Uppity Women Unite!!

Last night on All In with Chris Hayes, who was home cuddling his brand new son, it was Ari Melber who was All In, which is OK under the circumstances, considering that I also like his style.

The subject under discussion was the $1 million report, paid for by New Jersey tax payers, that exonerated Chris Christie, and blamed Christie’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, for the mess because she was emotionally upset over having been dumped by Bill Stapien, Christie’s campaign manager and longtime friend.  Nothing in the report mentioned Bill Stapien’s emotional condition.  I have long called this bridge scandal the “Ongoing Saga of Trenton Place”, even though the George Washington Bridge is nowhere near Trenton, NJ.  This scandal is better than Peyton Place ever was.  I believe that there was some reference to the Mayor of Hoboken, NJ, Dawn Zimmmer, as being somewhat emotionally fragile.  So far I haven’t heard anything about the Mayor of Fort Lee, Mark Sokolich, being emotionally unstable. 

But then take a look at the chief attorney, Randy Mastro, an older white male who had to come up with something to try to exonerate Christie, who from a casual observer across the nation, appears to be, in my opinion, not truthful at all times.  So who can Mastro pin this whole thing on?  Why the attractive, young female Chief of Staff, and the intense young Dawn Zimmer. Does anyone around here detect a bit of sexism?  But a Professor Butler, former federal prosecutor, on All In last night came right out and called it sexism from the 1950’s.  Really?  What would we expect from Mastro?  Someone who would write whatever he was told to write if offered a million dollars to do so?  Integrity?  (I hope my sarcasm is coming through here.) 

But if Mastro is a buddy of one of the leading lights of the current Republican party, which is like night and day from the Republican Party of the 1950’s to 1979, when Ronald Reagan was elected, he is not above denigrating young women (or old ones either) in order to try to get his buddy out of trouble.  She may be guilty as hell of something, but it will be because she made a conscious choice to act in a manner that causes her to be guilty.  Not because she was emotionally upset over a broken date!   

Which brings me to the fact that in Texas over 60 women’s health clinics have closed either because they provided abortions, or it was feared that they might.  But along with the provision of abortions, poor women also lost basic screenings for other reproductive health issues such as pap smears, mammograms, screenings for STDs, and basic reproductive health education, including birth control.  

And we have the case of the little girl who can no longer attend a “Christian” school in Lynchburg, VA, whose great-grandparents have adopted her, because she has short hair, wears jeans and t shirts, likes to collect hunting knives and shoots a BB gun.  This is a paragraph from the AP article, “School says girl is too boyish”.  “The principal sent a letter home last month that her tomboy appearance does not follow the school's religious affiliation and that it goes against a "biblical lifestyle."”   In my reading of the Bible, I don’t believe that I ever read that jeans and a T-shirt were not appropriate clothing for a girl!  Further, jeans and a shirt (no T-shirts when I was a girl) were my favorite things to wear.  I had to wear skirts or dresses to school, and I hated them with a passion.  I still do, and although I do have one for summer and one for winter, never wear either.  I learned to shoot a .22 rifle with a great deal of accuracy, still enjoy target practicing with my pellet rifle, have been married to the same man for nearly 61 years now, have four daughters, two granddaughters, and four great-grandchildren.  What in the name of all that’s holy does what a second grade girl wear or do have to do with Christianity? 

The connection between these three points?  It is a total and complete denigration of women as fully functioning human beings, capable of making rational decisions at the worst of times, just as men are capable of doing.  Too many men think women can’t make decisions regarding their reproductive health because they are emotionally unstable, so we big, rational men must make these decisions for them.  And, hey, what the heck, if we get in trouble, we can blame it on the closest woman.  Except we have to start training them at a very early age to accept the blame!! 

Fortunately not all older white males, or young ones either, have this mindset.  We are making progress.  But when one is on the receiving end of this way of thinking, after so many millennia it really gets old!!  An old 1960’s slogan comes to mind.  “Uppity women unite!!”  If women all over the world could unite, not to dominate or take over, but simply walk equally, side by side, with men in all aspects of life, including wearing jeans and a T-shirt, think what we, all of us, could accomplish.