Transcription
Hi there. I'm a former MAGA mommy, and that's really hard to say. I haven't talked about politics for the entire six years that I've been on social media, and I just decided a couple weeks ago to post my very first Democratic event that I've ever gone to. It was a town hall with Corey Booker, Mark Kelly, Gabby Giffords here in my hometown in Arizona. And I'll tell you, even posting that video was one of the most agonizing things that I've ever done because it's really embarrassing.
I am an outspoken global women's rights activist. I am an outspoken ex-Mormon Christian deconstructionist. And it was really hard to go back to that space where Donald Trump was literally my Facebook profile picture. A time when I would literally get on my knees in the morning and pray for President Trump in his first term. But I did it. And now that I've kind of ripped off that band-aid, I feel like I can talk about some more things from my former MAGA life. So, let's go. I feel like this is the ultimate life take two. Ready on the set? Let's try this again. I'm Jenny Gage, and this is life take two. Thanks for watching.
I don't have a script or anything today. I just want to answer some of the questions to comments on my video about leaving my party. And one question that seems to come up a lot is, why was I ever part of the ultra-right to begin with? And the easy answer is just, I was raised in a church community that everybody voted that way, and everybody was that way. But at a certain point, as an adult, I did have a buy-in, and I was very emotionally connected to what back then was just an alt-right Republican movement, and then eventually would become Trump and Make America Great Again. And there's reasons for that buy-in. And I have to admit right off the bat, and this is really embarrassing, that I was just really uneducated and really ignorant. I only went to college for a couple years. I met my husband at age 19. I was a little church wife by the time I was 20. And I really didn't know anything about anything. I didn't understand much about politics, despite the fact that I had taken a semester of political science at my Mormon junior college. That's probably a big part of the problem right there. I knew nothing about politics. I knew nothing about the Republican party, the Democratic party. I knew almost nothing about our Constitution. I spent more time reading the Book of Mormon, the Bible, going to church, listening to church music, and Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and stuff like that than I did actually studying anything that would have taught me. So, my lack of education was a big foundation for really everything.
And to me, who I voted for and the passion that I threw into being part of the MAGA movement boiled down to just two things. It's just as simple as this: murdering babies and letting gay people get married. I believe deeply with every cell in my body that one of the biggest commandments was not to murder people, and that if our country had on its law books that you could legally kill a baby by having an abortion, that God would take his blessings away from the earth, and that would just open our country up to like Armageddon and everything that was going to happen in the end times. The Mormon Family Proclamation teaches that there will be calamities that come on America, on this North American continent, on the United States itself, if we do not protect families and protect life. So I saw it as a religious responsibility to protect life. And to me, that meant making sure that abortion was not legal, that nobody had access to abortion.
What's interesting though, is that I didn't have a problem with the death penalty. Never once did I ever jump on a bandwagon to make sure that prisoners couldn't be executed for their crimes. I also didn't necessarily have a problem with Dr. Kevorkian when he was in the news a lot. I felt, in a way, like it was more kind to let somebody who had a terminal disease pass away on their own terms rather than suffering through a prolonged illness with a lot of pain. I supported the military. I was really big into the military because I knew that Satan was out there fighting against God's country, the United States. And so I was completely fine with our soldiers going out there into the world and ending people's lives. But over my dead body was a newly fertilized embryo, one of God's spirit children who is just coming to earth in its mother's womb, be destroyed.
I should have said at the beginning of this video, you guys, please be gentle on me in the comments because it is really hard to be vulnerable and talk about my old life. I've done a lot to change. I was deeply indoctrinated in this community from birth, and I just didn't know better. And now that I do, I do everything that I can to make sure that nobody else falls into this mindset. I'm trying to stop the hate. So, don't hate on me for sharing what I felt and thought.
And then gay marriage was my next big issue. And it's funny that that was such an issue in my religious community. Like, homosexuality was the curse that was going to bring about the end days and the complete destruction of society, when really, the LGBT community is so small. It's not, it's not like humans are going to go extinct because of lesbians. And let's say homosexuality was a sin. It's a sin without a victim. In my own religious community, there is a huge number of leaders perpetrating crimes against children. My own family and myself personally were impacted, and I don't want to talk about it, by horrible men who did horrible things. I personally was the victim of domestic violence, a churchgoing heterosexual man who harmed me and our children and our pets, or anyone he could get his hands on or have power over for two and a half decades. I didn't put any of my personal energy into fighting against people who were committing sins that actually had real-life victims whose lives were being destroyed. The only sin that I cared about stopping was homosexuality. I was taught at church from the time that I was a child that AIDS was a curse from God because his children had been gay. So I would watch stories on the news of children in Africa during this widespread AIDS epidemic, and it would just horrify me, and I would think, we have to stop homosexuality, and if my vote can help stop this curse from God, then by George, I will vote, vote, vote.
And it's interesting to me now how the Republican party has just packaged itself in those two items: abortion and gay marriage. And the first thing Donald Trump does when he gets in office is illegalize trans athletes and make sure that Roe v. Wade is not coming back anytime soon. And I honestly think that the only reason why the Republicans cling to being the anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ party is that they know that most of their base is the church people like me who were brainwashed to think that those were the only two issues that mattered. And to be honest, if somebody had asked me what it meant to be a Republican, I would have just said that, you know, we, we're anti-abortion, we're anti-gay. And yeah, there was kind of this general party vibe of America and the military and the flag and families and big trucks, but I knew absolutely nothing about any policies. And I really didn't until I left my religious life at age 44.
And what's interesting though, is that when I left the Mormon Church and then left Christianity four and a half years later, I hadn't really looked into politics or deconstructed my party at all. I still sort of felt, in a lot of ways, that the Republican party was still my home. But then thankfully, in the middle of me feeling like I could just hide and never have to address politics, we had a big election. And this election made me, for the first time in my life, actually look at what political parties stood for and what candidates stood for.
As an atheist and a woman, I simply don't believe that abortion is wrong. I think that in a lot of cases, it can be warranted. It can be beneficial. I think that there are more ways to destroy a life than just to have an abortion. And I have seen firsthand lives that were destroyed by unwanted pregnancies. Add to that the fact that I left the Mormon Church because of their policies about the LGBTQ, because I could no longer just be a hater. I think that that was the biggest underlying shift in everything. I had spent my whole entire life steeped in this community that was just hate and fear all the time. And after a while, that just makes almost every cell in your body want to explode. And I just couldn't do that anymore. I wanted to live my life in peace and love and community with other people. I didn't want to spend my whole entire life judging and hating everybody.
So, knowing that, yes, I do support abortion, and I do support LGBTQ rights, but also realizing that my party cannot necessarily just be based on those two issues anymore. There's such broader things that impact our nation. I just started diving into politics, and as I read what the Republican platform was and what the Democratic platform was, it literally just shook me because all of these things are my core values, like equity and justice for all, strong social safety net, government is a tool for public good, workers' rights, union support, inclusive democracy, voting rights. Some of the key Democratic policies like healthcare, like Obama healthcare is the only reason why I've been able to get the medical care that I've had the past couple of years, protecting and expanding the Affordable Care Act, lowering prescription drug prices, reproductive healthcare access, including abortion rights, the climate, expanding public education, funding in early childhood education, reducing student loan burdens, raising the minimum wage, taxing the wealthy and corporations fairly, investing in infrastructure, innovation, clean energy jobs, everything around social justice and civil rights, combating racism, sexism, LGBTQ, and then the basic, basic needs of every citizen of this country, expanding affordable housing and fighting homelessness, protecting renters and first-time homebuyers, investing in historically excluded communities, and curtailing some of the access to guns in this country, whatever that looks like, with gun reform.
As I actually dug deep into what the Democratic Party stood for, I realized two things. First of all, I had never even known what a political platform was. I didn't know what political parties stood for outside of abortion and gay rights. And I realized that I am not a Republican at all, and probably never was. But I simply wasn't educated enough to know anything about anything. And once I became educated a little bit, I jumped completely out of MAGA, jumped out of the Republican party. I landed for a little while in this weird space with Robert Kennedy because he felt like a neutral spot. But then I decided, no, I'm, I'm over here. I am squarely in the Democratic House.
And I do want to say that it's hard to just dig on the surface and not go even deeper than that. So, as I dug a little bit deeper, I eventually realized that I'm actually an anarchist, and I want to give the land back to the indigenous populations. And I think that we should break into smaller city-states, whatever that looks like, respecting the boundaries of those original indigenous populations. I'm kind of just waiting for it all to collapse so that we can start over in a more eco-friendly matriarchy that's more respectful of the First Nations. So the Democratic Party is not my new obsession. It's just, I think, the best option for the system that we're currently living in. Who knew? And who knew? I had absolutely no idea because sticking my nose in the Bible all day long really didn't inform me about anything in the world. Thanks for watching. Once again, please be kind. I am still in the process of deconstructing and learning after a lifetime in this system. And I'd love to hear more questions in the comments. I'll try to do some more Q&A videos like this. Bye.