“I am woman, hear me
roar.”
—Helen Reddy, 1975.
“I am woman, watch me cringe.”
—Barbara Anderson, 2014
When people become disappointed (or disgusted) with existing
political parties, they sometimes start a new party. I’m thinking of
trying something different: I want to start another gender. Being a
woman in the political arena is getting too embarrassing, one wants
to wear a bag over one’s entire body and deny being the same sex as
all those women who are hysterical at the moment because they think
they are going to lose their birth control because some other people
won’t be forced to pay for it.
I could just declare
myself a man, if not for my history of falling in love with them;
unless I could then claim to be gay, it would be confusing. No, I
think I need to form an official new gender named Women Who Think.
The hysterical women who believe there’s a “war on women” in which
someone is coming for their birth control can belong to the other
group, Women Who Believe Anything Democrats Tell Them No Matter How
Ridiculous. As with the League of Women Voters, men can be in this
group, too, if they can’t think either or want to pretend they
believe this stuff to impress some clueless babe.
The clueless babe
category includes those female reporters who describe the recent
U.S. Supreme Court decision as “declining to provide insurance
coverage for contraception.” Maybe they’re just too lazy to research
the actual decision, which ruled that some private businesses owned
by people who oppose abortion cannot be forced to provide the four
(out of 20) kinds of contraception that are used after the sperm and
the egg unite and are, therefore, considered, by these particular
business owners, to be an early abortion.
Despite the
often-slanted media coverage, many women don’t Believe Anything
Democrats Tell Them, etc. They have found trusted news sources, as I
did, who explained the somewhat complicated 5-4 Supreme Court
decision.
There are many kinds of
contraception, including various pills, contraptions and foamy
stuff, all of which Obamacare says must be covered by insurance. But
of those 20, four kinds (two pills, two IUDs) are used after
conception has possibly already taken place. These are the ones that
the Supreme Court has ruled don’t have to be covered by employers
who think that their use is the same as abortion, which is the same
as murder.
You don’t have to agree with them; you just have to acknowledge
their right to their own religious beliefs and the wrong of those
who want to force them to violate those beliefs.
Here’s an example. You
have sex. You take what I, in my own memory of my pre-menopause
years, affectionately call the greatest invention of the 20th
century, The Pill. I remember when it was illegal in Massachusetts,
back when women REALLY had something to complain about, but don’t
get me started.
Your insurance covers
it. Yay, insurance!
Wait, oops! You forgot
to take your pill on schedule, or to have your partner use a condom.
You have sex. Uh-oh. You think you might have just conceived. You
take a pill. For most every woman in America, insurance will cover
that, except for those few who work for companies owned by people
who think after-conception is murder. They will have to pay for
their own pill, hopefully, just this one time because they’ll be
more careful the next time, right?
Or, you have an
intrauterine device that somehow gets rid of the just-connected
sperm and egg. Your religious-motivated employer didn’t have to pay
for that IUD expenditure to be covered by your health insurance. You
had to pay for it yourself, or find a sponsor.
OMG! Is this the end of
the women’s movement, or what? Have we just lost the right to vote,
too? Can’t we have our own brand of cigarettes either?
I recognize the concern
of those who think that although this decision is narrow, affecting
few women, it will be used for future challenges on the grounds of
religious freedom. Some of the opponents of these four kinds of
contraception also are opposed to all birth control, except maybe
“the rhythm method” permitted by the Catholic Church, which, trust
me, doesn’t work.
For some reason when I
was planning my church wedding, I was told by the parish priest that
I had to sign a paper promising never to use “artificial” birth
control. Off we went, my fiance and I, to a justice of the peace.
For the rest of my fertile life, I took The Pill. I think I paid for
it myself for much of that time.
Women Who Think know
they have to take responsibility for their own fertility; it would
help if there were many choices of health insurance, not tied to
one’s job, not controlled by the government. Might as well add that
my Third-Gender entity, Women Who Think, probably won’t appeal to
women who allow men, including religious leaders, to tell them they
can’t choose to limit the number of children they bear.
Meanwhile, Women Who
Believe Anything Democrats Tell Them, etc., get used as political
pawns to elect politicians they wouldn’t like if they learned to
think.
