Editorial: Missourians have backed abortion rights twice now. It’s time to move on, by the Post-Dispatch Editorial Board
8 November 2026
How many times will Missourians have to vote to keep the long arm of the state off women’s bodies and out of their doctors’ offices?
For the second time in two years, the state’s residents on Tuesday voted to defend reproductive rights, solidly turning back the near-total abortion ban threatened by Missouri Amendment 3.
Already — predictably — there’s talk among anti-choice activists of getting a citizen-initiated referendum back on a future ballot to try again to outlaw abortion services statewide. As one, Tom Estes of the pro-Amendment 3 campaign, told the Post-Dispatch’s Jack Suntrup, “The pro-life community is never going to stop.”
SOURCE: https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/column/article_7d957981-6a83-41c6-85b1-9dca29260f5c.html
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How the Bluenami Swept Away the Christian Right’s Texas Stronghold
The movement will have to look elsewhere to rebuild on a map with a shrinking number of safely red states.
With the blue tsunami that inundated Texas on Election Day, the Christian right has lost the state that made it one of the most powerful forces in modern American politics. Since forging an unbreakable pact with the Republican Party in the Reagan era, for decades the Christian right purposefully notched its national successes by building robust state-level legislative and electoral machinery across the country. Texas was the crown jewel of this strategy, where operatives and elected officials together hatched plans to kill off church-state separation, Christianize the public schools, criminalize abortion, and eviscerate the civil rights of LGBTQ people.
For three decades, Republicans with close ties with the Christian right — George W. Bush, Rick Perry, and the outgoing Greg Abbott — have occupied the governor’s mansion. The latter two, in particular, have worked hand in glove with the Christian right to make the country’s second most populous state the proving ground for a white Christian nationalist agenda. Abbott’s lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, who was first elected to the office in 2014, wielded enormous power over the state legislature to enact it. Like Abbott, he went down to defeat, on Tuesday, losing, like Abbott, to a woman.
SOURCE: by Sarah Posner. Talking Points. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/how-the-bluenami-swept-away-the-christian-rights-texas-stronghold, 8 November 2026.
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The political playbook that unravelled US transgender rights in the past decade: From the military to healthcare, Trump systematically dismantled Obama-era protections for transgender rights
Shelby Chestnut remembers turning on the news in 2016 and hearing something he didn’t expect. Then- attorney general, Loretta Lynch, had just announced a federal lawsuit to block HB2 in North Carolina, otherwise known as the “bathroom bill”. Lynch said the law, which made it illegal for transgender people to use a public restroom that did not align with the sex listed on their birth certificate, was reminiscent of those passed during the Jim Crow era that restricted public facility use by race.
Then, Lynch addressed transgender Americans directly:
“But no matter how isolated or scared you may feel today, the Department of Justice and the entire Obama administration wants you to know that we see you; we stand with you; and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward.”
HB 2 was repealed within the year. Chestnut said he thought at the time: “Oh this is the next phase of protections for trans people.”
by Maggie Mertens. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/nov/08/transgender-rights-unraveled. 8 November 2026.