Living In Fantasy

THE GOVERNOR OF OHIO, a Republican, came to his senses, proving that, at least occasionally, a Republican can do that. He defied the evangelical Christian conservative party line, and vetoed a bill which would have made it illegal for doctors to treat transgender patients as if they are transgender patients. Under the legislated law, doctors would have been required to retreat into pure fantasy, to treat transgender women as men, and transgender men as women. Such laws have already been passed and have become law in several other states, states of the Christian conservative kind. The underlying reasoning, if it can be called that, is based entirely on hatred, bigotry, ignorance, and religious fanaticism,all of which always seem to accompany each other, and to underpin bad policy. Since Republicans generally despise gay people and gay rights, as well as transgenderism and transgender people, they choose the easy way of pretending that such people simply do not exist, because they should not exist, and because the Christian fascist mob would prefer that they did not exist. The governor's veto in Ohio will most likely be overridden. The Republicans in the Ohio state legislature have enough votes to do it. The conservative playbook is to treat transgender people as if they do not exist,just as they treat human caused climate change as if it does not exist, and the self delusion does not end there. Cosnervative Christians pretend that Darwinian human evolution by natural selection does not exist. Conservatives in general and Republicans in particular simply pretend that Biden did not defeat Trump in the election, that he stole it. If you don't like it, just pretend it doesn't exist. The examples of right wing retreat into fantasy are too numerous to ascribe to any other cause than deliberate strategy, exacerbated by severe mental illness perhaps brought about by extreme despair, the horrible, all consuming despair one experiences when one realizes that the world does not conform to one's expectations, and that one can take drastic measures to refuse to recognize reality, because millions of other people are willing to join you in your delusional dishonesty. The more people who embrace nonsense, the more attractive and safer it becomes for yet more people to embrace it. With increasing support for one's beliefs, there is increasing motivation to continue to harbor them, no matter how unfounded they may be. The people who continue to insist, including the origingal election denying liar Trump himself, that the election was stolen, find it easy to continue the lie; millions of other people help reinforce the big lie, psychologically. As troubling and alariming as this pervasive pattern of right wing thought and behavior is, even more alarming is the apparent willingness of right wing Trump supporters to try to implement and enforce their skewed, psychotic agenda by resorting to violence. Public officials, including judges and prosecutors, who make rulings inimicle Trump or to the far right cause, face death threats daily. Election workers experienced a veritable avalanche of death threats beginning soon after Trump lost the presidential election..We can expect the people in Colorado and Maine who ordered Trump's name to be removed from the ballot to continue to be harassed,as they are already. And, in the very unlikley event that the U.S. Supreme Court rules that Donald Trump did indeed incite an insurrection and therefore cannot become president, which to sensible people seems obvious, we can expect our hateful, angry, violent conservative community to suddenly abandon their loyalty to the stacked conservative high court, and to direct their threats of violence against the highest court in the land.