Narcissists and Our Corrupt Political System: Can It Be Fixed?

Why are the desires of the religious right being shoved down our throats?  The will of the American people is being ignored in multiple areas. This was a country built on self governance, but whose governing it now? I even told my husband seeing Trump's attempt to lower the poverty definitions, it's like they think of the most evil things they can do and go for it.

Our political system has been bought off and paid for by the uber-wealthy. The needs of the average person in healthcare, the economy and much more are being ignored and crushed for the needs of the greedy. The right wing seems to rule without hesitation making everyone suffer more. Weak-willed DINOS, Democrats in name only, bow down and lick the boots of the religious right Republicans who want all of us except the most wealthy to suffer.

Even with the abortion law in Georgia, that governor was voted in via corruption, Brian Kemp was in charge of the election vote counting process. He didn't remove himself. So now Georgia has an insane law on the books, that is extreme and draconian where a woman can be investigated for murder for having a miscarriage. Is this something the public wanted? I doubt it.

Our government is growing more and more corrupt, everything is about domination, power, control, and punishment. This is not a government for the people or by the people but by wealthy vested interests in profit. The narcissists and sociopaths are ruling. Orange Cheeto is still loved even as he passes more laws and policies to make people suffer more. You ever see that guy support anything that does anyone any good or eases a burden for anyone? I sure don't.

Sociopaths and narcissists are really good at fooling people into thinking they are great. Most rule by fear, but then even with all the fear, some manage to fool people into thinking they are wonderful people. All these narc patriarchs and matriarchs of many a narcissistic family cult, play the fear games while helping out a few of their chosen types. They are fakes but people believe the masks. There's still people who believe Trump cares. How did they get so fooled?

Some of us who are ex-Scapegoats now watch the American political system and it reminds us exactly of how our families operated with tons of lies, corruption, and double-talk. There is a charismatic popular narc or sociopath at the helm, defining everyone's reality and silencing their enemies. Many are fooled and in thrall. There was enough people from 4chan, Alex Jone's Infowars, and the Tea Party to see Trump as a Savior. Sadly many remain in thrall, even after his tax hand-out to his wealthy buddies. We saw that too where our narcissists could get away with whatever cruelty they wanted and people still would not wake up. They still followed without question.

Trump is operating just like many of them. Notice all his investigations folded. How did he get Mueller to roll over? What things happened behind the scenes to allow him to get away with so much? I've been in groups of people with a narc in the room, and even some would discuss the bad things that narcissists did, they screwed over this person, they lied about that person, but no one dared to challenge their power and we see this happening with Trump.

One reason the Democratic party has lost the plot bringing people in like Biden, is many progressives believe in cooperation and talking things out but sociopaths on the right exploit this 'empathy' pushing forth even more insane laws getting Democrats especially the sold out neo-liberal types to compromise. This is one reason the Democratic party has moved more and more to the right with every passing year. Young people are trying to push real progressive agendas, but they are already being shut out by the monied class.

The narcissists are running the asylum. The rules forming the gerrymandering are no longer fair. We see them all supporting each other. This is why for every societal problem, they offer oppression and punishment. Did anyone ever consider when it came to abortion, that if birth control was improved, or accessible, we may have a day where no one would ever need or want an abortion? Nope, they just want to lock all the women up, outlaw birth control too and threaten people. Why are people paying billions to insurance companies  and middle men, instead of financing a decent medical care system? Our country is self destructing under the narcissist's sway. America is regressing. The corruption has taken over.

Can it be stopped? One thing about narcissists, is they get people to believe that things have to be hard and cold. "This is the way things always have been", "This is all you deserve". People are conditioned, into the very wealthy and powerful grabbing all the goodies for themselves. One sees this now where people are conditioned into the right wing saying "Nothing comes for free" or even the idea that life must be based around suffering and pain instead of life being improved for everyone. This is one role where toxic religion plays a strong role in the control matrix.

I often think America's only hope is to face down narcissism. Writing this blog, I have faced so many trolls it's not funny. There's a lot of vested interests, I discovered this on Facebook where, they don't want people talking about how the wicked gain their control or the corrupt tools in their toolbox. What if we had a society where we had a change in culture, where we faced down the lies of the narcissists and sociopaths? Where we taught young people to reject scapegoating? Where we changed the mindset where the poor and powerless and disenfranchised were no longer blamed but elevated? Sadly these narcissists got people to scapegoat all the marginalized as being at fault for everything. The poor didn't make the rules where people were to be exploited by employers, landlords, schools, insurance companies and banks. They didn't make it so the bills grew far bigger then the paychecks, or where life became nothing but a drudge exercise to survive. Narcissists like Cheeto Hitler are good at deflection. Sadly it works.

This hatred and cruelty has existed from time memorial, but sadly it's worsening. Why are all the laws being passed out to harm people and crush them? Why does the religious right hold so much power in a country where they only are a certain small segment of the population? Our country has been bought out by megacorporate and wealthy interests, they have sold this place down the river. Have you noticed like I have, that none of us have a voice any more? They've written the rules to suit themselves.

Is this the future America wants? A religious right, Republic of Gilead hellscape sponsored by Trump and his evangelical advisors who preach prosperity gospel lies to their deluded and aging flocks? A neo-liberal Capitalist megacorporate society where the rents have risen so high, only the very rich can live in the city while the poor are pushed out to American's new version of favelas? Democracy is dying in America. There's no representation in our representative Republic when every representative is purchased and placed into office by greater powers.

The laws being passed now are about punishment, profit, and control not life improvement or making life better. Many aren't even being voted on. Our politicial system has become a hate-filled mess, filled with fear, filled with lies and corruption and run by narcissists. We are long over due for a change.

People have stood up against evil in America's history before. It's definitely time to do so again. We need some major changes to this system. We need people who have brighter visions of the future too. We need to tell the narcissists and sociopaths, no more.

Targeted People and Ex-Scapegoats

When I was into conspiracy theory, I encountered people who believed they were "gang stalked" or "targeted persons". Some of them were paranoid, or paranoid schizophrenics especially the ones keeping track of what color cars followed them or that there was special meaning in license plates. Mental illness came with the delusions of hearing voices, being watched, or followed.  Others with lives permanently trapped on the "hard setting" sought explanations for why their life had gone astray ignoring the built injustice to our society that can push a person further and further down where there's a punishment around every corner.

However with lots of things, there can be truth too behind the stories. There's definitely stories of whistleblowers, who have had their lives messed with. People facing down megacorporate interests or the powerful who notice their lives crumbling apart especially when they were standing against corruption.

A friend into conspiracy send me this video. I told them, this video was interesting to me, outside the conspiracy stuff I take with a grain of salt. I warned them, there's false parts of this video where people who have real mental health concerns would have them worsen.  I don't know if scalar technology is real, I don't know if they can send people radiation burning them. I can see some mentally ill people being taken too far down the conspiracy rabbit hole. One magazine article points out how we are all targeted individuals with the constant tracking via computers. So this can be a complex issues.

Yes some mentally ill people do take this stuff to extreme. Some of the conspiracy websites get crazy where they talk about gangstalking and schizophrenics talking about 20 red cars following them and delusional and schizoaffective patterns. Aunt Confused talked all the time about the mafia pursuing her. So be mindful here, even the narcissists themselves can claim being targeted.

Gang stalking and targeted person is a term most often used the conspiracy community and elsewhere, but it has been proven as being done to various whistleblowers etc. Like people who leave cults, who get tracked down by them, there's a lot of overlap with scapegoating and how narcissistic families target ACONs and try to sabotage careers, relationships and more in the background. There is a spectrum where there is out right life destruction, criminal harrassment to those who may just face emotional abuse. Yeah they try to drive people crazy or try to ruin their lives. Smear campaigns are a giant tool in the tool box.


Everyone who has been victimized by a narcissist or sociopath however knows they have been made targets to an extent.  I wrote the conspiracy friend and told them, if you have a malignant narcissist or sociopath in your life or had one or more then one, then you are a target to a certain extent. Narcissists STALK. I told them them to be careful of taking things too far, where you see every random event as having meaning and go deeper into paranoia. Americans need to return to critical thinking. Conspiracy beliefs can lead to some negative places. However if you were the family scapegoat, smear campaigns alone can cause great harm. ACONS know that targeting is REAL.

You have to go no contact, and no contact means, cutting off all their minions. Many scapegoats discover as I did, that family friends, friends from high school 30-40 years back are not safe.  Many ACONS who go no contact realize the only way to go into a free life is to completely clean the slate.  Until I cleaned out my life with anyone who had connection to them, it left a vulnerability.  Even with the VLC cousins, my contact is limited to Christmas cards and a once a year or every two years, "hello". These cousins who were the children of the aunt who loved me, are better people but sadly still have intermittent although rare contact with my abusers. This means I will remain very low contact as long as certain parties are involved in their lives.

Life became much more peaceful for me during my years of no contact. I don't care what they do or don't do. I just want left alone. Many narcissists turn with time to easier targets or choose new scapegoats especially if you have kept your no contact wall intact. That said, I do think scapegoats have to remain mindful and vigilant to a certain point for the rest of their lives. Being too trusting, and not realizing how these people work, can work against an ACON. Many of us were told growing up to always give the benefit of the doubt and to be too trusting. We were told to ignore our own intuition and to give everyone else a break while not protecting ourselves. To succeed an ACON must learn self protection.

I have known ACONs where their sociopaths have gone on full gangstalking campaigns. I have met ACONS who have been committed against their will and others caught up in legal battles. Some of these folks were even NO CONTACT for YEARS prior. For me their lives and experiences have served as a warning. Live your life, do your thing, be happy, but keep a level of caution. These people are never to be trusted.

Some ACONs get hoovered even 5 and 6 years into their no contact and beyond. Some have had legal machinations and one can read about those who have had their narcissists go so far to get them committed. Connected narcissists can use government and legal branches to make their targets miserable, destroy lives, mess with wills and probate, and other nasty plans. Many can easily find co-narcissists in multiple establishments to help them carry out their dirty work. Wealthy narcissists have more resources at their disposal to abuse. Sadly in our corrupt society, mask wearing narcissists are more often believed. They can get other narcissists or flying monkeys to join in on their plans. We do live in a narcissistic supportive society where they can play martyrs and be believed very easily.

Here too, an ex-scapegoat may face down, the fact that being an empath standing for love and truth, can make one a target, and you learn with time and boundaries, that you don't owe the world or narcissists who have abused you for years, your time and attention any further.  You shut some of that down and learn not to let people "invade". You learn to build the walls of boundaries. You stop the enmeshment and the false love and "forgive and forget" crap that made you vulnerable over and over.

  False guilt too is a weight on the ACON's back that can keep them in the game too long, as the world will tell you that you are "unforgiving" or "mean" to "cut your family off.  Learning detachement is a definite asset. You figure narcissists are going to narc but it doesn't matter anymore. I know in this world learning to protect yourself can take some time. We have to reengage our intuition to learn who is an enemy and who is a friend and who is neutral.

One thing I had to face was the total nexus of disrespect, and I faced facts I wanted a life of respect even if this meant having "no family" and in many ways I did not have a family outside of my loving husband. The me of today is sickened by how little regard they held me in as I went crawling like a puppy dog to beg for their crumbs. I forgive myself too because I knew no better and had been trained and needed to find the path to a new life.

In my family they were alike in ways I recognized as I exited, deadened down emotions, shutting off emotions, shutting off guilt, playing to win, caring most about appearances, I noticed all these traits in them and didn't want to be associated with them anymore anyhow. I realized I had become someone else. They don't even know the me of today.  Let your absence be your witness.

As for the Conspiracy level targeting? Some perhaps are paranoid, and being led into mental illness. America as a whole seems to be descending into a religious fueled fear based insanity crushed by corruption. However for the ACON being paranoid is having all the facts on certain levels. Don't be too trusting. Build your life around safe people who have shown themselves to be empathetic and kind. This changed my life for the better on multiple fronts. Avoid all narcissists, their minions or anyone connected to them. Keep yourself safe, and listen to your intuition. They really will sink as low as your imagination will guess. That said, your life is still yours to live, and the more time you are away, the better it will become.

Targeted by Narcissists?

Religion, Fear and the Regression of the USA

Fear turned me to Christian fundamentalism. Fear of death. Fear of my economically collapsing life. Fear of my extreme 1 in a 5 million body. Religion, my almost dying and fear joined together into a dance with each other. Fundamentalism and Fear go together. My deconversion was not only about freedom, but moving life beyond fear. I got tired of being afraid. The narcissists made me afraid all the time, my then religion taught me to fear hell,  I was told to toe the line over and over or fear the consequences.

America is a very fearful place. Falling down the economic ladder with a thud, has this place in a panic. Fear has people operate from the lowest base, cooperation, care and love disappear. An online friend I will call Mr. Tibbles, and I got into a discussion about religion and fear and politics.

He wrote:


Fearmongering is pervasive in US society right now, because it works. People give in to it, so it's a great method of gathering and maintaining power. So politicians and church leaders everywhere are using it. And they're using it to deflect attention, too. People can see their lives and neighborhoods worsening, but can't see why.

They turn on the TV and there's Fox News, fearmongering, saying it's the fault of brown people, the fault of women, the fault of gays and the fault of bums who refuse to work. And because they don't hear anything different in their communities, they believe it. I mean, I don't know of any nationwide TV progressive equivalent of Fox News. Do you? And the fundies use fear because right now it works. The people give in to it. They let themselves be ruled by fear. Just as phobics do. Only, with phobics, the damage is individual. But with a whole people, the damage is society-wide. Entire nations get damaged. Fearmongering kills democracies and sets up totalitarian police states. And all police states run on fear. But a people can decide to throw off fear. People always see through lies eventually...then they get fed up and stop knuckling under to it...a people then becomes ungovernable and the elites have lost all power over a society.

The same exact way you and I both threw off the Christian Church, and for the same reason. The church promised us heaven but delivered nothing but oppression, intolerance, and a terror-filled hell on earth. I got sick and tired of living in fear of a control-freak God who seemed anything but loving to me....got exposed to other views of the world, views that gave me freedom and got rid of the fear and the nightmares I used to get of being sent to hell over and over again, often through no fault of my own... The British lost their empire because they became too oppressive, and people worldwide got fed up with it and rebelled. The British use of fear as a governing principle didn't work anymore. Happened right here in the US, in the 18th century as you recall. The Catholic Church lost their hold on civilization the exact same way. They were benevolent in the beginning. They gave people aid and comfort and kindness and tolerance and acceptance...so the church grew. Too bad they didn't stay kind and tolerant. The bigger the church grew, the meaner they got, until they created The Dark Ages...which worked for a while...until the people got fed up with living in fear and quit, in droves, and launched a continent-wide holy war, and won.

*******************************

I wrote back:

This place is utterly ruled by fear. Fear is running this show now and building an extreme authoritarian police state and fundamentalist and evangelical religion is fueling a lot of it. People are so fearful in the United States. I see posts of people from Europe who come here, who are in shock at how on edge Americans are, and they can barely stand it. People from the third world, have talked to me about how anti-social and unfriendly Americans are on a certain level like they are afraid of one another. Sadly I would say this is true.

We are stuck in an obey and command culture. It is ruled by punishment. Even our economic system is formed around the basis of punishment for not having enough money.  "Might makes right" and the farther to the right one goes the more this is true. Leftists desire some aspects of cooperation while rightists worship power.  Narcissists and sociopaths rule by fear. They don't want freely thinking populaces who feel safe and empowered. They profit off people living on the edge all turning against each other.

Why do evangelicals and fundamentalists support Trump? I left the religion realizing the core of it was authoritarianism. The strong man leader overlaps with a strong man God with no vulnerabilities or sensitivity. Trump advances fear every chance he gets. There is an enemy around every corner and if they can't find an enemy they will make one up.  Everyone outside of the white Christian middle class with men at the top of the pyramid are the enemy or outsider. Trump inside is a three year old brat, remaining immature on a certain level, but that's every narcissist. Selfishness rules.

I see Trump as a three year old brat. If people simply made the decision to not show up that would go a long way. I think some of us have checked out. I am scared because he has done worse things then Nixon by far, and nobody is doing anything. Mueller's investigation was just another distraction, another joke.

I have seen this cowardice in the face of narcs and sociopaths before you see. Our entire country is being run like a family with a sociopathic narc at the helm. They all operate using fear to run the show. He is a symptom of this culture, the epitome of the whole screw or be screwed mentality. The darkness of mankind shows up in the evil assholes they make leaders. Yeah while some of the elites rule, many of the elites live afraid, always scared of losing their money. One can tell they have disconnected from society only swimming in their own circles, out of touch with reality. 

There's some good rich people who go around helping people, Bill Murray goes around saying hello to his neighbors. Many of these aren't members of the 1 percent, but they are out there too. Who are the ones getting all the attention though? Who are the ones in charge making the rules? Who are the ones who are always concocting laws to worsen everyone's lives? Right now we have the neo-liberals pushing mega-corporatist Biden to the fore-front. They are blocking out real progressives like Bernie and the slew of younger ones like Buttigieg are being closed out. It's Hillary 2.0 but with sell out Biden. They may want to get Trump re-elected.

Neo-liberals helped to empower these conservatives as they turned more and more extreme. Now we are facing down full Dominionism, the religious right vying for ultimate power above the desires of the majority. Who did this? Why is it happening? Religion helped to pave the way here. I remember all my indoctrination, and I held out, holding against war, and still standing for unions as so much of America at the behest of their preachers marched to the beat of the drum of the capitalists.

Why can't we make everyone's lives better? Why does society have to focus on crushing punishment as the answer to every problem?  Sometimes I have thoughts about how religion made our society so punishment focused. Some who believe in hell, seem to want to make life here as much like hell as possible. Shouldn't mankind evolve beyond that? It doesn't work anyhow.

Why do people have to be PUNISHED for losing the job Lotto?  Why should someone become homeless or life ruined because someone behind a desk decided they did not like them. The USA is backtracking on decades of progress, the meanness needs to stop. Many conservatives are a miserable lot, always afraid someone won't suffer enough just to eat or be housed. Some people who want to progress are dreaming of a different future, but there's so many who want to dial the clock back to the dark ages. Europeans and Canadians are watching this place with horror, they have their own economic and other problems but they see where extreme religion and fantasy thinking is taking the United States.

Neo-liberals destroy a place while being socially liberally but when it comes to money they are just like their Republican counterparts, because the rents rise just as high. It is based on Social Darwinism too. Calvinism helped fuel the false morality of the rich narcissists as well. The whole country has been programmed to gaslight themselves believing their poverty is all their fault instead of a crooked system full of injustice.

Many of the young are for progressive and democratic socialism but sadly there's too many living in the past. They think someone can walk the street and ask for a job directly when the reality is most are lost in the online application process and a computer program is weeding out their resume. They get lost in computer files and paperwork. We have a generation directing life for everyone else based on 40 year old precepts that no longer apply and getting reality through to them seems impossible.

One reason the United States is regressing is, at least  on one half of the side of the equation, is it has lost interest in science, progress is now seen as a negative. Carl Sagan's warnings are coming true now. The anti-vaxxers have now created pockets of the country again where measles is roaring back. What is ironic is that all the fear and religious talk about "end days" is ensuring more trouble for human beings and more things for people to be afraid of.

You know I left Christianity realizing the darkness within it, politically and otherwise. I woke up one day and have written about this before where I did not want to be on the side of the oppressors. Yes there are Christians outside of the evangelical system with it's horrifying authoritarian politics but the extreme ones are taking our country down. I hope for liberal Christians to align with those who want progress but sadly they must realize that many of the churches are aligned with political and economic oppression. These folks have more power then they should have.

What is ironic is when I was still a Christian, I used to warn from my belief in bible prophecy that churches would join with the Antichrist. While I no longer believe in the Bible now, we definitely have seen religion and politics join together in a quest for evil in this country. It is interesting how this has occurred supposedly at the same time, the statisticians are telling us that more people are abandoning Christianity. People don't realize the trouble, the USA is facing, with the Dominionists on the extreme right.

Mr Tibbles responded:

The problem with most religions is they create such ossified, frozen societies, frozen in time. There's no mechanism in place for altering rules or beliefs, or growing in societal wisdom, no mechanism for learning better ways of living together. Any proposal to make changes is seen as heresy, the work of the devil, and therefore evil. So you get stuff like the Jews versus the Muslims in the Middle east, locked in combat for more than 1400 years straight, with no real means of reconciliation or living together in harmony, since both depict the other as Evil, and negotiating a way to live together is seen as compromising with Satan and becoming tainted with evil yourself.

The ironic part is all religions are changing all the time, including the Abrahamic ones like judaism, Islam, and Christianity. They've all split into endless variants, and even the same sect changes greatly over time despite claims of being "the eternal unchanging church". I.e. the Catholic Church and Vatican II. 

I predict that eventually, centuries or millenia from now, Christianity will fade away and be considered mythology, just as we regard the Roman pantheon of gods like Zeus, Minerva, Apollo, etc, as mythology now. No one considers that a real religion anymore, though 2,000 years ago it definitely was.

The dark Fundamentalism had overwhelming influence on you, but I have read articles showing that Christianity is actually fading very significantly in the USA. Lots of churches and monasteries all over the US are closing their doors, nuns and pastors having to take up non-religious jobs because congregations are shrinking and the money just isn't there to keep them going anymore. 

This article, and this one, among many others, saying 4,000 churches "go out of business" every year in the US.

Neither article explores why congregations are shrinking, but I can make a number of easy guesses. You and I are both Exhibit A and B for why. Christianity itself has turned itself into a liability, not an asset. People are happier without it. Too many Christians including clergy promise heaven but create hell. I'm just not interested in participating or supporting that. If I join an abusive church, that makes me complicit, doesn't it?

It's not all bad. The old stone cathedrals with their stained glass windows are gorgeous, and that organ music and the choir singing is pretty wonderful. I have a number of gospel songs in my music collection. I even have entire albums of Gregorian chants, sung in the original latin by actual monks and I love listening to it. There are many beautiful stories and movies that came out of it. "Going My Way", "Bells of St. Marys".Margaret Craven's "I Heard the Owl Call My Name", .... and another beloved fiction book about a church kitten called "Magnifi-Cat" by Carolyn and Edmund Sheehan--heartwarming tearjerker, that story's adorable..lol

And all churches are supposed to have a mission of giving comfort, wise counseling, and aid especially to the needy. Clergy were the first therapists. 

If the churches could just hold on to that stuff, and drop all the fearmongering and the control-freak intolerance and abusive stuff....I think they would be doing a whole lot better in society. But power goes to their heads,and priests and pastors and ministers and popes can't change that any more than any other human can.

Have any of you wondered why hard core evil is not discussed in the churches? Not since I was a kid, actually. Always seemed obvious to me, why; because they're complicit in the hardcore evil.

The more power they gained, the more oppressive and fear-based they became. I read my history of the Dark Ages. They didn't call it that for nothing.

And nothing turned me off Christianity as much as the whole pedophilia crisis; not just the acts of some very sick priests, but how the church responded to it, protecting the evildoers instead of the victims and further victimizing the victims. "No true church of god would behave this way."
Then I read of similar behavior from the Buddhist monks in Tibet.

And there was that bombing incident in Bangladesh thats in the news right now....done by self-described Buddhists. So Buddhist extremists can be hate-filled, intolerant, and violent terrorists too. Every single religion I ever studied has a dark side like that.

I do get people saying "those are extremist fanatic crazies...they don't truly represent that religion. Most believers are peaceful and tolerant. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater."

To which I say..well...agreed that all religions have good in them....they all have bad in them, too. Problem I have, there's an authoritarianism in a lot of them that really bothers me ethically.
But more important...there's all these different belief systems, and they contradict each other, and none of them fit my own experience 100%. They all have good parts I agree with. They all have bad parts that strike me as evil.
I don't think joining any religion 100% wholesale absolves me of the responsibility to figure out for myself right and wrong. I was given a brain. I'm pretty sure I was meant to use it.
So I pick and choose what seems wisdom to me, from wherever I find it. And knowing there's an inherent contradiction in this; the twin imperatives of one the one hand, behaving well, and on the other hand of the other imperative to survive and flourish, knowing that immoral people have an apparent advantage over moral ones hamstrung by moral constraints, at least in the short term.
This becomes keenest for victims of abuse and exploitation and various kinds of theft, some of which are legalized.

The March of the Republic of Gilead: Abortion and Birth Control

Interesting cartoon, I don't agree with all of it, because the left at least supports women's rights and birth control. Women better wake up because this isn't just about abortion, it's about control, and they want to scale back many gains women have made.

The other day I learned Georgia had outlawed abortion, does this mean better child care or more programs to support these children once they are here? Nope, it's going back to the bad old days of back alley abortions and women dying. What is scary is Ohio too has joined their ranks and Ohio now is even gunning for the birth control. One thing to remember is many fundamentalists claim that birth control pills prevent implantation all the time so it wouldn't be just IUDs on the chopping block. None of these people care, that Available birth control has dropped the abortion rate in America.

The Republic of Gilead and the Dominionists are on the march. As a Christian, I never gave a dime to the pro-life movement, I was too troubled by my own personal circumstances. They also were really against birth control which never made sense to me. In my old fundie small town, I knew some avid prolifers, they would ask me for money for donations and I would say "No." Abortion to be frank, is a topic I avoided like the plague. Inside, I knew women had complicated health problems like me. I knew many abortions were from economic fears and survival issues. I knew some women had babies dying in utero or with severe birth defects. Of course all my churches preached abortion was wrong. 

I was told I would die if I got pregnant by three different doctors in my early 30s. One doctor even told me I should not even take the risk of having sex, that's how extreme it was. With PCOS. fertility is limited but possible.  So birth control issues always were scary ones for me especially when I was forced off birth control pills in my early 40s. I also was on a drug Spironolactone which immediately causes birth defects. This drug was for heart and hormonal issues. It helped my congestive heart failure and also lowered the testosterone that messed me up via severe PCOS and androgen disorders. I was forced off it for kidney issues around 7 years ago. I was mostly infertile but doubling up on the birth control most of my life just in case one of my troubled ovaries decided to pop an egg at an inopportune moment. In my case, I never became pregnant in my life. 

I too was technically against abortion like the other fundamentalists, but lived in a strange area of extreme cognitive dissonance as I pondered my own possible demise.  There was no way I was going to join the pro-lifers on their marches at Planned Parenthood. I once got accosted outside a Planned Parenthood clinic by some protesters. I was there for birth control as they screamed at me, "Don't kill your baby!" It was a bit traumatic.

After my deconversion, I started listening to the arguments of those who wanted abortion kept safe, rare and legal. Too many Republicans and religious leaders didn't give a damn about the health needs of women or taking care of the babies once they were here. Places like Finland, because of sexual education, and available birth control had their abortion rates drop to very low levels. What's going to happen here? They are busy repeating the mistakes of 50-100 years ago.

This is just one issue, but I sometimes want to throw up, seeing this country regressing. Abortion was a topic that was dealt with 40 years ago. Abortion rates fell. I knew unlike the 1980s even, that far fewer teens were getting pregnant. They were figuring out the birth control. Many young girls were going on birth control even before having sex. The Patriarchy wants to do away with birth control too. Yes the birth control that would stop the need for abortions. Oh and don't forget these "pro-life" states have the death penalty as the penalty for abortion on the books now too.

They Do Want to Subjugate Woman

Gaslighting Red Flags

This is a great meme to warn about gaslighting red flags. I avoid gaslighters like the plague now.