Editor,
There are good Republicans leaving Congress and their party, and there are good Republicans staying who are afraid to speak out due the fear of threats to themselves and their families. Fringe elements have moved into this political vacuum, and they are not conservative Republicans.
Faith: My faith is personal, but I do have concerns about the merging of politics into Christianity. God is not into politics and does not take sides. Jesus was (and is) neither a Republican nor a Democrat.
Christianity is not a white European religion. Its ancestry is Middle Eastern and Jewish. The original scriptures were not written in English and contain no words written by white Europeans. Whatever white supremacists may believe, it is not a Christian religion as it cannot include Christ because Jesus was a Jew. Christianity is also not nationalism. Most of the Christians in the world are not only non-white, but they do not live in the U.S.
Fraud: It is likely that fraud occurs with every election. A conservative organization called The Heritage Foundation has been monitoring election fraud cases state by state for some time. In all the states they monitored, “there have been a total 1,465 proven cases of election fraud — 1,264 resulted in criminal prosecutions and the remainder in civil trials, diversion, judicial or other official findings.” These sound like big numbers, but these findings are from “more than a decade of data during which hundreds of millions of ballots were cast.” If the difference between winners and losers was a few hundred votes, that might affect an election, but with a difference of a few thousand votes, fraud would not have any impact on the outcome. There has been no actual evidence presented to any court of law from the 2020 election to prove otherwise. As the result of election fraud lies, many states have passed laws that were designed to make election fraud less likely but in actual practice increases voter suppression. Meaning people qualified to vote will not be allowed to.
Freedom: Both parties have real patriots, and both speak about the importance of personal freedoms. However, the results of some state legislative actions provide fewer, and not more, personal freedoms. In a least 20 U.S. states, women are less free than they were before, and in libraries around the U.S., fewer books are available to be read. In a few states, American history books need to be rewritten to avoid the “uncomfortable” truth of slavery and Black history.
The MAGA movement has a leader who both admires dictators (like Putin and Orban) and wants to be a dictator. Does anyone know of a dictatorship whose people have greater personal freedoms?
When the patriots of old rebelled against the king to create our democratic republic, the people on the other side who tried very hard to prevent that wore red coats. The people who want a dictator, who want us to abandon our almost 250-year-old republic, are not patriots and wear red hats.
Darrell Anderson
Battle Ground
