Evening Wrap

I am often in the position lately of not knowing how to open the newsletter, even though I have a boatload of news to discuss. The stories are fresh, but I still feel like I’m repeating myself, because the topics stay the same — most days, we’re talking about abortion, or school vouchers, or attacks on LGBTQ+ rights. And some days, we’re talking about all three.

At a glance, the GOP’s education agenda can seem overly broad. (Among other things, lawmakers would like to: Ban books, limit lessons about things that happened and people that exist, meddle in athletics, give (some) parents more rights and siphon public funding away from public schools.) It’s a long list of policy goals that might seem divergent, but it’s not difficult to find the common thread among them. One way or another, it’s all about politics.

Unless you’re a foodie, most of the food news you’ve read in the past year has probably focused on grocery-store sticker shock. (Remember when we could all afford eggs?) There’s good reason for that — on average, grocery store prices increased by 11.8% from December 2021 to December 2022, and they’re expected to keep climbing — but it’s only half the story. The other half is hidden in kitchens across the country, where struggling families are about to lose the life raft that’s kept their heads above water since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

With all of the drama over the fate of democracy and high profile battles in the Culture Wars, it’s easy to forget that the issue that hits closest to home for many, maybe most, people is how to access and pay for health care. And today, that’s what our newsrooms seem to be talking about most.

How about we talk about elections? Specifically, let’s talk about the 2020 election. But we already talked about that, you say? Right, but it’s the gift that just keeps giving. In Arizona, at least four current or former state legislators have been ordered to travel to Washington, D.C. to give testimony before a grand jury looking into efforts to overturn the 2020 election. (Spoiler: Joe Biden won, Donald Trump didn’t, but that didn’t prevent a lot of people from pretending otherwise.)

You can’t discuss criminal justice in America without talking about guns, especially in the aftermath of (yet another) high-profile mass shooting — so let’s start in Michigan, where students from Michigan State University traveled to the state capitol to demand action on gun reform two days after three of their classmates were killed and five more were injured when a gunman opened fire before taking his own life.

Mass shootings are so endemic to America that I could write about them daily without ever running out of material. As of Wednesday morning, there had been 81 mass shootings in the United States this year. Four of those have occurred since Monday, when three students were murdered and another five were injured in a shooting at Michigan State University. The political aftermath of that tragedy followed a predictable script that opened with Democrats once again renewing their oft-renewed pleas for the most basic of gun control measures.

I was shocked this morning when I checked the ol’ bigotry tracker and saw that the number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills filed by state lawmakers was unchanged from Friday. This isn’t good — the total is 299, a preposterously large number — but it’s the first time this year the tracker hasn’t jumped multiple spots in a matter of hours, which I guess makes the situation “not actively bad.” It’s the tiniest of moral victories, but in these terrible times, we take the wins where we can get them, you know? (Update: It is now 310. The moral victory was fleeting.)

I’d thought we were focusing on health care today, but it turns out we’re really focusing on abortion — which is fine, because abortion is health care. (Say it with me: Abortion is health care.)

The only thing that seems to change in the bigoted hellscape of 2023 is the number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills filed by state lawmakers. Last week, it was 234. Two days ago, it was 272. As of Friday afternoon, it was 299. (Thirty-four of those have been defeated; the most microscopic of victories.) It’s like one of those horrible word problems about multiplying bacteria: The growth is exponential. The petri dish is ever more disgusting.

Let’s start in the place where everything is always snarled: Congress. House Republicans gathered there on Wednesday to unveil what they described as “innovative solutions” to the super pressing problems plaguing the nation’s public education system. Those solutions? Funneling public money to private schools, banning transgender athletes and ensuring that parents can complain about everything that happens in their child’s classroom, our D.C. bureau reported.

The last time we talked about the GOP’s nationwide assault on LGBTQ+ equality, I told you that state lawmakers had filed at least 234 bills taking aim at the basic (and hard-won) rights afforded to gay and transgender citizens. That was a week ago, and that number is much higher now. As of Wednesday, advocacy groups were tracking at least 272 anti-LBGTQ+ bills, well above the number of similar proposals filed in all of 2021 and just 68 shy of the record-breaking 340 introduced last year.