So far in Election 2012, we’ve seen a foul-mouthed Rush Limbaugh, men-only Congressional panels on women’s rights, transvaginal probe laws and efforts to restrict women’s access to contraception.
And yet there’s still a dispute over whether there’s a war on women?
Through the hype, women and all Americans deserve better than 24-hour media mayhem. We deserve the facts.
That’s why the American Civil Liberties Union Liberty Watch 2012 project today launched a new report card that reveals all the presidential candidates’ views on a range of key women’s issues important to all voters. Unfortunately, it paints a portrait that would make the Mona Lisa weep.
In the report card, which can be viewed here, we awarded up to four Lady Liberty torches to each presidential candidate on seven issues: abortion rights, access to contraception regardless of employer, Women in Combat, Title IX enforcement, which ensures equality in education and school sports, and support for the Violence Against Women Act, the Family Medical Leave Act and the Equal Pay/Lilly Ledbetter Act.
Here’s what we found:
Equality for women, manifested in the Constitution and the rights it guarantees, isn’t a Republican or Democratic issue. It isn’t even a women’s issue -- it’s an American one.
And if there’s one thing about this unpredictable election year that’s become predictable, it is that women are going to decide this election.
Our new report card gives voters and the candidates a roadmap so that more candidates and the voters can begin to finally put full equality for women and all Americans on the horizon.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar: Why We Must Reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act Now
Jon Soltz: Obama Lifting Ban on Women in Combat Makes the US Stronger
This conversation should be long behind us. America should be so much better than this, yet here we are in 2012 honestly arguing with each other over whether or not women deserve to be treated as equal, first class citizens. I truly hope that someday this will be something that was just a senseless, harmless hiccup in American politics that everybody has gotten past rather than something that grew into a huge, crippling blow to American progress.
All the sane people see it for what it is.
no mention of the heinous attacks at Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman and laura Inghram
(sarcasm)
The Congressional panel was on relgious freedom and the Constitutionality of the Obama administration's mandate. It was not on "women's rights" by any reasonable stretch of the imagination.
In regards to the "transvaginal probe" laws. Those ultrasounds are STANDARD PROCEDURE before an abortion. Generally if you are having a surgical procedure done they want to know ahead of time what they are going to be dealing with. As a result those types of ultrasounds are performed before 99% of abortions. Its just that normally they don't show the woman the picture. The reason they don't is that they know she will be less likely to get the abortion and that is what they are being paid to perform.
There hasn't been a single effort to limit people's ability to get birth control. There has been an effort to oppose a new mandate that would force people to buy coverage without a deductible for birth control in all situations on their health insurance. Like any mandated coverage it costs money. The objection is that those who don't want birth control will be forced to buy it and ultimately pay for the birth control of others.
If these ultrasounds are standard procedure...then there shouldn't have to be a law requiring them. Either way, why is congress involved in what a doctor does with a patient.
One of the states wants women to PROVE to their employers why they are using birth control.
No war on women? Please think...
Women are being sent to jail for ten years to life for miscarraige in this country by people like you.
Free Bei Bei Shui and the other political prisoners in the war on women.
Kudos to Democratic Oklahoma state Senator Constance Johnson and Virginia Democrat Janet Howell. Johnson proposed a bill that would make it illegal for a man to ejaculate anywhere except into a woman’s sexual organs, giving an even more extreme twist to the current so-called personhood laws cropping up across conservative states. Howell proposed a bill requiring all men to get rectal exams and cardiac stress tests prior to receiving prescription erectile dysfunction medications.
We don't want any forged paperwork.
of over hundreds of pieces of legislation design to curtail their rights:
- Have tried to abolish choice;
- Their spoke persons like Rush have trivialized their issues;
- Have for decades and continue to try to govern womens reproductive rights;
- Want to make contraceptives hard if not impossible to get;
- Have infiltrated a organization meant to find a cure for br.east cancer and used its fund to go against women issues;
- Have tried to shut down Planned Parenhood which offers inexpensive health care to women;
- Their elected leaders like congressmen Blunt who has tried to make this discrimination into law;
- Their elected leaders at state level have tried passing laws like making being a single parent a crime.
- Their elected leaders in congress voted down the administration of the papillomavirus vaccine for women.
- Their elected leaders in congress have tried to redefine "R.ape" so as not to be so criminal.
- Cons like governor Tom Corbett forces women to have intrusive transvaginal ultrasound
- Gov. Scott Walker (R) repeals the Equal Pay Enforcement Act.
....and on and on...to a total to over 400 pieces of legislation
If you don't call that a w**, what is?
They are sending police to women's houses to drag them to hospitals so they can be tied to beds and cut open in forced Cesarean sections.
THIS IS HAPPENING!!!!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/24/america-pregnant-women-murder-charges
http://www.lifescapes.org/Papers/COCS%20Hahn%201987.htm
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In the discussion that follows, we first summarize nine cases in which court orders were sought. In five of these, sections were actually carried out. In all the cases the women differed significantly from the medical staff in what they conÂsidered legitimate and consequential grounds for making decisions about birth.
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