I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar

So evidently, what we are going to have to focus on, because someone else wants us to, are issues that have not been real issues for years. Abortion. Access to birth control. Health care for issues particular to women. Women in the workplace. People suggesting that women are harming their children if they work outside the home. Prenatal testing is the gateway to Hell itself. Those damn gays insisting on the right to marry the ones they love and commit to.

As if the housing market, job growth, unemployment, poverty, the threat of terror, world hunger and thirst, wars, nuclear threats, global warming, the fuel crisis (say when) aren't enough to hold our collective attention.

No, we have to bring up old settled issues as a distraction. In an appeal for the much sought after Idiot Vote, we have to bring up issues that the poorly informed tend to have opinions on. Opinions of the heart. Opinions weakly supported if supported at all, with genuine facts. You have to know a thing or two, and maybe have a 4th grade education to decide whether or not the current job growth strategy has merit. You don't have to have a PhD in Medical Ethics to assert that you think it is wrong to end the life of an unborn child. These are Common Man issues that will bring out voters in mass numbers, because suddenly someone with no real opinion on any of the candidates, will have one.

That isn't to say that if you have an opinion on these things that you are an idiot. No, not at all. There are lots of very educated, well-read, informed people with strong, weak and middle-of-the-road opinions on all of these things. But even the morons of the world tend to weigh in on these matters. These are the opinions that will swing an election when it is too close to call on the real issues. Men who want their women at home and not out prancing around some law office come out to vote with their penises. The same lunk heads who say it is wrong to kill an itty bitty unborn baby but will gladly fire their shot guns at the backs of teenagers who trespasses on their private property will come out to secure their right to bear arms. Closed minded people will assert that the Bible says it's wrong to be gay, because gay people freak them out, even if they've never met one (so they think!)and will vote to persecute them.

And this is just a cheap ploy. Trick the American public into thinking that if we get back to good old fashioned Family Values, all the rest will magically fall into place and be healed. Gas prices will drop. Jobs will be created in massive numbers. The housing market will rebound. All because women will be home baking cookies with their 17 unplanned children who never had the benefit of prenatal testing.

And it is the worst kind of insult. A smoke and mirrors magician's act to try to give people who can't begin to decide which candidate is better equipped to fix all that is going wrong in this country today a sense of control. Give them an issue or two they can understand - if only with their hearts - and they can get behind a candidate. Perhaps even one with no discernible talent for running anything larger than a Book Club, but really great hair. Put the masses in their comfort zone of comprehension and they will all come out and vote for the candidate that represents their opinions on the Non Issues.

And these people claim to love this country. What a farce.

Well, I have an assertion to make. The role women will play in all of this will be way bigger than anyone expects (so long as no one repeals the 19th Ammendment before the election) Women are a bigger, bad-ass voting demographic than any one of these guys ever conceived of. Women of all walks of life, of all educational backgrounds, and all social positions know on some level when their rights are about to be trampled on. And every woman, whether she will openly say so in polite conversation, or dare attend a rally, or bravely carry a poster at a speech, or join a movement, or feel compelled to sit quietly and defy her real feelings in conversations at Bridge Club, when she steps into that voting booth, alone with no man at her side, she will vote with her uterus. For herself. For her daughters. For her daughters' daughters.

To even raise some of these ideas as political issues is offensive and misleading. It is an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of people who are not equipped to understand the complicated economic landscape or world politics by giving them a sense of control. And it is at the expense of women who still, to this day, will be sacrificed in favor of power.

The lionesses are awakened. Let the wise not underestimate their strength.