We want to end all wars

Dr. E. Faye Williams
TriceEdneyWire.com Columnist

President Barack Obama has brought our troops home from Iraq. In so doing, he brought an end to one of the most unnecessary, shameful wars of our time. He did his best to clean up one of his predecessor’s worst disasters. Well, maybe we could rank the financial mess his predecessor left for President Obama to clean up for a tie! Those of us who often get classified as being on the Left are still pulling for an early exit from Afghanistan, too—another of the President’s jobs he inherited from his predecessor. We want to end all wars because nobody wins in a war where innocent women and children die and have their lives shattered when so many men die.

We’ve been applauding the fact that the President is succeeding with the economy. People don’t seem to be afraid to spend now. We’ve just learned that jobless claims are going down. General Motors has overcome the near total collapse that was about to happen just before President Obama took office. Stocks have been up for a while now. The President doubled Pell Grants, making it possible for more students to go to college (something for which Rick Santorum calls him a snob—but intelligent people know better.)

We now have the Affordable Health Care Act, and many of the dates for benefits to go into effect have arrived.

The President has a special Council on Women and Girls. He gave us the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. We now have more women on the Supreme Court than ever before. Yeah, we are still waiting for a Black woman to be there—and we know the “Change is Gonna Come”! Women were feeling real good about this president.

Then along came a slew of Republicans running to try to take the President’s job away. They went so far as to deny everybody who is unemployed a job just to try to take one man’s job. They began attacking every bit of progress the President has tried to make. Not only has racism burst on the scene again, but this War on Women is the shocker!

Not only presidential candidates, Republican members of Congress, but governors, sheriffs, state legislators, and bombastic Rush Limbaugh came after women like the worst-ever tornado. Some of the worst offenders aside from them are Rep. Terry England (GA) who wants women to carry dead fetuses to term like cows and pigs; Rep. Don Pridemore (WI) suggested that single parent households are a contributing factor in child abuse and that even abusive marriages don’t have to end in divorce. Guess we are expected to grin and bear the abuse! Not to be outdone, Arizona would give employers the authority to request that women being prescribed birth control pills would be required to provide proof they’re using them for non-sexual reasons! I guess they wanted to make sure that Rick Santorum’s wish to ban contraception would get a little more traction. In a previous article, we’ve already talked about the trans-vaginal probers’ powers granted by the governor of Virginia.

I forgot to mention that Rush has resurrected the title he gave us years ago—Feminazis! Yes, there’s a war against women, and we women had better wake up, suit up and begin to fight back. We’re being forced to re-fight many of the battles we thought were settled years ago. As Sojourner Truth once said, “If one woman could turn this world upside down, surely all of us women together can turn it right side up again,” so we had better get busy. We’re in a war, but let us use our ballots as our weapons. When we do that, this stupid war against us will end.

This article was originally published in the March 26, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper