The Republican crusade against women’s reproductive rights showed its true colors during a January 26th testimony on a draconian anti-abortion bill that would impose a “near total” ban on the procedure in the state of Florida. When discussing Rep. Charles Van Zant’s HB 865, an anti-abortion activist, made some extremely disturbing remarks that revealed there is a deep undercurrent of racial supremacy motivating their efforts to control women’s bodies and impose their extremist religious beliefs on the people of our nation.

A religious zealot by the name of Greg Pound addressed the Justice subcommittee on January 26th, where he explained that his real concern was not about the welfare of fetuses but a paranoid fear of changing demographics and the collapse of “white culture,” threatened by the idea that the socioeconomic primacy of the white Christian male might be near an end, and with it, the political base of the Republican Party.

“You don’t see us as a culture, as a white culture, pushing this agenda of abortion, women outside the home not having babies, everybody getting more and more and more? We’re a sick nation and if we don’t repent then the people leading our government, you are legislating morality by the laws you pass. I was sitting in this chamber when the immigration bill came through, and the Mexicans in here – do these white people think they live on an island? These people [Mexicans] aren’t going to kill their babies. Their race is through the breeding of having families, children. And what happens is once you see the condition we’re in, we’re destroying ourselves and destroying our families, we’ve accepted something in this country that the Creator — that we’re going to pay for.”

Bill sponsor, Baptist preacher, and religious extremist Charles Van Zant is no stranger to paranoid conspiracy theories himself, having once announced in the statehouse that the “Common Core” educational standards were in fact a liberal plot that would “attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can.” He has inserted religious language in the bill, recognizing the “Creator” as the source of all human life in a flagrant rejection of the separation between church and state.

This kind of religo-racist supremacy is the ideological foundation of the modern Republican Party, and they will not stop until they have imposed their archaic ideas of social control on the people of America. These attacks against Planned Parenthood and women’s healthcare choices are socially counterproductive and are a disgusting affront to the values that our nation was founded on – a secular government and a society of religious pluralism. This bill is obviously unconstitutional and has no hope of becoming law, but the fact that they are trying at all is a deeply alarming development – and sends a strong message about the misplaced priorities of the Florida legislature, who would be better off working to stop their state from inevitably sliding into the ocean. For the sake of our right to plan our own family and the right for women to have control over their own bodies, we cannot allow these Christian fanatics to impose their version of sharia law on an unwilling populace.

Please call your Florida representatives and fight against this despicable attack on women’s rights and reproductive healthcare for all!

Senator Anitere Flores: (850) 487-5037

Senator Stargle: (850) 487-5015