Challenge #10: Women and Politics

To be honest, I'm really sick of my ovaries being the butt of political jokes. However, I don't think I'm those jokes are going to stop anytime soon. It's February 2014 - the 41st anniversary of Roe vs. Wade just passed, and America is gearing up for the good-old mid-term election (and primaries!). The cast of candidates is nothing if not entertaining - Clay Aiken, openly gay American Idol runner-up, is competing in a heavily conservative North Carolina district - and with the GOP looking to strengthen its majority in the Senate and Democrats looking to cling to the lead in the Senate, I can sense a return of 2012's 'war on women'. See cartoon below. 

applicable political cartoon 

The GOP knows it, too. They’ve held ‘training camps’ for incumbent, male candidates who will have to defeat female Democrats in November. They’re especially necessary, considering even after the 2012 election, politicians have made awful, ignorant comments - most recently Mike Huckabee at the RNC’s winter meeting. (Props to my friend Julia for showing me his comments in the Oracle, our school newspaper, article). Huckabee accused the government of providing women with the birth control pill, which is necessary to ‘control their libido’.

Gag me. Most male politicians (Democrats included) could learn a lot for the Oracle article. The GOP leadership shouldn’t be teaching their candidates how to politely interact with women - they should be making re-take a basic sex ed class, and learn how the states the represent actually define buzzwords like rape and abortion rules. I agree that they have a right to their opinion - but they should be able to explain the facts behind the female reproductive system before they should be able to make a legal ruling on ‘when life begins’.

Another sad aspect of the media’s focus on these comments is that they’re not all that important when it comes to voting. Sure, the media’s able to taint a candidates image, but even for women voters, issues like the economy mattered more than abortion and social issues when they cast their ballot - only when men went to the very extreme end of the spectrum, and publicly, did it really matter.

What does this all add up to? I don’t want the 2014 midterms - and the 2016 presidential election to be another ‘war on women’. However, it might be inevitable, especially if the GOP favorite Paul Ryan is the nominee, and the Democrats nominate Hillary or another women.  The same Paul Ryan who doesn’t think I, as a child born from IVF, should exist. Examples like this from Ryan’s past would be easy targets for opposition research.

However, women can try and make the issues they care about matter, because women are increasingly the determining factor in elections. We have higher voter turnout rates than men, which means our votes count. Let’s make sure that they do.  

Cia♀,
Charlie