Perspectives

What to make of Republican men and the few Schlafly-like Republican women who drink the Kool-Aid and vote with them? Florida's cracker Republican legislators. My goodness, what an assortment of simplistic, moralizing hypocrites. What an intellectual embarrassment. It is as if they are bereft of any knowledge of history, particularly the history of the West.

The most cursory understanding of history will show that for thousands of years, it has been a relentless slog for women to escape the oppressive, brutal yoke of authoritarian male dominance. It is an indisputable historical fact that men considered/consider women inferior. It speaks volumes to the status of women that at the end of the Civil War, the U.S. awarded the right to vote to freed slave men, decades before America's women.

Republican men today are a holdover to an age when women knew their place and did as they were told. Shut up, woman! Be quiet, woman! Sit down, woman! Republican Legislators do not believe that a woman should be allowed (or is capable) to determine her future for herself. They do not believe Florida's women have the intellectual capacity to think and make decisions for themselves (as individuals). Father knows best, don't-cha-see.

Republicans would like a future that has all Florida's daughters registering their uteruses at the onset of menses. The state of Florida (government) would own a woman's body as long as "it" was capable of reproducing. From age 12 or 13 to age 50, Florida's females would be under the control of the state. That's our Republican's brave new world ("1984"?).

Let's not be confused as to the crux of the issue at hand. Reproductive choice (including abortion as an option) is about control of a woman's body. When Republicans put obstacles in place — hurdles to a woman's right to reproductive choice — Republicans are saying to Florida's women, you are not capable of thinking for yourself and we will do it for you. You are female, after all! Therefore we know, as Republican men, what is best for you. Daddy knows. He does.

If pregnant, woman, you will take your fetus to term. All women, regardless of circumstances. That is what Republican men would do to Florida women if they could (federal law prohibits the outright ban of all abortions). But they can't, so they institute cowardly, shameful laws that put up obstacles to a woman's right to decide what is best for herself.

Republican legislators do not respect Florida's women. They consider them as children, that they are incapable of making decisions for themselves without government restrictions, regulations and oversight.

Is it irony or just sheer monumental hypocrisy on the scale of Mt. Everest that has Republicans constantly saying we have too much government in our lives but, for Florida's fertile women, not nearly enough? You sanctimonious Republican hypocrites.

The fundamental core issue is who owns a woman's body? The woman herself or government (men)? It is the ongoing historical struggle women have been waging, have been fighting for thousands upon thousands of years. Freedom.

To the misogynistic Florida Republican state legislators, keep your creepy, cowardly government hands off my daughter's body!