After what feels like an age of lurking, I've finally mustered the courage to assume there is another human being out there who might think I have something interesting to say. After considering numerous diaries on numerous subjects, it seems to me only natural that what finally spills out is the most personal, visceral struggle I have with politics today. It's a struggle many of you are familiar with, and that is reconciling what you love about the people you love with the political stances they hold. I haven't gotten the courage to hit the "send" button on this one yet. Perhaps I can find that with you, Daily Kos.
Mom, please tell me that you don't still listen to Rush Limbaugh. You used to, when I was little, driving around in the car, and I knew his name and the sound of his voice long before I had a grasp on what he was actually saying or the ideas he stood (and still stands) for. I know you and I have political differences, and that is perfectly fine. But you have to consider how absolutely insane the recent discourse has been regarding women's health. I can totally understand you being Republican when it comes to fiscal policy, etc - after all, just like you and I have different ways of handling our own personal budgets, we're bound to have differing opinions and priorities when it comes to how we imagine our local, state, and federal budgets should be managed. I can respect you for that difference, even if we never see eye-to-eye. However, I am compelled to press you further on social conservatism, in particular, because I cringe at the thought of you supporting the same views that a lot of leading Republican figures currently espouse.
I’m sure, by now, you’ve heard about Rush Limbaugh’s comments regarding one Sandra Fluke. If you haven’t heard the actual testimony, please go listen to it now, because listening to and basing your reactions solely on the response and not the original material is intellectually irresponsible. We can quickly address the policy being discussed, which is a sound one: religiously affiliated institutions should not be able to flatly deny women their health care based on moral objections due to a separation of church and state. This is the obvious acknowledgement that a woman has a suitable moral compass and adequate bodily sovereignty to decide for herself, with the prescription of a doctor, to choose whether or not she wants to use birth control. I'm sure if you've been paying attention to the news, you're aware of the compromise that was reached, which I consider to be perfectly acceptable. If you at all expressed sympathy with or at any point bought into the rhetoric about “religious freedom” that has tried to muddy the waters of the real facts at hand, I'll put it to you this way: I want the religious freedom to have my medical decisions made by myself and a doctor, not dictated by celibate clergy who are out of touch with real, modern, women's health needs. I find it sadly ironic that when the Affordable Care act was passed, Republicans railed on about how they “didn’t want the government getting between them and their doctor”, but when the government and the clergy want to bar a woman’s access to preventative care, well, that’s just fine.
What Rush Limbaugh chose to fixate on was the mandate that insurers be required to provide birth control access to women at no out-of-pocket cost to the woman. It has already been demonstrated that in this case, it is incredibly sound fiscal policy; as they say, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. It is much less of a burden on taxpayers to ensure that birth control is provided for and available to all women than to pay for so many unwanted pregnancies. But Rush acts as though money were being taken directly out of his pocket to pay a woman to have sex, and the indignity for him lies in the fact that it’s not to his direct, visceral benefit: "If we're going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch." Somehow, subsidized preventative medicine translates to prostitution, and the statements he’s making apply to all women. Rush Limbaugh is calling all three of your daughters sluts, because all three of us use birth control.
Here’s the thing that really angers me about the whole situation, though. If you had even a glimmer of sympathy, understanding, or agreement for anything that streamed out of Rush’s mouth, you’re buying into an age-old, what-should-be-long-dead viewpoint called the virgin/whore dichotomy. You know better than that. You’re smarter than that, and way fucking stronger than that. Yesteday, I was telling Sparse, the mechanic who is helping me with my Vanagon, that I was extremely grateful to grow up in a household where we were never told we were incapable of anything, and that as a result, I am equally comfortable in the kitchen and in the garage. The only reason I can peel a Granny Smith apple in one long spiral with a paring knife is from years of watching you. The only reason I had the confidence to take a beater old Volkswagen and try to get my hands dirty fixing it up is because of watching Dad. I know women who are scared of cooking and could burn a salad, I know men who are scared of mechanical things and don’t know where to put their wiper fluid, and I am neither of those things because of you guys. Even though you and Dad fit into pretty traditional gender roles (he makes the majority of the income, you stayed home to raise us until we were all in school, he fixes stuff, you're a great cook, etc), neither of you ever impressed on us the idea that we had to lean towards certain interests. So if anything, you should be least likely to buy into such tired ideas like the concept that a woman is either a chaste angel or a dirty slut – and even though Limbaugh describes himself as an entertainer, you know full well he’s a lot more than that; he’s an influential mouthpiece, and the tipped bad hand of cards of every conservative leader in this country that shares his views but, as politicians, are expected to maintain a certain level of window-dressing for their backwards thinking.
You’re a smart, strong woman. Your daughters are proud, successful, and confident as a result, though we’ve all had our various highs, lows, and run-ins with the ugliness of reality. How you raised us is what gets us through these things. Goodness knows I’m the least of your daughters in terms of success, but I’ve struggled constantly with the person I know you to be, the women you’ve raised us to be, and the conservative ideologies you seem to espouse. One of these things is not like the others. I can only ask for your reasons why.