What I Don’t Get About Galloping Magaism.

Mark Olmsted
2 min readApr 14, 2023
The frustrated author

It continually brings me up short to realize I am in the same age range, often even much older, than these conservative white men rampaging to turn this country back to 1953. I was in high school in 1973 when Roe vs Wade legalized abortion. Yes, in suburban NY, but I’m pretty sure boys my age, even in conservative Christian states, were also living to get girls to bed and many did. Abortion rates in these states were just as high as in NY. They came to adulthood in the 80s and 90s, where old friends from HS came out and they were finally exposed to LGBT people at work and on screen. (They watch the same TV in red states as blue states.) Some of our most right-wing leaders went to Harvard or Yale or Princeton, thoroughly exposed to progressive thinking and diverse peers.

Have they really never gone to a doctor named Patel? Employed (or work for) the hardest-working ethnic group ever, Latinx people? Cheer on and worship black entertainers and athletes and work with “regular” black people? Have they really had no family members come out to them? Did their wives and sisters and daughters never have miscarriages requiring a D&C? Have they known absolutely no women who have been raped? Had mistresses that needed abortions? No sons or daughters who “had” to get married and subsequently divorced, marring the lives of what was their unplanned (unwanted) child? Have they known no…

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Mark Olmsted

Author, "Ink from the Pen: A Prison Memoir" about my time behind bars. See GQ dot com “Curious Cons of the Man Who Wouldn’t Die” for story of how I got there.