Thirty Reasons Why I Can’t Imagine Ever Voting Republican

I’m sure more reasons will come to me later

No throat-clearing preface or introduction is needed. Let’s get to it, in alphabetical order:

1. Abortion. If zygotes, embryos, and fetuses were people, then the words zygote, embryo, and fetus would not exist — but they do, which suggests that personhood is achieved at birth. Most people who are against abortion tend to be religious. So what does the Bible have to say on this matter? Numbers 5:16–22 discusses how to perform an abortion if a married woman has gone astray and has become pregnant by another man. And, while I’m here, what about post-birth matters? Leviticus 27:6 says children who are less than one month old have no value, and Matthew 18:6 says it’s okay to drown children. What about miscarriages? Permit me to quote Sam Harris: “Twenty percent of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage. There is an obvious truth there that cries out for acknowledgment: If God exists, He is the most prolific abortionist of all.” And remember this (from a meme not written by me): “The GOP is one hundred percent opposed to abortion, except to save the political life of the father.”
2. Book banning. Books are “dangerous” to the extent that they can expose you to ideas that you’ve never considered before — and to despicable characters that do or say appalling things. There was a school board in McMinn County, Tennessee, that voted to ban Maus, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust. Spiegelman concedes there is some “disturbing imagery” in his book. “But you know what? It’s disturbing history.” But according to that school board, it’s just not a nice thing to introduce eighth-graders to a particular period of history that might prove upsetting. Remember, kids, all history is sunshine and rainbows. What about Toni Morrison’s Beloved? Viet Thanh Nguyen argues that the attempts to suppress this novel “are less about its graphic depictions of atrocity than about the book’s insistence that we confront the brutality of slavery.” And what’s the appropriate earliest age for someone to read Lolita? I have no idea. But the answer to that question isn’t to ban the book. I like what the historian Kevin Kruse said in a tweet: “If you’re worried your children will read a book and have no…