In addition to Gorman's poem, Salinas also challenged four other books: The ABCs of Black History, Cuban Kids, Countries in the News Cuba, and Love to Langston for what she claimed were filled with "indirect hate messages" inspired by critical race theory.

Those of us who are not gun fetishists are supposed to "keep our powder dry" on the subject, but it must be said: The Second Amendment is as antique as a muzzle-loaded long gun, and should be treated as a historical artifact.

We're not supposed to even whisper such things because the NRA and right-wing extremists have sensible Americans — including many gun owners — so bullied and cowed that we feel we are only allowed to hope for sensible gun-safety legislation around the edges of their highly profitable assault on American lives.

We've said it before, but it is always worth repeating for the millions of younger people coming to voting age each year who may not have considered it before: It doesn't take a grammarian or a constitutional scholar to tell you that the opening clause of the Second Amendment is obviously conditional:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Meaning, so long as a militia of citizens is necessary (and a well-regulated one, at that), then what follows is true. But only if that first part pertains.

The Gun Violence Archive found that on average, 50 people die every day in the United States from non-suicide gun-related violence. Approximately 100 more are injured. In 2022, there were 20,200 firearms-related homicides or accidental deaths, with 38,550 injuries and 22,292 suicides. Let’s connect the dots: Hyper rugged individualism in the context of fear and hatemongering within national firearms culture produces a severely fractured sense of community where property rights hold sway over human rights, resulting in ever-increasing gun violence, injury, and death.

*snip*

While the Founding Fathers crafted what many consider today as a brilliant and enduring blueprint for a new nation, the Constitutions of the United States, they were nonetheless products of their times with their individual human shortcomings and biases. Just coming off a war of independence against one of the world’s great colonial powers, leaders thought it reasonable to ensure the “free” people the capability of defending themselves against any potentially tyrannical government. In this regard, they established the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights, granting people “the right to bear arms.”

These same men owned large parcels of land, and many gained wealth from engaging in the slave trade. In her book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, historian Carol Anderson argues that the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was crafted by James Madison “…to mollify the concerns coming out of Virginia and the anti-Federalists, that they would still have full control over their state militias – and those militias were used in order to quell slave revolts.”

In other words, the “right to bear arms” was only meant for white people to repress forms of resistance, including uprisings by enslaved Black people. Since then, firearms and the culture supporting it has been encoded into the very DNA of the U.S.-American identity and what it means to be “an American.” But what was not even reasonable in the 18th century without substantial reform stands as an existential threat today.

More: https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/05/hyper-rugged-individualism-the-terror-of-the-2nd-amendment/

CLIVE, Iowa -- Republicans are caught in a trap on abortion, and it's only getting worse. They know extreme abortion policies are unpopular and will cost them at the ballot box, yet any step they might take to the center on the issue risks angering evangelical voters, a key GOP constituency that is bent on banning the procedure nationwide.

The intraparty conflict in post-Roe America was on full display here in the Hawkeye State, where a crop of declared presidential candidates and some who are still exploring a run gathered on Saturday for the first major event of the 2024 presidential caucus cycle.

The forum, hosted by the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, a leading organization of social conservatives, drew over a thousand like-minded attendees who came to the event in support of evangelical causes and to kick the tires on the expanding GOP presidential field.