Civility.
That’s the card you’re pulling now?
That’s where you’ve landed?
That’s your go-to play at this stage of the game?
It’s a little late for you to roll that out now, isn’t it?
After voting for a self-proclaimed genitalia-grabber.
After he suggested dissenters at his rallies should be beaten up.
After hearing him call violent nazis “fine people.”
After he bulldozed sacred Native American lands and turned frigid hoses on tribe elders.
After he ignored mass deaths in Puerto Rico and vilified their public servants.
After he began dismantling protections to our planet and shrinking our national parks.
After witnessing Flint, Michigan go without clean water.
After watching exhausted refugee families stranded at airports.
After leveraging religion to justify all manner of discrimination.
After ignoring evidence of a Russian interference that threatens our national sovereignty.
After seeing ICE raids in hospital rooms and workplaces.
After his gross, reckless fabrications about Muslims and Mexicans and immigrants.
After witnessing him work tirelessly to take healthcare from the sick and the poor.
After he vilified kneeling black athletes and badgered their employers into silencing their peaceful protest.
After his unhinged Twitter rants against private citizens and their businesses, against celebrities and political opponents and world leaders.
After terrorizing teenage shooting survivors on social media.
After allowing the radicalized Christian right and soulless NRA gun zealots to shape national policy.
After sanctioning Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka and Jeff Sessions.
After retweeting the toxic filth of Dana Loesch and Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter.
After celebrating while he’s alienated our greatest allies and aligned with malevolent dictators.
After your silence in the face of migrant children being ripped from their parent’s arms and placed in dog kennels.
After digging in your heels for the past two years on every bit of it.
Now you want to pretend to be civilized?
Now want to talk about measured debate?
Now you want to wag your finger at us for being disrespectful?
Now you want to shame us for our supposed lack of manners?
Now you want to gaslight us into guilt and apology—as if we’ve lost our dignity, as if we’ve sacrificed our humanity, as if we’ve bastardized our religion, as if we’re the ones impervious to other people’s feelings.
With all due respect—to hell with your phony civility.
No, you don’t get to play that card. That request is off the table for you.
You lost that moral high ground somewhere between excusing his mocking of a disabled reporter—and celebrating brown-skinned kids in cages.
Your lengthy, sickening body of work over the past two and a half years is the greatest witness of your fraudulence.
You don’t really want civility, anyway. That’s not what you’re asking for. If you were simply asking for that, we wouldn’t have an issue.
You want something else:
You want consent to your abject cruelty. You’re not going to get it.
You want our silence in the face of perversions of justice. It will not be forthcoming.
You want tacit approval for a white Evangelical theocracy. That ain’t gonna happen.
You want to us to quietly witness this President dismantling democracy. We’re simply not going to.
You want us worship your white, angry, American, gun-toting God. We won’t.
You want us to join you in your blind idolatry of a man fully lacking nobility. We won’t be.
You want the steady stream of Sarah Sanders lies, alternative Fox News facts to go unchecked. We’re not giving you that courtesy.
You want us to allow you to perpetuate dangerous false stereotypes of immigrants and young black men and Transgender people. We’re not going to.
You want us excuse your supremacy and indulge your privilege and sanction your President’s bigotry and applaud this Administration’s legislated assaults on marginalized communities. It’s gonna be a long wait, friend.
No, we’re not doing any of that.
What we are going to do, is clearly, repeatedly, and unapologetically oppose it all with everything we have.
We’re going to push back hard against every divisive meme you produce, every incendiary Tweet he manufactures, every human rights atrocity this Administration generates, every effort you make to normalize monstrous behavior or excuse his ramblings.
We’re going to be unflinching, and we’re going to use our outside voices, and we aren’t going to mince words when it comes to the inherent worth of human beings, the affronts on our Constitution, or the hijacking of our faith traditions.
You can call that uncivilized if you’d like, but honestly we don’t give a damn.
We’re going to be profoundly pissed off whenever diversity is threatened or when human beings are treated as less-than or when religion is invoked to do harm or when America’s stability is under attack.
In the face of the inhumane things on display in this country right now, we’ll take the cause of humanity and our volume every single time.
We’re going to be loud in the cause of love, even if that sounds like anger in your ears.
This post originally appeared on John’s blog, JohnPavlovitz.com.