A Modest Proposal

Bernie Moreno: Don’t worry about pets being eaten as long as it’s not your pets being eaten

Also Bernie Moreno, who is running against Sherrod Brown in Ohio.

Speaking on Friday at a town hall in Warren County, Ohio, Mr. Moreno characterized many suburban women as “single-issue voters” on abortion rights, suggesting that older women should not care about abortion because they were too old to have children.

“It’s a little crazy, by the way — especially for women that are like past 50,” Mr. Moreno said, drawing laughter from the crowd. “I’m thinking to myself: I don’t think that’s an issue for you.”

New York Times

Nikki Haley wrote on twitter, “Are you trying to lose the election? Asking for a friend.”

Commenters asked Haley if she understands that menopause is real and that women over 50 rarely get pregnant.

On a post criticizing men who date much younger women, a man commented that the older women were just jealous – that we were hags who couldn’t attract men anymore.

I replied that we were not jealous – we want to protect younger women.

We know what men like him are like.

We know why they don’t want women their own age.

We know it’s because these men know that women our age won’t put up with their BS.

We care about what happens to younger women.

Extrapolating from Moreno’s comments, I guess we are supposed to care only about issues that affect us directly.

Why send foreign aid? They’re not even Americans.

Why fund the fire department? My house hasn’t burned down.

Why care about voting rights? I’m a white blue-eyed blonde. Nobody tries to stop me from voting.

Why care about lead pipes? I don’t have children drinking water in my house.

Why care about schools? I don’t have kids in school.

Why care about police brutality? Cops usually don’t mess with middle-aged white women.

As I write this, trying to identify issues that MAGA voters would care about, I can’t think of any.

Except for the cells that make up the fetal tissue in abortions in the US, 85% of which are performed before the ninth week, they don’t care about anyone else, especially people who don’t look like them.

We older women – we menopausal useless women – care about what happens to younger women.

And that’s enough to get us out to vote.

Do you understand the assignment?

It’s to protect girls and young women (I know you understand!)

Volunteer now!

I was heartbroken to read that Amber Nicole Thurman had died because a Georgia hospital refused to give her the medical treatment she needed.

She needed a D&C to get rid of tissue that had not been expelled with mifepristone.

Georgia has outlawed abortion.

By the time they finally did the D&C, it was too late.

She.

Died.

She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.

But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.

Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

An otherwise healthy 28 year old woman died.

Unnecessarily.

She left a little boy motherless.

No.

The state of Georgia – DONALD TRUMP – left that little boy without a mother.

Look closely at Meg Lionel Murphy’s painting above.

Do you see the part where a baby is being born?

When you see it, ask yourself where else you have seen this event portrayed in Western art.

Almost never, right?

Childbirth – and its attendant dangers – is all but ignored.

Pregnancy is glorified because it’s the thing men can’t do but they need because they want heirs and someone to carry on their name and all sorts of BS that make me roll my eyes.

We have forgotten that pairs of graves like this – which took me only minutes to find as I walked in the old section of a cemetery – used to be common.

(And in the three minutes after finding these graves, I found four other graves of 1800s women who had died before they reached the age of 35. I can’t be sure if they died of pregnancy or birth complications, but I would guess it’s likely.)

All those stories of our great-grandfathers and multiple wives?

It’s because women died while giving birth.

(And then they would lose children to diseases that are now easily preventable if parents are not idiots and vaccinate their children, which is a different story but it isn’t really, is it?)

Some man online said that older women are just jealous of younger women who are involved with men our age.

I said nope, that’s not it at all. It’s that we want to protect young women from predators.

That’s our mission right now: We have to protect young women and girls. We have to protect them from predators and we have to protect them from bad laws that keep them from getting the medical care that they need.

We all know someone who has had an abortion or a miscarriage and has needed a D&C.

Even if you think you don’t know anyone, you do! One in four women is expected to have an abortion in their lifetime. And about 10-20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, which sometimes needs a D&C as well.

Believe me, you know someone.

Even if you are not in a swing state and can’t knock on doors (I KNOW! I HATE IT TOO! But I hate the alternative more.), you can do something.

You can phone bank. They train you and give you the phone numbers and a script.

You can text bank.

And you don’t necessarily run the risk of talking to people who are hostile. A lot of it is just reminding people to vote. When I texted for Mandela Barnes, I encountered people who had questions about issues – questions I could answer (because I had an entire list of FAQs). I also found people who wanted to donate money but wanted to send a check to a physical address and needed that address.

My point is that you don’t need to be scared of calling or texting people.

In addition to those things, you can also leave notes in the ladies’ room. There are women married to R men who don’t want their husbands to know how they vote. We need this election to be a landslide for Kamala. Help these women – many of whom have voted R in the past but who are furious about abortion – know that the can vote the way they want. I keep a pack of sticky notes in my purse now and leave one in each stall in any public restroom I use.

Let’s GO!

So much progress that I am tired of progress

Shouldn’t we be grateful for the crumbs that have been given to us?

I cannot believe there are not comments on the posts about the anniversary from women who are livid about this – that it didn’t happen until 1974. Source

I just learned that it’s been in my lifetime that women got the right to join the marching band at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Yeah – they just made a big deal about celebrating the 50-year anniversary of women being allowed in the band.

I have been learning how awful things were for women in the past – like not being able to get a bank loan in their name – but it never even occurred to me that there would be something so stupid, so mean, so petty as to not let women in a band.

My mom, who played clarinet in her high-school marching band in a town so small it didn’t even have a stoplight and who went to UW-Eau Claire before 1974, would not have been able to play in the Madison band. She could have joined the Eau Claire band, but didn’t because you had to go to all the games. (Which leads to the question – why were women allowed in the Eau Claire band and not the Madison one?)

(About the loans: When I wrote about that on facebook, a FB friend told me that she had been able to get a business loan before the law changed and she was just fine thank you very much and if women just pull themselves up by their bootstraps life will be fine.

As I have resolved not to argue with idiots online, I didn’t reply that there was no law against giving a loan to a woman, but there was also no law requiring anyone to do so and refusing to lend money to a woman had no repercussions.)

So anyway here I was all angry about the Badger Band and women not being allowed to join until 1974 – when I read Abbie Conant‘s comments on one of Katherine Needleman’s great pieces.

Conant wrote,

In the mid 1990s, the Mozarteum was interested in hiring me as the trombone professor. That would normally be an absolutely dream job for anyone, and especially an American in Salzburg with its musical history and fairly-tale cityscape at the base of the alps. I refused. The Vienna Phil still categorically forbade membership to women and I was beginning to become very outspoken about women’s rights.

Turns out the Vienna Philharmonic didn’t even let women audition until 1997.

NINETEEN NINETY SEVEN!

That’s only 27 years ago.

That’s nothing.

I have t-shirts older than that.

It takes forever for us to get rights.

And no time at all to lose them.

I leave you with Shemekia Copeland’s new song, Blame it on Eve, with these brilliant lyrics:

But these days, a woman can feel alone

When even her body she doesn’t own

Wanna know how it feels to have the blues?

Just try losing your right to choose

Would Jesus pull the switch to execute someone?

(Just in case you didn’t know the answer, no, he would not)

“As Thomas Merton, one of the great mystics of the Catholic Church, said, ‘The end of the world will be legal.’ That kind of thinking that ‘If it’s a law it must be right.’ But the death penalty is just using law to torture and kill human beings.”
(source)

A few months ago, I was lucky enough to see Sister Helen Prejean, the anti-death penalty activist who wrote “Dead Man Walking,” speak.

Her main message was that

THE DEATH PENALTY IS EVIL

and Christians and other people of good will should not support it and indeed, should fight it LOOKING AT YOU SO-CALLED CHRISTIANS WHO SUPPORT THE ORANGE GUY.

Even if someone is guilty, I don’t think the state should have the power to decide if someone lives or dies, but if your reason for being against the death penalty is because we can’t be sure someone is guilty, that’s fine with me, too. We shouldn’t have the death penalty, period.

Here are some of my notes from her talk. I’m leaving out the quotation marks, but assume unless otherwise stated this is what Sr Helen said, either in direct quotation or in spirit.

The Geneva Convention says you can’t tie a man’s hands behind him and then take him out and shoot him. It’s the defenselessness.

They’re designing a game – Death Row Lottery. On the first roll of the dice, where you get a one or a two, the question is “Are you rich?”

In Texas, when they executed Ivan Cantu (who was possibly innocent), it’s a cruciform. They have to stretch their arms out. (Sr Helen stretched her arms out to illustrate. She looked like Jesus on the cross.) She told Ivan, “Your death will not be in vain.”

One out of eight people sentenced to death are later exonerated.

Why do we focus on pain and punishment and exile? Separating people from their families? How do we restore people and bring them back to life?

It’s always people who are poor.

Prosecutors who go for the death penalty are in ex-slave states: Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana.

Iowa was the first state to eliminate the death penalty. And now Wisconsin. Y’all are a life state! Not saying that cheese is all there is to life, but – you got cheese at the airport! (Me: We do!)

The biggest prison in the US is Angola (Louisiana). Inmates earn 2.5 cents (Me: YES CENTS) an hour picking cotton. Angola is on the site of three former plantations.

Slavery morphed into convict leasing.

What do we do when we finally get knowledge?

Do we walk away?

Or do we act?

Jesus was always on the side of the vulnerable. Always.