Carole Simpson

Fight Women, Reelect Obama

Mar 8, 2012 | Politics, Women | 5 comments

Barefoot, pregnant and staying home.  That’s where Republican men apparently want to see women of the 21st Century.  They have begun their endgame by chipping away at women’s reproductive rights.  Predominantly white male-dominated legislatures in 20 states have enacted onerous restrictions on women’s health, including Texas, which now forces women, who want an abortion, to submit to ultrasound probes of their vaginas.  Cruel and unusual punishment for getting pregnant?  I think so.

Didn’t we take care of all this in the 1960’s and ‘70’s?  The birth control pill—approved for use in 1960—gave a woman, for the first time ever, the ability to control when she wanted to have a baby.  It brought about major social change.

In the 1970’s, didn’t the Women’s Liberation Movement protest in streets across the nation calling for equal rights and reproductive freedom?  In 1973, didn’t the Supreme Court rule in Roe v. Wade, that a woman’s right to privacy make the near nationwide ban on abortions unconstitutional?  Didn’t Anita Hill put a human face on the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace, which led to new laws protecting women from being called “sluts” or “prostitutes?”

“It’s déjà vu all over again.”  Yogi Berra’s famous line comes to mind as I watch this absurd drama, over a woman’s right to control her body, unfold on the national stage.  Are the Republicans crazy?  Do they believe they can win a presidential election by alienating the majority of voters inAmerica?  That’s right.  Women go to the polls in larger numbers than men.  And they vote differently, too.  A study byGallupshowed that 41 percent of voting age women say they are Democrats while only 32 percent of men say they are.

President Obama can thank women voters for his 2008 victory.  While 49 percent of men cast ballots for him, 56 percent of women voted for Obama.

I can imagine the President and his staff chortling in the Oval Office about the Republicans’ stumbling efforts to wage a “war on women.”  They are already working on a strategy for the fall campaign targeting women.  As the President said in his first press conference of the year, “The Democrats have a better story to tell.”

You can bet that women will remember Rush Limbaugh’s hateful radio speak about Sandra Fluke, and the tepid responses from the Republican candidates.  Mitt Romney brushed off Rush’s remarks as “inappropriate” instead of denouncing them in the strongest language, such as “gross and unacceptable.”

Women aren’t going to forget the Senators who voted in favor of the Blunt amendment, which would allow employers to opt out of providing certain health care benefits for their employees if they have religious objections.  Viagra, yes.  Contraceptives, no.

The amendment failed, but barely, 51 to 48, pretty much along party lines.  The only Republican voting against it was Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, who a short time later announced her decision not to seek reelection.  She couldn’t stand it anymore.

The Republican Party and its puppet master Rush Limbaugh have picked the wrong fight.

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

Limbaugh Wages New War On Women

Mar 2, 2012 | Politics, Republicans | 6 comments

Rush Limbaugh, a blowhard who has been going too far, for far too long, has now made it abundantly clear that he hates women. America’s highest rated and highest paid radio broadcaster is a dangerous misogynist.

The venom he spewed at Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke, a private citizen, is unprecedented.  An overweight, overpaid, hateful “little” man, who always plays the “big” man, has victimized her.  This young woman simply had the temerity to testify in support of a woman’s right to health insurance coverage for contraception.

For this Limbaugh calls her a “slut,” a “prostitute” who, he says, wants to be paid for having sex.  He even suggested that if she wants money for her sexual activity, he should at least be able to see it taking place.  How humiliating, how embarrassing.

I became a victim of his nasty talk on the radio, after I moderated the 1992 presidential debate featuring President George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot.  The day after the huge political event—watched by 91 million people here and abroad—Limbaugh called me a “femi-Nazi” who caused Bush to stumble so Clinton could outperform the President and win the debate.  (That was a lie.)  He said I was a liberal Democrat and never should have been chosen as moderator.  (Another lie.)  He ranted for 15 minutes about how awful I was.  The innuendo, that I was an unqualified and biased black woman.

Within hours of that radio show I started getting death threats by telephone and over the next few days hundreds of letters flooded my office from people who warned me I would be killed, wished I was dead, or planning to shoot me themselves.  For about a week armed bodyguards followed me everywhere to provide protection from any Limbaugh “ditto-heads” with guns and a violent streak.

Does he talk about women the way he does for ratings?  He surely couldn’t believe all his nonsense talk.  Or is he an evil man who wants to yank out from under our Easy Spirits, all the progress we have made.  To men like Limbaugh, the advances of women are threatening.  That’s why they are “little” men.  They can’t stand the fact that females can–not only do what men do–but can have babies, too.  And with contraception we hold the ultimate power over society’s growth or decline.  Maybe that’s why Neanderthals like Rush, want to force women to bear babies no matter what the circumstances.

Women will not go back.  We may be on the cusp of the third women’s rights struggle in US history—suffrage in the early 1900’s, equal rights in the 70’s and now, the new assault on reproductive rights, being given boisterous voice by Limbaugh.  Bring it on.

Four wives?  Rush can’t seem to get it right.  Sounds like he has a woman problem.  I met him and one of his wives at the ABC Washington Bureau in the early 90’s.  She was a tiny, curvaceous aerobics instructor.  Gee, I wonder who left whom?