Kansas is proposing adding an Equal Rights Amendment to their state constitution. Pretty great, right? Not if you hate women as much as the anti-choice lobby.
“If we allow it to pass, Kansans will wake up one day wondering how a right to unrestricted and taxpayer-funded abortion was smuggled into our constitution,” said Beatrice Swoopes, a lobbyist with the Kansas Catholic Conference.
What the fuck? Seriously, what the fuck? I mean, feminists have been saying it for the longest that anti-choicers really, really don't believe women should have equal rights. But to read it on my computer screen . . . damn.
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Hah, you know what strikes me as funny about this? It's as much as admitting that if men were the ones who got pregnant, abortion would be legal. How else are we supposed to interpret the message that equal rights for women would involve abortion rights? They're saying that abortion is a right men already have, and they apparently have no problem with that, beyond the obvious fact that men don't get pregnant.
If anti-choicers were really about saving babies and not controlling women's bodies, they wouldn't see it as an equal rights issue, would they? They would see abortion as a right nobody should have, and an equal rights amendment should be no threat to their cause.
I know I'm twisting words, I just found that funny.
P.S. I do think that equal rights for women would involve access to abortion, but I think it's more complicated than that. The right to have an abortion is deeper and more meaningful than just the right not to be responsible for a child. It has to do with making decisions about who gets to do what with your own body.
The right of a man to decide that he would be a terrible father and to say he'll have nothing to do with raising his offspring is a right women should have as well.
It is a different right than the right to say "no" when somebody else wants to touch/use/view/control your body.
So what I'm saying is, I think some anti-choice people might view the equal rights amendment as granting abortion rights because they think a woman having an abortion is the same thing as a man having nothing to do with his children, but that's because they don't understand that abortion isn't about social/parental rights, it's about physical/medical rights.
I got you, and I was going to say this in a reply to your first comment. Now I don't have to :) But while anti-choicers conflate getting an abortion with a father walking out on their child, they really do nothing to prevent fathers walking out on their kid. They still put 100% of the responsibility of having sex, getting pregnant, and raising a family on women. They do nothing to make sure that children receive child support, even though 80% of noncustodial parents are fathers and only 40% of custodial parents who have child support orders through the courts get regular and full child support payments. Where's the "pro-life" movement in these cases? Nowhere. Which I think is what you were getting at. Fathers can "abort" their responsibility to their children by leaving in the middle of the night and neglecting to pay child support.
I don't know. That doesn't seem right to me. Men may be able to walk out on their kids, but it is not really a right guaranteed by the state. But then, I guess thinking abortions would be guaranteed by the state ERA is a stretch no matter how you look at it.
What I find amazing is that they don't just claim it is a right, but a right that will be subsidized by the state. It seems they are just trying to capitalize on their biggest arguments-- fear of abortions being unlimited and fear that they will be funded with tax dollars. I almost cannot believe they would be that blatantly untruthful in advocating, but the best guess I can see is that they are just trying to scare the people who won't know any better.
P.S. Sabriel, are you a fan of Garth Nix?
Jesus Christ, you radical feminists REALLY love to generalize, don't you? How many radical feminists does it take to make a huge leap from one quotation by prolifer to saying "all pro-lifers hate women"? 1. 1 stupid, ridiculous ultraliberal radical feminist who whines about her "victimhood" here in 21st-Century America, yet she fails to see just how far her own gender has advanced over the past FIFTY years! When will you people EVER be satisfied?
Even if you get all your radical agenda passed into law, you're still gonna whine and make up problems that don't exist and try to "solve" things that will always be in existence, like rape or domestic violence. I mean, I'm no fan of those things, but come on, that's reality. You can reduce the occurrence, but we're never gonna get rid of them entirely. That's life. Stop being a bunch of utopian pansies.
And stop with this "antichoice" nonsensical label. I'm prochoice, but I'm not some knee-jerk liberal who thinks that every single person who is opposed to abortion wants to control women. Believe me, if all the prolifers were misogynists, I'm sure they'd find easier and more clever ways to control women than trying to pass laws endlessly for the past 36 years to ban abortion again. Get real. Maybe there are a few misogynist prolifers here and there, but I don't think every single one of them opposes it just because he hates women.
I used to be prolife, but I didn't hate women or equality. I just had moral issues with ending human lives after conception. Prolife is more complex than "antichoice." How about giving people the benefit of the doubt for a change and quit assuming everyone fits neatly into some stupid little box?
You got your "good little feminists" over here. And you got your "misogynist" prolifers over there. And your "privileged" white males over there. And your angry misogynists over there. And your "backwards" conservatives behind them. Just stop with the stereotyping and grouping. Think OUTSIDE the box.
I think you should follow your own advice about not generalizing and thinking outside the box.
True. But vagina does have a common usage referring to the whole of the female genitalia, just as penis refers to a specific part of the male genitalia but also has a common usage referring to the whole. For example, I automatically thought of the inclusion of bedroom furniture the scrotum in Velvet Acid Christ's question about drawing a penis on her or his car.