Fear and Loathing

As I've talked among women about the insanity that is called Congress and its anti-abortion, anti-birth control antics, the question has come up, "Why do they hate us?"

I hadn't been able to find an answer; in fact, it seemed that "hate" was too strong a word.  It just didn't fit.  And I think the reason "hate" doesn't fit is because it is tempered considerably with denial.

My days of studying Freud are long gone, and there is a lot of derision for the man, but I believe he was brilliant in conceiving the battles within our minds.  So let me get a little faux-Freudian with this.

The most powerful object in an infant's life of course is its mother.  For a girl child, I think there tends to be more overt intimacy, and later, more overt battles for independence.  For a boy, I believe issues of dependency are far more insidious.

So, unlike with girls, a boy's anger is nearly certain to get convoluted.  Until, as an adult, you have rage that cannot be named.  That denial of rage becomes a need to protect that gets twisted all around to the most destructive forms of control imaginable.  I'm not talking about the obvious overt rage that comes in the form of rape and spousal abuse.  What I'm talking about is something I'm thinking of as "legislative rape."

It's amazing, but maybe not really, that as women become more powerful in business and politics, the push to confine us has become so much greater.  And indirect.  Of course a woman is entitled to the same job as a man, but she doesn't need a law saying she's entitled to the same pay.  And if she wants to work, then she needs to be a man and take responsibility for caring for her children -- she certainly has no right to expect the State to take care of her children for her.

And then there is the ever more abrasive and abusive anti-abortion movement.  I'm not talking about the whackos out there with there placards trying to intimidate women when they are at their most vulnerable.  I'm talking about the whackos elected into the 112th Congress on a "jobs, jobs, jobs" platform, who introduced 44 bills on abortion.  I'm talking about our own South Carolina legislators, who proudly -- and yearly -- introduced "personhood" bills and continue to try to put a monument to "unborn children" out on the State House grounds, which would have it in good company with the Confederate flag.

While these legislators look out for the interest of the "preborn" against us stupid and selfish women, they are also cutting funding to welfare, food stamps, education and health care.  And let us not forget that while they are stamping out abortion, they are also working hard to ban birth control.

That, my friends, is where the rage is evident.  This is not a case of wanting to help a woman through a hard time in bringing a baby into the world.  This is a pure and simple case of punishment.  Punishment for leading a man into sin.  God punishes the woman by getting her pregnant, and folks like SC Senator Lee Bright are going to make damned sure she pays the price.  For the rest of her life.

There is just not enough of calling things by their rightful name.  Men in power acting like they are protecting babies when they are in fact punishing women (and of course the eventual children).  Calling their motivation Christianity rather than "loathing."  And let's once and for all rebrand that "personhood" bill and call it by it's true name:  enforced pregnancy.