Why do conservatives always accuse their opponents of exactly what they themselves are doing? [View all]

[mwb970]

Republicans don't care about freedom

As long as I have been alive, republicans have been stoking fear about what Democrats will do if they are allowed to govern.

They'll take away your rights.
They'll silence speech they don't like.
They'll take your money and give it to their rich friends. They'll steal your elections. They'll take over the educational system.

Yet time and again, that's exactly what republicans do when they get power.

They take away your rights - to marry who you want, to make choices about when and where you start a family. They silence speech they don't like - banning books and ideas that offend them, outlawing constitutionally protected rights to assemble and protest your own government.

They take your money and give it to their rich friends by cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy and throwing sweetheart deals to their well-heeled donors.

They steal your elections through blatantly unconstitutional gerrymanders aided and abetted by an illegitimately stacked federal judiciary and Supreme Court.

And now, right after an election when voters rejected extremist republican ideologues and elected Democrats to the state Board of Education, your ridiculously gerrymandered Ohio state legislature is poised to take over the educational system too - by stripping power from the elected state board and controlling our state's educational system from the republican governor's mansion.

republicans don't care about freedom or government overreach or protecting your rights or anything else. They care about power, specifically forcing their radical MAGA agenda on the rest of us. Now that their most extreme elements have seized total power in gerrymandered states like Ohio, there is nothing to stop them.

Judson Dunham, Bexley

(Letter to the Editor, Columbus Dispatch, November 20, 2022)