Here’s something I’ve wondered: Across all of these anti-Trump rallies, has anybody urged the protesters to look to their Trump-voting family members and neighbors with compassion and try to understand why they voted as they did?  Or asked the activists to remember that support for President Trump isn’t self-evidently proof that people are deplorables or irredeemables or accepting of some litany of ugly isms and phobias?

After all, a movement that explicitly excludes people who hold a different view on a specific issue (e.g., abortion), doesn’t seem so much like a tolerant, grassroots gathering as a partisan and ideological insurgency.  Add in the shocking vulgarity of many of the signs, which makes me think of Dorothy Day, who was recently lauded by both Pope Francis and President Obama.  As Dan Hitchens writes in First Things:

It was hard to get thrown out of the Catholic Worker house over which Day presided—a house which welcomed the helpless, the lost, the mentally ill, the addicted, and the simply obnoxious—but Day did once expel some young bohemians after they used the printing equipment for an obscene magazine entitled “F*** You.” The use of the word shocked her: It showed contempt, she wrote in her diary, “for the very sources of life itself.” It was a “breath of evil,” a blasphemous nihilism which maimed “the creativity within them.” To profane the creativity of sexual desire, in word or in deed, was a kind of self-harm.

The marchers are narrowing womanhood by assigning a particular political stand to womanhood and reducing their greatest profundity to a purely materialistic bodily organ.  (At the same time, their ideological allies are insisting that one can legitimately claim to be a woman without that body part.  Go figure.)

They are also woven through with hints of repeating the bigotries of the past in reverse.  John McDaid quotes one sign in a post on RIFuture as reading, “The future is female.”  And note this telling detail from a Karen Lee Ziner post on the Providence Journal site, yesterday (emphasis added):

“HENNY PENNY POSSE” UPDATE: Tiverton artist Kathrine Lovell, carpooling with a group dubbing themselves the “Henny Penny Posse” that left Friday morning, posted on Facebook as their van reached the N.J. Turnpike:

“The van is loaded with women of several generations, and a couple of young men in the back row. …

Prodded along by the institutional Left (from mainstream newspapers to teachers’ unions to celebrities), progressives are deliberately pushing the nation toward civil war, and the sides are these:

• On one side are people who doubt central planning is the way to ensure freedom or to foster the well-being of all members of every family, regardless of gender, race, religion, or political party.
• On the other side are people who insist that we all live as they want us to live, bowing to their hollow gods, divided up into simplistic, manageable identity groups defined in whatever way is convenient for the underlying ideological demands — with anybody who disagrees ignored and without rights and anybody who doesn’t fit the ideological mold sitting at the back of the bus.