Weekly Roundup: Protecting Women or Policing Bodies? Trump’s Latest and the Fallout
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In this week’s roundup, we take on Donald Trump’s latest claim of being the "protector of women" and the outrage it sparked. We dive into the growing threats to women's rights and healthcare in America, with abortion bans and reproductive health restrictions leading to shocking maternal and infant mortality rates. We also discuss how political rhetoric turns into real-world consequences, and they expose recent voter suppression efforts in Oklahoma and Texas. There's a look ahead to Trump’s 2024 campaign strategy and a hopeful note on local support for Kamala Harris.
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AXIS MUNDY Sadly, women are poorer than they were four years ago.
Much poorer.
Are less healthy than they were four years ago.
Are less safe on the streets than they were four years ago.
Are paying much higher prices for groceries and everything else than they were Four years ago are more stressed and depressed and unhappy than they were four years ago and are less optimistic and confident in the future than they were four years ago.
I believe that I will fix all of that and fast and at long last this nation and national nightmare It will end.
It will end.
We've got to end this national nightmare.
Because I am your protector.
I want to be your protector as president.
I have to be your protector.
I hope you don't make too much of it.
I hope the fake news doesn't go, oh, he wants to be their protector.
Well, I am.
As president, I have to be your protector.
I will make you safe at the border.
On the sidewalks of your now violent cities, in the suburbs where you are under migrant criminal siege, and with our military protecting you from foreign enemies, of which we have many today because of the incompetent leadership that we have, you will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared.
You will no longer be in danger.
You're not going to be in danger any longer.
That's Donald Trump in one of his cringiest rants to date, talking about being a protector of women.
This is, of course, a man who is an adjudicated sexual assaulter.
It's a man who's been accused of sexual harassment by dozens of women.
Nonetheless, it comes in a week when reproductive rights and abortion have come to the forefront once again of the American political landscape.
We have new reports about the ways women are dying in medical facilities as a result of not being able to get access to reproductive care.
We also have Candidates for Senate in Ohio saying that all women care about is abortion and if they are over the age of 50, well, that's not an issue for them, so who cares?
It's a stunning admission of his lack of understanding of why these things matter to women and Americans all over the country.
We dive into this as well as the ways Republicans are trying to rig the election before it even happens across the country.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Brad and Dan back together.
Dan, hello.
How are you?
Who are you?
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Glad to be back.
I want to give a shout out to everybody, all the kind regards that I got from folks.
As you mentioned, I had a loss in the family.
My mom passed away, so we did the Memorial service and all of that.
Um, but I'm, I'm back.
Feels good to be back.
Um, so yeah, glad to be here.
Glad to be doing this.
Thanks for obviously very capably holding down the fort last week and.
No, it's good to have you back and glad you're, you're here.
I know it's a, it's a tough time right now, but just, um, really thankful for your presence and yeah, we, we, we both have had a week.
My dog died, 18 year old dog that we've had.
For a long, long time.
And then it was my one-year-old's birthday this week, and on her birthday, her three-year-old sister put a bead in her nose, and so we went to the emergency room.
So that was a really— Her sister's like, hey, think you're the center of attention?
Yeah.
Hold my—I guess not beer.
Hold my juice.
Yeah.
And like, you know, let me show how I can be the center of attention.
Just sniffed a bead up her nostril and was like, now what?
So yeah, that's life.
It's all good.
All right, friends, I'm going to remind you, November 21, we are at USC, Los Angeles, 7 p.m.
More details to come, but you need to mark that night out on your calendars.
November 22, guess what, people?
We did it.
We're going to be in San Diego at the convention center Friday night.
More details to come on that, too.
If you're in San Diego, anywhere around there, 7 p.m., make your way downtown to hear Dan and I and some other great folks, including Matt Taylor.
And Leah Payne and other folks, so it's going to be really good.
If I go back to L.A.
and USC, November 21st, that's a Thursday, you'll have Andrew Seidel, Rachel Lazor, Robert P. Jones, Dan Miller, Brad Onishi, Kiyoti Joshi, Diane Winston, and a bunch of other great people.
So, you need to be there.
It'll be all the cool people, plus the...
That's what we're doing that Thursday night.
We're going to all the cool people and after LA Thursday night, everyone's going to an after party.
You and I are going to bed and then we're waking up early.
We're going to, we're going to get in my minivan and we're driving to San Diego.
That's how that's going.
Okay.
I just want everyone to know how we're rolling.
Dan's going to have the cargo pants.
So we'll have plenty of room for snacks and we will make our way.
All right.
Please don't hang up.
We're going to, we're going to get going right now.
Today we need to talk about some really paternalistic, misogynistic, and cringy comments from Donald Trump and Bernie Moreno on abortion.
We'll talk about how those illustrate the kind of patriarchal understanding that not only Trump and many of his followers have, but also Christian nationalists.
Things Dan's been highlighting and it's in the code for the last couple of weeks.
We'll then jump into the ways this affects real people and we will talk about abortion and the ways that American women are dying In medical offices are dying because they cannot get care.
I mean, simply put, people are losing their lives.
We'll finish with the discussion of the ways that changes to election laws and rigging the rules are potentially setting up some issues as we careen towards November.
So with all that said, Dan, I'll turn it over to you at the top.
I'll just get your comments here.
We heard Donald Trump say that women are poorer than they were four years ago, less healthy.
They're more stressed.
They're unhappy.
He will fix all of that and fast.
Why, Dan?
Because I am your protector.
I want to be your protector.
President, I have to be your protector.
I hope you don't make much of it.
I hope the fake news... I'm a protector!
Who needs a protector?
Old man screaming, protector!
Okay, so that's the end of the quote.
I'm just kidding, not a direct, but still.
There's so much more to this.
And...
I'll stop because I'm going to lose my mind and blow a gasket.
What do you think about this whole rant of Donald Trump?
Yeah, so I think we have to situate this first.
I think this is the important thing is Trump continues to be flummoxed by the whole abortion thing.
We've seen him.
I'm going to invoke the notion of doublespeak probably more than once today, but we've seen him do the thing where like in the same speech, he'll be like, Yeah, for me, I overturned Roe v. Wade and put it back in the states where everybody wanted it, even though not everybody wanted that at all.
But then he'll also say that he's going to be great for reproductive rights and for women and for fertility, you know, things like that.
Yeah.
So then he has this.
So, I mean, what he's trying to do, I think what the GOP is still trying to do, and Moreno does this, too, in a slightly different way, is to be like, you don't even need to worry about abortion.
Just don't worry about it.
It's not a big deal.
I'm gonna fix it, I'm gonna protect it, whatever.
The thing about this is, like, this isn't limited to Donald Trump.
I don't know how many conversations I have had, I know you have too, where like, whether it's Facebook, or, you know, just somebody that you meet somewhere, or social media, when you're critical of, say, purity culture, or you're critical of, quote-unquote, you know, traditional gender roles, or your, you know, gender essentialism, or whatever, And you'll get that Christian person who's like, I don't understand why this is bad, bro.
I don't understand why you keep bad-mouthing this.
I mean, I treasure my daughter.
She's my princess.
I would do anything to protect her.
I would do anything to protect my wife.
I don't understand why you think that this, you know, this patriarchal model is so bad.
We're here to protect women and to care for them.
And what they don't seem to get is that, like, that's the problem.
I think what we're envisioning is a world where women don't need powerful men to protect them.
That you've got a whole history of powerful men structuring society in such a way to ensure that women need powerful men to protect them, which means...
By definition, those same powerful men are the ones who are threatening them.
They're the ones who make sure they don't have the power to protect themselves.
And so Trump just leans into this.
And so for me, it shows where he's at.
It shows where the GOP is at.
It shows how just still off they are on understanding the concern about abortion and health care access.
But it also shows that this communicates with huge swaths of the American population.
It communicates with lots and lots of women.
As we know, men are not the only people who vote for Trump.
And I feel like you, for years, have talked about the comfort that can come from a patriarchal social structure for You know, women who understand themselves in certain ways and so forth.
So just so many layers of this, but it is the packaging of misogyny as deliverance.
It's the gender equivalent, I think, of, you know, the white savior helping black people.
This is the powerful man who will save women.
And hey, women, just put your trust in me.
You're not going to worry about abortion anymore.
It also obviously trivializes abortion.
It makes it the sense that, like, if you just knew what to really focus on, You wouldn't worry about it so much.
So, yeah, I mean, as a starting point, those are my reflections.
I'm sure you had more than a couple thoughts about this as you heard Trump say these things.
Well, let's play some more of the Trump clip because he says, the deliverance part you just mentioned, he says that exact thing.
Let's play it.
You will no longer be thinking about abortion.
It's all they talk about, abortion, because we've done something that nobody else could have done.
It is now where it always had to be with the states and they vote of the people.
You will no longer be thinking about abortion like what this whole protector idea.
And then you'll no longer be thinking about abortion.
It's like, I am going to solve you.
I am going to end the existential question of you so well, you won't be worried about anything.
Food, groceries, inflation, happiness.
You won't even be thinking about abortions.
Uh, and it's, it goes to exactly what you just said, Dan, about deliverance and patriarchy as the, the idea that I am needed to make sure that your existence is what it should be, right?
That men think that without men, women cannot be women.
They cannot be happy.
They cannot be successful.
They cannot be safe.
They cannot be protected.
And so let's let's play a clip from Bernie Moreno, who you've already mentioned.
Bernie Moreno is running for Senate in Ohio, and he said this recently at a rally or a campaign kind of event.
I think it was a town hall meeting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And and here's what he said.
Sadly, by the way, there's a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women.
They're like, listen, abortion is it.
If I can't have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else.
Okay, a little crazy, by the way, but especially for women that are like past 50, I think of myself.
So he's saying here that if you're a woman over 50, why do you care about abortion?
Because that's not an issue for you.
So we're getting really, really into the like, The ways that the conservative mind, at least in the MAGA world, and the ways that Burt Moreno are expressing it, are thinking about abortion as like a transactional thing, a thing that is only... Like, he really can't comprehend that if I was a 50-year-old woman, or I don't know, Dan, a 43-year-old man, like myself...
That I would be concerned about abortion for so many reasons.
One of them is women's health and safety and protection.
All the things you're talking about, because as we're going to talk about here in about 10 minutes, women are dying in this country because they can't get access to reproductive care.
It's also just a matter of, it doesn't matter if you're a 50 year old woman, a 43 year old man, if you're a person who can get pregnant, if you're a person who cannot get pregnant, you would be thinking about abortion because of the freedom of, of individuals, the choice, the quality of life.
The all the reasons that people should have bodily autonomy and control over their existences and so on and so forth.
Now, there's another clip here, Dan, and it's a clip from from from the past where Moreno talks about what he would do to change policies on reproductive rights or abortion in the US.
So here is his really, really breathtaking, genius answer on that.
Here we go.
What changes would you support regarding reproductive rights or abortion as a U.S.
Senator?
My daughter just took a flight to go back home to where she lives.
You know, mom carrying what looks like an F-1 team worth of equipment.
People helped her on that plane.
Helped put the stroller away, helped her with her seat, gave up her seat.
Those are the kinds of things that we can do.
Let's be a pro-mom, pro-family.
So he says here that you know what would really be helpful is like dudes helping her out on the plane, getting the stroller and the carry-on, bin, giving up their seat.
Those are the kinds of things that we can do.
Let's be a pro-mom, pro-family policy.
Brother in Christ Bernie, my brother in Christ That's not a policy, my guy.
That's just a bunch of individuals helping each other in the social square.
You're running to be an elected official.
You're a person who's been in politics.
Policies are systemic things the government enacts in order to ideally help people flourish and be safe.
This that you're talking about is just etiquette or mores.
Now, I'm not against those.
I am a parent.
Dan, I am often.
Walking through crowded spaces with like a stroller and nine bags and like diapers falling out of my like, uh, you know, shorts pockets and, you know, milk bottle that somehow is caught in my shirt.
And so it is very helpful for me as a man, me as a woman, anybody who exists in the world, trying to like take children places for people to be like, yo, can I like get the door for you?
And people do that all time for me.
And I'm like, thank you so much.
I appreciate it.
Hey.
You're on a plane.
There's a kid screaming.
Let me take that bag real quick.
You put the stroller up or I'll put it up.
It's always happened.
That's great.
That's not a policy, Bernie.
It's not anything but you saying, if we just had strong men in the world, everyone would be safe and they would be happy.
If you just let me and the other big daddies around the country take control, we'll make sure you're all okay.
Well, we're not okay.
And we'll get to that in a second.
But Dan, take the mic because you know, I'm getting, I'm getting going.
One of the tropes that I think is underlying all of this is the trope of the unhappy woman, the woman who's too emotional.
So if you're Trump, it's not really about abortion.
It's not really about women's health care.
It's not about autonomy.
No, no, no.
These women, they're just scared.
They're just too emotional.
They just knew that they were safe.
They just had the right guy in power, like, that would go away.
So it's that.
I think for Moreno, it's the same kind of thing.
If these women were just not so stressed, if they weren't so upset about things, if they could just calm down and recognize that, you know, how to take advantage or make use of the nice people in the world, they'd realize this isn't such a thing.
It's, again, it's another misogynistic trope.
It's really, really old, whether we're talking about, like, much broader discussions about health care and the dismissal long-term of women's health care and the kind of hysterical woman model, whether it is anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, like, you know, lesbians are women who just don't like sex or didn't have the right guy or whatever.
These misogynist tropes about women who just don't really know what they want and need, and if they would just pay attention to the men who are trying to show them, all the problems would go away.
So this is I think, you know, you talk about systems.
This is a systemic, misogynistic discourse that this is part of, and it bleeds into other things.
We hear this, you know, Marina saying this about, you know, how to fix society by like, I don't know, just being friendlier or something.
It's J.D.
Vance saying, you know, the problem with healthcare, you know, yeah, just let Grandma help out more.
Right?
Great Aunt Betty wants to help.
Letter.
You know, we just need to do these things.
And there's no answer but patriarchy and misogyny, which of course is exactly what advocates of women's health care don't want.
I think, as you're pointing out as well, this notion that the only stakeholders, so to speak, I don't like that language here, but that only people who can currently have babies are stakeholders in this is ridiculous for a number of reasons.
I can't get pregnant.
My kids can't get pregnant.
My partner can't get pregnant.
We all care about this for lots of reasons.
I don't know if in the future This will directly impact me or not, and that's not the point.
The point is being in a society of people with equal rights and equal protections.
And there is the old thing of like, you know, if people don't care about this for any other reason, here's where I think they should care about it.
Here's where I think people on the right should care about this, is they come for their rights, when are they going to come for your rights?
It's really easy to want to limit somebody else's rights, but as soon as we start that, as soon as we start defining who the real Americans are and who deserves rights and protections, and who doesn't, I think that's when we go down a scary path, which is, of course, where the right wing has been taking us for a long time.
Just a couple, you said J.D.
Vance, and I just want to say a couple things.
You know, if we zoom out and we talk about Christian nationalism, we talk about the possible Trump presidency, we talk about the MAGA movement.
I've maintained this for a long time.
I'm not the only one.
Project 2025 is a lot of things.
It's a wildly Catholic vision for, for the executive branch.
I've made that case and I interviewed Chelsea Eban, Dr. Chelsea Eban Monday, who made that case by way of her great new book, The Radical Mind.
It is also Dan, a radically patriarchal document that really, and you talked about this and it's in the code the last two weeks, that really wants the family to be not only two heterosexual people, But one where the dad is Mr. Strong Handshake.
He's the protector and in control.
And the woman is just beaming, submissive and smiling.
And that's exactly it.
And on Wednesday, you talked about this.
She's smiling because she has a protector, because she has a guy with a strong handshake.
And, you know, we're not.
I think if you've listened to this show.
If, if you are somebody who identifies as male and you have a strong handshake, that's not, we're not saying that's bad.
Okay.
We're also not saying that if you have a family where sometimes one of you lifts heavy things, cause you have like, you know, the ability to lift the heavier things, is that necessarily bad?
We're not saying that either.
You want to protect your kids, obviously.
What parent doesn't want to protect their kids?
It's not that.
We don't have time for this because we really do need to move on, but what does protection mean here?
That's what I want to know.
And I'll also say everyone needs protection at times.
Men need protection.
We all need people to look out for us.
Like to me, part of being a family and part of being in a partnership is like, we all protect each other.
And I like, but the idea here is that men don't need that.
And that leads to all other like avenues of this.
Oh, men don't have emotions because they don't need to be protected.
Right.
Men are not in their feelings because if they were, they'd need to be protected.
There's a whole masculinist category that we could unravel right now.
Let's not do it.
Let's take a break, come back and talk about what's actually happening on the ground with abortion and reproductive rights and American women dying on medical tables.
Be right back.
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All right, Dan, throw it over to you.
Give us an update on some of the things that are happening in this country as we speak.
Yeah.
So if somebody said, you know, why do these things that, you know, Donald Trump or Moreno or people say matter, I think part of it is because it's intended to deflect and mask some of the real consequences of what's going on.
The people on the right are not protecting women.
You said, I said, everybody who opposed the Dobbs decision said for a long time that this was going to endanger people, and we see this now.
So, I came across a good Guardian article this week that You know, we talked about the maternal mortality crisis in the U.S.
and I just direct people to that because it pulled together a lot of good illustrations and sort of pulled these together and you can link on it and go into more detail than we will here.
But just examples that are starting to emerge and have been emerging.
So I'm just going to run through some of these, right?
In states like Texas, infant mortality is soaring after the Dobbs decision.
Partly because children who will not survive are being brought to term and it's raising infant mortality.
People, we've known about this, people who are driving for hours in states that don't provide adequate abortion care, so there's now more limited access to just OB care.
And they are driving for hours to get to places where they think it's going to be safe to give birth if they have a complicated birth or something comes up.
Women turn away from ERs until they're in bad enough condition to warrant care.
And Oklahoma and Georgia have been sites of this.
Women who go to the emergency room, they're literally sent back to their car and it's sort of like, well, wait till you're worse.
So that we can actually be sure that your life is in danger so that then we can give you the care that you're seeking.
Because doctors don't think that they can provide that.
And of course, the examples that I think are on the front of a lot of people's minds are two women in Georgia who died.
After using abortion pills because they didn't have access to other forms.
These are people who needed abortion care.
It was denied.
They died as a result of this because they couldn't have access to safe care and it cost them their lives.
And observers are noting that this is a crisis in the U.S.
that's only going to get worse over time.
It's just going to continue to build.
And just some other statistics that I think illustrate this.
In the year following Texas, Texas's abortion ban, child mortality increased 12.9%.
Nationally, it was up like 1.8%.
Congenital abnormalities are the leading cause of infant death.
I think anybody who's been around children or had people who've experienced this know that it's often a congenital issue of some sort.
They decreased nationally by 3.1 percent.
They increased in Texas by 22.9 percent.
That's almost a quarter increase.
Even before Dobbs, there's a study that came out that found that between 2014 and 2018, states with the most restrictive abortion access had 16 percent higher infant mortality.
So that's one piece of it.
People die.
It has real concrete effects.
The notion that we're somehow doing nothing but helping children by doing this is there.
We know that these are high-risk pregnancies that are being brought to term, and that creates issues.
There's also the sort of knock-on effect of this.
Additional drugs and treatments become harder to get in some states like Louisiana.
If drugs could be used in abortion care, they now become more restricted and doctors don't have access to them for other things.
There's evidence that medical residency applications have dropped for states with bans.
People coming out of med school who have to do their residencies are steering clear of places where they think that they... Let's say you're an OBGYN.
Can you practice in those states?
Do you want to practice in those states?
Let's say that you're an ER doctor.
Do you want to go to a state where you're afraid of, you know, malpractice?
Low-income people and people of color, of course, have been more adversely affected than anybody else.
So those are some of the real-world effects of this.
I think that this discourse, you know, Moreno's saying that suburban women are too focused on this and, you know, that they should be focusing on other things or being single issue.
I think it's intended to mask These real-life consequences, and we've had people on the right who've mocked Kamala Harris for talking about people quote-unquote bleeding out as a result of abortion bans, who challenged folks to prove it.
They proved it.
Lots of things on TikTok and Twitter and places like that about stories just like this.
So I've got a couple more things to say, but I'll throw it over to you for your reflections on, as we're saying, the real-life consequences of why this matters.
Well, I'll just highlight one story from ProPublica that came out about 10 days ago, and that's about Amber Nicole Thurman, who had taken abortion pills and had a complication.
All of the fetal tissue from her body was not expelled, and so she went to a hospital.
Needed a procedure that is described as routine, Dan.
Something that could be done safely, could be done relatively easily as procedures like this go.
It was not going to be life-threatening, invasive, life-changing in terms of, you know, recovery or anything like that.
But as ProPublica says in a piece by Kavitha Sarana, just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony with few exceptions.
Any doctor who violated the New Georgia law would be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.
So she waited in pain, worried about what would happen to her six-year-old son.
The doctors monitored her.
They watched her blood pressure go down.
Her organs failed.
It took 20 hours before they operated.
By then, it was too late.
She was 28.
She's a medical assistant.
She has a six-year-old son.
And it's like, man, you look at this picture, Dan, and whoo!
I'm doing everything I can not to cry right now, because when you look at this picture of this smiling 28-year-old woman holding a five-year-old boy, and you think, this is a country that will not save her, will not help her, will not provide her a routine procedure where she could have gone home the next day to be with that boy.
But now instead, that child is parent, you know, his mom is no longer with us.
That's there is nothing pro-life about that that I could ever think of ever.
And this is just one story, but it's it's everything you're highlighting.
And again, when you go back to Moreno and Trump saying you won't be thinking about abortion.
They're not thinking about actual women.
They don't care about women with choices, women doing their best to make their way in life as human beings with control over their choice, their body, and the ways that they are going to construct and build and have a family.
They're not thinking about people who are trying to make choices that are often hard, people that are Trying to navigate things that feel really difficult.
They're not thinking about women actually dying on a table where somebody could have stepped in and saved them in a way that would have been nothing more than routine.
Dan, what kind of country do we have if people that can be saved by way of routine are dying on tables?
That is the effect.
of the kinds of policies we're seeing all over the country.
And I can tell you, as somebody who's been talking about Project 2025 all over the country the last couple of months, it will make it much worse.
And a second Trump presidency promises nothing but this going into a more dark place.
I have more thoughts.
What do you think?
Well, I'm going to circle back around.
I promised more doublespeak stuff.
In Florida, maybe last week, this week, You've even got now in the states with these restrictive policies recognizing some of these problems, but they're just completely incapable, in my view, of responding to it.
So Florida informed doctors that, in sort of like updated guidelines or whatever, they informed doctors that abortion is permitted, quote, at any stage in pregnancy to save the life and health of the health of the mother.
They also, the state of Florida, threaten regulatory action against doctors who don't provide such care.
Right?
I mean, that sounds like good news.
That sounds like exactly what you're describing that, oh, the doctors would need to provide that care.
They couldn't send somebody out or just watch them get to a critical state.
That's too late, and so forth.
Florida goes on to say, to inform doctors, that the provision of life-saving treatment, quote, does not violate Florida law, and the failure to do so may constitute malpractice, end quote.
They also insisted that Florida, quote, requires life-saving medical care to a mother without delay when necessary, end quote.
So, somebody on the right is going to say, Brad, well, yeah, those things are tragic.
They should never happen.
But these laws, they're not about that.
That's not because of these laws.
Doctors didn't understand it, or hospitals did things they shouldn't have done.
But here's the problem, right?
And we talked about this going way back to the beginning, too.
That guidance doesn't fix anything.
Because you still have words like, save life and health of the mother.
Okay, so what counts as health?
The people that are in favor of abortion access, in favor of reproductive care, will say health means health, and you can't draw sharp lines, which is why you need to just have access to this care so the doctors can make the judgment calls that they need to make.
But you've got that ambiguity.
It's built in.
You can't take care of it.
Or that Florida law requires life-saving medical care when necessary.
I don't care if they come out and say this, the doctors in the ER are still going to say, well, was this necessary?
We think it's necessary now, but what's going to happen four months from now when the attorney general in Florida or whatever state comes after us and says it wasn't necessary?
When somebody who's not medically trained, wasn't in that situation, says it was necessary?
So, these ambiguities are built in, and so this is the doublespeak of saying, well, you know, the laws have all these allowances in them, but as we've seen, they can't be enforced.
And you have the tension that has existed between the political side of this and the medical side of this.
We've talked about this before, where the doctors and, you know, the attorneys for the doctors, I guess, have said, we need the legislators to clarify this.
We need clarity on what, you know, constitutes You know, a threat to the life of the mother and so forth.
The legislators have sidestepped that repeatedly.
They say, well, we're not doctors.
That's a decision for the doctors to make.
And so we just go in circles where we get empty terms like life and health, life saving, when necessary.
All of which are terms that cannot be defined in the abstract.
They are a case-by-case situation, and as long as doctors and, you know, potentially women and pregnant people are threatened with jail time, with prison, with the loss of licenses, with fines, with whatever, those ambiguities are going to remain, which is why advocates will say you simply can't have these kind of restrictions.
and protect the lives that you say you're trying to protect.
I agree with everything you just said and want to point us to yet another story that that is right along these lines, Dan.
So I just want to like zoom into another story and that this this came out from South Carolina a couple days ago.
CNN had the story, but it's been covered other places.
Amari Marsh was a junior at South Carolina State last year, and she got a call from a police officer.
And she got that call because she unexpectedly gave birth in the middle of the night during her second trimester.
So Dan, you know, you and I are parents.
We've, we've been alongside spouses who have been pregnant.
We have not been pregnant ourselves, but to give birth during your second trimester is pretty unexpected.
It's not something that you wake up in the middle of night thinking is going to happen.
It happened in her apartment.
She was screaming and panicking in her bathroom, covered in blood.
She woke up the next day in the hospital.
So you can think of this as what an awful, terrible thing to go through as anyone who is pregnant.
Well, that was only the beginning.
Because once that police officer called her, it set in motion a set of events that led her, Dan, to being incarcerated for what happened.
The end of the, the, the baby's life, the pregnancy, the end of the pregnancy and the unexpected birth were seen as criminal.
She has spent a year either behind bars and is, and, and, or with an ankle brace on in home arrest.
So Dan, here we have somebody.
An unexpected birth, something that is awful, something that I'm sure she will remember and play back for the rest of her life.
And she will mourn and it will be something that never leaves her.
And yet the, that was the beginning of the, of the trauma because she's now put in jail for this whole thing.
Again, I'll just, you know, you're doing more analysis.
I'm doing more kind of like zooming into these examples, but what is it?
What kind of country is this?
And this is not a lone story.
This has been happening.
I mean, the BBC and others are reporting on this going back to 2021.
There are other folks who have been arrested for these reasons.
This is not isolated, and yet it continues to happen, and it will continue to happen.
And I just want to come back to the callousness, the sophomoric naivete, An idiocy of Moreno and Trump at the top saying what they said about abortion and who cares and if you're a woman over 50, what?
Hey, Bernie Moreno, if you're a woman over 50, who cares if like women are, I don't know, almost bleeding out in bathrooms and then being arrested and put in jail?
Hmm.
Who cares if 28 year old women are going to the hospital seeking a routine procedure and dying?
Oh, you're over 50.
You live in the suburbs.
It doesn't matter.
Like, that is not a person who should be elected to office, and it's a disgusting, inhumane understanding of reproductive rights.
Yeah, I just, you know, he's not here, and if he was, he'd be incoherent, but it'd be interesting.
Cool, Trump, you're going to protect, like, how?
How are you going to protect him from this?
I'd love to hear an answer, Mr. It should be a state's rights issue.
States should do what they want.
Everybody wanted it in the states.
Who am I to tell states what to do?
Yeah, I don't hear anything that you or your ilk or the MAGA world is doing protecting people.
It's vacuous at best, and as you say, it's inhumane and callous and cruel at worst.
And I think what makes it more galling is that it marches under the banner of righteousness, that this is somehow the moral high ground to take, that this is somehow the party that cares more about people or something like that, when it's so evidently not the case.
I want to bring in one more element to the stand before we go to break and talk about voting rules and rights and so on.
But JD Vance said this week, September 23rd, a couple of days ago, that a sex scandal in North Carolina is between Lieutenant Governor and the people of North Carolina.
He also said, and we support him.
Okay.
So I talked all of last week about.
Vance and Trump and what they're doing about Springfield, Ohio.
And I'll tell you, Dan, what they're doing to folks in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian or not, is the opposite of protection.
I can tell you that much, that nobody in Springfield, Ohio feels protected.
In fact, and you and I have read the article and we sent it back and forth to each other this week, Vance and Trump are being sued and charged with with crimes related to that because the folks there feel so unsafe and so targeted.
And there's the potential that crimes were committed.
Nonetheless.
I also spoke last week about Mark Robinson in North Carolina, the gubernatorial candidate, the lieutenant governor, and he is caught in a scandal among I mean, one, he's not caught in a scandal.
He's caught in many scandals.
But they're related to his like comments on a like adult pornographic website going back a decade where he said, I'm a black Nazi, where he talked about all kinds of things and watching women in the shower and all this stuff.
Okay.
A sex scandal in North Carolina is between Lieutenant governor and the people of North Carolina.
Now, Dan, a woman's choice about her body.
People who are going to hospitals needing to get a routine procedure that they have chosen to do and they're asking their doctor a choice between them and their doctor.
Nah, that's not between them.
Somebody who lost a child and a pregnancy on the toilet in their own bathroom in the middle of the night.
That's not that's not between them.
That's actually between us and the government.
And we might need to put them in jail.
We might need to punish them.
But, you know, J.D.
Vance, that North Carolina gubernatorial candidate who said, literally, I'm a black Nazi.
Dan, do you know that there is people like on his team?
So like half his campaign team quit campaign manager.
They're all gone.
It's in complete freefall to North Carolina.
And is North Carolina something that might be winnable for Kamala Harris?
It might be.
Yeah, it might be.
He says literally, I'm a black Nazi.
And some folks on his team offered, they were like, Hey, you didn't make these comments.
We can get like a forensic internet team in here.
We'll, we'll definitely find out the truth.
And he was like, no, no, no, don't, don't, don't, don't.
We don't have, let's not do that.
We don't have the money for that.
Do we have?
Nah, we can't.
That's a waste of time.
Just let's move on guys.
Here's my point.
J.D.
Vance is the guy who says the reason for 50-year-old post-menopausal women to exist is to take care of their grandchildren.
He says all the things Moreno and Trump says.
And then he has the gall to say that a man who identifies as a black Nazi, who villainizes LGBTQ people, who calls trans people maggots and filth, that his sex scandal's between him and North Carolina.
Why would we get involved?
When you decided, J.D.
Vance, To do everything you could to get involved everywhere possible in Springfield, Ohio.
To go in and ruin a community.
To go in and menace folks, Haitian and not Haitian.
To go in and insidiously destroy the fabric of that public square where people are trying to exist, to work, to go to school.
That seemed like that was between you and anyone you cared about.
But this is between a governor, lieutenant governor, and North Carolina.
Let them decide.
But don't let those women bleeding out on tables decide.
Nah, we can't trust them.
You know why, Dan?
Because the men are here to protect them.
The men are here to make the decisions.
The men are here to make sure they're happy and smiling and at church with a strong handshake.
And someone to make sure they know what to do.
So when it comes to women, they don't get to make those decisions because they need a man to make sure they know it's right.
And we'll make them healthy and happy when it's between a governor who are gubernatorial candidate, who says I'm a Nazi.
It's like that scene from anchorman.
He's like, you know, there there's a fight happening and they're like, no, let's let them fight it out.
And the fight just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.
And everyone's like, no, it's between them.
And everyone's like, is it?
I think we should.
It's probably not.
I don't think it is.
All right.
Anything else on this before we go to.
Yeah, it reminds me of two other things that we talk about a lot.
Number one, and I see these as parallels.
They're both present in the right.
They're both part of Christian nationalism.
One is that myth that the right is about small government.
We talk about this all the time.
It is not about small government.
It favors big government.
It favors intrusive government.
It just, it doesn't think government should be doing things like taxing corporations or enforcing environmental policies or things like that.
But when it comes to like- That's between a corporation and its board, Dan, and a CEO.
Who are we?
Yeah.
But when it comes to like, you can marry, what you can do in the bedroom, when it comes to your access to healthcare, all of a sudden they're super involved.
And there's nothing too intrusive to poke around in and to regulate and to punish people for.
The flip side of this is the religious line of this.
I don't know how many times I have had discussions with people where you're pressing, maybe you're doing what I would consider sort of anti-apologetics work or something, and somebody's like, well, you know, God's ways are not our ways.
I can't explain that, but you know, who are we to question God?
I'm like, yeah, but You don't seem to think that when you're talking about queer folk.
You don't seem to think that when you're talking about abortion.
I don't hear you saying, well, hey, who are we to judge?
If somebody loves somebody, I'm not God, I'm not there to speak for God.
Whatever we think happens when people die, I guess that's when God will deal with it, or whatever.
Nope.
When it's on those things, you're absolutely convinced.
That you are the voice of God and that you know exactly what God wants.
I find these to all be parallels.
The selective small government appeals on the Christian side, the really selective, you know, well, who are we to say what God is?
I'm like, you've made your career around this, around persecuting others.
It gets me pretty worked up.
And I think it's a parallel that's sort of all over this line of reasoning.
And so I'm not surprised to hear Vance say that.
It brings them all together in one place.
My brethren in Christ, God's ways are not our ways.
And as a result of that, when I see the wonder of human love in any form, I am bedazzled and overcome.
It is something I cannot reduce or understand.
It's not a thing my tiny human brain will ever comprehend in its full glory.
And as a result, when any people love each other, I stand in awe of the creator's Shekinah glory.
I look back.
At the trans woman and the cis man, the lesbian couple, the family, the queer family that lives next to me, and I say, praise God.
The image of God is a spark that emanates throughout all of creation.
Am I right, my brother in Christ?
And they're like, Well, that's not exactly, well, no, I mean, some of God's ways are my way.
Um, I think that, you know, my ways, yeah.
Um, strong handshake.
All right.
You know?
Okay.
Let's take a break.
Come back.
Talk about voting.
Be right back.
All right, Dan.
Um, so I'm going to, I'm going to say something that I'm scared to say, and I don't, I don't want it to lead to anything other than how A window into how I'm thinking about the race at the moment.
So I think that Kamala Harris is beating Donald Trump right now.
And I don't want to say that out loud because I don't want people to think that it's like, oh, all right, we're good.
We've avoided fascism.
We've avoided Project 2025.
Don't do that.
You need to do whatever you're doing, writing postcards, knocking on doors, calling people, whatever, getting people on college campuses to vote.
You need to go do that.
OK?
The reason I bring that up, though, is that we've talked about this several times on the show, but there's there is a way that I think some in the Trump orbit are playing for a tie.
And I just want to like highlight that one more time because it continues to rear its head.
We've seen a couple of things happen over the last couple of weeks.
So and Nelson, my friend and colleague, The great journalist is an Oklahoman and highlighted this the other day and I started to read about it.
But over the past three years, coming from the Oklahoma Voice, Oklahoma election officials removed 143,682 voters who moved out of state.
Okay, damn, they moved.
Makes sense.
97,000 who died.
No problem.
14,993 duplicates.
Well, no problem with that.
And they moved, makes sense.
97,000 who died, no problem.
14,993 duplicates, well, no problem with that.
5,607 people who were convicted of a felony.
Yeah, that I have a problem with, but we'll just, we'll talk about that another time.
However, Dan, inactive voters made up the largest share of the removals with 194,962 voters.
These are voters who have not participated in any election throughout four consecutive general election cycles spanning eight years.
So, Dan, this is where the plausible deniability comes in.
Well, we're just purging the rolls.
I mean, people died.
You go against that.
They're Mr. Liberal.
And what I am worried about is that the largest category of people who've been removed are people who haven't voted.
Why were they removed?
Why?
Like, voting is, like, promised to us as citizens.
People haven't done it.
People haven't changed.
Okay, maybe they didn't care.
Maybe they thought no one cared about them and a candidate showed up this time and convinced them, you know what?
You actually should participate and vote because I actually think we can do something great in this country or this state or this community.
We know.
I'm just going to throw this out there.
This is one of Trump's and Team Trump's stated strategies.
They think they have polling data that shows that lots of people who have not voted In recent elections lean toward Trump and they have said that they hope to motivate those.
So I mean this isn't even just a democratic thing or a liberal thing or whatever.
This is something that is part of their own strategy to get those people to vote.
So as you say that that's what they're counting on actually banking on is the people who haven't voted.
This will be the time they do.
And those are the ones that they removed.
So that's Oklahoma.
Let's go down to Texas.
In Texas, 13% of all 17.9 million voters registered in the state are on the suspended list.
So once again, Dan, we have a situation where something in the, in the ballpark of 2 million Texans are not on the, on the, um, the voter roll.
And a lot of that is because they've been taken off simply because they haven't voted.
Like Dan, You know, I don't know about you, I'm really not good at cleaning up my hard drive and my desktop.
If anyone sees how many tabs open right now, they probably will never speak to me again just out of sheer, like, disrespect for how I handle my business.
But we live in an age, right, where because our, like, computer hard drives and our digital storage in the cloud or such, like, I don't know, how many pictures do you have on your phone, Dan?
I don't know how many I have.
Like my dog died this week.
I was like looking at all the pictures I had of him.
It's like 500 pictures of this dog.
Dan, do you remember in eighth grade when you had like a throwaway camera your mom gave you and it was like, well, you got 30 shots, pal, make them good.
And you, you know, and no idea what they're like until like weeks later.
Yeah.
And like you're, you know, you and your dumb friends took a picture of like someone's shoe and everything.
And it was like, you know, that's 30 cents.
Here's my point.
Are any of those voters on those voter rolls taking up space?
Are they causing issues?
Is it a scarcity?
Is there a reason we got to like keep this tidy?
You just don't want them on there.
And Texas, I shall say, is a state where Ted Cruz is like really in jeopardy for his Senate seat.
There are some polls that have Ted Cruz losing at the moment.
This is not an accident.
Down in Mississippi, A panel of federal judges, according to the Washington Post, Patrick Marley, Colby Itkowitz, heard arguments Tuesday in a case that could upend the rules for counting a sliver of mail ballots in Mississippi.
So this case is really about ballots that arrive five days after election and are postmarked, however, by election day or earlier.
In 17 states and DC, you can send in mail ballots and they will count if they are postmarked by election day.
So hey, I go to the mailbox, I mail it, it gets in, five days later, my vote counts.
Now, is this gonna change the election in Mississippi?
Nope, Mississippi's going for Trump.
It's a deep, deep, deep, deep, deep Republican stronghold.
This would have a deep effect though on those 17 other states and DC, some of which really do Have something at stake in these mail-in votes that come in five days after the election.
OK?
Republicans are fighting mail ballots all over the country.
Going back to the Walpo article, in Pennsylvania, a battleground state that could decide the presidential election, the RNC last week filed a lawsuit arguing that voters should not get a chance to fix errors on their mail ballots to make sure their votes get counted.
Another lawsuit seeks to throw out mail ballots when their outer envelopes are undated or misstated, even if they arrive by election day.
So you, you vote, but you didn't put the date on it.
You know, Dan, we're in third grade.
You turned in your spelling test.
You got 10 out of 10.
But you didn't put the date on it.
Sorry.
0%.
Like, how does that work?
How does that make sense?
It only makes sense if you don't want people to vote.
If you want to suppress votes.
That's the only way it makes sense.
It also, I just want to throw this out, it also defies common sense.
So like everybody who listens to this podcast knows I struggle with names.
Say the wrong name all the time.
I do it in class and we're talking and like, I don't know, say you're talking about two or three thinkers and you say the wrong name and you're going along and you get that one student who puts their hand up and you know, yeah, and you said, you said Smith.
Didn't you mean Jones?
I feel like, okay, yeah, I meant Jones, but was there anybody in this room who didn't know what I meant?
Like, was there anybody who didn't know that that's what I meant?
That I got the wrong, you know, what, you know, or did the people, Walz versus Walz, there was, I forget which state it was, they've got to redo their ballots because they misspelled Walz's name.
People tick on that box.
In a realistic world, is there anybody who's like, oh, nope, nope, nope.
They thought they were voting for somebody in Waltz.
It was misleading.
Herman Waltz.
Yeah.
Everybody knows who they're voting for.
The point is, it doesn't fix anything.
Those chance to fix errors is because we know what you meant.
You knew what you meant.
Let's literally cross the Ts and dot the Is, make sure it's right, but give you a chance to fix it.
You're not changing your vote, you're not, I don't know, you're writing in somebody different, you're not, whatever.
The aim is not to fix anything, it is to create problems.
It is to gum up the system, it is to remove people, it's to do all of these kind of things to restrict rights, not to improve access, even though it's often described as that.
At the end of today, I just want everyone to think about what Van said.
That's between them and them.
Okay, so here's a really good way to understand politics in this country, especially right-wing politics in this country.
The things that they say are between That person and this entity, or we just can't get involved because to get involved would really be to step over the bounds of this person and their rights.
I want you to think about the times that folks on the GOP say that.
Well, we just can't get involved in a guy who says he's a black Nazi and says he likes to watch women in the shower because that's just between him and his state.
We're not going to get involved there.
Okay.
Got it.
You know, yeah, um, people have these guns that shoot like a hundred bullets per second, but you know, we can't get involved.
We just can't curtail that.
That, that really is between them and the constitution.
You're allowed to have a gun.
So, hey, sorry, we just can't step in.
It's just not something we can do.
Yeah, corporations, some of them, not all, a couple around the world are systematically denigrating our natural resources, water and carbon emissions.
And we just can't get evolved.
That's between them and their board of directors.
It's a free country.
Come on.
All right.
Yeah, this person hasn't voted for eight years because they didn't feel like it, didn't feel like someone cared.
They didn't think it was important, but now they do.
Well, we went ahead and stepped in, took them off the roll, because we needed to.
Oh, was it costing you money or taking up space or something?
Did you need to park a car there?
Was there not enough room in the parking lot?
No, no, we just decided to.
Okay, so that's not up to them and their sacred right to vote?
No, no.
20-year-old woman dying on a table.
You know, it turns out we had to step in with a law that says helping her would be a felony.
So just had to because life.
So yeah, we're watching her die and bleed out.
But sure, it's not.
We had to take care of that.
And she's really not allowed to, like, get with her doctor and make sure that's OK.
Do you all see the formula?
The things they say they can step in for and the things they say they can't step in for tells you everything you need to know.
I have some good news about voting, but Dan, I'll throw it to you for any final comments.
You can give us your reason for hope and then we'll go.
I think your analysis is exactly right there.
Again, I just refer to it as how selective it is of when they can and can't step in or when something is a private matter between somebody and their family.
But, but it's like Donald Trump and yeah.
Yeah.
I have a three-year-old and she's always like, you know, Hey, can you do this?
And I'm like, you know, I can't that the rules say I can't, I would, if I could, but I, you know, and she's like, you know, and like, she's like, put the window down in the car.
I'm like, you know, it's against the law to be doing that too much.
And, you know, or, or, or whatever it is.
Um, anyway, stupid example.
I interrupted you.
My fault.
Go ahead.
Well, no, I was just going to say, I mean, it tells us everything.
You know, years ago when Clinton had an affair, problematic and abuse of power, all those things are real.
But, you know, it was an issue of national concern.
He's not fit to be president.
Donald Trump comes along, you know, that's between him and his family.
Between him and God.
It's, you know, it's just the selectivity of, as you say, tells us everything about what they value in that.
My reason for hope is also election-related this week.
As people probably know, the national Teamsters declined to endorse anybody for president.
It was kind of controversial and a little bit weird and, you know, whatever.
But this week, or over the last couple weeks, whatever it is, several local and regional Teamsters chapters have endorsed Kamala Harris, and a number of those have been in Swing states, battleground states.
I think it says a lot about, you know, how she is resonating with people, trying to reconnect with blue-collar workers.
You know, a demographic that the Democrats have kind of overlooked in recent elections.
I saw that as hopeful, tied in with that data this week showing that she has closed the gap a lot with Trump and people's perception of, you know, the economy and being able to fix the economy and so on.
I continue to find hope in the support that she's winning beyond particular segments of the population that people might have expected.
My reason for hope comes out of Nebraska, a state I got to visit just recently.
And Nebraska is a state that has a kind of a strange electoral system along with Maine where You do have electoral votes up for grabs in various districts.
It's actually like a proportional representation of their electoral college votes as opposed to winner take all.
And there's a district in Nebraska that is projected to go blue, and it's actually pretty important.
It's one electoral vote, but it could be pretty big.
Surprise, surprise, there was a big push, last minute push, 40 days before the election for that to be changed and for it to be winner take all.
And surprise, surprise, it was pushed by Republicans.
A lot of people noticed.
This is one of those moments where, like, they would have got away with it except for you meddling kids.
And all of the, you know, national news and other reporters and people on social media were like, this is not OK.
And a Republican state legislature named Mike McDonald was kind of an important vote.
He came out against it.
I'm going to play you a clip of him on Chris Hayes from just the other night talking about why he wouldn't go along.
Here's that clip.
I've talked about this and other senators have talked about it since 17 when I was elected.
Let's do it in midterm.
Let's do ahead and go ahead and let the people of Nebraska vote, which I would oppose this, my vote on this to switch to winner take all.
If the people of Nebraska want to do it two years out, And let whoever wants to run for President of the United States know the rules.
Right.
I think that would be fair.
With two minutes left and says, I want to change the value of the field goal from three points to four.
And that's how I'm going to win.
That just, that's, it just doesn't, it doesn't ring true.
And that's not part of Nebraska values.
We want to let the people make the decision.
And you know, and to To President Trump and Vice President Harris.
Come into Omaha.
Come in and debate.
Have a debate in Omaha.
Again, work for that vote.
And work for that win as others have done in the past, including President Trump and President Biden.
All right, Dan.
He uses the old field goal analogy there.
Not allowed to move the goalpost after you've set up to kick.
And that's fair.
So, I think that's good news.
Again, I'm sure me and Mike McDonald don't agree on a lot when it comes to policy and other things.
To see people actually have principles here and say, look, it's not fair to change the rules when people are trying to decide to vote when the election is already in play.
I think that that makes a lot of sense.
So, all right, friends, a couple of things you need to be aware of.
Sanctuary is out this week.
It's about a fantastic movement of people of faith who practice radical hospitality to protect refugees in the eighties all the way to the Trump era.
Done by two fantastic historians, Lloyd Barber, Sergio Gonzalez.
Go find that now, Sanctuary on the Borders Between Church and State.
On Thursdays, we've had Leah Payne debut a series called Spirit and Power, all about Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians and how they are affecting the U.S.
elections and more.
Check that out in our feed.
And then finally, November 21, we better be seeing you at USC.
Dan is already ironing his cargo shorts.
November 22nd, we should be seeing you in San Diego and we are getting ready for that too.
So more details soon, but you need to circle those dates on your calendars.
Dan, I don't know what we're going to give people if they go LA and then San Diego, if they do like the, the two stop, the groupie thing.
What are we going to, how do we reward those folks?
Do we give them.
Like signed cargo shorts by you, or maybe I can give them a six pack of Diet Coke that I, you know, have, I don't know.
