"Women, Vote Your Way Out"
Both Justice Alito and President Biden call on women to save the nation. Which one is serious?
There’s an abyss between Supreme Court Justice Alito who I think scorns human rights, and President Biden who I think champions equal justice. Yet within weeks of each other, each said the exact same thing. One of them wasn’t being honest.
First Alito wrote a leaked document, and then Biden spoke directly to the nation. Each said that it’s up to women to vote in November to win back our Constitutional right that the Supreme Court took away last month by ending Roe v. Wade.
This crisis is about more than just women. Constitutional rights belong to every American. One was was just wiped out. Now how many more are at risk?
On July 8 I wrote a post about Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as her warning of what women’s enslavement would look like. Every page of the book seems overprinted with the words, “It can happen here”.
What is this about women? Why target us? We’re just people. I’ve spent my whole life trying to figure it out.
For example, in 1799 soon after the new French Revolutionary government took charge, women were thanked for helping it succeed. Then they were told to go stay home and “produce and raise the next generation of male republican Frenchmen”.
In the mid-1800’s America women began fighting for the right to vote. Seventy years later, in August, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution was ratified.
It took 45 more years for women of color to gain the same right with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed things like the use of literacy tests to qualify voters.
Since 1923 the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) has languished in Congress and in state legislatures. Today in 2022 only 27.5% of the members of Congress are women; but surely a third of the men there could jump in and try to make it a national reality for 50.5% of Americans (the women).
So once again, with the Supreme Court’s brutal reversal of Roe v. Wade, women’s votes and other rights are in the spotlight. A Justice and the President have each called on women to go to the polls to recover the first Constitutional right ever taken away by any Court.
What are these two men thinking?
Justice Alito knows very well that many American women are at the mercy of new and growing obstacles to voting. Wisconsin recently outlawed most absentee ballot boxes, and a voter there now has to return the ballot in person or mail it if they want it to be counted. Other Republican state legislatures, including ours in NC, are trying to push through similar new rules.
I believe that Justice Alito’s call for women’s votes was cruelly sarcastic.
On the other hand, President Biden urged women to care enough about their rights and their families’ well-being to do everything it takes this fall to get to the polls for Democrats. He probably knows that women are 52.5% of America’s population, regardless of recent extreme gerrymandering.
I side with Biden because he’s concerned about democracy in America. There’s no arrogant sarcasm in his call to women to defend our rights and our values at the polls. He knows we have the power of the majority.
If we use it.
How? Take the time to learn about Democratic candidates where you live, and talk about their values. Know how to get an absentee ballot. Sign up to work at the polls, so they stay fair. Plan to take a few friends to vote.
This always stuns me: I’m ready to reassure any woman who for any reason doubts her Constitutional right to vote her own mind. In America her vote belongs to her alone, not to the person she rode to the polls with, or to someone she depends on. And her vote is still secret.
That’s power. We won it. Of all times, let’s use it now. Spread the word.
Yes! Just shared on Facebook.
A very powerful statement!