Sunday 26 June 2022

The South will rise again!

Except, the Confederacy never really went away.

- They kept slavery by the back door until the advent of World War II. They arrested people (including a few whites) for very minor crimes and put them in chain gangs or imposed savage $ fines which they couldn't afford to pay off, thus making them debt slaves (see lengthy Knowing Better YouTube video);
- They had segregation (in one form or another) until the 1960s;
- There is a high overlap between the states which execute most prisoners and former Confederate states.

Today, let's look at the thirteen states with "trigger laws", i.e. the anti-abortion states.

Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee - the five Western-most Confederate States.
Missouri, Kentucky - half-in, half-out Confederate States (they were 'slave states').
Oklahoma - wasn't yet a state at the time of the Civil War, but probably would have been a Confederate State;
Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota - were largely unoccupied at the time of the Civil War and not yet states. These four form a large contiguous block along the US-Canada border between Washington/Oregon (Pacific coast) and Minnesota (Mid-West?). Only Montana is missing from that block. Either Montana is relatively progressive, or they never realised that abortion was legal in the first place.
(Funda)mentalist Utah directly to the south of Idaho/Wyoming.
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Or maybe this is the usual American "progressive coasts, conservative interior" divide? Confederate states without trigger laws are the ones with some Atlantic coastline, plus Alabama, although that will probably be next.

4 comments:

mombers said...

Keep your god out of my uterus

Mark Wadsworth said...

M, we are men. None of our business!

Bayard said...

"Let's put all our religious maniacs on a ship and send them over the Atlantic. What could possibly go wrong?"

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, if that was the plan, it worked a treat. For us.