Pistol Packing Mamas?

As I have mentioned in previous posts, I can remember when I was a very young child hearing my mother and my grandmother argue over whether women should vote.  My grandmother, apparently, was adamantly opposed to it, but my mother said she was going to vote anyway.  My childhood and young adulthood was pretty much dictated by what society expected of girls and young women.  When I was in high school I also remember my mother telling me that I must not let the boys know how intelligent I was because they wouldn’t like me, yet at the same time being expected to make all ‘A’s.  Talk about a double message! 

When we got to the 1960’s and ‘70’s and the rise of feminism, what a heady time that was!  We were encouraged to make our own choices about our lives, our bodies, our thoughts, and whatever we wanted to.  My parents had taken out a life insurance policy for me when I was about 10, and in the mid ‘70’s it became apparent it was not worth much, and the funds could be invested better elsewhere.  When I went to our insurance agent, who was also a fellow parishioner in Fresno, he told me I had lucked out – that the law had just changed and I didn’t need to have Bill along with me to sign that it was OK if I cashed it in.  I could just choose to do that all by myself!!  I also have some memories that were horribly denigrating to women regarding rape, and sexuality in general.

Consequently, the rise in the past 30 years or so on the part of the radical religious right to roll back some of the advances made by women have had me somewhat concerned for my beautiful great-granddaughters.  My daughters and granddaughters can really take care of themselves better than I ever could have at their ages, but it is the little ones I worry about.  Here in California we aren’t impacted so much by this roll back, but using Texas as an example, it really is worrisome that the state government is complicit in closing women’s health clinics across Texas that provide basic health screening to women.  They are being closed because they also offer abortions.  Forget that they provide screening for the cancers that are the most prevalent among women (breast, ovarian, cervical), but also diabetes and cardio-vascular health, and the education that must go along with this.  I have singled out Texas, but this attitude is also gaining ground in too many states to mention here.  It is indicative of an effort to prevent women from becoming equal to men in decision making.

My understanding is that the logic for this is that women need to get married and have their husbands take care of their health needs – they don’t need specialized clinics just for them because it encourages them to be independent of men, and to make their own decisions about their health care.  All of this under the guise of being anti-abortion.  When Bob McDonnell, the past Governor of Virginia, and his Attorney General, Ken Cucinelli, determined that a woman in Virginia who needed an abortion would have to undergo, at her own expense, a trans-vaginal ultra sound probe, in my mind I could hear them snigger behind their closed doors that they would show these women who was boss.

But the final straw for me was the clip from All In with Chris Hayes this past week that showed a bunch of scruffy men who are outraged over a group of young women who have formed a group, Moms Demand Action, firing multiple times at a naked female mannequin, nearly destroying the mannequin.

My grandfather and my dad taught me how to shoot a gun, but of greater importance, how to treat one with the great respect a gun deserves.  Not to respect the gun itself, but to respect the damage and horror the misuse of a gun could generate.  But this new gun worship really has me deeply concerned.  Responsible and mature male gun owners are not who I am talking about.  I am talking about the non-thinking male who believes that a gun is what makes him “a man”.  But turning a bunch of non-rational gun-toting men loose on women who they just might disagree with is terrifying.  Without ever turning back from any of these anti-woman decisions, our rights as women, and now our very selves have once again become endangered. 

I am speaking metaphorically, but we gun-toting women, so to speak, need to all join Moms Demand Action.  A pistol packing mama with a fast trigger finger might work, but what is better and more effective, an even faster mouth.