. But their focus was on voter registration, voter education and non-partisan candidate questionnaires and voter guides. And those topics by their very nature, when undertaken with good intentions, lend themselves to progressive underpinnings. Outreach is by its very nature a movement toward expansion of rights and opportunities.
This is what DeSatan should be afraid of and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. It will “dump smelly and possibly harmful piles across beaches and dampening tourism season.”
Today is Saturday, so the first three digits are the countdown to the first indictment, then as the count goes up each day it’s the total number of indictments:
The league revealed that it had been denied permission by the Florida Department of Management Services to hold an outdoor rally on the steps of the Old Capitol in Tallahassee under a new DeSantis administration rule requiring groups to first get sponsorship from a sympathetic state agency.
The rule took effect March 1 and says the requested use of the space must be “consistent with the Agency’s official purposes.” Its stated purpose is to ensure that demonstrations are “conducted in a manner that protects public health and safety and ensures that state employees and officials can fulfill their responsibilities.”
I didn’t realize that the 1st Amendment had such severe restrictions on publicly owned
property.
ETA, maybe if they had guns then their demonstration would have been approved as being consistent with official State policy.
