Reply #8: Send this to your mom.

[VolcanoJen]

Excerpt below, but the entire diary is very compelling.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/6/1/194832/9161/895/526946

I can't keep quiet now. I've just been watching a white woman in my age group on CNN going radioactive to the cameras about how she's going to vote for McCain if Hillary Rodham Clinton doesn't get the Democratic nomination. She gave as her rationale for this chop-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face tactic that the Democratic party has turned on its women supporters.

To this woman, if you and others like you are reading this: and you'd like the proven record of Republican conservatives for their all-out war on women's rights? We're now paying the price for three decades of conservative domination in America---what it's done to the American character; the fact of American commerce now as morally bankrupt as it is; the abuses of Wall Street; the abuse of the environment; the poisonous cynicism and corruption of this administration---I could go on for pages.

Back to the issue of women's rights. You, woman screaming into the cameras: you are old enough to remember the pre-Roe v. Wade days in America. Remeber coat hangers, Drano, women hurling themselves down steps, women dying and left unable to bear children from illegal botched abortions? Remember birth control outlawed? Remember the early 1970s, when a woman could not get a credit card or bank loan in her own name---when a woman needed an adult male co-signer's permission for them because we were deemed incompetent to manage our own financial affairs? Remember when sexual harassment and open sex discrimination were legal? Remember when we didn't have rape shield laws, when marital rape wasn't illegal? Remember when a woman being used as a punching bag by her husband had no recourse---had no earning power, no options, when the police she turned to often were abusers themselves and sympathized with the husband, when domestic violence shelters weren't even a twinkle in anyone's eye?