Yes, yes we do. Here’s why.
by Stephen Whitworth
Prairie Dog’s Equity Report is an annual feature we run every year around the same time as International Women’s Day, which by the way is on Friday March 8, the day after this issue hits the streets.
Why run it every year, some readers might wonder.
Are you kidding? Have you had a vagina lately? Hopefully not, if you’d think something that dumb!
Let’s just take a peek at some of the highlights in gender equality over the last year. Let’s see…
In the United States, our neighbour to the south and a place that, on balance, we’re not so different from, a good chunk of an apparently electable political party’s election campaign platform was built on promises to pass laws that dictate what women can and can’t do with their bodies. These laws would literally (or at least effectively) ban abortion.
And they were just getting started!
The Republican Party and its Bible-thumping wingnuts also went after insured birth control and breast cancer screenings. And how about those so-called “conscience laws” that allow alleged medical professionals to refuse to prescribe, say, emergency birth control if it goes against their moral beliefs? Sorry American ladies, their right to selectively believe in incoherent religious juju supersedes YOUR right to not have a baby you don’t want or aren’t ready for!
(Hey Terry, I want to take off for the night but the paper’s not done. Can I just leave? Doing my job is against my deeply-held ethical beliefs!)
Dig a little deeper and one sees that the whole small-government agenda kicks the shit out of women: cutting childcare services, closing shelters, gutting welfare and affordable housing, defunding education programs. Oh, and then there’s federal health care, an eeevil socialist scheme if there ever was one. Conservatives are TOTALLY against that.
It’s a hoot that a lot of U.S. Conservatives want to force women to have children but will bend over backwards to make sure there’s no public support of any kind for that. A shitty-ass hoot.
It’s less of a hoot that the seeds of these toxic beliefs are being nourished in Canada by the Conservatives and their allies.
Meanwhile in the rest of the world, we have incarceration for being a rape victim (Somalia) honour acid attacks (Pakistan), disembowelment-enhanced rapes (India) and murder by abortion denial(Ireland).
Really, it’s just a never-ending cavalcade of fun.
So if it’s all right with you, I think we’ll just keep on printing our little equity reports.
By the way, don’t even get me started on gun laws right now.
