I have been listening to the rhetoric that has been thrown out by the Tea Party and Republicans about women's rights. I HAVE HAS IT!!! So I wrote my thoughts to share with others. I hope it gets a discussion going.
Does it not strike anyone as odd that the Far Right is so focused on women’s crotches? It reminds me of junior high when the boys would look at a girl’s burgeoning breasts and giggle with each other and then make a dirty joke. It seems to me that these men have not outgrown their adolescent fascination with women’s intimate parts. I find this terribly troubling when there are so many much more important issues than interfering with women’s vaginas.
Denying women the right to decide for themselves their own healthcare decisions smacks of a very immature fear of women and the power they have over men with their sexuality. It is like a dad, whose daughters are entering adolescence, who is so fearful of what that means that any attempt of the daughter to begin to dress or act in a more adult way is quashed through punishment, disparagement, and isolation.
It is also a worrying sign that these men still consider women and children property rather than human beings. For many generations this view of women and children as property has given men license to abuse, control, rape, and impoverish women and to abuse children physically and sexually. It has been shown that 1 in four children are sexually abused either by family members, coaches, church leaders or others in positions of power over them.
The Tea Partiers and far right Republicans wish to control everyone by keeping women under their thumbs, keeping children undereducated and keeping the poor impoverished. I see this as fear of anyone who is not like them, i.e. white male (and in some cases black, Hispanic or other races of males.) If they can keep women and children under educated and impoverished then they can harvest them as possessions and can do with them what they will. This is what the wealthy landowners in England did and this is what despots do. Human rights only apply to them and everyone else is their serf. The lord of the manor had rights to take away a women’s virginity (rape her) as she was his serf.
If you are married to one of these men it is time to reexamine their behavior with you as their wife or their behavior with your children. Are they over controlling? Do they deal out harsh punishments? Do they keep you and your children isolated from your family or friends? Are your children showing signs of abuse like bed wetting, depression, fear of their father, withdrawal from interaction with the family, nightmares or other signs all is not right with them? Then it is time to suspect that this man is an abuser.
It was men that set up all boy or all girl schools and then used the school as a venue for the physical and sexual abuse of children and I find the attitudes of the Far Right to fall right into line with these actions. They are good about preaching that women should submit to their husbands but they forget that the rest of the passage says that men should treat women as Christ would treat his church and that the men should treat them as they would treat their own bodies. If the husband does not treat his wife with the respect he treats himself with then a woman has no reason to respect him. If you read Genesis, we were created as God’s gift to men to stand at his side and not to walk behind. Some men seem to think they were God’s gift to women.
Men and women are equals in this society and just as men have the right to have Viagra and male hormone therapy; women deserve the right to have birth control and make other decisions about their body. Until men stop considering women as property and baby makers or “hosts” and stop raping them and molesting their daughters, unfortunately, abortion is a necessary part of these decisions. It is the attitude that women and children are property that has allowed these behaviors by men.
It is time that these men pull their heads out of our crotches and let us decide what is best for us since over the centuries men have made it clear they are not good decision makers where we are concerned. And if you are a woman married to one of these men, it is time to take a stand against their ill formed decisions by refusing them access to the very crotches they are so fascinated with until they give you the rights you deserve.