I hope you guys have been paying attention. I use the words guys loosely because so much of what’s been going on in government adversely impacts women. In January we had Congress attempting to redefine what counts as rape. Now we have state governments criminalizing women and doctors for legal medical procedures and barring Medicaid recipients from low-cost health care altogether! It’s down right scary.
This ridiculousness comes at a time when legislators all but banned the word uterus from normal political discourse, while a jury acquitted a man of rape, ostensibly due, in part, to a woman bruising her cervix from being too enthusiastic with a washcloth. (No country for basic anatomy. Body parts are dirty words after all).
It’s not all about women’s issues. There’s enough to go around for poor and working class people (many also women) who, without probable cause, now have to submit to drug testing prior to receiving government assistance. Before you get the chance to assert how reasonable this could be, let me help you – it isn’t. It’s discriminatory and disgusting. Period. People don’t deserve to be treated as potential criminals because times are hard. (Rachel Maddow is brilliant as always on much of this. It’s 6 minutes well spent).
The point of this post is to make sure you’re paying attention. The buzzwords are smaller government and taking the country back, but the actual policies are larger, more intrusive, and discriminatory, and they punish women, poor and working class people, and people of color. These laws get written and passed by legislators. This is an important point.
Who is (supposedly) representing your interests? Do you know what they’re really doing?