This diary is an extension of a comment I left on the "Pie Fight, Please" discussion.
The much touted cultural divide and resulting battle between urban and ex urban; between the cosmopolitan and rural; between Christians and the unchurched; between Republicans and Democrats; between the Red and the Blue isn't about culture at all...it's about male fear, male hatred, and male dominion.
The leaders of the Republican Party fear reproductive power in all its forms because it trumps money, fame, coercion, and their vision of success. The font of this power lies with women. Primarily and most primal, women give birth. Women are also the civilizing force in society. Women are the muses of art. Women are the driving force of the curative sciences. Women are humanity's spiritual and physical connection between the artifice and the environment.
For centuries, men have dominated women through sexual slavery and brute force, keeping them in check, ensuring a woman's power was channeled to male ends and for male gain. Then, over the last fifty years, women have regained their voices, fought back, found men ready to give them their due, and made great strides, disrupting the old order, certainly, but making for a more equitable, and enriched society.
The old order is back, they are angry, and they have a whole cadre of women willing to sell out their gender for a measure of security, a degree of acceptance, and a release from responsibility.
Every action of the so-called culture war is an affront to womankind. One of John Ashcroft's first acts as attorney general was to cover up the profane bosom of the statue of justice in the Department of Justice building. This symbolic act of making clean for innocent eyes the dirtiness of the female form set the stage for very real acts of barbarism and inhumanity culminating in the Iraq war.
The Republicans claim to champion the culture of life, but everything they want to promote: war, economic disparity, politicized and hobbled scientific inquiry, and a stifling climate of fear all points to the stench of death.
This culture war, on each of it's fronts: religious, political, social is aimed at putting women back in their places, in and under control of men, breeding soldiers to fight endless wars. Allow me to cite some examples:
Religious: the abstinence pledge where a daughter pledges to her father that she will remain a virgin until she weds. The father then gives his daughter a piece of jewelry, a lock, symbolizing her commitment to him and almighty God. On her wedding day, the father gives the key to this lock to the young bride's husband. So a young woman's body doesn't belong to her, it belongs to her father and one day will belong to her husband.
Political: Abstinence only sex ed in the public schools. This disastrous policy, grounded in theology, not science, has the double ill effect of increasing the chances of unwanted teen pregnancy and contracting a sexually transmitted disease. If yours is an administration desperate to increase the ranks of the military, you most definitely want an increase in the population: particularly if that increase is among the poor and undereducated, like the folks receiving abstinence only sex ed.
Social: Getting back to the afore mentioned complicity of certain women to betray their own sex. Much like female genital mutilation is inflicted by mothers upon daughters in Africa, so to is the demonization of feminism inflicted by the mothers of the modern conservative movement upon the daughters of our great nation. Bemoaning the right to vote, the sexual revolution, women in the workplace, and women as leaders in the church, these betrayers hearken back to a simpler time when men ruled the world and women knew their place. All of society's ills can be placed at the feet of Betty Frenand, Gloria Steinem, and Hillary Clinton.
It is my hope that we liberals can cut through the righteousness rhetoric and eloquently clarify the true intent of this culture war. To do so, however, we need to be willing to take the battle right to the doorsteps of the talking heads, politicos, and bastard who blather on about "America's moral decline". No more giving ground. No more going mum at the talk of morals or values. We need to ask them, point blank and on national TV: Why do you hate women so very much?
For the sake of my wife, my son, my mother, my sister, my friends, and all of humanity, please join this call. Do not fear these spiders, these devils. United with one voice, we will prevail.