ThinkAboutWriting

2012: Resolved: Stop the Assault on Women’s Health

2011-12-30T15:04:00.004-05:00

It’s really very simple: Anybody who opposes reproductive health services for women is unfit to hold public office in this country. Period.

These people—they are mostly Republican men, but some Democrats are also in league with them—will not admit they really hate women, but that is the only way I can read their relentless assault on reproductive choice. By their actions, they reveal a deep-seated hatred of and contempt for women.

Why else would men campaign so fiercely against clinics, such as those of Planned Parenthood, that provide a range of health services, including STD testing for men as well as women, breast cancer screening, birth-control information, pregnancy counseling and abortions?

The precedents for these efforts to control and subjugate women date back to the pre-scientific era when superstition reigned and hysterical mobs burned women who provided birth-control information as witches. Yes, there are present-day precedents, too—most notably the Taliban, whose members forbid girls to go to school and publicly stone women accused of adultery.

In the Republicans’ vicious assault on women’s health, which has been going on since Reagan’s administration, Republicans reveal themselves as right-wing zealots attempting to impose certain religious views on everyone—men as well as women.

Catholic bishops, too, are overstepping our Constitutional separation of church and state by, most recently, lobbying for a loophole in health care that would allow doctors or nurses to refuse, for religious reasons, to perform abortions, even to save a woman’s life. Besides violating separation of church and state, this position is extremely dangerous. The same argument could be made to withhold antibiotics or cancer treatment or any other life-saving medical procedure because of religious belief.

There’s a vast difference between belief and science; the former relies on faith, the latter on evidence. There’s also the gross hypocrisy of the position. The bishops’ vow of celibacy hasn’t precluded sexually abusing children and then covering it up. How dare these men, who know nothing of pregnancy, birth and child-rearing, issue dogmatic proclamations about women’s reproductive choices? This form of theological bullying is unacceptable.

During these past two years, the Republican assault on women’s health has accelerated—bills to prevent women from buying their own private health insurance to cover abortion; attempts to defund Planned Parenthood and close clinics that provide a range of reproductive health services to women; bills that would define a fertilized egg as a “person”; bills to spread ignorance and misinform women about abortion; bills to spread anti-woman poison throughout the world by cutting funds to UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, the world’s foremost agency for family planning services.

In Virginia, Republican Governor Bob McDonnell’s New Year’s gift to women was to sign the Board of Health’s so-called “emergency” regulations for abortion clinics. These medically unnecessary regulations require women’s health clinics to meet the same strict building standards as new hospital construction. Although the governor proclaims the regulations will protect women’s health, they will do just the opposite by making reproductive health services inaccessible to women. Ultimately, McDonnell and his Republican colleagues’ intent is to close abortion clinics, making it impossible for Virginia women to obtain medically safe abortions in the state.

Finally, there is the blatant hypocrisy of the right-wing zealots who decry the intrusion of big government everywhere but a woman’s uterus. It’s okay for women’s bodies to become state commodities, controlled like agricultural crops.

We have seen during these past two years, a Republican party that celebrates ignorance, rejects science, embraces superstition, and wages war against half the U.S. population. Their policies would take women back to the Medieval age before birth control—a time when men as well as women were enslaved by the gonads. Before birth control, the only form of family planning was the cruelest form—infanticide. Do those who lobby so aggressively to deprive women—and men, too--of reproductive choice, really want to undo all the advances of medical science?

Birth-control technology truly sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. It gives us the ability to choose how many children we will produce or whether to have any children at all. Contraception frees both sexes from enslavement to their reproductive biology.

“No woman should be a mother against her will,” wrote Margaret Sanger, the pioneering American advocate for woman’s reproductive health services, in 1920. Yet today, on the cusp of 2012, retrogressive politicians and medieval churchmen are trying to turn back the clock and ban birth control.

The meaning of the contraceptive revolution is that births can be limited by rational means, and that sex can be enjoyed without fear of pregnancy. This is not to say that children will be less important, that the miracle of procreation will lose its impact, that marriage and families will be denigrated. Rather, these aspects of life become more precious because they happen by choice and not by chance. With fewer children, women and men have more time to devote to themselves, to each other, to enjoying the wondrous adventure of helping their offspring grow into successful adults. Most of all, real liberation is not just freedom from sexual taboos and discrimination; it is the freedom—for both women and men—to discover and develop all the multifaceted aspects of human nature, not just the reproductive aspect.

Through birth control, women have the option of being freer than females of any other species. And that seems to scare the shit out of the current crop of Republicans and right-wing zealots.

New Kindle Book

2011-11-28T12:16:00.004-05:00

I've taken a flying leap into digital publishing with my first Kindle book, "How To Have Sex If You're Not Human: Intimate Journeys in Natural History." It's a collection of a dozen of my articles about animal and plant -- yes plants do it, too -- reproductive strategies. If you've ever wondered how snails or gorillas or lions or any other creature mates and passes along its genes, you can find out in my new book. Amazon Kindle

The War Against Women Heats Up

2011-02-18T17:42:00.003-05:00

I am beyond fed-up with right-wing men – mostly Republican men – in Congress leading a crusade against women. Make no mistake – there’s a full-scale war going on in Congress. At stake is a woman’s most basic, most intimate level of citizenship – her right to control her reproductive biology. And the war is being waged by the sex that doesn’t have a uterus and doesn’t get pregnant!

Today’s vote in the House to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood sends a loud and clear message to American women and the men who truly care for them: We don’t give a shit about your health. The anti-choice gang have a vicious agenda: They’re trying to force women back to the Dark Ages, when there was no science or birth control. What’s next – a bill to make menstruation a crime?

Not since Suffragettes were jailed in the last century for demanding their right as American citizens to vote, have we seen such a vicious attack on women. In the past few weeks, the anti-choice gang has introduced bills to redefine rape, confer “personhood” on a newly fertilized egg, and prevent insurers from paying for abortions even if a woman pays for the insurance herself.

While millions of Americans desperately need jobs, the best Republican men in Congress can come up with is an anti-woman campaign.

Ironically, these same anti-choice males are the ones who’ve been screaming the loudest about the intrusion of big government into their private lives. But out of the other side of their hypocritical mouths, they’re pushing bills that would give big government the right to intrude on the most intimate aspect of a woman’s life – her control of her reproductive biology. This should be unacceptable to any sane human being. But there’s the rub – these men are not sane. They are mad, living in the alternate universe of a past century and trying to push women back into it, cut off reproductive health care, deny women this most basic level of citizenship.

Is anybody pushing dick laws? Anybody pushing castration laws for rapists? Anybody trying to make men’s bodies property of the state? Anybody trying to cut off funding for men’s reproductive health? Can you imagine the outcry if women legislators were sponsoring such measures?

This campaign is obscenely offensive to all Americans and to our country. What a backward bunch of yokels we have in Congress. They are not worthy of the people who elected them.

Rappers for the Rich

2010-12-03T11:58:00.004-05:00

So the Republican blockade of bills that might actually help the middle class and the poor continues—all held hostage to the party’s demand that tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires be extended. You have to hand it to Republicans, they know how to practice togetherness. Not one independent voice among them. Tweedle-Dee, Tweedle-Dum, and Tweedle-Dee-Dum—the Boehner, McConnell-Cantor corporate rap trio – lead their faithful lackeys in their continuing assault on government for the American people. It’s nothing new. Ever since President Obama took office, Republicans have turned their backs on the people whom they were elected to represent and have instead refused to participate in governing. President Carter called their behavior “irresponsible” in an interview with NPR’s Diane Rehm on Tuesday, November 30th. Along with raw sewage and flesh-eating microbes, Republicans are right up there with the most toxic elements in public life. Never before in my lifetime – and I’m a senior citizen – have I seen an entire political party work single-mindedly to bring down the country in order to bring down the President.

Congressional Republicans have become the most destructive force in American life. Their efforts to create more economic disaster to gain political advantage in the 2012 election displays disrespect for the Presidency and contempt for the American people, for democracy and for our Constitution. As if their actions hadn’t revealed their seditious strategy right out front, corporate rapper McConnell proclaimed the Republicans’ agenda baldly: “The single more important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” he said in an interview with the National Journal’s Major Garrett on October 29, 2010. Note: not a single word about the good of the country or the American people. Now McConnell has sent his ultimatum letter to Senator Harry Reid basically saying, “It’s our way or the highway.” In the ultimate display of arrogance and hypocrisy, the Boehner/McConnell/Cantor trio refused to extend unemployment benefits for the 2 million Americans whose benefits expired midnight December 1st. For the past two years, this gang of naysayers has voiced support for only one thing – tax cuts for the super rich. In case you don’t remember, these are the Bush tax cuts that raided the U.S. Treasury, squandering the budget surplus left by President Clinton and creating the largest redistribution of wealth from the middle class to millionaires in the nation’s history. No matter that extending these tax cuts will add $700 billion to the deficit over the next 10 years. Well, you know, the country can afford a deficit that goes to “feeding” millionaires but not an $18 billion (the cost of extending unemployment benefits to the long-term unemployed) deficit that goes to put food on the tables of people who’ve lost their jobs. Recall Rhett Butler’s line to Scarlet O’Hara in GONE WITH THE WIND: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

It’s all so simple really – not all deficits are equal. Although the “party of No” proclaims cutting the deficit is the single most important thing that Congress must do, this deficit addition that will be created if Congress allows itself to be bullied into extending the millionaire tax cuts doesn’t count. Under a Democratic President, Republicans are for reducing the deficit; under a Republican President, they’re for racking it up. And rack it up, they did, creating the largest deficit in the history of all previous administrations put together. But that was THEN, you know, under the Bush/Cheney team of good ol’ corporate boys.

If the Tea Partiers, or anybody else who voted the new crop of Republicans in office, believes Republican propaganda about working for the American people, they should pay close attention to what Republicans have voted against during these past two years. Then decide what people Republicans are working to help. Here’s just a partial list of what Republicans have blocked, stalled and tried to kill altogether:

- No to regulating the big banks and investment houses, the very institutions whose fraudulent manipulations brought the country to the brink of another Great Depression.
- No to equal pay for women.
- No to requiring oil companies to fully pay for oil spill damage.
- No to increasing bank loans to small businesses.
- No to the health reform bill, which will reduce the deficit by $143 billion over the first 10 years and by $2 trillion in the second 10 years.
- No to expanding health coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans.
- No to eliminating pre-existing conditions as insurers’ pretext for dropping coverage.
- No to closing the Medicare prescription “donut hole.”
- No to giving seniors in the gap a 50-percent discount on brand-name drugs in 2011.
- No to allowing children to remain on their parents’ health insurance policies until age 26.
- No to eliminating co-payments for preventive health under Medicare.
- No to prohibiting health insurers from placing lifetime caps on coverage.
- No to banning annual limits on coverage.
- No to reforming student aid.
- No to expanding eligibility for the State Children’s Health Insurance Fund (SCHIP)
- No to increased infrastructure spending for roads, bridges and power plants
- No to consumer financial protections

No. No. No. That’s all Republicans have contributed to government over the past two years. It’s a tribute to President Obama that despite Republican attempts to bring down the government, more legislation has been passed during these first two years of his administration than under any other modern President. Yes, Republican opposition has caused some of this legislation to be weaker than it could have been, but it’s out there. Despite Republicans’ refusal to act in a bipartisan manner even after President Obama offered numerous – perhaps too many – attempts to reach across the political aisle, landmark legislation, such as the Health Care Reform Bill, was passed.

The message of Republicans’ behavior has been loud and clear. Their constituency is not the people who elected them; it is the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies, the big banks, the investment houses, and the two percent of the wealthiest Americans. Anybody who thinks any differently is in denial. If Republicans have their way and are enabled to carry out their corporate agenda, American’s middle class will sink to the level of the poor in Third-World countries, becoming just a cheap labor pool ripe for exploitation. Maybe China will give them jobs. The Republicans surely aren’t.

The Ferocious Madness of Hate

2010-09-01T20:56:00.003-04:00

When President Obama was elected, I was prouder of my country than I have ever been. I dared to think that Americans had finally grown up and turned a corner on the poisonous hate of racism – and, in truth, half the electorate has. But too many of our citizens made a U-turn back into racist muck.

The hate-mongering began during the presidential campaign. Who can ever forget the McCain/Palin rally where Palin was trying to whip the crowd into a frenzy by demonizing Obama as a terrorist. She succeeded. “Kill him,” a member of the crowd shouted.

Since President Obama took office, racism has continued steaming up like swamp gas from every Republican/Tea Party/right-wing fundamentalist rabble-rousing orifice. So pervasive is the hate-Obama campaign that the entire Republican contingent in Congress turned its back on this nation and set a seditious agenda to bring down Obama’s Presidency by obstructing, blockading, stalling, misrepresenting, lying and saying “No” to whatever this administration wanted to accomplish.

Anyone who has studied history recognizes the bullying scenario: Appeal to the most primitive human fear—fear of the “Other.” Demonize Obama into a fearsome “other”—someone unlike “us.” Enlist a propaganda agency—in this case, the misnamed Fox News—and a few willing hate-mongers who command large audiences to spread the word. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin slide neatly into those slots. Then spread lies about Obama designed to scare people to death. So the lies proliferate about Obama’s birth, his citizenship, his political philosophy, and his religion. In February 2009, Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing tabloid, the New York Post, published a racist cartoon that depicted Obama as a chimpanzee being shot by cops. More recently, Tea Party signs depict him as Hitler and Lenin.

In September 2009, the Rev. Steven L. Anderson of Tempe, Arizona, preached a sermon he titled, “Why I Hate Barack Obama.” During the sermon, Anderson said, “When I go to bed tonight, Steven L. Anderson is going to pray for Barack Obama to die and go to hell,” So much for the reverend’s Christian love and peace.

Also in September 2009, during Obama’s address to Congress about health care, South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson shouted, "You lie!" Afterwards, former President Jimmy Carter said Wilson’s disrespectful outburst was "based on racism" and ran "deeper" than mere policy opposition. "There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president," Carter said.

It’s ugly. More than ugly, there’s madness afoot. As we near the November elections, the exhortations to hate are becoming more frenzied, more dangerous. The most recent ploy is to gain a “twofer”—whip the crowd into anti-Muslim hate and propagandize Obama, a devout Christian, as a Muslim. The trigger for this propaganda is the proposed mosque two blocks from “Ground Zero,” site of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centers in New York City. Protests and heated opposition seared by hate and fear have dominated the airways. Incredibly only a few politicians or either party have stepped forward to defend our country’s separation of church and state. Have they all been bought?

The most eloquent statement came from New York City’s Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Aug. 3, 2010: “Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question – should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here. This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions, or favor one over another. . . . We would betray our values – and play into our enemies' hands – if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists – and we should not stand for that. For that reason, I believe that this is . . . as important a test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime – and it is critically important that we get it right.”

The only other prominent Republican to come forward and defend our precious Bill of Rights was Congressman Ron Paul of Texas: “The fact that so much attention has been given the mosque debate, raises the question of just why and driven by whom? . . . In my opinion it has come from the neo-conservatives who demand continual war in the Middle East and Central Asia and are compelled to constantly justify it.

They never miss a chance to use hatred toward Muslims to rally support for the ill conceived preventative wars.”

Not surprisingly, some Republicans are now trying to paint Congressman Paul as a left-wing ally of Democrats.

Where are other voices speaking out against the madness of hate? Where are Republicans who should know better? Where are Senators Olympia Snowe Susan Collins? Where are the Democrats -- Senators Barbara Boxer, Russ Feingold, John Kerry and Sherrod Brown? Not even Minnesota Senator Al Franken has raised his voice. Why haven’t they rushed to defend the 1st Amendment to our precious Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion, speech, the press, peaceful assembly and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Does anybody believe in democracy anymore? Did anybody, going back to the founders, ever believe in it? Since the Nixon and Reagan administrations, and accelerated by the Bush/Cheney administration, we have seen our Bill of Rights shredded and the “freedoms” our politicians talk about so piously, curtailed. Al Qaeda can see it, too. We are ripe for the picking. Money has replaced democracy.

Meanwhile, the bloviators haven’t hesitated to spew their racist venom. Hate-rouser-in-chief, Rush Limbaugh, referred to President Obama as “Imam Obana,” and added he’s “the best anti-American President the country’s ever had.”

The campaign of lies is taking hold. According to an August 2010 Pew Research poll, nearly one in five Americans (18 percent) say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11 percent in March 2009. Roughly one-third (34 percent) of right-wing Republicans say Obama is a Muslim.

The hate madness is dangerous—not only to the President but to our country. One of the extremist Republican Tea Party politicians, Sharron Angle, senate candidate in Nevada, issued a call to armed rebellion. During a radio interview on June 16, 2010, she said, “ I feel that the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms for our citizenry. This not for someone who's in the military. This not for law enforcement. This is for us. And in fact when you read that Constitution and the founding fathers, they intended this to stop tyranny. This is for us when our government becomes tyrannical... it's to defend ourselves. And you know, I'm hoping that we're not getting to Second Amendment remedies.”

In case anyone has forgotten, our Supreme Court interpreted the second Amendment to mean that individuals have the right to carry guns. We saw footage of men toting guns among groups protesting President Obama’s speeches in Phoenix, Arizona, and New Hampshire. In the state of Virginia, the General Assembly voted to allow concealed weapons permit holders to carry guns in restaurants that serve alcohol as long as the pistol-packing daddies and mamas don’t drink. Good Luck! Frankly, I will avoid Virginia restaurants. I don’t want food seasoned with bullets.

Step-by-deliberate-orchestrated step, the fanatics, the crazies, the hate-baiters are setting up the United States to become a fascist state. So far, the campaign of the corporatists is spreading, persuading tens of thousands of gullible Americans to give up their liberties for “protection” from those “others” who are to blame for our woes. Don’t underestimate the awful power of hate pitting tribe against tribe, religion against religion. When reason is abandoned and hate fueled by fervor, the consequences are genocidal.

History is replete with awful examples: From 1885 to 1908, King Leopold II of Belgium conducted a reign of terror in Congo Free State. Depending on whose estimate you accept, between eight and 10 million Africans were whipped, raped, tortured, shot or worked to death as slaves. Leopold ruled the Congo as his private fiefdom to extract rubber and ivory.

Between 1915 and 1923, the Muslim Ottoman Turk empire systematically slaughtered some 1.5 million Christian Armenians. During World War II, German Christians embracing Hitler’s Nazi racism slaughtered more than 20 million human beings, including 6 million European Jews, some 10 million Slavs, and millions of Poles, Czechs, French, Dutch, Slovenes and others. From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot slaughtered 1.7 million Cambodians. The 1990s saw rampaging Hutu extremists slaughter some 800,000 people in Rwanda. The Hutu blamed the Tutsi minority for the country’s increasing social, economic, and political pressure. Sound familiar?

Then there are the murderous policies that lasted for decades: the USSR’s murder of about 41 million citizens from 1917 to 1987; the Chinese government’s slaughter of about 35 million of its citizens from 1949 to 1987; and what the Religious Tolerance.org website calls the “longest lasting genocidal campaign in human history”—the systematic extermination of Native Americans that began with the arrival of Columbus in San Salvador in 1492 and continued as Europeans invaded North America. In the early 18th century, the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey promoted genocide of local Native Americans by imposing a “scalp bounty” on dead Indians. This bounty continued into the 19th century until ended by the public. George Washington compared Indians to wolves, “beasts of prey,” and called for their total destruction.

History is clear: No religion, no ethnic group, no country is immune from hate. We’re all terrorists. It’s what makes us equal.

Hate spreads like a lethal virus unless citizens and politicians assert their better selves, call on our compassion and use our reason to see through the lies and resist the fear and hate manipulators. We do not have to spend our short lifespan killing each other. Our evolutionary history shows we would not have survived without using our nurturing, cooperative capacities. These are the traits that make us truly human—traits we desperately need to summon and exercise. It’s well to remember that no other animal treats members of its species with such murderous ferocity as humans.

In her brilliant book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy warns: “To all the reasons people might have to worry about the future of our species—including the usual depressing litany of nuclear proliferation, global warming, emerging infectious diseases, or crashing meteorites—add one more having to do with just what sort of species our descendants millennia hence might belong to. If empathy and understanding develop only under particular rearing conditions, and if an ever-increasing proportion of the species fails to encounter those conditions but nevertheless survives to reproduce, it won’t matter how valuable the underpinnings for collaboration were in the past. Compassion and the quest for emotional connection will fade away as surely as sight in cave-dwelling fish.”

If the United States goes down in the current environment of fanaticism, ignorance and madness, it will not be due to Al Qaeda, or illegal immigrants, or any religion, or any outside power; it will be because Americans turned on each other, destroying the great promise and hope of our country with hate.

Epitaph for a Family Tree

2010-08-27T22:16:00.002-04:00

Recently we had to have a great Southern red oak tree in our backyard cut down. It was like losing a member of the family. Thus this epitaph, which was published in our local newspaper, The Smithfield Times.

We are in mourning for a member of the family--a gnarled southern red oak tree that shaded our backyard for more than two centuries. Three generations of my family enjoyed its majestic beauty. Our grandfather tied his mules under that tree when he came to the house for the midday ”dinner” common on farms. My brother, sister and I played beneath its sheltering branches. I collected acorns, placing them on the tiny plates of my tea-set for a pretend meal that would have been a real meal for squirrels.

But we had to take it down. Trees age as people do but in tree time, not human time. Two weeks ago, the tree suffered a fracture as one of its enormous limbs crashed to the ground during the night. After consulting with local tree services, we had to recognize the tree was dying, and we had to put it – and us – out of our misery. The old tree was no longer a protective organism but a danger to life and human limb.

So the tree comes to the end of a life stretching back beyond my family, connecting us to a deeper history with the greater human family and the land. Its acorn may have spouted when Native Americans hunted on this land and paddled their canoes along the “creek,” as we affectionately call the Pagan River that flows along the back of the property. We know Native Americans were here because my nephew has found many projectile points in the fields.

Saying goodbye to this botanical member of our family has been painful and morbidly fascinating. Using ropes, crane and saw with surgical expertise, the highly capable Wade Brothers cut off the tree’s massive limbs one by one until it stood like a giant amputee with bare stubs. Finally, they felled its great trunk with an earthquaking roar as it struck the ground and lay like a wounded prehistoric beast.

It came to my generation to let it go. My brother Vasco Batten will enjoy its warmth as he burns oak logs in his fireplace next winter. We’ll spread oak-chip mulch to nourish our gardens. Now there’s only a gap in the sky where its 100-foot crown once spread its leafy branches. The tree enriched our lives. If not blood kin, it was sap kin. Humans share with trees, and other plants, the same four chemical building blocks that make up our DNA—our legacy of life on Earth. We’ll miss it.

TRUST WOMEN

2010-01-22T12:16:00.003-05:00

Today is the 37th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe v Wade decision, the most important decision for women's rights since the 19th Amendment extended voting rights to women in 1920. Yes, we've come a long way since then, but we can never take reproductive choice for granted. There is still a strong anti-woman faction in the U.S. that is trying to turn back the clock and take away our right to control our own bodies. The anti-choice movement is the American equivalent of the Taliban.

As I wrote in my book, SEXUAL STRATEGIES: HOW FEMALES CHOOSE THEIR MATES, "Although we now live in the 21st century, superstitions, practices, and attitudes from a prescientific era are still with us. Even in technologically sophisticated countries like the United States, women's reproductive autonomy is threatened by fanatical groups that would turn back the clock on contraception, ban abortion and, in effect, make women's bodies property of the state. . . . In line with male subversion strategies in other species, the antiabortion movement is driven largely by fundmentalist religious groups led predominantly by men. . . . In today's world, opposition to reproductive choice is the human equivalent of male insects' copulatory plugs and toxic sperm. . . . Among humans, females' evolutionary right to choose their mates extends to the right to choose whether to give birth."

We have to continue being vigilant and support pro-choice candidates. The current right-wing leaning of the Roberts Supreme Court and the continuing anti-choice assault on reproductive choice is a very real threat to our most intimate right.

In her 1981 book, THE WOMAN THAT NEVER EVOLVED (reprinted in 1999 with a new preface), anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy ended on this note:
"The female with 'equal rights' never evolved; she was invented, and fought for consciously with intelligence, stubbornness, and courage. But the advances made by feminists rest on a precarious framework built upon a unique foundation of historical conditions, values, economic opportunities, heroism on the part of women who fought for suffrage, and perhaps especially technological developments which led to birth control and labor-saving devices and hence minimized physical differences between the sexes. This structure is fragile. Should it collapse, it is far from certain that the scaffolding needed to surmount oppressive natural and cultural barriers could ever be pieced together again.

To assume that women today are regaining a natural preeminence, or reinstating some original social equality, belittles the real accomplishment and underestimates its fragility. However well-intentioned, these myths pose grave dangers to the actual progress of women's rights. They devalue the unique advances made by women in the last few hundred years and tempt us to a false security. Injustices remain; there are abundant new problems; yet, never before -- not in seventy million years -- have females been so nearly free to pursue their own destinies. But it won't be easy."

My 2010 Wish List

2009-12-29T09:41:00.005-05:00

I wish that by some shift in solar winds or magnetic fields, Michigan Congressman Bart Stupak and Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson could have their hormones scrambled and change into women. It’s not that I’m eager to join into sisterhood with these two but it would be instructive for them to feel in their feminized gut what it’s like to have a pair of men using their legislative clout to restrict women’s reproductive health services. It’s difficult to understand what motivates men like Stupak and Nelson. Maybe they’re so angry nature didn’t give them the biological equipment to become pregnant and give birth that they’re out to get revenge by efforts to control women’s bodies. Maybe they just hate women. There’s surely a lot of that sentiment among men throughout the world. The Taliban, radical Islamists, fundamentalist Christians—they’re all the same in their anti-woman attitudes. Whatever their twisted motivation, Stupak and Nelson are among a cadre of fanatical men who lead the anti-choice brigade. If these men are enabled by a spineless Congress to succeed in their ultimate goal of banning abortion under the ruse of “health reform,” American women’s health will be pushed back to the era of coat-hanger abortions. Since I don’t believe in magic, I know there’s not even the freakiest chance that Stupak and Nelson will change into women. So my back-up wish is that they change into frogs. Forever. With no chance of becoming princes!

My second wish is for more members of Congress who will serve the people who elected them rather than the lobbyists that dump bribe money into their campaign coffers. We have some terrific Congresspersons who do stand up for the American people and who passionately care for our Constitution rather than the corporations but we need more. So I wish that in the upcoming 2010 elections, all the corporate fascists and cultural Neanderthals will be kicked out of office and more enlightened candidates elected.

I wish for a Republican party that is a true opposition party rather than a demolition party. Since Barack Obama was elected, Republicans seem to have only one item on their agenda – destroying his Presidency. There was a time when overt efforts to bring down a Presidency would have been considered treason. Today it’s just business as usual for a Republican party dominated by white right-wing fanatics and led by a venomous ex-vice-president and hate-mongering spokespersons like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Democracy needs an intelligent opposition party; right now, we don’t have one. The “party of no” is just that. All negatives, lies and fear manipulation. Nothing positive or coherent or intelligent.

On the cusp of a new decade, I wish for an end to war. I wish leaders of the world’s nations would recognize the terrible waste of war – the killings, raping, ecological destruction – so much needless suffering and misery. With commitment and leadership, economies could be profitably based on efforts that nourish life rather than on technologies that hasten death and philosophies that turn human beings into weapons of mass destruction. The human lifespan is pitifully short but it’s all we have – less than nine decades to discover and fulfill our potential, realize our hopes and dreams, raise families, and leave the planet a better place than the one we inherited. Subjugating that precious lifespan to death and destruction is the most obscene crime against nature imaginable.

Finally I wish for a powerful global movement of citizen activists that will work on all fronts – the arts, science, education, technology, politics, religion – to transform societies from death promoters to life supporters. Each individual in her/his own way CAN help to make a difference. We CAN empower each other.

The Party of Pinocchio

2009-08-04T14:07:00.004-04:00

Remember the wooden puppet Pinocchio? Every time he lied, his nose grew longer. Pinocchio’s lie-driven nose growth is a more appropriate image for the current Republican party than the traditional elephant’s trunk. The party now seems a cartoon of itself, its body politic squeezed to death by its boa-constrictor nose.

Lies and disregard for evidence have marked Republican strategy for decades. It was lies about WMD that led to the Iraq war, lies about torture that condoned those practices of so-called “enhanced interrogation,” lies about Guantanamo, lies about rendition, lies about Bush/Cheney’s surveillance policy. The Bush/Cheney years demonstrated that lies repeated often enough are taken for truth. It’s a script from Karl Rove and Nazi chief Hermann Goering’s playbook.

“Of course the people don’t want war,” Goering said at the Nuremberg Trials, April 1946. “But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.” Sound familiar?

Of course, there’s a major difference between Pinocchio and current Republican leadership. Pinocchio wanted to be a real boy but Republicans don’t seem to want to be a mature party. Reality is inconvenient. They’ve gotten away with lies for so long, why change? Now the Pinocchio Republicans are in high gear spreading lies about Presdent Obama’s birth – he’s not a natural born citizen; and about a public option in health care reform -- it will kill old people, the government will take away your freedom to choose your doctors.

One could laugh. How could anybody believe such nonsensical claims? But the lies are dangerous because if believed, they will damage the nation even more and negatively affect every American for many years to come.

Media, with a few notable exceptions like Bill Moyers, Keith Olberman, and Rachel Maddow, only aid and abet the lies by spinning them as “news.”

During the Congressional recess, we can expect to be bombarded with more lies from Republicans and their pals in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. The party of Pinocchio doesn’t seem to give a damn for evidence or accuracy. They’re out to stall, distract, subvert, and damage Obama’s presidency at any cost and they’re out to prevent any meaningful healthcare reform.

The consistent stream of “no’s” from the party has morphed into its grotesquely deformed proboscis. What’s needed in the 2010 election is a big nose job for the Republican Pinocchios! The millions of supporters who said "No" to Republicans last November have their voting scalpels poised.

The Hypocritic Oath

2009-07-28T17:53:00.003-04:00

Accept the fact – life is a pre-existing condition. Any health insurance that denies this fact is not health insurance; it’s death insurance. Sad to say, that’s what the United States’ so-called health care has become. Except for the rich, of course. The poor don’t count. The middle class don’t count. They’re going to die anyway. May as well be sooner as later.

The opposition to healthcare reform comes mainly from Republicans but also from a small group of “blue dog” Democrats, and it’s gotten ugly. These politicians, elected to serve the American people are, instead, serving health insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists. Once again, the power of money trumps the health of a nation.

Forget single-payer – the plan some 72 percent of polled Americans want. It’s socialism, cry the corporate flunkies. But the two government programs that really help people – Medicare and Social Security – are both socialism. Without those programs, millions of Americans would be suffering more than they are. They’re the only two programs the United States has that return benefit to citizens who have worked and paid taxes all their lives. Why not solve the health crisis by extending Medicare to everyone?

It’s striking that the same crowd of public citizens who oppose single-payer health insurance didn’t mind socializing debt through the bank bailouts. Okay for the government to be the single payer in those transactions. Mercy! What would happen if we really had universal health care in the United States like most other civilized Western countries? If we cherished and nourished that pre-existing condition we call life instead of denying it coverage? The big bad wolf of socialism would eat up some of those inflated profits of health insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Oh mercy, health care just might become affordable for our citizens if we had a single-payer system. People might go for check-ups more often. Maybe our citizens would be healthier and wouldn’t have to wait until they are so ill, they have to use hospital emergency rooms as their family physician. Sickness is costly. Untreated diseases that reach advanced stages when diagnosed require the most expensive treatment. Fostering health is a lot more cost-effective than the current neglect and denial built into our wretched healthcare system. It’s no accident our health care is the most expensive in the world but our outcomes are among the worse. In our current system, only the lives of the rich seem worth saving. Do they think they aren’t going to die?

In their zeal to “kill” healthcare reform, Republicans have declared war against President Obama, predicting a defeat will be the President’s “Waterloo” and will “break” him. Isn’t there something a bit unpatriotic about trying to bring down a President who is heroically working to repair the severe damage inflicted on the United States by the previous Republican administration? The gang that for eight years self-righteously promoted itself as the party of family values and country now turns its back on both and acts as if it wishes nothing other than revenge against the American people for electing President Obama.

As the President said in his press conference about healthcare last week, this isn’t about him. It’s about the health of the American people and the future of our economy. But nobody gets rich looking out for the poor and middle class in this country. Only the corporate rich deserve tax breaks, health care, and bonuses.

The party that racked up the largest deficit in American history – more than that of all previous Presidents combined – now complains about the cost of healthcare reform. Do they really think Americans are too stupid to see through the hypocrisy?

What a sorry bunch of human specimens that would rather, through their cynical inaction and sudden onset of fiscal conservatism, kill a healthcare bill that could prevent so much suffering and save people’s lives. Life is cheap. It’s health industry dollars that line politicians’ pockets.

As for the blue dog Democrats, their opposition to healthcare reform places them in the same alternate universe as the right-wing Republicans who have sold their souls to lobbyists and turned their backs on the only condition that afflicts any of us -- life.

Will Congress Sell Out Americans’ Health Care to Insurance Companies Again?

2009-06-21T15:30:00.006-04:00

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
Benjamin Franklin

The assault on a public option for health care is a mounting obscenity as Republicans, insurance lobbyists, and some Democrats roll out a propaganda campaign designed to scare Americans – and Congress – into turning their backs once again on the American people in favor of corporate greed.

Contrary to industry propaganda, the system we have does not work. High costs are bankrupting families and businesses and our quality of care is abominable. The United States is the richest country in the world but it provides the poorest health care among Western industrialized countries. According to the World Health Organization, The United States ranks 37th – lower than all the Western European countries. We rank lower than Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Israel, and Canada. (France is ranked #1, Italy #2, and Japan #3.) What a miserable shame we can’t – or won’t – do as well

Ranked by “Health System Attainment and Performance,” the U.S. was 72nd, between Argentina and Bhutan!

Nor is the U.S. any better than some Third World countries in average life expectancy. According to the Central Intelligence Agency’s rankings for 2009, the U.S. ranks 50th, (78.11 years), between Wallis and Futuna (You aren’t alone if you never heard of these two tiny islands in the South Pacific.) and Albania. In comparison, Japan’s average life expectancy is 82.12 years, Canada’s 81.23 years, and France’s 80.98 years.

With respect to infant mortality, the U.S. has the worst rate in the Western world, ranking 37th with 6.37 deaths per 1,000 live births, between South Korea and Croatia. In comparison, Sweden’s infant mortality rate is 2.76 deaths per 1,000 live births. Keep in mind that these are average rates. In America’s inner cities, the rates are much worse. In 2007, Washington, D.C., had the highest rate: 12.22 deaths per 1,000 live births. In New York City, the infant mortality rate for black babies was 9.8 deaths for every 1,000 live births compared with 3.9 deaths for every 1,000 live births among white babies. Minnesota had the lowest infant mortality rate in the U.S.: 4.78 per 1,000 live births.

The U.S. maternal mortality rate is scandalous, ranking 41st among 171 countries surveyed by the United Nations. Even South Korea has a lower maternal mortality rate than the U.S. Based on the United Nations’ 2005 estimates, one in 4,800 American women carry a lifetime risk of death from pregnancy, something the anti-choice crowd doesn’t bother to mention. In contrast, among the ten top-ranked industrialized countries, fewer than one woman in 16,400 carry such a risk. The most probable reason is that many European countries and Japan guarantee women high-quality health care and family planning services.

For those who tout the U.S. health system as “the best in the world,” there’s an important qualification – IF YOU’RE RICH. Anyone in the top one percent of wealthiest Americans can buy the best health care in the world no matter where they have to go to get it. But the majority of American citizens have to fight their way through a maze of bureaucratic fine print to obtain health care that, in far too may cases, is no better than that in the Third World. Families have the triple financial whammy of foreclosures, lost jobs, and mounting healthcare costs while insurance executives and pharmaceutical companies rake in huge profits. Paying for health care is the major reason for personal bankruptcies, a situation that analysts say will continue unless Congress passes meaningful health reform.

Our current healthcare system is not only a burden for citizens, it also burdens physicians. By enabling insurance companies to run our healthcare system, Congress usurps physicians’ medical expertise and burdens them with voluminous paperwork and restrictions. The nation’s doctors want to be healers not secretarial assistants to health insurance companies. Doctors – not insurance companies – are the experts in providing medical services, yet in too many cases, insurers dictate medical decisions to doctors and hospitals. Sometimes patients die because an insurer has delayed or denied needed medical care. Yet those who support corporate profits rather than public health don’t seem to give a damn.

President Obama calls for a public option. The message of the last election is that the people support a public option. Now is the best opportunity since Clinton’s failure on health care for Congress to pass a real health reform bill. If our elected officials turn their backs on we-the-people this time, such an opportunity may not come again in our lifetime.

NOTE: Since publishing this post, economist Dean Baker has published an excellent commentary on Truthout. See ""Spreading the Wealth Around to the Insurance Industry and Friends," Truthout, June 22, 2009.

Terrorists In Our Midst

2009-06-04T15:07:00.009-04:00

So a woman-hating, American terrorist has struck again. Murdering Dr. George Tiller, a healer, in his Wichita, Kansas, church. The alleged murderer, Scott Roeder, a so-called “pro-life” advocate, has taken a life. Some anti-choice spokespersons quickly rushed to condemn Dr. Tiller’s murder, express their “shock” and attempt to disassociate themselves from this heinous crime. But they drool hypocrisy. Over the years, the antiabortionists’ inflammatory rhetoric has incited the most extremist, perverse, and maniacal among them to break the law and commit crimes.

Linking abortion to murder, genocide, and the holocaust, the anti-choice movement has done more to incite domestic terrorism against women and the medical profession than any other home-grown group. “Pro-life” has always been a misnomer. These groups are not pro-life of the mother. Many endorse the death penalty. They are pro-defamation of character, pro-misinformation, pro-harassment, pro-extremist, pro-anti-woman, right-wing propaganda. Media that buy into the “pro-life” label should step back and look at the anti-life positions these groups support.

Yes, there are many well-meaning, nonviolent people who oppose abortion. Although I disagree with their position, they have a right to their opinion. But they do not have the right to impose their views on everybody else. They do not have the right to harass women seeking medical services. They do not have the right to bomb clinics and murder doctors. While calling for “peaceful protests,” many of the movement’s leaders speak with forked tongues. Even as Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry issued a statement of shock and grief, he implied that Dr. Tiller’s murder was justified. After all, Terry said, Tiller was a “mass murderer.” It was Operation Rescue that coined the term “Tiller the killer,” which was taken up like a mantra and endlessly repeated as “Tiller the baby killer” by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, cheerleader for violence.

One group, calling themselves the Army of God, are celebrating Scott Roeder as an “American hero” on their toxic website. With a variety of Biblical quotations and a ribbon of animated “hell fire,” this website condones murder and has links to several articles, such as “Why Shoot an Abortionist,” by Paul Hill, who was executed September 3, 2003, for murdering Dr. David Gunn and his bodyguard outside a women’s clinic in Pensacola, Florida. Hill is also portrayed as a hero on the Army of God’s website.

But Dr. Tiller was no killer. For three decades, he was a compassionate physician, a practitioner of family medicine, a protector of women’s legal right to control their reproductive biology.

Terrorist attacks on women and their doctors have been waged for decades in the United States. According to the National Abortion Federation, since 1977 in the United States and Canada, there have been 10 murders, including that of Dr. Tiller, 41 bombings, 173 arsons, 619 bomb threats, and 1264 incidents of vandalism. In addition, there have been 383 death threats and 655 bioterror threats. Dr. Tiller survived an assassination attempt in 1993 and his personal information, including his address and names of family members, was posted on antiabortion websites. Such invasion of privacy, even to the extent of going through people's garbage, is a favorite tactic of some anti-choice groups. In Kansas, at least one clinic employee was harassed by parking a trailer with loudspeakers across from her home. The intent of such tactics is to frighten employees into leaving their jobs.

This terrorism must stop. Congress must take the antiabortion terrorists as seriously as it takes Al Queda for they are no less dangerous. Like other religious extremists, the antiabortion terrorists claim they are carrying out “God’s will,” that they are on “holy” missions. George W. Bush made the same claim in leading this nation into a disastrous and unnecessary war in Iraq. One should always be wary of any movement or politician that justifies violence as the will of any god. The founding fathers, fresh from the terrors of Europe’s theocracies, provided for the separation of church and state in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Of course, the ultimate goal of the anti-choice zealots is to take away a woman’s freedom and her right to control her own body. By murdering, intimidating, and assaulting doctors, these extremists aim to terrorize doctors into closing their clinics, making abortion inaccessible. These modern-day terrorists are in line with centuries-old male-dominated efforts to control women. Incredibly, some women also support these efforts that go against their best interests.

As I have written in the new update to my book,
Sexual Strategies: How Females Choose Their Mates, “Although we now live in the 21st century, superstitions, practices, and attitudes from a prescientific era are still with us. Even in technologically sophisticated countries like the United States, women’s reproductive autonomy is threatened by fanatical groups that would turn back the clock on contraception, ban abortion and, in effect, make women’s bodies property of the state. . . . In line with male subversion strategies in other species, the antiabortion movement is driven largely by fundamentalist religious groups led predominantly by men.”

Unfortunately the terror tactics are working. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights, the number of abortion providers has declined almost 40 percent since the peak of 1982. Eighty-seven percent of U.S. counties have no abortion provider and some women are forced to travel long distances to obtain an abortion. Yet Americans support reproductive choice. A recent Gallup Poll showed that 76 percent of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or certain circumstances.

Right now, we have a minority of hoodlums waging a terror campaign against a vital legal health service for women. It can be stopped if we the people bombard our members of Congress with calls to protect reproductive choice and treat domestic antiabortion terrorists with the same vigilance and vigor that our government exercises against foreign terrorists.

THE GLOBAL WAR AGAINST WOMEN

2009-02-18T18:10:00.042-05:00

It happens every minute of every day. Women and girls somewhere in the world are humiliated, raped, beaten, sold into sex slavery, genitally mutilated, blinded, set on fire, and murdered. They are victims of the most vicious animals on planet Earth – not the four-legged kind but men -- male specimens of our species Homo sapiens. But neither Homo nor sapiens applies to such men. Police know about these crimes. Government officials know about these crimes but the criminals are rarely arrested or prosecuted. All too often, assaults on women are not taken seriously. They are excused as “family matters” or “honor killings”. But what kind of honor resides in killing a woman?

Atrocities committed against women seem to be cropping up more frequently on the news these days. Just today, a Muslim man in Buffalo, New York, confessed to beheading his wife in what is apparently an “honor killing.” She had filed for divorce and had an order of protection that removed him from their home as of February 6, 2009. This past Sunday (February 15, 2009), the CBS television program, 60 MINUTES, aired a report on Pakistan that mentioned the Taliban recently blew up five girls’ schools. On Saturday night, February 14th -- ironically Valentine’s Day -- ABC World News featured a story about young women in Pakistan whose faces are disfigured by acid thrown by men – spurned suitors, husbands, or other disgruntled males. The scarred faces of these once beautiful women are haunting reminders that the most pervasive, destructive, yet undeclared world war is that waged against women. Yet no country raises an army to combat the terrorism that women have endured for centuries. There is no “coalition of the willing” to protect women. The question is, Why not? Why no international force to protect mothers, daughters, wives, sisters, grandmothers, children? Why?

The ugly fact is that no other species treats its females with such cruelty. In her 1981 book, The Woman That Never Evolved, anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy wrote: “ . . . women in so many human societies occupy a position that is far worse than that of females in all but a few species of non-human primates.” What is going on? Why do some human males have such a feeble sense of masculinity that they believe their manhood depends on raping or beating up women? Why do young women in some countries bear the burden of a concept of family honor based on their chastity? It’s a fragile sense of honor that resides in an intact hymen!

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I have to say right now that this is not a tract against men in general. I do not hate men. There are intelligent, tender, compassionate, creative, liberated, wonderful, supportive men who treat each other and women as full human beings. I am married to one such man and my son and son-in-law are among many others. The men who mistreat women also mistreat each other and the planet. The only foreign policy they understand is war. They construct economies based on weapons and violence. They seem beset by a madness that hates all life, including their own. In their suicidal frenzy, they act to destroy life for everyone and everything around them. Even the basic animal survival instinct seems to have left them.

I suspect that the worldwide battle to control women rages as a sub-text of all other wars. This is not the proverbial “battle of the sexes”. It is a savage war, powered by attitudes that females are less than human and deserve mistreatment. A Pakistani woman interviewed on the ABC News report was asked whether women are considered second-class citizens in her country. She replied, “We are not even citizens. We are commodities.”

In some countries, women are treated worse than farm animals. Recently I was reading about The Carter Center's “latrine revolution” in Ethiopia. The goal of this project is to fight trachoma, a crippling disease spread by flies that breed in human waste. But the project has an unexpected benefit for women. Without a latrine, people are forced to use the fields and woods as toilets. However, custom requires that women hold in their natural urge to relieve themselves until night so no one can see them. Latrines give women freedom to carry out basic bodily functions. Not surprisingly, women are now activist leaders of the latrine project and a latrine has become a status symbol in Ethiopia.

In many countries, groups of courageous women are protesting and speaking out, demanding justice, sometimes at great risk to their lives. But this is not just a women’s issue. Violence against women diminishes all of us. Everyone who cares for our common humanity needs to speak out and demand international action because the war against women is the most long-lasting and destructive ever waged in human history.

Rape has long been an instrument of war. A GOOGLE search for “rape + war” turns up 5,160,000 hits. One need only read recent accounts of the tens of thousands of women raped by soldiers in Bosnia, Congo, Darfur, East Timor, Haiti, and Rwanda. In Congo and Darfur, rape by soldiers has increased to the point where it is considered the “norm” and nothing is done to stop it.

Rape, genital mutilation, burning, and murder are the most extreme forms of gender terrorism. But there are other daily humiliations and restrictions that women, particularly those living under religious fundamentalist regimes, endure.

I am reading Iranian author Azar Nafisi's 2003 memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, about the literature group for women that she held in her home so they could take off their veils and freely discuss books forbidden by the Islamic fundamentalist regime. The intellectual deprivation was just one of the government’s attempts to subjugate women. Expelled from her university post in Tehran in 1997 for refusing to wear the veil, Nafisi, who is now a professor at Johns Hopkins University, describes the separate entrance women university students in Tehran were forced to use and the “morality police” patrolling the streets on the lookout for the least exposure of female skin.

Throughout the world, the restrictions and humiliations forced on women take many forms: denial of education, laws against owning property, job discrimination, punishment for listening to music, wearing Western clothes, driving, or going outside the home unless covered from head to foot and accompanied by a male family member.

Nor are such anti-woman actions confined to developing countries or Islamic regimes. Under Communist rule, Romania banned birth control and abortion. The result was unwanted children, many of whom were abandoned or sold by desperate parents overburdened by more children than they could afford. In the United States today, Christian fundamentalist groups are trying to outlaw reproductive choice and make women’s bodies property of the state. They even try to prevent pharmacists from filling doctors’ prescriptions for birth control. It’s as if birth should be punishment for having sex. Notably there are no organized protests against Viagra or other erection-promoting drugs. Male potency drugs are advertised on prime time television but there are no such advertisements for condoms or birth-control pills! “If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament,” said an anonymous taxi driver, quoted years ago by author Gloria Steinem.

It’s easy to forget that it was only in 1920 – less than a century ago – that the U.S. constitution was amended to allow women to vote. It was only on January 27, 2009, that President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act granting equal pay for equal work. Oh yes, we’ve come a long way, but the operative term is “long”. From the time this case was first filed, it took ten years to end this particular form of job discrimination against women.

Yes, Western women are much better off and enjoy many more liberties than our sisters in Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and a score of other countries. But one can never let down her guard. There is still a lot of work to do in extending human rights to women throughout the world. In the United States, maintaining the rights women have achieved continues to require vigilance because there are too many reactionary forces that would return women to the Middle Ages. Thankfully, we now have a President who respects and supports full equality for women.

Educated women and supportive men are the best -- and only -- hope for improving living conditions for all people and prosecuting the mad animals that wage the most brutal gender war in all of nature.

Cleaning House

2008-11-05T12:43:00.003-05:00

This morning I am proud to be an American, proud of my country for the first time in eight long years. Yesterday we rocked! Unprecedented numbers of Americans of all ages and backgrounds went to the polls and rejected the Bush/Cheney/Neocom politics of deception, fear, divisiveness, war-mongering, and greed. We rejected the anti-democratic Bush/Cheney efforts to shred our Constitution and establish a fascist police state. After eight years of trying to scare us to death, Bush was felled by his own petard – a crashing economy driven by unregulated corporate greed. Yesterday, Americans said “Enough!”

In a stunning outpouring of outrage and hope, Americans suffering losses of homes, jobs, retirement funds, and lack of healthcare, gave George Bush, Dick Cheney & Company, the boot. We cleaned house. Thanksgiving has come early.

By this extraordinary election, the majority of American voters also turned a page on the racism that for almost four centuries has brutalized, divided and dishonored our people and made a mockery of the promise of our Constitution. The election of Barack Obama is the closest we have ever come to fulfilling that promise of democracy, equality under the law, and justice for all.

I looked at the throng of people in Chicago’s Grant Park as they waited for President-elect Obama to speak. Young, old, black, white, Asian, Hispanic – faces lit with hope and tears of happiness that this moment -- Obama’s moment, America’s moment -- was actually happening. I could hardly believe it myself.

Obama’s mixed heritage is so profoundly American, reflecting our racial diversity, our demographic reality, our African and European history embodied in this young man who fearlessly seized the moment to undergo the grueling months of campaigning for President. And he has been tested. For almost two years, he steadfastly prevailed against an onslaught of malicious attempts to smear his character and defeat his candidacy. But the smear campaign backfired. In his steadfast refusal to stoop to his opponents’ sleaze level, Obama revealed his true character – calm, steady, focused on the issues – the kind of leader we need for the problems and crises that confront the nation. At last, we have a leader for our time, a man with a vision of our better selves and what we can become. A man who is not tied or beholden to past failed policies and bankrupt ideas. In his endorsement, General Colin Powell called Obama a “transformational figure.” And our country desperately needs transforming.

For eight years we have endured an administration that tried to dumb down America. The Bush/Cheney administration must surely rank as one of the most anti-intellectual -- if not the most anti-intellectual -- government in American history. This was a president who ridiculed science, censored scientific reports, and rejected facts whenever fantasy and lies better fit White House propaganda.

Inauguration day, January 20, 2009, cannot come too soon. It will be wonderful at last to have an intelligent leader in the White House, a leader who understands the complexity of our world, who commands global respect, who opposed the most reckless, unnecessary war in America’s history, who is not afraid to negotiate, who respects women’s right to reproductive choice, who supports science, and has compassion for the poor and empathy for the forgotten middle class.

In his speech to America last night, Obama said his election demonstrates that “government of the people, by the people, for the people has not perished from the Earth.” But we had a close call. It was on its way to extinction under the imperial Bush/Cheney administration. With President Obama, there is hope for protecting our Constitution, ending illegal assaults on our privacy, restoring international respect for our country, stopping the plunder of our national treasury to benefit greed-driven corporations, and investing in America’s greatest treasure – its people. Healing our nation and repairing the damage of the Bush/Cheney years will be difficult but not impossible. President-Elect Obama says, “Yes, we can.” Yesterday, we made a start!

McCain/Palin – King and Queen of Sleaze

2008-10-20T17:07:00.002-04:00

Yesterday General Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama for President and then firmly chastised John McCain’s hate-mongering ads and robocalls as “nonsense” and “over the top” for political campaigning. General Powell is a statesman. John McCain and Sarah Palin are moral meltdowns.

In the past few weeks, the deplorable duo have descended into the political sewer, belching out the same kind of gaseous slurs and lies that George Bush and Karl Rove used to defeat McCain’s Presidential bid in 2000. Remember? The smears reached peak stridency in South Carolina. McCain was accused of being homosexual, fathering a “black” child out of wedlock, and having a “dope-addict” wife. All lies. Now, after his commitment to run a “clean” campaign, McCain is indulging in even more vicious smears against Barack Obama. Fear-mongering robocalls accusing Obama of being a terrorist are clogging people’s phones in Virginia and other states. Racist TV ads that begin with Obama’s face in dark shadow visually suggest that the black man is dangerous. In every way possible, McCain is trying to make people afraid to vote for Obama.

Sarah Palin’s major function in the McCain campaign seems to be as the mindless attack dog and she acts as if she relishes the role. Forget any attempt at eloquence or intelligence. Palin follows a script filled with lies casting Obama as un-American and in league with terrorists. But who cares about lies? Following Karl Rove’s script, George Bush and Dick Cheney have conducted their entire administration based on lies. Who needs facts or evidence? Reality can be a hindrance. McCain and Palin are no different. After all, isn’t the lesson that if you repeat lies often enough, people will believe they’re true? Bush/Cheney started a war based on lies. Surely the same technique can be used to elect a president. It worked in 2004, defeating John Kerry.

Thankfully, increasing numbers of Americans are smarter this time. They see that John McCain and Sarah Palin’s lies are inciting hate and fear. At their rallies, people have shouted “kill him” when Obama’s name was mentioned. John McCain even had to take the microphone from a supporter who said she was afraid of Obama because “he’s a Muslim.” McCain was forced to defend Obama from the hate and fear his own campaign has stirred up. It’s more than a sorry spectacle from two adults in public office who should know better. It’s offensive and dangerous – the kind of inflammatory rhetoric that once incited mobs to lynch black men and burn women as witches.

But if we can believe the polls, the McCain/ Palin lies are backfiring. In trying to paint Barack Obama as someone voters should fear, McCain has painted himself as the scary candidate, too angry, unfocused and impulsive to be President. In ignoring the economic and social issues that are the real threats to people’s lives, McCain is sinking his campaign ship in the slop of his own making.

I have never been a McCain supporter, but even I find it sad to see a man who heroically served the United States demeaning himself for political gain. In stooping to such sleaze, McCain shows his willingness to put his political ambition ahead of the country that he says he loves.

Then there is the matter of McCain’s judgment. In addition to condoning what may be the nastiest presidential campaign in American history, McCain’s selection of the pitifully unqualified Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate, demonstrates extraordinarily poor judgment. I find it hard to believe that a man who truly loves his country could jeopardize it by selecting a running mate as ignorant as Sarah Palin. Should McCain become President and suffer a health crisis – or worse – elevating Palin to the Presidency would be like putting a not-terribly-bright high-school student in the Oval Office!

Finally, in the last debate, McCain betrayed a shocking contempt for women. With huffing and puffing and much head and shoulder jerking, he mocked Obama’s support of a woman’s right to abortion to protect the health of the mother. Using air quotes, McCain dismissed women’s health as the “extreme pro-abortion position.” In that exchange, McCain In effect, was saying that women don’t count. Like George W. Bush and the Republican right-wing, McCain wants to undo all the hard-fought victories women have won for their dignity, their privacy, and their right to control their own bodies. McCain, like Bush, would take women backwards to a time when there was no birth control, no reproductive options. McCain, like Bush, would overturn Roe v. Wade, have government invade the womb, usurp women’s bodies as state property, and deny women’s most intimate and fundamental right to exercise reproductive choice. This position should be unacceptable to every woman and every enlightened man. Returning Americans to the pre-contraceptive tyranny of the gonads is not a tolerable platform of a 21st-century president.

And that’s the biggest problem. McCain hasn’t moved into the 21st-century and he seems incapable of doing so. It’s not just his age; it’s his attitude, one which the younger Palin shares. McCain is hopelessly locked in the past and his presidency would drag us all back with him. Yesterday, General Powell spoke of America’s need for “a generational change.” McCain represents a past generation. Obama has the vision, the world outlook, the understanding of complexity, and what Powell called “the intellectual vigor” to address the wretched problems left by Bush/Cheney. It’s Obama who presents the possibility for change you can believe in.

McCain's VP Choice Insults Women, Endangers Nation

2008-09-04T11:37:00.002-04:00

If there were any doubt about John McCain’s judgment, his choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate bares all. His choice was both impulsive and ill-informed. He didn’t even know her and she was not thoroughly vetted! The choice of Palin insults the intelligence of all Americans, but its cynicism is particularly insulting to women. Does McCain really think that women are such gender knee-jerks that they will embrace the Republican ticket simply because Palin is female? Women I know are outraged. Some men of my acquaintance wonder, “Has McCain lost his mind?” As Clinton supporters have pointed out, they voted for Hillary because she was qualified to be President of the United States. Aerial hunting Alaskan wildlife does not quality Palin to have her finger on nuclear triggers should that case arise. And it may. McCain is 72 years old, the oldest candidate ever to run for a first term as President. In a health crisis or worse, his vice president will become Commander in Chief. She is literally a breath away from the presidency. For all his bombast about the importance of experience, McCain has displayed his hypocrisy and poor judgment by choosing a person who lacks national experience and has no shred of international experience. Palin’s sudden elevation to the presidency could endanger the country even more than a McCain presidency.

Forced to abandon his first choices for vice president (Senator Joe Lieberman and former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge), McCain reacted like an adolescent boy with an “Okay, I’ll-show-you” attitude. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want our country to be run by another adolescent boy or an adolescent girl trying to prove how tough they are. The voters, the country, and the planet would be the losers.

Republicans are making a lot of Palin’s “executive experience.” So far as I’m concerned, running a household is a kind of executive experience but it hardly qualifies a person to be President of the United States. Before becoming governor of Alaska, Palin was mayor of a suburban community of fewer than 6000 people. She has served barely two years as governor of the 47th least populous state. Alaska’s entire population—650,000—is less than one-fourth that of Chicago (2.8 million) where Barack Obama spent years as a community organizer before becoming a member of the Illinois state Senate, where he served for eight years before being elected a U.S. Senator. Palin has served a largely homogenous isolated population in contrast to the diverse communities that Obama has served and knows so well. At best, her experience is too limited to qualify her for CEO of a large company.

Beyond the demographics in Palin’s background, her fierce opposition to reproductive choice – even in cases of rape and incest – threaten women’s health and autonomy. McCain has already said he would work to overturn Roe v Wade, the landmark case that freed women from enslavement to their gonads. A McCain-Palin administration would continue the war against women waged by Bush and Cheney. If Roe v Wade were overturned, women’s bodies would become, in effect, property of the state. The next President will likely fill two vacancies on the Supreme Court. One more right-wing justice in the mold of Scalia, Roberts and Alito would plunge women back to a medieval mentality that would not only outlaw abortion but also force contraception underground. Yes, Palin is a woman but she represents the good old evangelical boys’ club when it comes to their fanatical desire to control women’s bodies. Reproductive choice should be personal not state-controlled. There is no more intimate right than the individual freedom to control one’s own reproductive biology.

By selecting Palin, McCain has just upped the stakes in this critical election. He and Palin represent an unacceptable and intolerable past that is better relegated to history than to a future it is unprepared to meet.

Who Will Own Your Body?

2008-07-30T17:09:00.001-04:00

Is there any woman out there who really wants her body to become property of the state? For women, that is the most critical question of the approaching election. If you want to control your body, the choice is a no-brainer. Voting for a candidate who opposes reproductive choice is a vote to hand over your body to the state as if it were a piece of real estate instead of the unique bundle of pulsating cells, strands of DNA, thoughts, feelings, and desires that make up you.

Think about it. Really think. The antiabortion position deprives women of their most intimate right – control of their own reproductive biology. If men got pregnant, abortion wouldn’t be an issue. How many politicians would be discussing how to deprive men of controlling their reproduction? Can you imagine a Congressional hearing about male sexuality, condoms or Viagra? ”If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament,” said an anonymous New York female taxi driver, quoted years ago by author Gloria Steinem.

Anti-choice rhetoric about “murder” is a smokescreen for a far more devious goal -- control of women – a medieval position in line with that of the Taliban and other fundamentalist groups headed by men.

Not surprisingly, most of the antiabortion groups in the United States are headed by men: James Dobson, Douglas Johnson, Pat Robertson, Randall Terry, Richard Viguerie, and Jack Willke, just to name a few. Like male insects that seal female insects’ sperm storage chambers with a kind of genital glue, men who oppose abortion make up a sperm protection society that seeks to force pregnancy and birth on a woman whether she wants it or not. Some years ago, I wrote about the similarity between male insects and men who oppose abortion in my book, Sexual Strategies: How Females Choose Their Mates. In that book, originally published in 1992 and recently reprinted in a new edition by iUniverse.com, I wrote: “The so-called right-to-life movement may be perceived as a highly organized effort to legislate away women’s right to choose whether to reproduce.”

Although we are living in the 21st century, those who oppose reproductive choice – and yes, birth control, too – are trying to foist medieval notions on women and men. At various times in history, dispensing birth-control information has been considered subversion or an act of the devil. During the later Middle Ages, midwives were often persecuted as witches for assisting women with birth control and abortion. Sadly this persecutorial attitude rears its ugly head in the self-righteous political posturing of politicians like Presidential candidate John McCain and a number of local candidates running for Congressional seats in various states. While trying to woo Christian fundamentalists, these candidates are taking a vicious anti-woman position. McCain, for example, voted against requiring insurance companies to cover prescription birth control. What century is this man living in? True, he’s 71 years old, but there are lots of men his age and older who are in step with our time. McCain’s attitude would have been more appropriate a century ago. Keep in mind that many fundamentalists are trying to equate contraception with abortion. McCain has voted anti-choice 123 out of 128 times. And he voted against allocating money to preventative health services that would have reduced unintended teen pregnancies. McCain supports overturning Roe v Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that liberated women from enslavement to the dark ages of reproductive tyranny. McCain, like George W. Bush, would take women backwards to a world pre-contraception, a world in which men and women had no options for limiting family size. Before contraception, men and most especially women lived at the mercy of their gonads.

Throughout history, various male leaders have enacted laws to dominate and restrict women by controlling reproduction. Whether among mice or men, once a male copulates, he no longer controls his sperm; he cannot force a female to use them to fertilize her eggs. Because of this biological fact, males throughout the animal kingdom, including men, will do virtually anything to control female choice and ensure confidence of paternity. Men in the antiabortion movement seem involved in trying to ensure a kind of group confidence of paternity. Sadly, many women support these efforts that only contribute to diminishing their individual freedom and basic human rights. But in the United States of America in this year 2008, there is no need for any woman to vote away personal autonomy over her body. Women have the voting power to swing this election away from a leader mired in the past toward a leader ready to move forward into a more enlightened future.

Our Endangered Democracy

2008-07-29T14:11:00.004-04:00

The Republicans are at it again -- "purging" new registrations from voter rolls in Colorado, New Mexico, Ohio, and Nevada. Guess who's being purged. You're right if you guessed blacks and Hispanics. "They" shouldn't be participating in our democracy! Just as Alberto Conzales's Justice Department illegally weeded out any applicant that didn't embrace Bush's right-wing Republican posture, so Republicans now want to prevent Democrats--especially minority Democrats--from participating in this year's Presidential election. The rot in Bush's Justice Department is hitting the fan this week with the testimony of flunky Monica Goodling before the House Judiciary Committee. Unless there is massive protest and Congressional action, we'll have a repeat of Florida and the stolen 2000 Presidential election. That can't happen. Anybody who cares about the future of our country must take action to prevent what will amount to the destruction of our election process and the ultimate destruction of democracy in the United States. Fact is, democracy's just too risky. The people might actually kick the lobbyists out of government. The people just might win for a change. Bush/Cheney and an all too compliant Congress have set us on the road of becoming a big banana republic, lawless, fascist, a pathetic vestige of what we could be. Author Jane Mayer has just published a book called The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. In her essay, "The Battle for a Country's Soul," published in the August 14, 2008, issue of The New York Review of Books, she writes: "Seven years after al-Qaeda's attack on America, as the Bush administration slips into history, it is clear that what began on September 11, 2001, as a battle for America's security became, and continues to be, a battle for the country's soul."

But the Bush/Cheney era will not slip into history if John McCain wins the White House. McCain is making himself into a Bush clone. His flip-flopping positions and ignorance of basic geographical and political facts will push us into an ever darker age of deception and fear manipulation, continuing the Bush/Cheney dismemberment of our Constitution and keeping us bound to the only foreign policy he and Bush/Cheney seem capable of -- war. Forever.

Greg Palast, a fine investigative journalist, reports the underhanded attempts by Republicans to subvert our electoral process in an essay titled "Obama Doesn't Sweat, He Should." For more information see www.GregPalast.com.

A Great Review

2008-07-13T12:29:00.003-04:00

Bill Ruehlmann, a fine journalist, has a great article about me and my most recent book (PLEASE DON'T WAKE THE ANIMALS) in today's Virginian-Pilot. Here are some highlights: "It's full of surprises. . . . Batten captures her audience with documentary material that surpasses by far the unpredictability of fantasy. . . . This scientific wordsmith makes kids of us all. She resurrects our sense of wonder. . . . That's art."

Read Bill's full review.

In Mourning for the Fourth Amendment

2008-07-10T21:41:00.002-04:00

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation and, particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution
1791 - 2008

Today I am in mourning for the Fourth Amendment. Yesterday -- mark the date – July 9, 2008, the United States Senate, by a vote of 69-28, killed the Fourth Amendment. It had been part of the Constitution since 1791. It embodied one of our most precious civil rights – protection “against unreasonable searches and seizures.” But hey, it’s only the Constitution. Remember that precious document? If you’ve never read it, do so. Now. So you’ll know what a great foundation our nation once had. Not that we ever fulfilled its promise. But it was there. Unique in the history of governments. No more. Again, a spineless Congress played enabler to George Bush and Dick Cheney’s power addiction. By approving the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Amendments Act, the Senate has once again supported the President’s assault on the Constitution and the civil rights of the American people.

Despite vigorous attempts by Senators Christopher Dodd, Russ Feingold, and others, the 69 enabling Senators caved in to Bush’s ongoing fear manipulation, which he and Cheney have used successfully since 9/11 to terrorize politicians into supporting their lawless policies. Yet, there is no greater terror in a democracy than eviscerating the very rights that have defined us and protected us as a freedom-loving people governed by the rule of law. With every assault on our laws and liberties, Bush/Cheney and their enablers make us less secure and less free because they are destroying our nation’s soul.

By approving the FISA Amendments Act, the Congressional enablers have granted immunity to both the President and his accomplice telecommunication companies. They have condoned brazen lawlessness.

By ordering illegal wiretapping of Americans, “the President committed a felony, not just once but at least thirty times,” said Jonathan Turley, Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University. Interviewed on Keith Olberman’s show, COUNTDOWN, last night, July 9, 2008, Professor Turley said, “That’s a very inconvenient fact right now in Washington.”

But who pays attention to facts in the Bush/Cheney administration? These two and their Congressional camp followers have never felt bound by facts or science or evidence. Why should they be stopped by mere facts? This is an administration that runs on fear, propaganda, lies, and fantasies. An inconvenient truth? Just censor it, ban it, distort it, ignore it.

“This is a sad moment, a black mark on the Congress. This is one of the greatest assaults on the Constitution in the history of our country,” Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin told interviewer Rachel Maddow on COUNTDOWN July 9, 2008.

The FISA Amendments Act gives the telecom industries uncontrolled license to eavesdrop, without obtaining warrants on even the most casual e-mail and phone calls of Americans.

Yesterday’s action by the Senate furthers the executive power grab by Bush/Cheney. Throughout this administration, the agenda has been to remove the checks and balances so carefully crafted in the Constitution. Continually enabled by a spineless Congress – Democrats and Republicans alike – Bush and Cheney have systematically placed the executive branch beyond the law and established themselves as a lawless administration.

This Is the First Day of My Blog

2008-07-06T12:34:00.001-04:00

Welcome to my blog. I'm new to blogging, so this will be an ongoing experiment in freespeak and freewrite. I'll talk about my books, comment on writing, and express my concerns about anything and everything. Words are precious to me. Putting thoughts into words is my passion and my profession.

Be forewarned. A lot of my comments will be political. I believe that the 2008 Presidential election is the most important, the most critical in our history. The Bush/Cheney administration has severely damaged our beloved country. The choice we make in the coming election will determine whether the damage continues or whether repair and reclaiming our democratic ideals can begin. During the past eight years, Bush/Cheney abandoned our precious Constitution, shredded our Bill of Rights, turned away from international law, and began a path toward a fascist police state. They launched a war based on lies, they ignored laws they didn't like, they raided the U.S. Treasury on behalf of their greed-driven corporate supporters, they illegally spied on Americans, they condoned torture, they governed by fear manipulation, and they turned their backs on hard-working, middle-class Americans and the poor. They should be tried for war crimes. At the very least, they should be impeached.

Following is the essay I wrote recently for my website: www.marybatten.com

Making A Killing

It’s all about money. Forget about the freedom-and-democracy rhetoric. That’s for chumps. War is the biggest money-maker on the planet. With every bomb dropped, every rocket launched, every gun shot, the weapons manufacturers ring up profits. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Only the dead have nothing to gain.

So it has come to this. After some three million years of primate evolution, humans are still turning on each other with a ferocity seen only among chimpanzees. Homo sapiens, the species with the most complex brain, seems beset with madness. Visitors from another planet would be justified in thinking they had discovered a vast insane asylum.

Sadly, the fact is that the most deadly violence is committed by men. Numerous studies show that men are more likely to kill other people than are women, and they are most likely to do so in organized groups. The question has been raised whether humans have a violent brain. The answer is No, according to many anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists. Indeed, studies show that humans can live in cooperative groups much better than they can live in violent groups. Criminologist Manuel Eisner of Cambridge University says his study of history indicates that homicides have actually been declining since the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. During that time, says Eisner, there were an average of 32 murders per 100,000 people per year. The homicide rate declined every century thereafter, finally reaching 1.4 per 100,000 people in the twentieth century (Eisner 2001). Deaths from warfare have also declined. “If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million,” says Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker (Pinker 2007, Jones 2008). However, before humans congratulate themselves on a decline in violence, it’s necessary to take into account weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear weapons can instantly vaporize entire regions and the millions that inhabit them. Nuclear wastes tick out their half-lives over thousands of years, bestowing a toxic legacy on soil and water for future generations. It is not enough that violence has declined. In today’s world, warfare should be obsolete.

The political leaders who still pursue warfare as foreign policy, seem specimens of arrested development, their intelligence lagging so far behind the times that they might as well be ice men, thawed from a glacial past to confront a world for which they are unprepared. In their mindsets and actions, they are maladapted to the high-tech age. Seemingly bereft of reason and negotiating skills, they pursue inappropriate policies, making war instead of peace. It’s as if their brain cells never developed beyond the Stone Age, the early stage of human evolution that spans several hundred thousand years.

During the Upper Stone Age, some 40,000 years ago, anatomically modern people known as Cro-Magnons appeared. At that time, the total human population of the planet was probably less than one million. (Today it’s 6.5 billion.) Throughout the Stone Age, which comprises most of human evolutionary history, people lived in small groups of hunters and gatherers. They faced their enemies with clubs or spears. Battle was up close and personal. The reach of a weapon was arm’s length or the distance a rock could be thrown or a spear hurled. Then men fought to protect their women and children or their territories from bands of hostile males. Today, there are still bands of hostile males -- armies of them -- fighting each other, all out to kill, maim, and pillage, as if life were not short enough. Even warfare is not enough to satisfy their thirst for blood. Using their bodies as weapons, men rape and terrorize girls and women, treating females as reusable spoils of war. More recently, some young men turn their bodies into incendiary devices, killing themselves and anybody else in their suicidal path.

Modern warfare broadcasts its madness – grown men acting like bad little boys throwing tantrums with the most lethal weapons ever invented. Men getting their rocks off with each target incinerated, each bagged and tagged body, each woman raped, each child eviscerated.
Total madness! All waged by big men who have never grown up.

Bad boys, drunk on power, seem to be in charge of many countries, large and small. Even in the most sophisticated country on the planet – the United States – a bare majority of voters elected a bad little rich boy to the Presidency. Some folks said he was the kind of guy they’d like to have a beer with. Better they had left him in the bar. The arrogant folly of George W. Bush’s reign – yes, it has been an imperial Presidency – is the greatest disaster in U.S. history. His soon-to-be legacy is a list of horrors: a pre-emptive war in Iraq based on lies, suspension of habeas corpus, condoning torture, illegal spying on American citizens, a wrecked economy, tax policies that benefit the one percent of wealthiest Americans, and “signings” that place him beyond any law he doesn’t like.

For Bush and his compliant cadre of Republican faithful, war is money in their pockets. No matter that war kills other people’s children; no matter that war mongering in our high-tech age is suicidal, genocidal, and ecocidal. In the ultimate gesture of denial, this President doesn’t attend soldiers’ funerals. And, hey, so much destruction can be launched by remote control, just like a video game!

Afghanistan, Iraq, Chad, Congo, Darfur, Israel, Kenya, Lebanon, Pakistan, Sudan – all places of turmoil where innocents struggle against the violence imposed by bully leaders flaunting their pitiful machismo like the sandbox boys fighting with toy weapons. But these weapons are not toys.

In contrast are the artists, scientists, doctors, and inventors who compose symphonies, write novels, rocket astronauts into space, send instruments to explore the far corners of the universe, map the human genome, and analyze the DNA of cancer cells. One segment of humanity working to improve life and bring beauty to the world; the other vested in violence and death.

Given the vast destructive power of nuclear weapons, there can be no winners in modern warfare. So why do so many men glory in death and destruction?

I believe we can find some answers in evolutionary biology. Male-male combat occurs among many species of animals as part of the male reproductive strategy. Males fight to establish status and dominance. Males fight to obtain resources to impress potential mates. The genetic stakes are high. If a female doesn’t choose a male as her mate, he is a genetic zero. He will produce no offspring. Countries that foster war and base their entire economies on weapons manufacture have, in effect, nationalized male-male competition for resources but these resources are no longer connected with reproduction. Warfare could thus be viewed as male mating strategy run amok. Controlling the resource – in the case of Iraq, oil – is the goal. However, it is interesting that the young men who detonate themselves seem seduced by a fantasy of postmortem mating with virgins in Paradise.

In this election year, Americans face a clear choice between the warmongers and the peacemakers. Indeed, the Republican candidate, John McCain, has said staying in Iraq for one hundred years would “be fine” with him. Only those who lack vision, reason, and common sense would condemn this nation – and the planet – to eternal war. So much more is humanly possible.

References

Eisner, M. 2001. British Journal of Criminology .41:618-638.

Jones, Dan. 2008. Killer Instincts. Nature . 451:512-515.

Pinker, S. 2007. The New Republic . 236:18-21.