It’s all over the news, all over social media, the memes are filled with pictures of 25 White Males and the abortion legislation in Alabama.
Damn those White Males!
I’m a white male…..I guess I should hand my head in shame, assume guilt, and realize that I and those who LOOK like me are at the root of this.
It’s my white privilege, it’s the patriarchy, it’s my misogyny , it’s my fault, and you will know it just to look at me.
This is where we are at the moment. We’re divided against each other. Women are being stripped of their rights and it’s men, white men behind it all.
Never mind that a woman signed this legislation into law. Never mind that large groups of women support Trump and were pivotal in electing him in 2016.
Let’s focus on the white males as the oppressor. It’s bound to win the White House….this time.
There are some key adjectives missing from your summary, including but not limited to “Alabama”, “Republican”, and — pick your poison — “Christian” or “Evangelical”.
Women certainly ARE being stripped of their rights. There is a very real possibility that the current Supreme Court may overturn Roe v. Wade. That is only the beginning. This same political movement (however we choose to characterize its members) also aggressively seeks to:
– Ban artificial contraception for women (some proponents allow it for married women)
– Restore sodomy laws, criminalizing oral and anal sex.
– Establish personhood, including ALL constitutional rights, from the moment of conception.
– Reverse the legality of same-sex marriage while criminalizing homosexuality.
This most certainly IS an attack on women. It is also an attack on men who love and value women.
It is unfortunate that white men like you and me are too often included in the condemnation of this travesty. I think it is also true that white men like you and me have too often been silent, and therefore complicit, as this movement unfolded. I have fought against these reprehensible ideas my entire life.
I confronted anti-abortion protesters in Brookline each of the many times I walked through Coolidge Corner. I walked a gauntlet of anti-abortion haters to get to Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday services at my church in Brookline (we were targeted because my church offered temporary space to Planned Parenthood after the murders by John Salvi). I have worked against every government official I’ve known who opposed women’s rights, and I’ve worked to support every government official I’ve known who supported them.
The deplorable attitudes of Alabama didn’t begin with these 25 white men who passed this outrageous legislation. It comes from the same toxic mix of God, superstition, greed, and bigotry as the Jim Crow laws of fifty years ago. Like cancer, it won’t go away by pretending it doesn’t exist.
I haven’t heard anybody suggest that we “focus on white males as the oppressor” as a strategy.
What I DO hear is that we loudly proclaim that we oppose this attack on women. We loudly proclaim that our candidates will fight to protect these rights. We make it crystal clear which side of this war we are on.
Let’s focus on defending women in America. They ARE under attack.
A woman sighed this into law and many women celebrated it; Your personal feelings and experiences aside, how can we define this as an attack of men against women under those realities?
Where did I say “an attack of men against women”?
The middle of America has many women who long to revert to the patriarchal society that the rest of us have fought to dismantle for generations. Many of the perpetrators of out-of-control police violence against blacks are themselves black — being a certain race or gender is absolutely not a vaccination against racism or sexism.
The key dynamic here is the attempt by religious extremists, including religious extremists who are also elected officials, to impose their particular beliefs on others regardless of whether or not they share those beliefs.
This IS, therefore, an attack on women. That is the reality. It is an attack that we Democrats should aggressively and passionately fight. Our daughters and grand-daughters face a lifetime of unwanted pregnancy, dangerous and often lethal illegal abortions, and of being punished by outrageously misogynist laws.
If the perpetrators in a given battle are men, then we must attack those men. If the perpetrators are women, we must attack those women. You and I are old enough to remember Phyllis Schafly. Her gender did not stop her from setting back women’s rights by a generation. The same is true for Anita Bryant, another woman who fights to enslave all women.
Kay Ivey has now joined that dubious pantheon of women who harm women. Ms. Ivey has a long history of sexist, racist, and homophobic positions and acts. Ms. Ivey epitomizes the worst of heartland Trumpists.
This is a fight for ALL of us to join. It is a fight to defend women. It is a fight defend the core values that make us free.
Why are so many women attacking other women?
@Why are so many women attacking other women?
I, frankly, blame religion in general and Christianity in particular. Especially the toxic mix of superstition, racism, and misogyny that so heavily influences Protestantism in the deep south. The institutional Catholic Church is unabashedly sexist by construction. Just to proactively respond to Christopher, the UCC of New England is absolute anathema to the culture I’m talking about. Alabama protestants view UCC believers as heretics, blasphemers, and agents of Satan. They really do.
A more objective answer to your question sounds like a PhD thesis in women’s studies to me. I think it’s a marvelously insightful question, though.
I was watching TRMS last night and was encouraged to see that she was not portraying this as a men attacking women problem but more a one culture attacking another problem. She highlighted the fact that a woman signed this into law and not the fact that 25 white males wrote the law. She also spent time discussing the latest judge appointed by Trump and the Republicans, a Ms. Vitter who has said that Planned Parenthood killed over 150,000 women a year and abortion causes cancer.
As to the PhD…..I think these women represent a manifestation of the Stockholm Syndrome
I think that responsible reporting, such as this piece from today’s New York Times, focuses on the religious tradition from which these laws emerge. Here are some highlights (emphasis mine):
The core issue here is the role that the extremist religious beliefs of Alabama voters play in destroying the freedoms that ALL of us hold dear.
I want to offer a bit more specifics about my own answer.
1. Christianity, and especially southern protestant Christianity, is at its core a religion of personal revelation. God speaks to each individual. That individual, and ONLY that individual, is the last word on what God said. Not surprisingly, this leads to a propensity for those with deepset emotional and psychological disorders to view themselves as “prophets” acting as an “agent of God”.
2. The fundamentalist and Literalist evangelical sects — specifically including the Southern Baptist Convention (the largest Protestant denomination in the South) hold that “Faith” means believing something in spite of evidence to the contrary. The stronger the evidence, the more important it is for the “true believer” to reject it. This is why attempting to debate Creationism or the Young Earth theory is such a futile exercise.
3. Each of the three Abrahamic faith traditions teach that their God is the only God. The notion of religious tolerance — especially tolerance for agnostics who reject the images of God embraced by these traditions — is fundamentally at odds with the fundamental constructs of the faith tradition.
I think what we see in Alabama is what happens when you mix the interplay of the above items (there are some others, of course) with the intentional merging of Church and State that the GOP has been pursuing since the Reagan era.
I also think this is just the beginning. There is a reason we talk about the “Dark Ages”. I think we are on our way towards a return to that era.
The United Church of Christ seems to have never gotten the memo on #3 above. We also come from a tradition that absolutely embraces #1, which is preferable in our estimation to the intercession of priests and prelates.
It appears to me that even the UCC embraces the Nicene Creed. That language explicitly names “One God”, “One Lord”, and “one holy catholic and apostolic Church”. My own Episcopal tradition repeats the same text each Sunday.
I’m pretty sure that the various Islamic congregations do not view themselves as part of the same singular “holy catholic and apostolic Church” as we Christians. I’m pretty sure they don’t view Allah as the same singular deity that we worship (although some sources assert to the contrary).
Jewish congregations stand far outside this schema.
In any case, as mentioned, the UCC is already WAY outside the envelope of faith traditions recognized as legitimate by the believers in Alabama who clamor for these abortion laws and who genuinely believe that Donald Trump has been raised up by God to save America.
These three beliefs work together in synergy to produce the aberrant behavior that threatens to tear us apart.
We’re not a creedal church, and proudly so. Most UCC congregations do not recite it regularly though I too believe in one church, one Lord, etc (which should be construed as unifying among Christians, not exclusionary of non-Christians). Allah is absolutely the God of Abraham simply using the Arabic word for God. My belief in one God does not make me arrogant enough to say everyone else is wrong. That is the difference between believing as a matter of faith and knowing as a matter of fact.
I really wasn’t criticizing you or your faith. To the contrary, I’ve tried to be clear that precisely because of the tolerance of the UCC, the UCC is viewed as the work of Satan by the southern Christians I’m talking about.
Alabama is not Massachusetts, and the religious beliefs that motivate the outrageous Alabama anti-abortion laws are far away from the practices of the UCC (and the Episcopal church, by the way).