Editor’s Note: Another installment of guest posts in the Louisiana Republican Party’s “Why We Fight” series, this one by Shayna Connell

One of the best programs I have ever watched on television is Band of Brothers, with my favorite episode of the ten-part HBO WWII miniseries being “Why We Fight.”

In the episode, Easy Company is starting to contemplate why America got into the war and whether the many young American lives that had been sacrificed in battle was worth it.

And then the soldiers stumble upon a concentration camp that shows the horrors of Hitler.

This episode hits home with me because my grandparents were Holocaust survivors and were forever grateful to the United States and the young men who fought and died so that they could live on.

When they legally immigrated to New Orleans in 1950, they were proud to be Americans.

They never spoke about their distant homelands of Poland, Belarus and Russia, and never desired to set foot in those counties again.

They were proud to live in a country that gave them freedom and the liberty to protect and practice their traditional Jewish values.

They became a typical American success story.

My grandfather started as a bag boy at a grocery as my grandmother worked at home raising three small children. They embraced capitalism; they started a small business and bought property. Through hard work and sacrifice, their endeavors allowed them to provide for their family.

They weren’t born in America but my grandparents lived the American Dream, a dream I hope and pray that can be passed down to my children.

As a woman, wife and Jew, I vote Republican because I understand, through my family history, the importance of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, due process, and the right to bear arms to protect those rights.

These are luxuries that my grandparents and great-grandparents did not have in 1930s Europe.

As a mother, I am a Republican because the GOP is the conservative party.

Conservatives appreciate and defend freedom. And there is no more precious freedom for a mother than to be able to raise her children with the morals and ethics that stress the importance of family and traditional values that made America a great nation.

During the Judge Kavanaugh hearings, some of the senior Republican leaders were caught off guard by the cruelty, shamelessness, and false accusations levied at the president’s Supreme Court nominee by the “progressive” Democratic Party.

The older conservatives still thought we lived in a country that values chivalry, honor, personal responsibility, the rule of law, and decency.

They learned otherwise as they watched in shock as their deeply flawed colleagues smeared a man who had lived an exemplary life.

Some would say I’m old fashioned, but the America that saved the world from fascism and welcomed my immigrant grandparents is the America in which I want to live and raise a family.

A country that doesn’t economically or socially punish a person because of his moral or political beliefs.

I want a country that recognizes the value of my daughter’s life path no matter what course she pursues, whether it be a professional career as a doctor or raising a family as a homemaker.

And finally I want a country that allows my sons to be proud of their masculinity.

Many of the soldiers who fought fascism in World War II may have been only slightly older than teenagers, they all fought and died as men.

They protected our nation and saved the world.

This is why this woman, who is a granddaughter of Jewish immigrants and a wife and mother, fights .