Thread by @IsTrumpCareDead

Y’all.

I’ve been doing some reading and research and a bunch of online quizzes and some soul searching and...well, I have a confession.

I....I think I might be a Democrat.

To understand this, you have to know that up until a month or so ago, I was a registered Republican.

Because that’s how I was raised here in Red country as the daughter of a very conservative Southern Baptist head deacon.

I was raised thinking Democrats did the devil’s work.

I remember crying, sobbing even, when Bill Clinton won the election because I thought we would all be headed straight for hell.

And my fairly small, conservative k-12 school with all 130 of us in my graduating class did nothing to teach me otherwise.

And I remember hearing that Democrats were “Satan’s tools” more than once. That they wanted to kill babies and make it illegal to carry your Bible or your gun.

This was before the internet was much of a big deal. We didn’t get dial-up until the summer after my 9th grade year.

My media consumption was very limited. I wasn’t allowed to watch MTV, VH1, or cable news at all. Everything else was on a “by the show” basis. We only got our local newspaper- also pretty conservative.

And this was all I knew.

But I decided to go to college and to go “away” - a whole hour and a half away! - to a “secular” state college.

Talk about culture shock.

But I still had to check on every morning and night and report on my day and my classes. So my viewpoint didn’t necessarily change much.

Then in a very tough course of events my Junior year of college, my mom passed away from a life-Long illness and my dad had some mental health issues and was no longer really involved in my life. It was the first time I was really free to do my own thing and form my own opinions.

And from then, I started figuring things out more for myself. I did horrendous and unforgivable things like drinking alcohol and making friends with the gay guy in my ethics class. (Sarcasm!)

And from there it was a slow evolution but still firmly Republican.

Until my daughter was born.

She was born with a list of medical issues. Then I discovered that the ACA kicked in on my husband’s insurance 6wks after she was born and the lifetime limit was removed.

But I had listened to Republicans shred the ACA and had blindly nodded along.

And here was the ACA, saving my child. Saving us from bankruptcy. Preventing her from being denied coverage.

And then we applied for Medicaid. Medicaid, I had always been told, was for lazy poor people who mooched off the rest of us.

It’s not.

It’s lifesaving coverage.

And then the 2016 election cycle came around. First presidential election since my daughter’s birth. And the GOP began shouting loudly about repealing the ACA. And I looked at my child. And thought about what that would mean.

And so I stood up to fight for my child.

And as a result of the ACA fight, I logged on to twitter for the first time, and I started following people like @benwikler and @charles_gaba and @TopherSpiro, who tweeted not only health care news, but other political issues. And I began to see the GOP in a different light.

I also began to see the Democrats in a different light. And while I began as “I’m only involved for health care”, I found it’s all connected. And I had to decide what to do.

And so I stood up to fight.

But not just for my daughter this time.

For everyone who needs a voice.

And so finally, at 35, I formally removed myself from the Republican Party. And since then, I’ve been learning and reading and soul searching (and yes, taking some of those long online quizzes.)

And I’m pretty damn sure I’m a Democrat.

All that to say - don’t give up on all the Republicans. Some of us don’t know what we don’t know. And everyone’s going figure that out at a different pace.

And sometimes what we figure out is what we were taught all our lives is wrong and backwards and hateful.

And some of us - maybe not all of us, but some of us - might just figure out we’re Democrats who were never given the chance to figure that out before.

(/end, now that I’ve yammered my life story to all of you.)