Sunday, April 29, 2012

29 April 2012 It’s time to rally round the women of your choice.


  


Will the ‘war on women’ get women into office?
By Kathy Kleeman and Debbie WalshPublished: April 27
            “Don’t get mad, get elected.”
            “Like 2012, 1992 was a post-census year, which means that reapportionment and redistricting had created a large number of new or open seats. It was also a presidential election year, when interest in electoral politics increases. Most important, though, it was a year when women realized that their power was limited at the highest levels of government.
            “That wake-up call had blared when the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court and a University of Oklahoma law professor, Anita Hill, appeared reluctantly to testify about the sexual harassment she said she had experienced while working for Thomas. Suddenly, women across the country saw two plain facts on the evening news: The harassment many had experienced was not just an embarrassing personal incident, but a real and serious phenomenon with a name. And the senators hearing testimony about it were all men who didn’t get it…”
            Cassi Creek”
            It’s time to rehash a subject touched upon earlier.    The GOP/teavangelists have made a practice of co-opting national symbols and customs.  The Gadsden Flag – rattlesnake on a yellow field – was designed to be a symbol of national unity.  The teavangelists have turned it into a symbol of a divided nation.  The national ensign and any number of patriotic songs have been co-opted over the years since the Nixon era when blue-collar men, in favor of extending the Vietnam War, waved them about as if they were initiating a new crusade.  In fact, it was common for the preachers of various sects, particularly Protestants, to thunder from their pulpits infamously unjustified condemnations of many of their fellow citizens who opposed the use of American lives to prevent a war of unification in VietNam.   The appropriation of flags and other symbols combined with close-minded evangelical intolerance and regional bigotries was pathognomic for the disease of disunity we now seek to cure. 
            Women have been hit hardest by this disease.  The intolerant religious fundamentalists seek to punish women for their insistence upon their full rights as citizens.   Lead by current teavangelists and financed by medievalist robber barons and greedy financial manipulators, the GOP is trying to push women back to the dark ages. 
            The article above indicates that many of the problems women face are being mishandled in the halls of power by men, “who didn’t get it.”
            I’ve looked at the issues that should be dealt with in the next four years.  I’ve looked at those that may surface in the next two years.  In each instance, the males who currently hold the contested seats, or who will most likely win them, will vote to keep or enhance the status quo, and to further strip women and minorities of their rights and of equality under our laws. 
            I am male, and so lack some of the common experience that sets women apart from men in so many ways.  I can’t pretend to understand or promise that I can “get it.”  There is no way I can point to my experience and claim that I can right the idiocy that is now taking place.  Some of the problems I will never quite understand and those will never be prioritized at the same level by men and women.  I don’t see our male legislators – particularly those GOP/teavangelists making the necessary changes in America.  However, I have a wife, a mother, sisters, daughters, and female friends who do “get it.”  If they, or women like them have new answers, or even old but untried answers that just might work, I’m willing to vote for them.  The women who make up my family and friends didn’t create this mess.  I don’t know that they can correct it now.   I know the idiots who voted to send us to war without raising taxes or manpower, who deregulated the financial industry so that the current Wall Street thieves could emulate those of 1929, and those who want to repeal the enlightenment to replace it with fairy tales, can’t begin to fix it.  If there were ever a time for women to form a gender-based political party, it is now.  I’ve seen enough, heard enough, and learned enough.  We must eject the GOP/teavangelists before they make this a third world theocracy.  I’m voting for the women, they might just “get it.”

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