Right-wingers want to deny us the freedom to define ourselves

An essential tenet of liberation is the freedom to define oneself. Unfortunately, many sycophants throughout MAGA world have other things in mind by intentionally misidentifying others for the purpose of disqualifying them from public office and from sports competition.

While Vice President Kamala Harris has always been clear about her racial and ethnic identities, former President Donald Trump went on a racist tirade while speaking at the recent Black Journalists Association Conference in Chicago when questioned about whether he agreed with some Congressional Republicans that Harris is a “DEI hire.”

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“She was always of Indian heritage,” he began, “and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black,” he asserted with loud audible gaps coming from the audience. “And now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know: Is she Indian or is she Black?”

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Oy vey iz mir! It’s déjà vu all over again in the so-called “birther” conspiracy continuing saga. Previously, though, the plotters and their collaborators amassed their venom against then Senator and Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s birth status during the lead up to the 2020 election.

Trump, arguably the more prominent of the so-called “birthers,” attempted to delegitimize President Obama by continually arguing that he was born outside the United States, even well after Obama released his official birth certificate showing his birth in Honolulu, Hawaii.

This, along with Trump’s supposed investigations into Mr. Obama’s time spent in Indonesia as a child and his inquiries into his African roots on his father’s side, coexisted as not-so-veiled xenophobic and racist rants.

Trump consistently tried to define President Obama as the “other” by attempting to prevent our former [resident the right of self-definition — an apparent contradiction within a Republican political party that supposedly emphasizes rugged individualism, freedom, and liberty.

Trump’s sideKKKick, conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, was one of the chief architects of the “birther” movement, challenging Barack Obama’s citizenship status and referring to his mixed racial heritage as “halfrican-American” and to the president as “Barack the Magic Negro.”

Nothing can be clearer than the U.S. Constitution’s Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment. It states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, California on October 20, 1964. Harris’s parents were both immigrants, with her father from Jamaica and her mother from India. They became naturalized U.S. citizens after Kamala’s birth.

Because she was born in California with documented certification to prove it, Kamala Harris is a bona fide natural-born citizen of the United States, period — end of discussion!

This is not dependent on her parents’ citizenship. “Anyone born on U.S. soil and subject to its jurisdiction is a natural born citizen, regardless of parental citizenship,” according to the Cornell Legal Information Institute.

The only Constitutional requirements for presidential candidates state that the candidate “must be a natural born citizen of the United States, a resident for 14 years, and 35 years of age or older,” according to the Library of Congress. 

Apparently, Donald Trump, a convicted felon, has the right to run for the presidency.

At a press conference in 2020, a reporter asked Trump about a Newsweek column written by far-right lawyer, John Eastman, which asserted that Harris was not eligible to serve as vice president since her parents were immigrants. Eastman claimed that Harris “owed her allegiance to a foreign power or powers” because her parents came to the U.S. from India and Jamaica.

“I just heard that. I heard it today, that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” Trump said. “And by the way, the lawyer that wrote that piece is a very highly qualified, very talented lawyer.”

“I have no idea if that’s right,” Trump continued. “I would have assumed the Democrats would have checked that out before she gets chosen to run for vice president.”

Trump, by not refuting the conspiracy, essentially gave it credibility from his “bully pulpit.”

“But that’s a very serious – you’re saying that, they’re saying that she doesn’t qualify because she wasn’t born in this country?” he said. “…I’ll take a look.”

While two Black candidates for the highest offices in the land faced intense challenges to their eligibility to run for president and vice president, others have experienced far less pushback than Barack Obama and now Kamala Harris.

Denying grace & godliness to LGBTQ+ Christians

Take, for example, many religious conservatives like Franklin Graham, the CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and son of Billy Graham, went bonkers over the announced presidential candidacy of Mayor Pete Buttigieg in 2019, whom Graham attempted to define.

Responding to Buttigieg’s discussion regarding his faith, Graham wrote on Facebook, “Mayor Buttigieg says he is a gay Christian. But as a Christian I believe what the Bible says. God’s Word defines homosexuality as sin, something to be repentant of, not something to be flaunted, praised, or politicized.”

Graham previously chastised Buttigieg in another response, “In reality, being a Christian isn’t just a title we select or a church membership. It is a faith in God and His Word that transforms our lives to be more like the One we follow—Jesus Christ. Jesus said, ‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments’ (John 14:15).”

And Graham also quoted the infamous scripture Leviticus 20:13: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.’”

The deceptive campaign to redefine a cis boxer as a “trans” woman

The gender identity controversy has surrounded the Olympic Games this summer in Paris, France. Two female boxers, Algeria’s Imane Khelif, 25, pleaded in an interview with Algerian media as she and another female Olympic boxer, Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, faced intense scrutiny and false charges about their gender and eligibility to compete with women.

“I address my message to all the people of the world to adhere to the Olympic principles, according to the Olympic Charter,” Khelif told the Algerian broadcaster SNTV in Arabic, “and to avoid bullying all athletes, because this has a great impact and is capable of destroying people, killing people’s thinking and minds, and dividing people.”

The International Olympics Committee currently bans transgender and intersex athletes (referring to people born with sex characteristics that do not fit strictly into the male-female gender binary) from competing. Khelif and Lin have competed in women’s boxing matches for many years, including at the Tokyo Olympics, and they do not identify as transgender or intersex.

The IOC has vigorously defended Khelif and Lin, with its president, Thomas Bach, describing the pervasive inflammatory online comments against her as “hate speech.”

Bach argued, “We have two boxers who were born as women, who have been raised as women, who have a passport as a woman, and who have competed for many years as women.”

This has not kept prominent politicians and celebrities from adding to the fray, including Elon Musk, J.K. Rawlings of Harry Potter fame, Republican Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and, of course, Donald Trump.

“I WILL KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS!” Trump wrote on his misnamed media site, Truth Social.

It appears that Jesse Watters, a host on Fox “News” hopes to keep men out of voting for a Democratic woman in his latest on-air diatribe.

“And to be a man and then vote for a woman just because she’s a woman is either childish — that person has mommy issues — or they are just trying to be accepted by other women,” Watters said. “I heard the scientists say the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.”

And everyone by now has heard of Republican vice presidential nominee J. D. Vance’s “childless cat lady” comments. He uttered them in 2021 on Tucker Carlson’s Fox “News” program, referring then to Vice President Kamala Harris as one of the childless cat ladies running the nation who “want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”

Vance continued, “If you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”

What connects all the people who wish to deny others the right of self-definition and self-expression is the overarching patriarchal heteronationalist Christian white supremist project, one based on an oligarchical dictatorial fascist foundation privileging the very few while controlling and disempowering the many who do not or will not conform and submit.

As stated previously, an essential tenet of liberation is the freedom to define oneself. Kamala Harris’ campaign motto of “Freedom” could not be more relevant and timelier than it is today.

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