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Primitive Attitudes Toward Women

I am staggered by the insistence of the political right wing
to legislate what women can do with their reproductive apparatus.

(Apparatus?  Maybe I was thinking about the Virgin Mary
and her immaculate contraption.  Maybe I was trying not
to get too anatomical for a blog that is read by precocious children.)

Near our neighborhood, someone has huge permanent signs
in his front yard railing against abortion.  They are not gentle signs.
The inevitable conclusion one comes to is that there is
a very angry person living at that house.

I listened, recently, to a discussion of the status of women
in the world, and one of the speakers--referring to the roles
religions and cultures assign to women; roles like property,
housebound, hooded, mutilated, set on phony pedestals,
non-voters, political outsiders, underpaid, a denial of access to
education, and all the rest--said that the abuse of women
was the largest moral problem in all the world.

Our right wing politicians, faced with endless and hopeless
wars, a maldistribution of wealth almost unparalleled in our history,
a miserable health care delivery system, a great recession,
need for tax reform, education reform, election reform,
and a shutdown of government, focus on regulating women's
vaginas!  They want to cut out funding for family planning,
chanting slogans about abortion.  The best way to lower the
number of abortions is to increase access to family planning!

The Neanderthals did not go extinct.  They ran for public office.

(That is probably hopelessly unfair to Neanderthals!  I have
no idea how Neanderthal men treated Neanderthal women.)

What is plain is that right wing religious and political opinion
is not very far, ideologically, from other cultures that force
women to cover their faces and submit to mutilation and stoning.
It is an unthinking, savage, primitive, shameful mindset.

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