NRA-Gabrielle Giffords fight heats up

[thucythucy]

64. So now, not only do I lack your alleged rural BS detector,

but I also don't understand "human nature"? Is this another one of those special gifts only "rural" voters possess? Because, you know, there just aren't that many people in New York, LA, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, to help with our understanding?

I think your analysis of what constitutes a winning vs. a losing political argument is shallow, to say the least. Abortion rights were granted by a US Supreme Court decision in the early 1970s, and have been whittled away ever since, often by rural constituencies who don't seem, despite their vaunted BS detector and your analysis of human nature, to understand that anti-choice means anti-rights. If you doubt this, ask yourself, how many health centers now offer abortions in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, South Dakota, vs. how many offer them New York, Massachusetts, or California? Your analysis doesn't hold water, not a bit of it.

And as someone quite interested in women's health issues, I can tell you that fight is far from "won." Again, how easy is it, do you think, for a poor woman in Mississippi to get an abortion if and when she needs one? The "right to choose" is being yanked away from us, even as we speak, and representatives of rural constituencies are often at the forefront of the anti-choice movement. And so rural voters seem to have no problem taking rights away, as long as we're talking women's rights, or the rights of people in poverty, or GLBT rights.

In fact, the anti-marriage equality sentiment (and law) is still strongest in precisely those places where pro-gun safety regulations are least popular. How does that factor into your freedom vs. taking stuff away paradigm? It seems to me the picture in the rural south is: gun rights are sacred, but women's rights, and GLBT rights, not so much.

That said, the last polls I saw showed the overwhelming majority of Americans--like say, 90%--support universal background checks. So let's start with that. Or is that another issue progressive and urban Democrats need to back away from, for fear of offending the (ever shrinking) southern rural white male voter?

That Senator Feinstein is a bogy for rural voters isn't surprising. As I recall, Speaker Pelosi served that function before her.

If progressives were to back down every time the right tries to demonize a Democrat, we'd be left with no agenda at all.

And as a progressive Democrat, that can't possibly be what you want, can it?