Friday: Bits and Pieces

Is anyone out there a balletophile besides me?  If so, and you have time today, go to youtube and find RoyalOperaHouse channel.  England’s Royal Ballet is streaming the whole day’s worth of classes live.  You can watch dancers in their technique and pas classes.  Too cool.  They’re doing pirouettes and turns right now.

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Dr. Elisabeth Cornwell explains why women need secularism:

The “war on the womb” is not just about the bizarre notion that a blastocyst should be considered a human being, thus banning all forms of viable contraceptives. No. It is much more insidious than that. It is the radical Christian version of the burka–designed to keep women in their place, subservient to men.

If women can’t determine their own reproduction, women will lose in the workplace, in education and in the right to live their lives as they choose. They will lose all they have gained over the past decades in terms of equality and opportunity. This holds true whether a woman is single, married, or divorced. Couples will no longer have the right to plan their own lives–to plan, for example, the number of children they want and when they want them. Some politicians and activists believe it is their ‘God-given-right’ to interfere in the most private of decisions of both women and men. They want to own the family and police the bedroom

I have to say, I am really angry. I am beyond the age of having children, so it has little to do with my personal life-style or life-choices any longer. But I know from experience how important those choices were to me as I entered adulthood and the work force. I made personal decisions, and had the means to follow my dreams and ambitions. Such choices that were never afforded to my mother or grandmother. I want my niece, and others like her, to be able to make her own decisions about her life and her body. I want her to dream and work and struggle for whatever she wants to achieve. I don’t want her dreams to die at the hand of those who would take this broad future away from her.

Please join me in rallying for taking back our rights as individuals from those who seek to impose their religious beliefs on the rest of us. Stop the new radicals from enforcing their fanatical views and ignorance by way of the government. Don’t let them cloak our daughters in invisible burkas.

 Here’s something we should consider.  What if it is just so conveenient to use religion as a way to get women out of the workplace, freeing up salaries and jobs for men.  It’s all being done with a wink and a nod and what the so-called “war on women” is really is the political parties trying to get the white male vote.  That’s why the Republicans are pursuing this strategy so vigorously and why Democrats are defending us so weakly.

Women have very little to gain from the Judeo-Christian culture.  It’s not a religion.  It’s a weapon.  Time to find a new God.  Or no God at all.

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In Philly today.