Party Talk

All this noise about the election isn’t worth talking about. Most of it is out of our control. But it is useful for one reason: it has revealed to us how broken our system is, and how much we need to focus on fixing it on the national level. George Washington warned us about the danger of political parties, but we fell into the trap anyway. Now we are stuck.

Two candidates have drifted to the top who are not compelling to the majority of either party. How do I know that? By the strange gift of being a person who grew up in New York City but has lived in Phoenix for more than fifty years. This move across the country took me out of the “Coastal Elites” echo chamber and made me politically indescribable. I’m neither a Democrat nor a Republican, nor a predictable voter.

But my values guide me, and my primary value is human rights. Especially womens’ rights.

What does this mean? It means I cannot vote for Donald Trump, although I could vote for a Republican if there were a platform I could even look at. But Project 2025 is not a platform, it is an ideological treatise. As a lifelong fighter for women’s rights, there’s no way I can accept this ideology as part of a government for the people and by the people.

How does a Republican, historically the party of limited government, get behind a document that increases the power of the presidency and sets women’s rights back fifty years? ( And I’m not talking only about abortion, about which I don’t believe we should be publicly talking about because all bedroom issues…