I have a daughter. She is 20 and just about to enter the world as an adult. What kind of world will she be engaging in?
America has a president who has bragged about sexual assault.
Republican men are pushing to vote to approve a man to the Supreme Court without investigating the allegations of sexual assault against him.
Republican women constituents are saying things like, “What boy hasn’t done this in high school?”
Why are they so adamantly supporting this man? So they can achieve their decades long push to finally rescind a woman’s right to control her own life.
If there is one mistake we women, democrats, liberals, feminists have made, it is that we mistook winning a battle for winning the war.
Sixty percent of Americans support a woman’s right to choose, so we thought the courts would never overturn it. If Kavanaugh is approved, Roe v Wade will be overturned.
We railed at the states that systematically made it difficult to impossible to retain access to health clinics for health care and abortions, but we never believed it would pass beyond a state’s rights issue. If Kavanaugh is approved, Roe v Wade will be overturned.
We didn’t understand that our fight needed to not only continue despite the gains we made in reproductive rights, it needed to expand.
By the time Phyllis Schlafley stopped passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, women had already begun to reap the benefits of the battles they had won, so work to pass the ERA virtually stopped. Brett Kavanaugh has sided with corporations over regular people on environmental, consumer protection and financial reform issues. If Kavanaugh is approved, many advances we have made—better pay, access to health care, family leave—are at risk of being overturned.
The republicans are hiding the advice Kavanaugh gave to the Bush administration on torture, spying on Americans, court nominees and lobbying. They are likely hiding the fact that the man supported the very policies that stained America’s reputation in the world.
We don’t know what will happen with this nomination. But it isn’t lost on women across the nation that it is a woman who has stepped up to challenge the man who is likely to be the deciding vote on Roe v Wade.
A record number of women are running for office. It isn’t lost on women across the nation that it is other women who are stepping up to challenge the policies that our male politicians have implemented.
Again, it is women who will step up with new ideas to remedy the issues that not only affect them, but all Americans. Because the policies women are striving for—equal pay, justice, better schools, access to reach our potential as individuals—will benefit everyone, even those who are willing to make excuses for men who behave badly.
There are many more battles to come. Unfortunately, we will be fighting some of the same battles we fought decades ago and though we had won.
The only thing you need to do is vote. Vote for democrats. Vote for Democratic women. And encourage your friends and family to vote, too.
You, me, a new batch of Democratic women in office have the power to make the world better for all of our daughters.