politics

Ya! Nuance!

You're taking evidence of a fringe movement and presenting it as evidence of a widespread Republican Party movement. Those are two very different claims.

Yes, there are fringe activists currently calling for repeal of the 19th Amendment, and one of them apparently showed up outside the Lindsay Clancy courthouse with a "Repeal the 19th" sign. That establishes that these people exist. It does not establish that this is a widespread movement within the Republican Party, much less that the Republican Party is pursuing repeal as a political objective. Current reporting actually describes the people pushing this as fringe activists.

There's also a rather enormous constitutional hurdle you're overlooking. The 19th Amendment cannot simply be repealed through ordinary legislation, executive action, or a presidential order. Under Article V, repealing it would require another constitutional amendment. That means either two-thirds of both chambers of Congress must propose one, or two-thirds of the states must call a convention to propose one. Then three-fourths of the states, currently 38, would have to ratify it.

So I'm not claiming nobody has ever suggested repealing the 19th Amendment. They clearly have. I'm saying that extrapolating from a handful of fringe activists and an isolated courthouse protest to "the Republican Party wants to repeal women's right to vote" is not supported by the evidence. If you have evidence of an organized Republican campaign, Republican Party platform, congressional proposal, or state-level movement actually pursuing repeal, that's a substantially different claim and I'd be interested in seeing it.

And now, for the not so nice part.

You are doing the exact thing I am arguing against: presenting out-of-context pictures as though they somehow validate a conclusion you had already reached. You aren't examining the evidence and then reaching a conclusion; you're working backward from the conclusion and selectively presenting whatever you think supports it. This kind of reasoning, and the way people manipulate information to fit an existing narrative, is precisely the sort of behavior that contributes to the political environment we are living in today.

And this isn't some new phenomenon. There have been people throughout human history who were absolutely convinced they knew better than everyone else while demonstrating very little ability to distinguish evidence from confirmation bias. You don't become intellectually or morally superior simply because you've found a group of people you consider stupid. If anything, you're demonstrating the exact same intellectual weakness from the opposite direction.

People are allowed to be idiots. That doesn't make their idiocy representative of an entire political movement, and it certainly doesn't make selectively presenting their behavior as evidence of a broader movement intellectually honest. If your argument depends on taking the most extreme people you can find and pretending they represent everyone else, then the problem isn't the people you're pointing at. It's the methodology you're using to make your point.