Don’t ignore ‘War on Women’
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Editor,
With all due respect to my neighbor, Carol Cummings, I am writing to disagree with her premise that the “War on Women” is not real (letters, April 11). Historically, there has always been a war on women. Women had to fight to earn the right to vote in the early 20th Century. They had to fight to get girls’ athletics funded in the 1970s. Today, women are fighting to get equal pay for equal work, as they still earn only 79 percent of what their male counterparts earn, according to the 2010 U.S. census data. And women are fighting to have contraceptives available through insurance, even though religion has the right through the First Amendment to deny them access. Another fight on our hands is the rampant spread through the media and other avenues of the cultural norms of the “objectification and hyper-sexualization” of women, so eloquently stated by Ashley Judd recently. There’s no “war on women?” Think again.
The Republican lineup of presidential candidates gave us a group of men with value systems, in varying degrees, that would take us back to the 1950s. The ever-charming Rush Limbaugh spewed out his misogynistic vitriol against a young, articulate law student just for voicing her opinion. One more example: Republicans fought against renewing the Violence Against Women Act, an 18-year-old federal law created to prevent domestic violence against women. This law originally passed with bipartisan support. I personally lobbied for reauthorization of this act last spring in Washington, D.C. Our group received positive responses from the offices of Sens. Baucus and Tester, and a negative response from the office of Rep. Rehberg.
Lastly, I’m sure you are correct in that there are many wonderful women in the Republican Party, just as there are many wonderful women in the Democratic Party. Rather than using divisive words that only polarize people more, I suggest that we need to come together as a gender, regardless of our party affiliation.
I also encourage anyone who votes to consider which person (not party) most closely reflects your own values and beliefs. We never lost our freedom in this country. Ask anyone from a third-world country.
P.S. My husband approves of this letter, and he is a Republican.
Nancy Teggeman
Polson
