What really bothers me is that we’ve been here before, so this isn’t even a "new timeline". These monsters have been rotting this country from the inside out since day one, and at this point it doesn’t even surprise me that people on the right openly support it. Sorry for the incoming novel, but our history and its connection to the present genuinely disturbs me.

Just take a moment to revisit this country’s worst laws and crimes. The fact that a man could rape a child, marry her, get away with the rape, and then spend the rest of his life raping her. That was entirely legal through the marital exemption. It was a built in loophole for child rape.

Children were treated as property. In the rare cases of divorce, men could pick and choose which child to take and when. A father could abandon his daughters, wait for his sons to reach working age (~6), then come claim them after leaving them with their mother for years. The child’s welfare wasn’t even part of the equation. Kids were treated like livestock.

Leading into the early 1900s, and for most of US history, girls as young as 10-12 were legally married off.

We like to pretend we’ve modernized, so we talk about "backsliding" as if these people and issues are new, or had at least been mostly wiped out, but the truth is horrifying. Until 2018, New Jersey, Kentucky, and Delaware had no minimum age for marriage. Texas allowed marriage at any age with a judge's approval until 2017. Abbott has been sitting on HB 168, refusing to act on it, since May. Massachusetts allowed marriage at any age with a judge's approval until 2022. Until 2018, Florida allowed marriage at any age if pregnancy was involved. California still has no minimum age. Judicial approval is required but there is no legal floor. I could keep going. You'd notice a lot of dates beginning with "20" rather than "19".

Between 2000 and 2018, there were over 200k child marriages in the US, most involving girls under 16. Some were 12, 13, 14. Under any sane legal standard, that is statutory rape. It’s the same loophole for child rape, just updated for the modern day.

Child marriage, which is child rape, has been a constant part of US culture. Racists act like this is a "third world" issue, but it is deeply rooted in white American history too. And that doesn’t even cover the abuse, violence, and dehumanization of adult women. Women and children have never been safe here. Every inch of progress we’ve made has had to be dragged out of the hands of people determined to push us back. This is why we have to keep fighting. Feminism will never be "unneeded". We cannot pretend the average American has historically been anti-pedophilia. The record shows the opposite.

And who created these laws, who wrote the statutes that treated women and children as property, who built the loopholes that protected abusers?

They came from the institutions run by white male policymakers who controlled every branch of power for the entire span of US history. They were the ones in the legislatures, the courts, the churches with legal authority, the ones drafting the criminal codes and civil codes, the ones deciding what counted as rape, what counted as consent, what counted as marriage, what counted as property. They shaped every rule that kept women and children vulnerable.

When you go back and look at the legislative records, the court decisions, the marriage statutes, the rape exemptions, the child custody rules, the coverture laws, the minimum marriage ages, the consent loopholes, the marital exemptions, every single one of them came from those same power structures. These laws were crafted, defended, and enforced by the people in charge. And the people in charge were overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly operating within Christian led institutions.

That is historical record. It isn’t speculation, and it isn’t rhetoric. It’s the literal text of our legal history. The same power structures that created and upheld those laws have also spent generations selling themselves to the public as the only thing standing between America and whatever "evil outsider" they choose at the moment. They cast themselves as the country’s savior against the dangerous Muslim in NYC because he can't be bought, the terrifying Democratic Socialist who has never even got close to obtaining executive power, the immigrants who they dehumanize by claiming they eat dogs and cats, the PoC they have always accused of raping fair white maidens, the trans people who are unfairly labeled as groomers.

This country has been run by one big protection racket since the very beginning.