Slavery came up today...

In a way where those who talked about it discussed it with something other than abhorrence. Are we in 1813? Or 2013? Insanity.

First, yesterday, a judge overruling parts of Texas's strict new abortion law said abortion is the most divisive issue in the country since slavery. This seems like a big comparison (*almost* like comparing something to the Holocaust) because it's clearly a horrific, embarrassing chapter. I'm giving this comparison some serious side-eye, but there's a bigger fish to fry.

A Nevada state legislator said today that if his constituents supported slavery, he would in the State Capitol. Two things here:

1) I'm happy to say even the NV GOP leader has already verbally smacked this guy for bringing up such a horrible thing & saying he'd be for it - even if only under the most bizarre of circumstances. I'm very glad the party is not honoring their fringiest of the fringe. (PS: This is how you lead, Boehner. Tell your crazies that they're crazy.)

2) DON'T ELECT PEOPLE LIKE THIS! People, if we want to live in a better world, we've got to strive to elect people better than us: people who know better how to make decisions, people who don't get bored by the minutiae of the farm bill, people who are smarter, better, kinder people than us. And this includes: don't elect people who pander to the lowest common denominator. History is filled with times when great leaders passed great laws to the chagrin of their constituents. But history has always rewarded them handsomely, as folks realize they're wrong. What if they would've listened & pandered to their constituents? We might *still* have slavery in some areas.

It stuns me regularly the issues that pop up. (RICHARD NIXON, Republican of the 60s & 70s, was down with birth control & created the EPA & OSHA, but we're still having fights about these things? And now, we're headed back even further to things from the 1860s? Progress is key to any civilization. It's how we've obtained great things like plumbing. Why are so many so keen to move backwards? Is it due to pandering? How can we, the constituents, encourage our peers to vote for those better than us rather than our average peers.

I don't know the answers to those questions, but I do know one answer that we've known for over a century: slavery is wrong & if you imply otherwise, you deserve to lose your job, especially if it is one as an elected official.