Men in this country love to go to war. We just left Iraq, we’re still in Afghanistan, we’re picking a fight with Iran and at various times in our history we’ve battled the Mexicans, the Brits, the Koreans, the Nazis, the Viet Cong and the Grenadians.
But I think the latest adversary will prove too much for the male leadership of the U.S. and many states now at war against this worthy opponent. I think they are unleashing a powerful, unrelenting force of unimaginable intelligence and determination.
Yes, women.
If there’s one thing I have learned over the years is that you don’t want to piss off women. Lord knows, men have tried to keep them barefoot and pregnant for centuries. It wasn’t until the mid to late 1800s that women seemed to have wised up and pressed for what we now consider such fundamental rights as the right to vote and the right to own property.
Of course, men threw them a bone now and then. They did give them the right to vote. But they still tried to kick them down at every opportunity that presented itself, from paying them less for the same amount of work to making it downright impossible for them to establish such things as a bank account or get a credit card without their husband’s permission.
Then that bitch Betty Friedan had to ruin it all with her bestseller, The Feminine Mystique. The house of cards that men had so carefully constructed started to fall down all around them as women took to the streets in droves to fight for women’s rights. Among their victories – an Executive Order extending Affirmative Action to include women, the Women’s Educational Equity Act, Title IX and a law in 1975 that required U.S. military academies to finally admit women.
Men had their own victories, however, finding a way to let the Equal Rights Amendment to expire, three states short of the two-thirds needed for ratification. Until 2010, women who wanted a divorce still had to show cause in many states, and sadly marital rape was not made illegal in all states until 1993.
I suppose we should have seen the writing on the wall for what was to come. Though Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in the U.S., men fumed about all this equal rights nonsense in the darkened back rooms of men’s clubs, state legislatures and Congress.
And then the religious right segment of high fiving white guys hit on a brilliant plan. They would fight for the rights of zygotes everywhere, making fetuses only a few hours old our equals. They took to the airwaves to beat the drum of to protect the sanctity of life. Few originally listened to these mad men.
Then a funny thing happened last year. These whackos got into office. They were elected to our state legislatures and to our Congress. Now they had a powerful platform to pass all sorts of bills that “protect zygote rights” at the expense of women everywhere.
Just look at Representative Terry England in Georgia. He is sponsoring a bill that would require women to carry a dead baby to term, because, as he puts it, and I am paraphrasing a bit here, that’s what cows and pigs do. In Arizona, there is a bill that will allow an employer to fire any woman who uses birth control. Twelve states are considering legislation that will require women to have a six to eight inch ultrasound probe inserted into them before they can have an abortion. I am pretty sure that qualifies as rape, in or out of a clinic. And finally, Bei Bei Shaui is awaiting trial in Marion County, Indiana because she was pregnant when she tried to commit suicide after her boyfriend told her he was already married. If convicted, she could get 45 to 65 years in prison for attempted murder.
As you can see, war has been declared on women. And true to form, men hide behind some pseudo righteous cause, all in their secret quest to keep women where they belong, out of the boardroom and in the bedrooms, barefoot and pregnant.
I for one am ashamed to be a male in this country. I happen to cherish women – I think they are far smarter than most men, are more caring, have a better head for business (men are better at monkey business, granted) and have far more compassion. After all, I don’t know of any women who would strap the family pet to the top of their car.
I imagine that if the roles had been reversed in our country, we would be far better off. Instead of starting expensive wars overseas, we’d have spent the money at home, ensuring that no child goes hungry, no American is homeless and that our basic health needs are taken care of.
We certainly would have never gone to war as much as we did. I have no quibbles with the major wars against evil – World War I and World War II or even our own battle for independence. But most war is nonsense and contrary to what men in the military and our government think, there are no winners, only losers.
Women already know this, of course. While they may indulge in a good drunken cat fight now and then, they know the cost of war all too well. The children they carried and nurtured don’t always come home from war. Or if they do they come home a shadow of what they once were or could be someday.
So women of our country – it is time to go to war. It’s time to protect your rights from the high fiving white guys who want to tell you what to do with your womb. Time to take to the streets, time to make your voice and vote heard. We need to send all the morality police packing and get them out of our bedrooms and out of your vaginas.
Return these relics of the past to their hometowns where they can continue to boss their wives around, beat them with regularity, abuse them verbally and knock them around and knock them up whenever it pleases them. If their own wives want to be second class citizens, that’s their problem. But don’t assume for a moment that our wives, sisters, daughters and friends want to be in their company. If you do, I promise you the women of this country will kick your ass!
Out on the Treasure Coast, the son of a very liberated 85 year old woman with a tattoo,
– Robb