FAREWELL: To our ‘more perfect Union’

Welcome to the new Theocratic States of America, where separation of church and state is dead, where women’s rights are stripped away, everyone can carry military grade weaponry without restriction, taxpayers are forced to pay for religious schools, and LGBTQ individuals are classified as abnormals with no right to exist.

Be prepared, because it’s underway. Still to come in this new dystopian America: banning contraception, removing voting rights from women and minorities, prohibitions on women working outside the home, outlawing all religions but Christianity, and new Jim Crow laws against all minorities.

How long before society devolves to the point where unregulated “militias” mete out public beatings for failure to open-carry, or stage routine public execution of “undesirables”— the openly LGBTQ, or women who seek abortion and health providers who provide them? Ridiculous, you say? It can’t happen? It can; history’s replete with examples.

For a present-day version, take a long, hard look at life in Afghanistan’s Taliban rule under armed, unrelenting, right-wing, religious zealotry. If you cheer the new theocracy with unlimited weaponry for all, its severely restricted, steadily diminishing civil and human rights, take a while to consider life in a nation where YOU are oppressed and stripped of your rights. Imagine life under daily threat for trying to live the belief “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Without a course change, this is our future.

CAROLYN F. MATTOON

Hayden