The first paragraph of a Wikipedia article about the assault on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado describes how, on Nov. 27, 2015, a lone gunman attacked the facility resulting in three dead and nine wounded.
This happened as the Republican presidential primary debates were under way with a cast of thousands — well ok — not quite that many, but still over 20 sought that party’s nomination for the White House that year.
I looked, watched, listened and then wrote this on Jan. 4, 2016 and sent it to Politico. They declined, actually and — to state the obvious — more than ironically given that a woman editor then 27 years of age, declined. It was not, she said, germane or some such.
It was in fact prophetic and it needs to be in the forefront of all our minds when we vote this year.
They do not mean only to restrict Roe v. Wade. They mean to nullify Roe v. Wade. Then they will go on to say the court was in error just a few years ago and reach back to nullify gay marriage (et tu Justice Kennedy?).
In fact, don’t be shocked if they reach as far back as 1964 to undo the landmark/benchmark Civil Rights Act. They have been after that law for generations now, seeking to invert the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution that is the constitutional basis for that law. They have all but gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, don’t hold your breath about the future of the parts of it they left in tact.
Interesting, isn’t it, that in setting out the establishment of the high court the Constitution refers to it (Article III, Section 1) as the supreme Court. The deliberate lack of a capital letter in the word supreme would suggest the authors of the Constitution intended it to be a court as they understood courts, places where law suits were settled and crimes tried but certainly not a third and supreme house of the national legislature they established clearly in Article I. That was then, this is now.
Here then, headline included, is what I wrote, that Politico declined to publish though it should have for any value it might have added in crystallizing the overriding issue in 2016: The composition of the United States Supreme Court.
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The Meaning of Colorado: Women and the 2016 Election
If you are a girl or a woman in the United States between the ages of 14 and 44, the overriding 2016 presidential election issue is not the economy, not war and peace, not global warming, not income inequality — except in the larger sense of life. The issue is whether you, or someone you don’t even know — a potential Republican president — will literally own you and own your body.
Anyone who did not know this until now, knows it now, knows that the rhetorical assault by Republicans on Planned Parenthood effectively has caused murder and that the Colorado murderer’s gun is pointed directly at your right to control your reproductive destiny.
Every Republican running for president is plainly sworn to take away your right to control your reproductive function, your right to decide if and when you will have a child. All but one is a man. The lone woman among them, Carly Fiorina, stands with the men against every other woman’s choice.
From Elizabeth Caddy Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, to Alice Paul, to the figurative Rosie the Riveter, to Eleanor Roosevelt, to Betty Friedan, to Gloria Steinem, there is an unbroken chain of custody of women’s rights in this nation. Among those rights is one that, like suffrage itself, is among the hardest to be won but is now the most imperiled – the right of a woman to own her reproductive destiny.
No man — be he pope, bishop, priest, rabbi, imam, preacher, United States senator, black-robed Supreme Court justice — president — or gunman infused with partisan rhetoric — no man has or should have a right to dictate women’s right to reproductive choice much less to impose his will on all women.
Yet, the entire Republican presidential field is sworn to that end, and to end that right. If one of them wins the presidency and secures control of the next two to five appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court then, like an Afghan Loya Jirga, Republicans will make chattel of American women of childbearing age.
If, like Sen. Bernie Sanders, you are concerned about income inequality — but especially if you are a woman of childbearing age or a girl who will reach that age in the next presidential term — then if you lose reproductive choice, you are almost assuredly sentenced to income inequality for the rest of your lives.
It will be visited on you by every one of the Republicans running for president — none of whom will pay a penny or sign a family assistance law to help support the child they would require you give birth to — all of whom would and will name a Supreme Court to overturn, entirely, the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that established the right to choose.
If they say they would compromise, they are outright liars. There is no middle ground with them on this. There never has been. There will not be if you let one of them into the White House.
If you are a Gen-x or Millennial woman in America, then know that the hard-won rights gained for you by your mothers and grandmothers, your aunts and grand-aunts are in jeopardy, are in grave peril right now.
Do not take this for granted as though it has been established for your forever. You must act to preserve the rights they won for you; to keep faith with your mothers and grandmothers, who have worked so hard to achieve gender equivalency and equality in education, economics, sexual independence, and, above all, reproductive choice.
Whose choice is it or should it be to decide what happens to your body and its reproductive function? Should it be that of Marco Rubio, or Ted Cruz, or Donald Trump, or Ben Carson, or Jeb Bush, or Carly Fiorina?
Or should it be yours?
The question is rhetorical. The Republican candidates, perversely unmasked by the Colorado gunman in their determination to control the lives and bodies of every woman, should have no say whatsoever concerning what a woman decides for herself about herself.
Women who want to preserve their choice should vote this year firstly and foremost for their rights as women, but especially the right to determine their reproductive destinies and, as the Declaration of Independence declares – vote to control their “… lives … fortunes and… sacred honor.”
Peeling the Onion 