Did I get your attention? We are their hostages, and they don’t care if we see their faces, since they plan on killing us anyway. See, we’ve reached the point with far right wing religious zealots where they are no longer claiming they only want to restrict abortions.They now proudly admit that they don’t care if women die. Even if the zygote or embryo they claim to be protecting has no chance of surviving, they still do not care if the mother dies. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/11/protect-life-act-anti-abortion-bill_n_1005937.html Do they have a logical explanation for this position? Religious freedom! My religion dictates that I kill you. Would you have me go against my religion????
The far right also wishes to roll back protections from ‘domestic’ violence by opposing renewal of the Violence Against Women Act. http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/03/republicans-violence-against-women-act What’s their excuse? The law does not discriminate against undocumented aliens, same sex or transgender victims of such crimes. Without discrimination, there is no Republican support!
And, why stop there? Women should not even divorce an abusive husband!
“Instead of leaving an abusive situation, women should try to remember the things they love about their husbands,” Wisconsin Representative Don Pridemore said. “If they can refind those reasons and get back to why they got married in the first place it might help.” http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/03/23/wisconsin-lawmaker-you-are-being-beaten-just-remember-things-you-love-about-your
Our religiously free captors also want us to know that abortion was never really the issue. If it was, access to birth control and services to help raise unplanned children would be their number one priority! But, no. They want to restrict access to birth control. Heck, Rick Santorum wants to allow states to outlaw contraceptives alltogether! http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/01/03/396516/santorum-states-should-have-the-right-to-outlaw-birth-control/ What an absurd claim for a presidential candidate to make! But Rick figures that anyone who cares about this issue will soon have no voice and no power to fight back. He truly does not care about the obvious benefits of a society built on family planning and healthy choices for everyone. The lives of individual women and children do not matter to Rick Santorum. http://jezebel.com/5873158/rick-santorums-anti+abortion-stance-would-have-killed-his-own-wife He unironically tells the story of his wife’s own lifesaving 19 week abortion (I’m sorry ‘spontaneous labor brought upon by antibiotics’ - wtf, Rick. Really?) and his daughter’s incredibly expensive round the clock care, yet would deny the same abortion to save any other woman’s life, and does not support any government assistance for health care whatsoever. He wants every child to be born, yet has zero interest in keeping them alive (or educating them) once they get here.
Why do these people hate women and children so much? No one knows for sure. Some of them do not mean what they say. They are simply pandering to crazy people for votes (think: everything Romney has said during this primary race). I honestly think this is a last ditch effort to drag women (and people of color, and lesbians and gays, and non-Christians, and people who are differently abled, etc.) back into second and third class citizenship status. Why? Because they can’t compete with us!! Diversity brings amazing new talents, not the same tired old ways of doing things. We make their lives too difficult, the questions we ask are too complicated, they cannot satisfy our constant demands for equality and fairness! So what can they do? Slash and burn! Make one huge national effort to attack women on every possible front. They are gambling that we will all turn tail and run for cover, like they would if the tables were turned. But progressive women and men are stronger than faux-religious zealots. We aren’t going away. We’re ready for them. And they can leave their masks off or put them back on. We saw through them a long time ago. And thanks for reminding us that we are not truly equal yet. It’s time for the ERA.
Game on.