This Fall's Election

I first want to say that I will be very glad when this November's election is over. I want it to be over and done with, so I don't have to watch one more advert by Linda McMahon, Connecticut's Republican candidate for the US Senate seat that's open because Chris Dodd has decided to retire. Somehow, Linda McMahon must have missed taking Civics in junior high or high school. She seems to be under the illusion that the job of a US Senator is to create jobs. The only jobs Linda McMahon could create as a US Senator would be jobs in her own Senate office, jobs for her staff. The role of a US Senator is NOT that of creating jobs. The role of a US Senator is proposing and enacting legislation, advising and consenting on Presidential appointments such as Supreme Court Justices, overseeing the government and holding hearings on potential problems, and appropriating funds for various government functions and programs. And those are just four duties I'm able to think of off the top of my head -- without consulting Wikipedia, the US Constitution, or my mother.

Yes, I'm ranting. I have found this election campaign profoundly disturbing and disheartening. This is especially so because of some of the women candidates, specifically those associated with the "Tea Party Movement." The Tea Party frightens me down to my toes. Their rhetoric may be populist, however, their ideology is straight out of some of the most right-wing thinkers and organizations in US history, including the John Birch Society. While Linda McMahon isn't necessarily a Tea Partier, Sarah Palin -- the elephant in the room -- and Christine O'Donnell definitely are. O'Donnell doesn't believe in a woman's right to choose to end a pregnancy even in the case of rape or incest. She believes that evolution is an unproven theory; she doesn't understand the meaning of the term theory where it relates to the scientific method. Reading her entry on Wikipedia -- which I DID read, at the urging of a close friend who lives in Delaware -- made me laugh, but it also scared me. This is a woman who has never taken responsibility for anything she has ever done in her life; she has repeatedly lied, misrepresented, and denied things she has done. It's frightening.

What frustrates me the most, I suppose, is also what disappoints me the most. The Tea Party women who are running for office are able to do so, in large part, because of what we did in the late 1960's and early 1970's, during the Women's Movement, the Second Wave of Feminism. We opened up our lives and opened up the world for women, for ourselves, for our daughters and for our granddaughters, so that we and they would have access to reproductive freedom; fair and equal pay; futures in fields that had previously been totally male or male-dominated, such as medicine, law, the clergy (at least many Protestant denominations and three of four branches of Judaism), and politics; our own bank accounts; credit in our own names; OUR OWN NAMES, period. And now, women such as O'Donnell and many others are running for office and getting support -- and money. It's the biggest argument against believing, as many women argued in the 1970's, that "all women are my sisters." Women like O'Donnell, McMahon, Palin, et al., are taking advantages of the progress made because of the Feminist Movement, however, they oppose most of the gains of that Movement, except the ones that benefit them directly. They are NOT my sisters, and they will NOT get my vote. I will be delighted to vote for Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut's Attorney General, for US Senate. And I will pray that the McMahons and O'Donnell's go down to major defeat on 2 November.