I am not sure I'm right by urging my friends to vote for President Obama as I plan to do. But I found this article interesting. Whenn I went to the link suggested I found that each statement was backed up by its own link. There was a link to the Senator from MD., who is said below to have voted with Paul Ryan, Republican vice-presidential candidate against all access to abortion. There are links to the other statements below about other Republican Congresspeople and about the Republican Party Platform.
If this Is the Republican Party official stance, then as a person who survived childhood sexual abuse I Have to vote against the candidates of that party who agree with this part of the platform!
I am not a one issue voter, not even in this case. Despite talk radio's noises to the contrary, I think for the most part President Obama will act as a centerist. We don't Get liberal talk radio in this part of the country, not through a Radio anyway. So I'm not familiar with it.
Frankly, we have a Democrat former President to thank for NAFTA and the subsequent moving of factories South, across the Mexican border. Those jobs are gone. So we must push President Obama, if he wins the elecction, to put Money where his mouth was during this campaign. We must put More money into clean energy research and development! We Have to train workers with New skills.
To me, this election looks like a choice between a mostly centerist Democrat and a Republican Party which would drag us back to "the good old days" in which women died From ilegal abortions and their families were shamed and shunned if the word got out. The "good old days" were when no civil rights Movement had become public and Native Americans were dumped at the edges of city ghettos with a lot of government promises of jobs which never came true. The rest, who stayed on reservation homelands were living in fear of "Termination", a government policy which took away all healthcare, other services, and subjected these rural ghettos to taxation by state, local, and Federal Government athorities. Some of the tribes "terminated" never came back as tribes, but were scattered to the winds. Guess who got the land?
In the "good old days" of the 1950's there was no Farm Workers Union and children brought here ilegally Always lived in hiding. Farm workers and sharecropers were treated like near slaves.
In the Ozarks in the "good old days" I was washing my father's greasy work pants, (as a very young child) on a scrub board in wash tubs and hanging clothes out to freeze dry in the painful wind. My sister was too. We had no indoor plumbing, or no hot water which wasn't boiled first. My dad was a self-respecting mechanic who wanted to look good each morning when he went to work. He needed those clean clothes.
Children were the property of their parents, to be dealt with or disposed of as their parents saw fit. Women were forced to shut up about having been raped. After all, if they didn't Somehow "ask for it" it wouldn't have happened. I'm not saying all people believed this, but it was the prevailing attitude across the country, not just here. It was also true in St. Louis and Kansas City.
If a woman became pregnant, she had her baby and gave it up and was shunned unless she could afford to move. Or she raised it, sometimes with resentment and hate.
It is true that some wonderful people are born of rape. But so are some killers.
Do we Really Want to take a step backward into all of those attitudes? I don't. And there is a harshness among many Republicans which I don't like. Atheists aren't welcome. Those who believe that Israel Must stop building settlements on Palestinian lannd are Certainly not welcome. Non-Christians in general aren't welcome. I don't want to go back to Those attitudes either.
Enough of a rant, although I am thinking and remembering, not trying to rant. When people are afraid they tend to want to go back to what they remember as a "safer time". This is normal. But for so Many Americans and for those who Wanted to be included in helping to build the American dream it was NOT sa
fe! Blind people were begging on the streets, if they weren't piano tuners or basket weavers or chair caners. We were subject to welfare worker raids in the cities to make sure we weren't "breeding" more blind people.
Normal fears of the changes around us and a desire to go back to what many remember as a happier time is understandable. But change is inevitable, everything is impermanent. And when we talk about the past in terms of prevailing social attitudes of the past, impermanence is a Good thing, I think.
I think the best slogan at the part of the Democratic convention which I watched was about "move forward, not back."
The Republican Party's actual campaign platform states that there can
be absolutely no abortion exception even in the case of rape. So why
is their nominated presidential candidate lying and pretending he
somehow has some other position?
Tell them Rape Is NO Choice:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1101.php
If the rights of personhood mean anything, surely they must include
the right of a woman not to be forcibly impregnated by a violent
criminal. But even that choice would be denied by Republicans from
top to bottom if they were to ever speak the truth. And when one
does, like Todd Akin, they act like they misspoke or it was some
aberration, but their voting records all show the same heartless
thing.
The Republicans' vice presidential candidate has voted lock step with
Akin on this multiple times. Rick Berg the Republican senate
candidate from ND voted to make abortion a homicide crime, even in
the case of rape. Then there is rape defender Mike Huckabee, who
argues that many wonderful people have been born through rape. And
did you know that the original "scientific" citation for Akin's
assertion that "legitimate" rapes don't lead to pregnancy was a Nazi
death camp "doctor"?
Please submit the action page above now to send an instant fax to
Congress, and to the Republican National Committee in particular,
with the message, "Rape Is No Choice."
Tell them Rape Is NO Choice:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1101.php
And after you submit the action page above, we would love to send you
one of the new "Rape Is No Choice" bumper stickers we just created.
There is no charge for this, not even shipping, but of course if you
can make a donation of any amount, this is what makes if possible for
us to send free bumper stickers to anyone who cannot afford to make a
donation right now.
Rape Is No Choice Bumper Stickers:
http://www.peaceteam.net/all_bumper_stickers.php
Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.
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