The Great Push Back

Digby posted this terrific photo this morning. It's about time people--men and women--started coming out and making the Republicans who have come into government with a stealth agenda aimed at rolling back progress on every front realize that there is such a thing as overreaching. I for one am concerned that this has been going on for far far too long--that the right has entrenched itself at every level and dimension of our government and polity, and will be extremely difficult even to prune, much less uproot.

The Tea Party events were an open threat, in many ways. People were brandishing weapons. In 2010 we had senatorial candidates talking about "2nd Amendment Solutions." Such "solutions" have been applied since the 1980s to various medical persons exercising their constitutional right to practice women's medicine. How is it a surprise that there is a full-on legislative attack on women's health care in a number of states and in Congress, or that the extremely mild-mannered testimony of Ms Fluke, before a forum of representatives with not even the status of a Hearing, can elicit the gigantic response it did from not only Limbaugh, but the entire right wing media and body of discourse.

There is an on-going war on women--a war that's been going on since the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment back in the late '70s. Perhaps we should be thankful that the GOP has become so bold that their long term objectives are more obvious.

But it's going to take a whole lot of effort to turn this tide, make no mistake. It's going to take people coming out, again and again. And it's going to take getting a lot of people elected, in an era when quite a few moderately progressive women's voices are actually going silent. In my own state, our fine governor--the first female governor in our history, has recently chosen not to seek reelection--a decision that came as a shock to many who worked closely with her.

Over on the Republican side, every candidate for President is "pro-life," versus "pro-choice." It seems we have forgotten what the two terms even mean, and which one suggests tolerance and democratic values. Perhaps this fact can be ascribed to a successful decades long campaign by the Right to demonize the very rights of women to have ultimate control over their own bodies. Perhaps far too many women have internalized this horrible bit of self-victimization.

At any rate--cudos to the fine citizen depicted in the photo. It's time and past to fight back against these dark forces aiming to destroy what America has promised since it started.