This one is for all my blogging Girlfriends, especially Nerdette
I don't know if I'm happy or sad. I'm pleased that young women are still (or again) taking stands and I love this new "power tool" the blog. I'm sad that we're still doing it after all these years. It was 1962 when I almost got kicked out of a conservative Southern University (redundancy?) for speaking out for a woman's right to at least have the option of both a family and a career. Oh, the horror.
And if that weren't heresy enough, that same year I jumped on the bandwagon driven by Sherri Finkbine, the woman who made headlines by planning to abort a fetus that was grossly deformed because she had taken the drug Thalidomide. Ms. Finkbine wasn't planning to become a poster girl for reproductive rights; she just wanted other women of child bearing age to know about the dangers of the drug. Then the shit hit the proverbial fan and she was forced to fly to Sweden for the procedure. Fast forward - let's see 2009 minus 1962 = WAY TOO LONG! Idiots are still murdering doctors who perform legal medical procedures and railing against women who think that those decisions should be nobody's business but their own, with the advice of a physician not a politician.
And don't even get me started on the misuse of the terms "Pro-Life" and "Pro-Abortion". I much prefer the more genteel phrase "get your effing filthy mind out of my bedroom".
But I digress.
Every day some new issue makes me shake my head in disbelief because I thought we'd put that one behind us. I'm looking at pictures of Sonia Sotomayor and a little voice is whispering in my ear "Clarence Thomas". He's my lowest common denominator for getting onto the Supreme Court - an unqualified womanizer who stared down his brave female accuser. Now a wholly qualified woman is being accused of thinking that the wisdom of her gender and ethnicity might possibly be an asset in serving on the court. The nerve!
I can't even bear to write, let alone think, about hate crimes again LGBT citizens. My precious step-son, a young man I adore, is gay. If anyone harms a hair on his chest because of his sexual orientation I will not rest until that individual is in some kind of hell - preferably a living one. Don't mess with me! I may be old but I'm ornery.
Daily Kos: State of the Nation