Sexism

Why Do I Care?


The Bush administration’s new rule to protect the tender consciences of health care workers at the expense of patient care is set to slide under the Obama wire at any moment. In a nutshell, any health care provider will enjoy the right to deny care, information or referrals to any patient under any circumstances they feel violates their religious beliefs or personal sense of morality.

For the most part this is aimed at women, infertile couples, gays and lesbians and the poor who are forced to rely on subsidized health care of some sort. This is not a surprise as the Bush regime doesn’t care much for any of those groups and has done its utmost to reverse women’s gains of the latter half of the last century and to deny rights to homosexuals this century. The almost former president and his compadres are no great friends of the poor either and have done little for them but increase their ranks.

And I ask myself, why do I care? I don’t need birth control. I am not hankering to do an end run around my ever diminishing procreative functions. I am not gay. And, knock wood, I am not poor. So why do I care?

There is that fable about the man who watched “them” come for his neighbors one by one but since he wasn’t being taken away, he saw no need to speak out. Of course, as it always happens, eventually “they” got around to him but by then their was no one left to speak out on his behalf.

Just because I don’t need many of the health care services this ruling will allow some zealous health care workers towithhold from some patients, doesn’t mean that at some point I won’t be a victim of this same ruling. What if I were in an accident and needed blood but the doctor on call in the ER didn’t believe in transfusions? Or the ICU nurse didn’t believe in turning off the respirator after I was vegetative even though I have a living will?

We smugly sit back and think this ruling is about abortion mostly, but it is so broadly written that it can easily be interpreted to cover a great many medical instances – minor as well as major – and it could catch anyone of us.

Well, any one of us who lives in the United States. Which brings me back to my original question, why should I care? I live in Canada. When I am lucky enough to see a doctor (we have our own issues after all) or visit the pharmacy, I will be served. No one can foist their morality or religion on me under the guise of freedom.

When I was  actively teaching I taught students whose parents never bothered to marry and who swapped live in partners as often as they changed addresses. My students were white supremacists, illegal aliens, members of religious sects that believed in the inferiority of women in practice as well as theory. Some were criminals. Some were casual drug users who acquired their attitudes from their parents. Some were parents themselves.

They were Christian, Muslim and Jew. They were black, Hispanic, Asian, African, Middle Eastern and East European.

I wasn’t able to just teach those whose lifestyles, values or religious beliefs lined up with my own. If I had problems with the differences I encountered I was welcome to find a new occupation. It was that simple.

Should health care workers be afforded freedom at the expense of the rights of other citizens?

Why should I care? Why should you?

We should care. Deeply. Every right that is denied our fellow citizens or right that is taken away puts us one step closer to the day when we will be denied ourselves. The slippery slope is not about other people because we are “other people” where someone else is concerned.

I admire people with deeply held beliefs or convictions, truly I do, but I admire them more when they suck it up and own these beliefs. If your conscience does not permit you to dispense birth control, find work outside of a pharmacy. If you cannot tell a rape victim that the morning after pill can prevent a pregnancy from occurring, don’t work in an ER. If you don’t believe in family planning that  involves anything other than calendar watching and mucous/cervical observations, don’t practice family medicine or go into gynecology or obstetrics.

There are ways to avoid compromising yourself which don’t involve forcing your beliefs on others. It’s really very simple when a person stops to think about it.

Say Goodbye to Self Control


In honor of the Democratic Convention, I am breaking my No POTUS rule to remind everyone (and by everyone I mean women) why Obama should be elected this coming November.

The Bush Administration has decided to unilaterally redefine what constitutes an abortion based on religious tenets rather than accepted medical/scientific fact. The unilateral part shouldn’t surprise anyone. When hasn’t the Bush Administration pandered and subverted in its own best interests?

What should alarm us, even those of us with sincere religious beliefs, is that the definition is so broad that it will effectively bar women from obtaining prescription birth control and will have a profoundly negative effect on research into a variety of health issues from infertility to stem cell therapy to cancer.

I have thought all along that the Pro-Lifers’ real target was the denial of birth control to as many women of child bearing age as possible. The conservative right cannot hope to force us back to the never existed at all hey-day of Reagan’s imaginary America if women are able to control their own reproductive processes.

It’s all about shoving the horse back through a closed barn door, people. It won’t be pretty. And don’t think for a minute that a McCain regime will roll any of this back.

The right in the U.S. are all about stripping women of any and all rights we have gained since the early 1970’s, and McCain especially is hoping that women aren’t looking up his real voting but instead are blinding by his ad campaign. The man is not a maverick. He is a slave to his party and its base – ultra conservatives – and a religious right so fanatical that Islamic jihadists could learn things from them.

Freedom is at stake this election but not in Iraq, ladies.

Now That it’s Over


Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for president. As promised, I will support him because the party has spoken and the majority rules. Regardless of my lack of enthusiasm, I cannot stomach the idea of another Republican administration, and I believe John McCain will make a lousy president (for example, he supports the Bush Administration’s position of what amounted to illegal wire-tapping on American citizens – shudder), but I am still harboring resentment, despite not being the tiniest bit surprised, about the blatant sexism that was not only allowed but condoned and reveled in by the media during the campaign.

CNN talking heads actually had to discuss whether or not it was okay to refer to Clinton as a “white bitch”. They needed to discuss it?

Personally, I think the word “bitch” should be completely taken off the table in terms of women. It should be as wrong to refer to us using that word as it is to use the word “nigger” when discussing blacks. Both words are pejoratives meant to degrade and remind us of our “places”. They are hurtful, hateful words, and they are intended as such.

There were the endless stream of cracks about Sen. Clinton’s looks. From novelist Kurt Anderson’s observation in New York Magazine that the Senator was connected to the working class by her “Wal-Mart shopper’s hair and big bum” to that misogynist Chris Matthews endless running commentary on the physical appearance of not just Sen. Clinton but Sen. Obama’s wife as well.

And there is still this idea among both men and women that while it is okay, expected even, for a man to be ambitious and aggressive in the pursuit, women must still ask permission and go about attaining their goals through “nice girl” means. Smiling and perfectly coifed and impeccably coutured. We can have our ambitions as long as we are ladylike about it. Reminds me of Sr. Marilou telling me that it was okay for me to play basketball as long it was 6 on 6 play.

I think Sen. Obama said it best at a rally in Iowa last month.

“No matter how this primary ends, Senator Clinton has shattered myths and broken barriers and changed the America in which my daughters and your daughters will come of age.”

Huh? How can myths and barriers that women are being told don’t really exist be shattered and broken?