And I’m deeply saddened by it all. Saddened that a significant portion of America’s population either failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam or chose to conveniently forget them because it puts a smile on their face to be led like lambs. It saddens me to see that my centrist-to-slightly-left self has become even more marginalized in today’s society and government. From now on, only red voices will be heard. Blue voices will cry and toil in modern desperation.

It saddens me that both of my children will reach draft age during the next administration and all it will take is a couple of skirmishes on the Syrian border to give us a new Cambodia — and the draft. It embitters me to think that, in that scenario, my disabled son will be excused from service but my healthy daughter will not. (And, please — no “noncombat” comments. Plenty of people are dying in noncombat roles right now.)

I mourn the possibility that there will never be a cure for my son’s psycho/neurological disabilities because stem cell research — our new Scopes Monkey trial — will not occur on American entrepreneurial shores.

It terrifies me that our Supreme Court will likely become aggressively conservative, perhaps even draconian should Scalia ascend to the throne as more of his ilk come to power via new appointments. (Yes, conservative judges are very likely because of the continued shift to the right in the Senate.) I pray Nitke v Ashcroft successfully dismantles that part of the CDA which deals with “community” — and definitively enough that the Supreme Court will decline to consider it. Even so, we can count on bold challenges to our reproductive rights, personal privacy, gay rights, and civil liberties.

And if all this wasn’t bad enough, I watched people in eleven states mandate marital exclusion for gay and lesbian Americans. My heart breaks for my friends and loved ones, many of whom will not only find themselves excluded from marriage but from any accordance of domestic and perhaps civil equality whatsoever. (See Ohio’s draconian ban for the details.)

Our culture war has blazed back and it’s me, my children, and my loved ones everywhere who will get burned by it. Give me space to mourn, but of this be certain: I’ll take my place among the ranks and continue the fight for social freedoms. I won’t give up.