Last night, Democrat Doug Jones defeated accused serial pedophile Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate special election.
It's beginning to look a lot like Resistance, eeeeeeverywhere you go...
(^^^I stole that from Twitter. Twitter was like Disneyland on New Year's Eve last night.)
So the disturbing thing about Jones' win is that 65% of white women voted for Roy Moore.
The Washington Post reported on Nov. 16 that "eight women have come forward to describe questionable behavior or to allege sexual assault by Roy Moore, Republican candidate for the Senate in Alabama." Multiple women are claiming Moore tried, aggressively and often, to have sex with them when they were 14 years old.
Fourteen-year-olds are children, so we're clear.
Supporters of Moore tore themselves--and the very fabric of their so-called "family values" party--into pieces defending him.
"God forgives him and so do I," they said. (I suppose God also forgives Bill Clinton for infidelity and lying under oath so that impeachment was unnecessary? I suppose God forgives the entire LGBTQ community for existing so we can stop discriminating against them? I could keep going...) "The women are being paid by Democrats to say this," they said. (Yeah. If I wanted to tip the scales in favor of Democrats winning a Senate seat, I'd go to a state where the scales are a little more loose. I would not go to Alabama.) "I don't believe the women," they said. (Unless it was Doug Jones who was being accused?) "I don't believe the women because women lie/these women are lying because they had bad reputations back then/because if it was true they would have come forward back then" etc etc etc insert every victim-blaming cliche you can possibly remember from the last million or so times this has happened. This is textbook rape culture.
Sarcasm alert! You gotta hand it to the Alabamans who were open and honest: "I don't want to give up a seat in the Senate" and "Doug Jones supports abortion so I can't vote for him." These people don't necessarily disbelieve the women. They just don't care what happened to them, what Moore did to them, and they want him elected anyway. Because "family values" and probably racism (via support of the white supremacist GOP and White House) and abortion.
Two thirds of white women in Alabama care more about protecting unborn children than children who have been born. That's my take on this. WashPo also reported:
“Abortion is a galvanizing issue in Alabama,” said Matt Barber, general counsel of Christian Civil Rights Watch, a conservative legal group, and a former dean at Liberty University. “President Obama said the social issues were so ’90s, but in flyover country, the desire not to be complicit in abortion homicide remains one of the top concerns.”
So Moore lost--does that mean abortion is not the single-issue powerhouse that it once was? Maybe. Again, WashPo: "...according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll in late November...41 percent of voters thought a candidate’s views on health care were most important, followed by moral conduct at 26 percent. Abortion trailed well behind at 14 percent."
Why did white women vote for Moore, then? Why did my demographic make this a nauseatingly close Senate race?
My guess, at the risk of over-simplifying things, is that being anti-choice might no longer be enough of a Republican vote-getter to hand an easy victory to a known sexual predator, but it's still enough to make for a nail-biter on election night.
And for what? Because the children are so precious? Jones alleged that Moore doesn't support renewing CHIP, which ensures 150,000 children from low-income families in Alabama.
What will you do, white women Moore voters, for the children in Alabama who have actually been born?
And last but by no means least: thank you, Black women. Ninety-seven percent of you--nearly a fifth of the voting population of Alabama--voted for Jones. Once again, you are social justice warriors and heroes of the resistance. I pledge to do my part to vote for your candidates and causes, amplify your voices, and continue to educate myself on systemic oppression and other ways to save the world so you don't have to keep doing it all by yourselves.