The
Republican Party promotes itself as “pro-life” and the Party of God. But
contemporary Republicans are the Party of Death.
Every year about 15,000 Americans die from gun murders. The multiplication of mass murders and school shootings in recent years has had no impact on Republican refusal to consider restrictions on guns, even though a majority of Americans support stricter gun control laws. Republican legislators are now removing the last vestiges of regulation on the public brandishing of guns: in Texas, adults can carry a handgun without a license, training or background check. The most extreme Republicans deride survivors of mass shootings as “actors” and reporting of those massacres as “false flag operations”, while the rest of the Party tolerates them.
The
National Academy of Sciences estimated in 2019 that each year over 100,000
Americans
die prematurely from air pollution that Republicans refuse to prevent or even
mitigate. The Party allowed the Trump administration to reduce regulation
of lead
in household water supplies, even though Republican politicians in Michigan were criminally
charged,
some for involuntary manslaughter, for refusing to deal with the lead crisis in
Flint.
As
deaths caused by hurricanes, heat waves, and flooding pile up across America,
Republican continue their denial of climate science. Climate change causes about 1000 deaths
annually
from heat. Hurricane Ida killed over 40
people
in the Northeast through flooding early in September, while
Tennessee suffered more flooding
deaths in 2021
than ever before.
Estimates
of the number of Americans who died annually because of inadequate health
insurance before Obamacare went into effect range from 25,000 to 45,000. Republican
policy since 2010 has paired unrelenting efforts to get rid of the ACA and
refusal to create anything in its place. Party policy under Paul Ryan’s
leadership tried unsuccessfully for years to cut Medicare, while Republicans at
the state level consistently refuse to expand Medicaid.
Death
from environmental pollution, climate disasters and inadequate health insurance
is concentrated among minorities and the poor, Americans whose welfare the
Republican Party has disdained for decades. Their assumption that these less
deserving Americans are Democratic voters is now being demonstrated again by
nationwide Republican efforts to limit their votes.
Unlike
the more murderous parties of death in modern history, such as the Committee of
Union and Progress in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, and the Argentine
junta and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s, Republicans could rely on
the defense that they didn’t kill anyone. Many people may have died, but
ideology is more important.
COVID
changed everything, raising the stakes of both conventional daily behavior and
national policy. Unified Republican adherence to lies about science, opposition
to the regulation of destructive business practices, and disdain for Americans
who aren’t rich continued right into the onset of pandemic. The early news
focused on the disproportionate deaths of urban minorities.
But
this year, Republican politicians ventured into new, possibly unprecedented
territory. Every day, more than one thousand unvaccinated conservative
Americans die of COVID, while the Republican Party insists ever more strongly on
anti-vaccination, anti-mask, and anti-life policies which are killing off their
own voters.
The
blinkered view of life and death common among so-called “pro-lifers” was
illustrated in the September 9 NYT
op-ed
by Prof. Karen Swallow Prior, which argued for the virtues of Texas’ new
anti-abortion law. She wrote: “The highest purpose of human law is the
protection of human life, from its beginning to its natural end.... A law
preserving the life of a human being at any stage can be considered ‘extreme’
only within a distorted social context.” In the distorted politics of
Republican “pro-lifers”, the beginning counts much more than the end.
Led
by the most extreme death-dealers, Republican politicians, with few exceptions,
have transformed themselves into a unique party of death. The vaccinated
Republican elite hides behind a perverted rephrasing of Patrick Henry’s
courageous motto: “In the name of liberty, we’ll give you death.”
Steve Hochstadt
Springbrook WI
