International Women's Day

Congratulations, ladies, you've come so far over all these years of struggling for equality...

Yep, it seems like only yesterday women were being called horrible, demeaning names by people in the media because they had the audacity to speak out for their best interests.  Oh wait, it was yesterday...

Rush Limbaugh might be catching the majority of the well-deserved public scrutiny for his misogynistic remarks about Sandra Fluke, but the flood of hateful support for his ignorant and insulting rhetoric betrays what progressives have been saying about the extremist, Tea-soaked conservative wing of the GOP ever since fields full of uneducated cousin fuckers started waving rebel flags and calling Obama a Kenyan, Muslim socialist who was going to hand the country over to Al Qaeda, the black panthers and whichever obscure socialist Glenn Beck could look up on google next - the America they want to "restore" is one where minorities and women know their place and stay in it.

Indeed, instead of recoiling from Limbaugh's banality, the far right is diving headfirst into the mud pit with him.  First came the complete distortion of Sandra Fluke's position - that somehow she was arguing for taxpayers to foot the bill for her contraceptives - which was obviously red meat for conservative sheep who are too lazy to do the 5 minutes of internet searching that it takes to debunk this lie and could care less anyway because it would deflate their pumped up self righteous indignation.

So, now it's not about Rush Limbaugh vs. Sandra Fluke anymore, it's about the conservative right vs. any woman who would dare to get an education, adopt an independent attitude and expect more out of her life than spending all day in the kitchen waiting for her husband to come home and put another baby in her.  You see, when a woman decides to speak publicly on any issue that pertains to her gender, she's an instigator and she's "looking for a fight".  No, you haven't gone back in time to the 60's, this is still 2012.

Women like "Everybody Loves Raymond" co-star Patricia Heaton, who apparently gleefully embrace the concept of returning to a society where they should be in the kitchen instead of wasting time posting their worthless opinions on Twitter have taken to posting their worthless opinions on Twitter, fueled by the complete lie about Sandra Fluke supposedly demanding taxpayers foot the bill for her contraception and bolstered by the support of their fellow kool-aid drinking supporters, ratcheted the rhetoric up to Limbaugh-esque levels.  Of course, Heaton was soon so inundated with angry retorts from Fluke supporters that she cancelled her Twitter account, only to rejoin a few days later, but unfortunately for Patricia, the internet don't forget.  


So, here we are, in 2012, nearly 50 years after the women's lib movement and the number one topic of discussion in the news today is whether or not a woman is a "slut" or a "prostitute" for wanting to use contraception.  Literally, an argument that was settled by society in the 60's has been brought back from the grave thanks to the GOP and their porcine spokes-deity.  Be proud, ladies, you have endured so much only to see things going right back where they were back when your grandparents were in school...

Oopsie...

Yep.  Those "sluts" and "prostitutes" who think they have the same right to an education and a productive life outside of birthing and waiting on their man hand and foot just so happen to also have the same right to vote that white guys with penises have too!  And, can you guess which segment of the female population votes more than any other?  Here's a hint: it's those sluts who go to college and get educations and use... gasp... birth control!  I guess conservatives should have worked on repealing that women's suffrage thing before they decided to start attacking the largest voting block of the gender that makes up over 50% of the voting public?

During women's suffrage, there were women who were strongly opposed to the efforts of women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady to earn the right to vote for their gender.  These women thought that voting was a right that should be exclusive to men.  They believed men were smarter and superior and that a woman should keep her opinions to herself and be sub-servant to her husband.  They didn't want the right to vote, they didn't want to be treated as an equal and they hated the efforts of the women's suffrage movement to try and change that.

In the 60's, when the woman's liberation movement was building a head of steam, there were women then, too, who thought that Helen Gurley Brown and other women's lib activists were "sluts" and "prostitutes" who wanted to live a life of brazen immorality where they popped birth control pills like candy and slept with every man with a pulse within range of their vaginas.  They, like the anti-suffrage women generations before them, believed a woman's place was in the kitchen, waiting for her husband to give her direction.  However, through the efforts of the women and men who supported the women's lib movement, gender equality was as close to being fully realized as it ever had been in our nation's history.

So, today I say Happy International Women's Day to every smart, independent, educated, hard-working and self-confident woman on the planet - including the ones who make the choice to stay home and raise a family.  And I would also like to say congratulations to the current conservative party for showing us that men can be shameless, immoral whores without even having to use birth control!