From Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/soraya-chemaly/womens-rights-united-states_b_1748526.html
Soraya Chemaly
08/09/2012
Chances are that you did not hear about the 47 UniteWomen rallies in defense of women’s rights, simultaneously held in more than 50 cities, on April 28 this year. What about the upcoming national rally being held by We Are Woman on August 18? Have you donated in support of the rally? Are you going? Hard to do either if you hadn’t heard about it via some kind of kooky xx-psychic osmosis.
Does it sound old-fashioned to you? This marching for women? You know, of course, that the Constitution does not actually ensure equal rights for women? Aren’t we “equal enough” yet? I mean, even if you didn’t know about it, a possible 40,000 marchers must have had some effect on women’s rights in April, right? Are you inclined to think it’s not necessary or that “social issues” don’t really matter?
I think differently (guess THAT’s obvious). I think indifference creates a petri dish for the influence of radicals and causes great harm that we all risk paying a high price for. Indifference is what makes it possible that at least four out of five Republican candidates for president would cheerfully consign us to theocracy.
Indifference assumes that our rights are secure and that others will remember that we have a right to have rights. What seem like radical outliers, people who, for example, seriously think women should not be allowed to vote or to be paid equally for work, reflect a wider, more general backlash that makes it culturally and politically acceptable to say women shouldn’t vote and be paid equally and be taken seriously. Indifference is what enables our rightward drift attempting to legislate our economy and health care into a mythological happy-land of father knows best — for you, your body, your family, your money, your government.
I wouldn’t have heard of either events beforehand if I hadn’t gone out of my way to find the information. Hundreds spoke, as I and a dozen others did at the D.C. rally, and tens of thousands marched to protest anti-gender equality initiatives around the country on the 28th of April. The next few days my local news was dominated by the information that Kim Khardasian, though not an experienced professional journalist herself, was at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. She looked incredibly hot. Despite the fact that these organic, rapidly organized events generated attendance in estimated excess of 45,000 people, there was virtually no media coverage before, during or after. That number is a rough total after aggregating local counts. Let’s say, for the benefit of the doubt, that it’s 20% too high. That’s still more than 35,000 people.
Continue reading at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/soraya-chemaly/womens-rights-united-states_b_1748526.html