It came as no surprise to me to hear that the GOP had chosen Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington State to rebut President Obama's State of the Union. They have made it clear that they are sincere about proving to women that, well, there are Republican women. It also came as no surprise that they had chosen a women that pretty much nobody had heard of. After all, this is the bunch that delivered us Sarah Palin in 2008, and we are all appreciative of that choice. The GOP could have had another comedic coup had they chosen Michele Bachmann in 2011, but they went and let her represent the Tea Party rebuttal:
Sadly, we all were so focused on the fact that her eyes were trained, in the distance, on those aliens that only she can see that we missed her sincerely spoken words of Tea Party misinformation. I can only imagine whoever was running the GOP into the ground back then sighing with relief that instead they had gone with male robot Paul Ryan.
But the election of 2012 caused the Republican party leadership to reconsider. With the words of Todd Aiken and his subsequent loss still stinging, leaders like Bobby Jindal of Louisiana urged his fellow republicans to stop being "the stupid party." By this he meant, of course, that they should stop letting the American people know what they really think. As we have seen since then, those old white men continue to loudly fault the poor for their poverty, the undereducated for their lack of success, and women for their menstrual cycles.
What to do, what to do? The problem being that since nothing is going to convince these guys that they might be wrong, they have apparently come to the conclusion that if women were to hear one of their own speak nonsense, they might not notice that it's nonsense.
So, just as in the not-too-distance past, the GOP found Marco Rubio to talk trash about immigration and Tim Scott to defend the denial of voting rights protections, they hunted and found a woman little known nationally to speak for them.
Cathy McMorris Rodgers has a voting record any Tea Partier would be proud of. She is a strong supporter of all those rich white men, against not just the Affordable Care Act, but Medicare and Medicaid, prefers subsidies to the rich to subsidies to the poor, and opposes women's rights to medical privacy -- by which I mean abortion and contraception services. Like her brothers-in-arms, she opposes equal rights and protections for LGBT, undocumented workers, American Indians, and, let me say it again, women.
I am looking forward to hearing what Rodgers has to say tonight, although to be honest I might not be able to get through it. I am confident though that in Rodgers the GOP has found exactly what they are looking for: someone to represent the men of today's republican party.
Our new-found and readily exploited fear and fascination with Shariah law is just the prescription for bringing Hitlers (and deMints) into power. Religious radicals of the Christian variety believe that it is just as important for them to dictate punishments for what they perceive as our transgressions as do the radical Islamic fundamentalists. They too would have sinners imprisoned, perhaps killed, for crossing their lines.
Our absurd focus on whether Shariah law would find its way into our courts is occurring at a time when we are genuinely at risk of that precise type of tyranny coming from the Christian radicals. Troubled pregnant women imprisoned for crack addiction has been a reality for some time. The hunger to make abortion illegal, along with the consequent absurdities of attempting to impose a definition on life before birth should lead us to wonder what punishments will be determined to fit the crime.
We know that there are those among us who believe that abortion is punishable by death; if life is defined by these religious "scholars" and pseudo-scientists as occurring at conception, there will need to be punishment meted out to those offenders as well. And who will police these criminals?
Then we need to address the issues of interracial relationships, as well as the religious practices of those who are not Christian.
We are on a slippery slope indeed here, are we not?
If you do not see shades of Hitler and bin Laden in the religious dictates of the Bachmanns and Perrys, then you are not taking their words to their logical conclusion.
Because what our Christian fanatics in this country are proposing, at the same time they are feeding the fears of Shariah law, is a Christian Shariah law. Or, if you recall, an Inquisition.
Michele Bachmann's well-played personal disclosure regarding her miscarriage and her faith left me chilled to the bone. Her sincerity is disarming. She has become exceptional at modestly telling us what an upstanding, moral individual she is.
I find it appalling that she parades her Christianity about as though without it we are, all the rest of us, dirty. Her morality tale of her miscarriage and her subsequent commitment to life is bullshit.
Let me share mine:
I was a rebellious teenager in a dysfunctional family. I acted out sexually into my twenties. I was irresponsible and careless. I became pregnant. Thankfully, our nation's leaders, its courts, were sane and responsible during that time, and abortion had become legal. I did the right thing.
Hey, Michele, I did the right thing. I had an abortion. It was difficult, painful, but to have a child at that time would have been morally wrong.
Later, I had two wonderful children who are now adults. I am thankful that I was able to wait until I had time to grow up. I was not forced to pay, and make a child pay, and make my family pay, for my irresponsibility and immaturity.
Had I been forced to bear a child at that time, I would never have had the two wanted wonderful children that I later had.
And Michele, I too had a miscarriage. It happened between the first and third wanted pregnancies, and it was heartbreaking. But I was able to love my firstborn and be thankful for her, and I soon had a son that I loved with all my heart.
Unlike you, I had that experience without feeling the need to judge other women and condemn their choices. That is what makes you a smaller person than me, although you have the wealth, power and persuasiveness to attempt to coerce people to follow your rules in their personal lives.
And as the anger rises in me for your judgmental insincerity, I first of all want to say that neither your god or mine give you the right to decide what my morality should be.
Secondly, your fight to deny those with less than you financial security, good educations for our children, health care for us and our families, belies your pretense that you give a damn about children, born or "unborn". Or, perhaps to reframe the thought, you only care about life until birth.
Shame on you. Keep your pretend morality to yourself.
