The Protect Your Vaginal Rights Election

By Donald A. Collins | 28 August 2012
Church and State

As Hurricane Isaac lumbered past the site of the Republican National Convention much business remains to be accomplished. Particularly that party’s continuing War On Women.

The generally right wing web site, NewsMax, just put up a column on August 27th by Susan Estrich, a writer for Creative News Syndicate entitled “Romney Can’t Run on New GOP Platform”, which you can read here.

Estrich’s main point is a point I have been making for years! The Republican Party has become a party of “religious extremism”, a phrase which in and of itself is a conundrum and oxymoron, since basically all religions are indeed extreme in their claims of direct connections to a deity. The most noxious and powerful of course are those which subscribe to monotheism, namely belief in a single god.

So here we are in the 21st Century, sending out probes to faraway objects in solar systems so vast that even our most powerful instruments can’t reach their limits with certainty and yet the Earth’s leading power, the USA, which in November with the election of the Republican candidate could be bogged down in governance by a President and Vice President who avidly adhere to two outdated and dangerous monotheistic faiths.

The wake up call for Americans certainly should have been the recent statement on rape by Missouri Senatorial Candidate, Congressman Todd Akins, which brought vast news coverage and request from Romney to leave the race.

But what anyone who can read or think realized, Akins was a person whose position on women’s rights to receive safe abortion care was the same as Romney’s and Ryan’s and virtually all of the Republican members of the US House of Representatives.

Frank Rich of the NY Times laid it out perfectly in his 8/24/12 OP ED on the National Circus: “Banishing Akin Won’t Cure the Stag Party”:

The truth is that Akin is typical of today’s GOP, not some outlier; only a handful of the House’s 241 Republican members differ at all from his hard-line stand on abortion.

The Republican War Against Women never went away — it hasn’t gone away for a quarter century. But in presidential years, the party tries to stuff it in the closet so women in particular and moderate voters in general won’t be frightened off.

In the radical GOP we have now, ideology trumps religion just as it trumps science (witness the junk-science purveyor Akin’s sinecure on the House science committee). Ryan’s ascendance to the national ticket was final confirmation, if any were needed, that the party’s patron saint is now Ayn Rand.

Then there is that article from the NY Times of 8/25/12, “Invitation to Cardinal Shows GOP’s Catholic Push”.

In short, one must ask pointedly if a powerful monotheistic religion which has a long history of female repression and child abuse by pedophiles is going to the exemplar of proper behavior to which the Republican Party kneels as it worships policies which endanger the health and the very lives of over half the voters it solicits.

Unless a real comprehension of morality and common sense can out vote these fanatics, there isn’t a safe vagina in America! As you may have read rapists often attack elderly women.

It is often said, and I believe, a picture is worth a thousand words. Recently, vacationing in Maine, I read daily The Portland Press Herald, an excellent paper, which on August 25th ran an AP story, “Catholics take center stage in election”. It featured a color picture of NYC Cardinal, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, fully adorned in his church’s regalia, with his jolly face beaming endless good will. Any woman in America who understands his stance on reproductive rights knows he is in full agreement with the anti-abortion plank in the Republican Party Platform that allows no exceptions for rape, incest or danger to the life of the mother. He may look like Santa Claus, but he doesn’t come bearing gifts of condoms! His many duties include the Presidency of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops which is the most powerful Catholic organization in the US. Dolan will be at the GOP convention, invited by Romney.

I dub this upcoming election THE PROTECT YOUR VAGINAL RIGHTS ELECTION, ladies, and make no mistake about it.

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC., has spent over 40 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013.

From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013

By Donald A. Collins
Publisher: Church and State Press (July 30, 2014)
ASIN: B00MA40TVE
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