Want To Be Free? Join The GOP.

I went on my first Freedom Ride when I was 15 y/o in 1959. We got on a bus at the high school in my New York City neighborhood, took the New Jersey Turnpike down to the Delaware Memorial Bridge and then crossed into Delaware to desegregate a diner on U.S. Route 40 which had separate sections for whites and blacks.

Delaware was a segregated state in 1959, as were the Maryland suburbs around Washington, D.C. I stayed involved with civil rights until LBJ got the civil rights bill through Congress in 1964.

The civil rights movement then morphed into women’s liberation. In 1972, I gave a little speech at a demonstration that Gloria Steinem organized across the street from the United Nations to help promote Ms. Magazine.

This dynamic of liberal political advocacy began to change when attention shifted to gay ‘rights.’ Even though a significant milestone would be achieved in 2015 with the Obergefell v. Hodges case, the landscape began to shift as the alt-right began to react against what was pronounced as a threat against ‘traditional values,’ in particular family structure and then LGBTQ presence in gender-based sports.

What the growing, alt-right segment in the GOP eventually realized, is that opposing equality of human conditions like gender and race was basically a losing proposition, but opposing equality for human…