I have reason to be optimistic that the grip of the Tea Party, the Evangelicals, and the more extreme wing of the Republican Party is starting to slip. Mississippi just rejected the "Personhood" amendment by a landslide, 59% to 41%. Issue 26 would have defined a fertilized egg as a person, thus, of course, making abortion illegal.
If you can't get abortion outlawed in Mississippi, which I presume is a state pretty much on the more extreme end of the conservative spectrum, I would say that a woman's right to choose is still quite safe, and will stay so in perpetuity.
The ideological extremes always over-interpret political trends. When the country turned against Obama and the Democrats in 2010, the far right thought it was the Tea Party that caused the turn. In fact, the far left thought so too, out of fear that their opposite extreme would take over the country that they had thought they had captured just two years earlier.
But, if fact, the Tea Party cost the Republicans control of the Senate, it seemed to me. Because of radical Tea Party candidates in Delaware, Nevada, Alaska, and New York, all of whom lost, the Senate stayed in Democrats' hands.
Now, the far right continues to believe that the tide has turned and the country is ready for a new revolution and embrace a tax-cutting, deregulating, abortion-ending, anti-gay, government slashing new reality. But, I think that quite the opposite is happening. I think that the country is getting a taste of their righteous and inflexible despotism and is being turned off by it.
Good for the good people of Mississippi for showing, once again, that even though the far right is very passionate and very loud, they do not get to dictate people's choices and lives.
