Republicans Slam Democrats' Support For (or Prosecutions For) Marijuana

Cissie Graham Lynch speaking at the RNC. 

The Republicans have put forth two women in the first two nights of its convention to lambaste Democrats over their marijuana policies. 

Last night, cancer survivor Natalie Harper praised the administration's FDA "Right to Try" reform act, affording incurably ill patients access to developmental drugs, then went onto claim that Democrats' healthcare plan is "a right to marijuana, opioids and the right to die with dignity."

Tonight, Cissie Graham Lynch, Billy Graham’s granddaughter, included among her indictments of the Democrats the banning of church services due to COVID, while declaring marijuana shops essential during the pandemic. “Even during the pandemic, we saw how quickly life can change," she said, "Some Democrat leaders tried to ban church services while marijuana shops and abortion clinics were declared essential."

A few speakers later, anti-abortion advocate Abby Johnson stated that, "Margaret Sanger was a racist who believed in eugenics," adding that Planned Parenthood clinics where "infant corpses are pieced back together” are predominately in minority communities.

Ironically, Republicans have been attacking former California AG Kamala Harris over her past record of marijuana convictions ever since her Vice Presidential nomination. Former New York Mayor and Trump acolyte/attorney Rudy Guiliani tweeted about it, which was especially ironic since under Guiliani's reign in NYC, the number of marijuana arrests soared, a result of his "stop and frisk" policies that largely rounded up people of color. 

I finally succeeded in getting the number of words in my convention speech below the number of small time Marijuana smokers Comrade Kamala put in prison.

— Rudy W. Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) August 23, 2020

Another granddaughter of Graham's, Jerushah Duford, called on evangelical Christian women to oppose Trump after his stunt holding up a Bible at St. John’s church. "Evangelical support of Donald Trump spits on [Graham's] legacy," Duford wrote in USA Today.  

Planned Parenthood of Greater New York announced in July it was disassociating with Sanger, a founder of the national organization, because of her “harmful connections to the eugenics movement.” Ellen Chesler, a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the author of a biography of Sanger, told the New York Times that the eugenics movement had wide support at the time in both conservative and liberal circles. Sanger, who was a social worker who wanted better lives for the children she saw in the slums of New York, "rejected some eugenicists’ belief that white middle-class families should have more children than others," Chesler said.

Sanger, an inspiration for Wonder Woman, argued in Woman and the New Race that overpopulation is the cause of all human misery, including poverty and war. Birth control, she said, is "the real cure for war" and "love is the greatest force of the universe." It seems like a lesson many (too many) need to learn.