An Eclectic Mind

My response to an e-mail message.

The other day, I got an e-mail message from a cousin of mine back east. The title of the e-mail was “Why Women Should Vote.” It was one of those typical “forward this” e-mails that tries to fire people up about one thing or another. It included the usual bold and UPPERCASE text and images. (I guess folks think that pictures can help make their case.)

I need to say here that my cousin did not write this e-mail. She just forwarded it. She often forwards messages about topics of interest to women.

I get a few of these forwarded e-mail messages each day. I agree with and enjoy reading about half of them. Some of them don’t even get read — I just delete them. And some of them — like this one — get under my skin and prompt me to respond and blog about it. Regular readers may recall “The Star Spangled Banner, In Spanish?”

The message was a combination history lesson and call for action. It began with the sentence, “This is the story of our Grandmothers and Great-grandmothers; they lived only 90 years ago.” I knew I was in for it when I saw a series of sepia-tinted photos of suffragettes on the march. I fully admit that I didn’t read the whole thing.

Instead, I thought about the idea that women should need a special reason to vote. And frankly, it made me angry. I wrote a response:

Women should vote for the same reason men should vote: it’s our RESPONSIBILITY as part of a democratic society. It has nothing to do with women’s rights or anything else that’s specific to women. We vote to have our say. Anyone who is eligible to vote and doesn’t is an IDIOT, plain and simple. They’re giving up their right to have a say in the future of our country.

Use it or lose it — that can apply to the democratic process, too.

And don’t you think this “battle of the sexes” nonsense has gone on too long? If we we acted like PEOPLE rather than WOMEN we’d be treated like people. That’s how I’ve always worked in male-dominated fields — finance, computers, and now aviation — and I’ve never had any problems.

Thanks for including me in your distribution lists, but you really don’t need to. I get an awful lot of e-mail and really don’t have time to wade through it all. I guarantee that I already THINK about things like this far more than most of the people in this country — people who care more about American Idol and Paris Hilton than how their congressman voted or what the votes were about. I don’t need e-mails that spell everything out for me with pictures, clip art, historical trivia, or angry words directed against one group or another.

Don’t be offended, please.

I didn’t get a response and honestly don’t expect to. There are far too many women who are quick to make us into some sort of special case. While I hope she understands my point, I don’t think this e-mail will change her point of view.

Comments? Use the Comments link or form below to share them.

I’d like to thank the robber.

One of my Twitter friends (@jeffcarlson, I believe), pointed me (and others, of course) to this article on the TwinCities.com Web site: “GOP delegate’s hotel tryst goes bad when he wakes up with $120,000 missing.” If this isn’t an instance of poetic justice, I don’t know what is.

Turns out the 29-year-old lawyer from Denver went to the GOP convention alone. While there, he was interviewed for LinkTV.org where he made some pretty amazing statements. According to the article:

Schwartz was candid about how he envisioned change under a McCain presidency.

“Less taxes and more war,” he said, smiling. He said the U.S. should “bomb the hell” out of Iran because the country threatens Israel.

Asked by the interviewer how America would pay for a military confrontation with Iran, he said the U.S. should take the country’s resources.

“We should plant a flag. Take the oil, take the money,” he said. “We deserve reimbursement.”

Think I’m kidding? See the Interview for yourself:

The guy even looks like a jerk.

The Twin Cities article goes on to report: “A few hours after the interview, an unknown woman helped herself to Schwartz’s resources.” Specifically, $120,000 worth of cash, jewelry, and other valuables. They were all taken by the woman he brought back to his hotel room. The last thing he remembers was her making him a drink and telling him to get undressed.

So here we have a 29-year-old lawyer who is a typical, small-minded, U-S-A! chanting Republican delegate, publicly voicing some extremely right-wing imperialistic ideas for a TV camera. For some reason, he’s loaded up with $120,000 worth of goodies at the convention — maybe he thought he could hand them over in person to one of his idols. Then he gets seriously taken by a call girl who probably slipped him a mickey before she had to service him.

Poetic justice? I think so.

A Web site sharing what thinking women think.

The other day, I got an e-mail message from a friend. She doesn’t usually forward political e-mails, but she had a lot of respect for the two women who’d written what she forwarded, so she sent it on rather apologetically.

The e-mail message was an appeal to women to share their thoughts on why Sarah Palin was a bad choice to be “one heartbeat away from the presidency. E-mails sent to a certain address would be put on a new blog. I shared my thoughts.

The following day, a Twitter friend linked to the resulting Web site, Woman Against Sarah Palin. I stopped by this morning to read what a few of the women had written. There were hundreds of comments from all over the country and none of them were positive.

The main thought of the site’s founders is summarized in their “Profile”:

We are not in the habit of criticizing women in the public sphere, as we usually feel we should support our female compatriots with as much encouragement as we can. However, Sarah Palin’s record is anti-woman. Feminism is not simply about achieving the power and status typically held by men. It’s about protecting and supporting the rights of women of all classes, races, cultures, and beliefs. Palin’s record and beliefs do not align with this. She was chosen by John McCain specifically because he believes that American women will vote for any female candidate regardless of their qualifications. He is wrong.

This echoes my sentiments exactly. I’m actually quite insulted by the choice — as if picking a woman as a running mate is enough to get the female vote.

But what’s scaring me most is that it seems to be working among some women. And that’s why I hope people will read what’s on this site. Don’t be fooled by a skirt and a lipsticked “hockey mom.” She was chosen not for her qualifications but for her ability to pump up McCain’s campaign. Do you really want someone with her background to be one heartbeat away?

Visit Woman Against Sarah Palin and see what the women there are saying.

Perhaps the Bristol Palin situation will put a spotlight on this.

One of the things that bugs me the most about the Religious Conservatives in this country is its policy regarding sex education. Basically, they don’t want it taught in schools.

Social conservatives — including, ironically, Sarah Palin — promote an “abstinence-only” sex education program. My understanding of such programs is that they attempt to teach young people to abstain from sex until they are married. There’s no deep discussion of what sex is and how it works. There’s certainly no discussion of “safe sex” or birth control. Young people are simply told not to have sex. Period. End of statement.

I’m pretty sure the idea behind all this has something to do with sin. Evidently, it’s a sin to have sex before you’re married. And since most high school kids aren’t married, they shouldn’t be having sex. Doing so would commit a sin. I’m not quite sure what happens when you commit a sin like that — eternal damnation seems a bit harsh, doesn’t it? — but it’s evidently a bad thing.

Now I could go off on a tangent and bring up the theories of Richard Dawkins, who claims that parents forcing their religious beliefs on their kids is akin to child abuse, but I won’t. Although I do agree with a lot of what Dawkins has to say, I believe that parents have a right to bring a religious (or non-religious, for that matter) belief system into their kids’ lives. (I don’t, however, believe they should force their kids to marry before the age of consent, as at least one religious cult is apparently doing.)

The trouble with this is that kids can be kids. Teenagers have raging hormones. Things happen. One thing leads to another. Not all girls (or guys, for that matter) are thinking about abstinence or sin or mom and dad on a date when opportunity (and something else) arises. It’s hard to stop once you get started. Anyone who has had (and enjoyed) sex can tell you that. (Which makes me wonder if these abstinence-only supporters ever enjoyed sex, but that’s something to debate another day.)

So when the moment of truth arrives and neither party remembers abstinence and holds up a STOP sign, where are the condoms? Obviously, they’re not around. These poor kids were never taught about safe sex and birth control. They were probably even told that birth control is a sin. Neither one of them would be caught dead with a condom in their possession. At that moment of truth, all they know is what their bodies are telling them they need to do. So they do it.

The very lucky ones don’t start a baby and they don’t share a disease. But maybe that just confirms that what they’ve done is okay. So they do it again another time. Or with another partner. And sooner or later, there will be a pregnancy or a disease or both.

Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, brought up in a religious conservative household by a mother who believes in abstinence-only sex education, is the victim of her mother’s policies. I don’t know the girl and I don’t know what she was taught. But I know she made a mistake and I can’t help but wonder whether the mistake was one of ignorance rather than stupidity.

I’m angry about this. I’m angry because the Republican party is simply blowing it off, using this unfortunate situation as proof that Sarah Palin is “just like anyone else,” with the same kind of family challenges that anyone has. This teenage pregnancy is okay to them. After all. Bristol is still going to have the baby. And she’s going to get married. So everything is okay, right?

Did anyone ever stop to consider what Bristol may have wanted to do with her life? Maybe she didn’t want to start bearing children when she was 17 years old. Maybe she wanted to finish high school and go to college. To become a doctor or a lawyer or — dare I say it? — a community organizer. In other words, maybe she wanted to start a career or have a bit of life on her own before getting married and starting a family. Or maybe she didn’t want to have a family at all.

Even if she did want to start a family when she was young, do you think she really wanted to be changing diapers for her own baby when she was only 17 years old?

Now although I’ll admit that I’m pro-Choice — as every woman who isn’t held firmly under a man’s thumb should be — I’m not for a moment suggesting that she abort the baby. While I think that could have been an option very early on, it should not be an option at 5 months into the pregnancy. (And yes, folks, there is a difference.)

What I’m suggesting here is that if Bristol — and the thousands of young women like her all over the country — received proper sex education, including safe sex and birth control information, she would not be in the situation she’s in. And neither would her boyfriend, who will soon find himself in attendance as the groom at a good, old-fashioned, shotgun wedding. (After all, why potentially ruin one life when you can potentially ruin two?)

Bristol’s lucky, in a way. Her parents are well-to-do. They have good jobs — hell, there’s a chance her mother might even be vice president. They have money. Even if Mom’s away on official business, there will be nannies around to help. Bristol might come out of this okay — if the media attention doesn’t permanently traumatize her.

But what I’m hoping for is that Bristol’s predicament opens a few eyes among the members of the Religious Right. Abstinence-only sex education does not work.

And now we have a poster child for it.

I want to think and write — but not about what I’m being paid to write about.

I’ll admit it here: the Sarah Palin VP situation has got me completely freaked out. The thought of someone with her background one heartbeat away from the presidency scares the bejesus out of me.

I want to research this issue. I want to think about it. I want to write about it in a clear, reasonable, and convincing way.

But I’m already two weeks behind on a book that I’m being paid to write. Thoughts about the book are making it nearly impossible to think about the current political scene.

And thoughts about the current political scene are making it nearly impossible to think about my work.

The only solution is to stop thinking about what I want to think about and work on the damn book to get it off my plate. Then I can think about whatever I like again. Hopefully, I’ll still feel passionate enough to write about it here.

So bear with me as I continue to neglect this blog and remain silent on the current issues that have me so concerned. With luck, I’ll be blogging again by Monday.

And don’t worry; I won’t spend all my time writing about politics. I’ve got a great helicopter flight and a boat trip — both with photos — to share here, too.