In the America led by Christian nationalists, democracy takes a back seat to doctrine, birth control is basically murder, and the wall between church and state … well … there used to be a wall, anyway.
I know it’s been said, and a lot of us have felt it, but this feels like those opening episodes of the TV series The Handmaid’s Tale, where everyone is kinda just like, “What’s happening? Should we do something?”
The problem is, by the time you find yourself wondering that, it’s too late.
Every week, Andra Watkins joins us to get into the authoritarian weeds of this Christian vision. Folks like Russell Vought might use polite euphemisms like traditional values or religious liberty, but their quiet implementation of radical authoritarianism isn’t hypothetical. As anyone who reads her Substack knows, all of these moves are encoded in Project 2025 and are appearing in all facets of our culture, government, and daily life, thanks to the religious zealots hoping to enforce their values on the rest of us.
This week, Andra and Lisa Senecal take us through their plans for birth control, which is to say, they don’t want birth control. There is nothing about reproductive freedom that they won’t touch. Emergency contraception. Birth control pills. Even rape kits are under coordinated attack by Christian legal organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom. Their strategy? Use vague phrasing in court filings to open the door to nationwide contraception bans without naming them directly.
They might say their goal is to limit abortion. It’s not. Their goal is to eliminate any and every family planning tool that a woman might have at her disposal.
It’s dark. And it’s even darker than it sounds. Lisa and Andra explain why in this conversation. As one Missouri lawmaker claimed, forced birth can be the greatest healing agent.
There is no salvation, only subjugation. And make no mistake, this is coming for you whether you’re in a blue state or a red state. If this feels like a slow-moving coup, that’s because it is. The strategy is deliberate, layered, and cloaked in religiosity and righteousness. They are counting on our passivity and the media’s unwillingness to address it, and that same feeling they had in the pilot of A Handmaid’s Tale. That can never happen here.
But it already is.
