Why The Attacks On Women?

Notice something strange about the Republican super conservatives' focus during their campaign? Notice that the issues are phony?

Instead of real issues there is targeting of a particular group of people, namely women. This targeting of a group of people tag teams with targeting their opponents with hugely expensive dirty attack ads.

Why?

One of my sons pointed out to me that the Republicans are lacking a real issue to use against President Obama in the Fall election. Hoping to use the recession, blaming him for it, they blocked his every effort to gain co-operation from a Republican dominated Congress.

But, the economy is relentlessly improving. So the Republican candidates have to come up with something else. That something else is to use distraction techniques: dirty politics, accusing scapegoats, inflaming old animosities, and targeting a minority group.

They use what I call The Falkland Islands Distraction Ploy. President Reagan used the Grenada micro mini war to accomplish the same thing.

Historically, looking for a good scapegoat has always been an effective distraction and relieving the tension technique. During the plague years that held Europe hostage during the Middle Ages nobody knew that the Black Death plague was caused by bacteria carried by fleas that made their homes on rats.

Scapegoats, Jews in this case, were accused of poisoning wells, and thus causing the plague. The witchcraft craze in Europe brought about the deaths of thousands of innocent women and men, particularly women. At that time there was an excess of females in the population and unmarried women were a financial burden on their families. Rich women's property could be taken from them if they were tried and convicted of witchcraft (really easy convictions).

Why choose women for the diversionary scapegoating attacks? Because it is obvious that the conservative Republican base, hyper right wing conservative religious groups, are male dominant and female repressive.

If you doubt that is so, read their writings, listen to their speeches, sermons, and TV and radio programs, read their books. I know these groups from having been inside. I went to a fundamentalist Christian college, sat in their pews, married into a fundamentalist Christian family, was a pastor's wife in a fundamentalist church.

From this vantage point I want to warn my fellow female voters: Believe them when they seem to be saying they don't really like women that much. They don't. If they did, they wouldn't repress and misuse them the way they do. They look at women as substandard human beings, and many of them want us to be silent, strictly obedient to the dominant males in the group, pregnant, and powerless.

Religion and politics don't mix well. Each religious group believes God is guiding them as they attempt to impose their own beliefs and practices on everyone else.

Without political power religious groups must persuade in order to affect people's behavior. With political power, they can force it.

Religion is as full of egotistic, domination obsessed individuals as politics is. Government needs to be free of interference and control by any religious group. Our country's founders knew what they were doing when they established this country with strict separation of church and state.

If we do not take action to retain the rights and protections our foremothers won for us we will lose them. Don't think it cannot happen here. It can. If you value your rights to your own body, your own privacy, and equal protection and opportunity under the law, you must take action.

Demonstrate, write letters to the editors, blog, make phone calls, put pressure on your government representatives. Object to attacks on individual women, to disparagement of them and of women as a group, and to threats against women's present rights.

Contribute to and vote for candidates who support women. And work, work, work to defeat candidates and groups who hold us in derision and aim to push us back into the days of coat hanger abortions, poor medical care, and endless pregnancies.