Okay, I know how this is supposed to work. You’ve had the beee-sponsors squeezed out of you like birds out of the snake that you are. And after gushing out your over-fed dinner, fixed for you by white guys just like you, you wipe your reptilian lips and say, “In this instance, I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack.” I’m supposed to say, “ahh, he’s contrite. Let’s all be friends.” And I sit here and watch those birds stagger back to life, looking around for another corporate mouth to crawl into, and I say “You didn’t mean a personal attack? Are you fucking kidding me?! You suggested Sandra Fluke post sex videos on line so you could watch! Was that a way to say, 'Howdy?! I deem you an equal'?!"
You’ve been perfecting the ad hominem attack and making a fat king’s ransom out of ripping others for so long, you never thought an attack on a young woman who attends law school would trip you up, did you? You’ve called the First Lady “uppity,” called the President’s economic program “reparations,” and race baited happily to your whitey tighty demographic. They’ve devoured your comments about illegal immigrants being “invasive species,” and your boys’ club relished your description of any group of women who won’t sit down and take any shit as “feminazis.” Hell, you even scorned somebody suffering Parkinsons. Only from a reptilian brain could come that little number about Michael J. Fox! But now you over-stuffed yourself, because you went after our daughters. And here’s a lesson for all you bloviating bullies out there, if you go after our daughters, you’ve got some damn angry mother bears standing right behind them.
See not only are moms protective as hell, but we've all been there. We made it to junior high right as Title IX was just getting started and watched it reluctantly be enforced by smug male administrators throughout our high school years. We got called all those names—slut, prostitute, cunt, you name it—just for breaking into the boys' clubs of better paying jobs or more interesting careers. We got patted on our asses, derided, put down, chided, told we were “too pretty to be doing what we were doing” or “too pretty to talk like that or have that opinion.” At my university in 1978, when I tried to change my major to history and political science, the dean in charge of signing off on the change told me “You’ll never get a teaching job because you don’t coach football.” I told him to sign the damn form and I’d worry about getting the job. Later in my career when I fought that type of discrimination, I once confronted an all male hiring board with the question "have you ever had a woman in your department? And don't you think not having a woman in your department could be perpetuating the idea that women aren't historically or politically important?" Yeah, I was a bitch. And I got that job.
We were also there before Roe v. Wade or available birth control. We watched young girls in our small towns “go away for the summer” and come back chastened and quiet. Others bore children early and stayed in those towns without a hell of a lot of options. All the while the chirpy church ladies were reading Marabel Morgan’s Total Woman and wrapping themselves in cellophane for their husbands and Jesus. Piously and primly lip-sticked they’d literally interpret scripture for us on Sundays telling us about the dangers of sin. Yeah, we understand the hypocrisy of the Fundamentalist Right when it comes to women. Been there, seen that.
We’ve listened to our friends who’ve survived rape. Not metaphorical rape, but rape. The real terrible thing. And we watched those friends cope with what that means in a woman’s life. With what that takes from a woman. We’ve watched the amazing strength of those survivors. We don’t like language that demeans women, period. It’s all part of that whole culture, and we by-God know it.
And Rush, we were around when Anita Hill testified before the white male Senate Judiciary Committee after Clarence Thomas had been nominated to the Supreme Court in 1991. We watched and got pissed then when a white boys’ club grilled a professional and intelligent African American woman on deeply personal sexual issues. White male senators “shocked” that something like “sexual harassment” even existed.
So you political parasite feasting on the blood money you make from rancor and hate, you’ve gone after one of our own. For every time a woman is publicly scorned and reduced to a sexualized snark for having an opinion, we all are—and in the words of the Dixie Chicks—
“We’re not ready to make nice
We’re not ready to back down…”
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