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Now
Last week George Bush, in a campaign
season when many Republican candidates are choosing not to appear
together with such an unpopular president, made a point of standing
alongside Don Sherwood. The reason for Bush's special visit is
that Sherwood, a Republican Congressman from Pennsylvania running
for reelection, who is embroiled in a controversy over his five
year affair with a woman. She recently filed a suit accusing
him of having repeatedly violently struck her face, neck, chest
and back with a closed fist and attempting to strangle her. In
his remarks, Bush made a point of praising Sherwood's wife, Carol,
for responding to this scandal by sending a letter to voters
on Don's behalf.
In other words, the woman who
reported being assaulted wasn't mentioned, the wife who stood
by her cheating, apparently abusive husband was praised, and
the man accused was recommended to take part in shaping state
policy. It's hard to imagine a less subtle statement from George
Bush on the role and value of women.
On the other hand, West Virginia's
Democratic candidate comes pretty close. According to The New
Yorker, after spending decades boasting of his military service
in Vietnam and hurling macho insults at those who refused to
fight in that immoral war, James Webb viewed the "prolonged
investigation of the Navy Tailhook sexual-abuse scandal in the
nineteen-nineties as a political witch hunt, driven by a radical-feminist
agenda to undermine the masculine culture of the military."
What "will of the people"
determined that this year voters should have a "choice"
between men who assault women and men who scorn women who report
their assault?
On November 8, the day after
the midterm election, the Supreme Court will consider whether
to uphold a ban that would, according to the ACLU, "prevent
doctors from performing abortions as early as 13 weeks in pregnancy."
This comes at a time when South Dakota and Louisiana have already
banned abortion state-wide and when the Supreme Court has been
remade in George Bush's ideological image. In this context, many
Christian fascists consider the outlawing of abortion just a
matter of time and have moved on. Doing just that, a month ago,
Pro-Life Action held a conference called "Contraception
is Not the Answer."
It's hard to imagine a more
surefire way to stunt and degrade the lives of women than to
force them back to a time when they were enslaved to their reproduction.
It's also hard to imagine a
more surefire way to land us back in those not-that-historic
days than to fall in line behind the Democratic Party's strategy
of totally capitulating on this issue.
The Democratic Senatorial Candidates
Committee campaign mailings don't even bother to mention the
words abortion or birth control. Meanwhile, all nine Democratic
women senators came together under the banner "Progressive
Pragmatic Women for Casey" to endorse and raise money for
a candidate who is vehemently anti-choice, pro-war, and against
stem cell research. And all too many progressive people and organizations
have fallen victim to this logic -censuring the word abortion
from their own vocabularies or speaking of it always as an unfortunate
tragedy.
What "will of the people"
decided that voters should have the "choice" between
theocrats who are moving relentlessly to criminalize and culturally
demonize birth control and abortion and a Party whose strategy
is to change the subject or join in?
In recent decades, a biblically
literalist and fascistically fundamentalist movement has effectively
captured the Republican Party. Their rallying cry is interchangeably
"traditional values" and "family values"
and their program hardened in opposition to the social gains
made by the Civil Rights, anti-war, and women's movements of
the 1960s and '70s.
Today, their cruel attacks
on the fundamental rights of women -to remove reality-based sex
education, to criminalize and even kill doctors who provide abortions,
to dry up access to and social acceptance of birth control, and
to reassert the shackles of traditional marriage including through
legally and culturally attacking divorce -do indeed hearken back
to the traditions of this country which regard women as the legal
property of their husbands. Consider that it was only 13 years
ago that the last state made it a crime for a husband to rape
his wife and that the most dangerous place for women and girls
is in their own homes, at the hands of their fathers and husbands.
Rather than making the simple
and much-needed truthful statement that women are human beings
with the ability, and deserving the right, to participate fully
and equally in every sphere of society, today the Democratic
Party is characterized by their attempts to "out-family-values"
the Republicans. Rather than standing up for women's rights to
control their own destinies, including their right to choose
not to have a child at any time for any reason, the dominant
liberal logic today is to substitute the discussion of the rights
of women with a discussion that they are the true defenders of
American families and mothers.
Consider the fact that leading
Democrats like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Ted Kennedy
have teamed up to support MoveOn co-founder Joan Blades's new
effort, Momsrising.org. Its mission is to champion "core
motherhood and family issues in political, social, and economic
spheres." The trailer to momsrising's Motherhood Manifesto
movie challenges viewers to take up the campaign as the real
way to fulfill the promise of "a pro-family culture, a pro-family
state." And groups like the National Organization for Women,
the National Women's Law Center, The Network of Spiritual Progressives
and dozens of other progressive organizations have gotten on
board with this effort.
The reality is that traditional
values mean the horrors of tradition's chains and patriarchy
no matter who is professing them! Revealingly, the Momsrising
website features a quote from George Bush that could be mistaken
for their own words: "Today, two-thirds of all moms also
work outside the homeand government must take your side."
What "will of the people"
decided that voters should get a "choice" between a
Party that celebrates enslaving women to their reproduction and
male authority and a Party that attempts to repackage these same
traditions as somehow empowering to women?
None of these choices were
shaped by the will of the people. Instead, they were shaped by
the needs of a system: capitalism.
And the fact that people get
to come in and "choose" between two programs, both
of which in different ways reflect the need of this system to
forcefully reassert male supremacy and the oppression of women
at this time in its development, does not make this a "democracy
for all."
Rather, it reveals the reality
of bourgeois dictatorship behind bourgeois democracy. This is
a dictatorship of the capitalist-imperialist class that accumulates
tremendous wealth in the hands of a relative few through the
exploitation of the labor of millions across the globe and which
has the oppression of women woven into the fabric of its culture
and ideology and has the patriarchal family as the basic unit
of its economic functioning.
But over the past several decades,
there has been a significant breakdown of the "traditional
family" and the traditional role for women in the U.S. Most
women have to work and are not full-time housewives, many households
are headed by women, many marriages end in divorce, and so forth.
These and other changes in the role of women and the family-along
with other dramatic economic, social, cultural, and demographic
changes related to heightened globalization -have given rise
to sharp and volatile contradictions for the ruling class as
a whole, which faces an acute need to resurrect and reinforce
the traditional family and traditional roles for women. This
is especially true as the U.S. has embarked on a very risky and
unpopular war on the world. It's in this context that the Christian
fascists and other reactionary movements are on a fanatical mission
to drive women into obedient submission to the authority of men,
and more generally the authority of patriarchal capitalist relations.
Certainly the Republicans are
more brazen in their insistence that women are fundamentally
different from, and inferior to, men. But in their own way-sometimes
dressed up in "enlightened" or pragmatic language (but
often not)-the ruling class forces generally represented by the
Democratic Party are responding to the same fundamental imperatives
of global capitalism where the forceful reassertion of male supremacy
is not up for debate.
At least not if progressive
people continue to allow the terms of the elections to stifle
honest and urgent discussions of the dangers posed. If people
remain confined within these worse-than-meaningless choices,
women will be thrust backwards in the most cruel, brutal, and
degrading ways.
It is a time for resistance.
It is a time for opening up new political space by advocating
unapologetically and struggling fiercely for the full equality
of women, rather than being confined to the ever-narrowing "electable"
discourse. And it is a time for people to spread very widely
a debate about the true nature of this system and of what it
will take to bring about the full emancipation of women and of
humanity as a whole.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
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