Every year, as we put out an annual Women’s Issue, we turn our attention toward perennial questions like, what is feminism today? Does it have a place anymore? Have women achieved the equality and parity in this 21st Century that was so sought after throughout the 20th?
To be sure, some of the past issues have been resolved. In 1919, the 19th Amendment guaranteed the right to vote for women. In 1974, women were allowed to have a credit card in their own names. Women today are present in nearly every profession imaginable, including having the right to serve in combat.
Those were milestones, hard fought, that we can celebrate today – but today is also, for those paying attention – not a time to sit back and rest on our laurels as if all is well.
This past year, for the first time in many women’s lives, the right to an abortion is not guaranteed for women in the United States. States, like Oregon, that have moved individually to protect women’s right to choose are fast becoming havens for those who live in states, like our neighboring Idaho, where those rights are not enshrined.
And that’s just the start of the concerns for women, and for those whom gender or sexual identity makes them vulnerable to the whims of the culture wars. Today, the culture wars are being fought most vehemently around questions of gender. Drag performers are being targeted, even in our own state, for the false notion that they’re “grooming” kids. Numerous states are working through legislation that places limits on the types of care physicians and other providers can offer to patients – including children experiencing gender dysphoria.
Looking at neighboring Idaho is an exercise in contrast. In that same state, in recent pandemic years, leaders and regular citizens proclaimed the supreme power of parents to make their own decisions regarding their children’s health. That was done in the context of vaccinations – but now, as it pertains to parents seeing their children get help for gender dysphoria, it seems that proclamation is moot. The Idaho House just passed a bill that criminalizes gender-affirming care for minors. The bill is likely unconstitutional, and has yet to pass the Idaho Senate – but if it does, it’s one more battle won for those who see gender as the new culture war. This is of course all quite ironic, because amid these battles that win political points for certain politicians are the very real concerns that affect child-bearing people and their kids. Child care across the United States is still in short supply. Schools desperately need updates and more funding to provide an adequate education for our nation’s kids. And the U.S. maternal mortality rate continues to get worse every year, and disproportionally affects low-income and BIPOC women. If certain politicians were seriously concerned about the welfare of children – and by proxy, their parents – they’d put their money where their mouths are.
A focus on the headline-making culture wars, as we know, is really just a diversion from tackling these very real problems that affect so many in our region, state and nation.
This article appears in Mar 1, 2023 – Mar 13, 2024.
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Very true, culture war issues are nothing but a distraction from real issues like clean water, air, infrastructure, education, healthcare, daycare, tax reform, and ending the corporatocracy Citizens United and PAC’s have created.
This generation started the gender culture garbage, which is setting this country up for a really big downfall, today everything is about your sexual preference or your skin color, the biggest threat against women are men becoming women and competing against them. The LGTBQ is the true threat to women. And another big distraction we have going is that smoke screen of the fraud climate change, that is not about climate, and the temperature has changed 1 in the last 125 years, its all about government control what PS theres two genders, man and woman, better get used to it
“Woman is the _ of the world” -Yoko & John, 1972
In 2015 Jimmy Carter did a Ted Talk titled ‘Why I believe the mistreatment of women is the number one human rights abuse’