My husband and late mother were once terrific Republicans who held public office, doing many years of good work for their community and using strong voices for those without. They left the party the day after Pat Buchanan’s “cultural war” speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention.

I believe there are still lots of benevolent, unbigoted Republicans, even if they’re not currently in Congress. More than ever, we need the balance of a two-or-more-party system with good people of all political persuasions to shout down and shut down the biased, repressive, dangerous so-called leaders threatening the life and lives of our country.

“Have you no sense of decency?” legendary Massachusetts attorney and chief Army counsel Joseph Welch asked the hateful Sen. Joe McCarthy in 1954, beginning the end of that despot’s witch hunt for communists in 1954. It’s the same question to ask of a Republican Congress marching us into hell by standing with the unbalanced, unfit bigot in the White House. Is this the way they want their “public service” to be eulogized? Is it all about donors and power and nearly nothing about country and character?

Except for Donald Trump’s fellow bully BFFs, the world watches and waits for America to regain its self-respect. Who among us would close eyes and ears to a president spoiling a ceremony honoring Native American war heroes by uttering disgusting cultural slurs?

All of us, regardless of political affiliation, should want generations going forward to know we stood up and spoke out (unlike our Republican Congress). We wrote letters, made calls, ran for office, rallied and resisted. Please leave your labels at home and do what’s right for America. Please be outraged! If not now, when? If not you, who?

Carol Selsberg

Eliot