Getty Images/ Political commentator Rush Limbaugh, left, and Sandra Fluke, a third-year law student at Georgetown University and former president of the Students for Reproductive Justice group there, are shown in these file photos.
Today is Mother's Day, 2012, the same year as election year, the same year women's concerns over reproductive freedoms, healthcare coverage, economic equity in pay, etc. are under attack. A war on women? An attempt to relocate the notion as a war between women?
Today I read Huffington Post's article by Pauline Arrillaga titled 'War On Women' 2012: Amid Controversy, Women Ponder How They Became Campaign Issue which recaptures a good deal of the imagery and energetic that swirls around what many women and men thought a non-issue, something as a nation we've already determined and a matter for families to decide privately and for women to shoulder responsibly and without invasive coercion from outside by dominator forms of religious and government imposition.
The article recaps "Susan G. Komen ending cancer-screening grants to Planned Parenthood (quickly reversed). And disputes over laws designed to protect women against wage discrimination (Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker last month signed a repeal of his state's equal pay law, while a U.S. Senate candidate in Michigan called a federal equal pay law a 'nuisance')" along with bringing back into the fray the very evident assault on abortion rights. I note the article articulates how, what many thought was an issue already decided, returned with "the historic Republican gains during the tea party-driven 'red tide' of 2010." Although someone else may have already made this connection, this is the first time I've seen in print what I intuitively already understand.
Now it appears the 2010 red tide "teaparty-bringing" activism to culture in socio-political surfaces in a "war on women" has become a "tea garden"―but written, "teegarden" as in Karen Teegarden, the woman who launched UniteWomen.org. Its mission statement: "Help defend women's rights and pursuit of equality." Her activism comes to the fore in the infamous and insensitive Rush Limbaugh/Sandra Fluke slut-calling fiasco. Teegarden's response comes at a critical juncture in a larger call to social activism for men and women.
If you didn't know it, Teegarden's UniteWomen.org used social media and internet to organize protests in cities across the country on April 28th, 2012. My locale, Phoenix, took part where coat hangers were on display featuring a plea: "Keep Abortion Safe & Legal." Photos of coat hangers inudated Govenor Jan Brewers office in protest to the Govenor's signing of a bill, HB 2800, unfunding Planned Parenthood. She did this at a gathering of the Susan B Anthony List, a grassroot activist organization intending the systematic defunding of Planned Parenthood. No "war on women," eh? Or "the only 'war on women' is the one being waged by the left," eh? Saying such things to we, the people is called gaslighting, telling people what they really see isn't really going on. But, who's nuts?
Of central importance is supporting and sustaining Planned Parenthood as an important, primary source of women's healthcare and it must not be covered over, something I think the phrase " 'Sluts' over 'Nuts' " taken as metaphor and turned diaphorically, suggests. My thought is that an amplification of the mythologem which underlies this notion may dwell within its “depth-nature” and “godding power”archetypally. And, I think a turning over of the phrase in another kind of therapy of soul is possible by re-turning the phraseology laying it aside David Miller's "Why Men are Mad: Nothing-Envy and the Fascration Complex," Spring 51, p77 sorting out a few of the 'nuts'.
David's remarkable thought, by extension, suggests we, too, might now apply at this critical juncture, a "therapy of ideas" to what ails our “national” soul. David's ideas say in essence, you have to let “the nothingness of words” get into you. That is, you have to wake up to the way mythos (the storytelling from psyche's point of view) coming from the inner experiences of people,"the nothingnesses," (particularly the nothingnesses of women, in this instance,) operates in the logos (the meanings that mean) suspending what is being conveyed to hear beyond egoic and superegoic points of view. One is to try to hear operating in our assertions in culture and politics what the alterity of being has to say.
In "Three Faces of God",(p.3) theologian, Miller also conveys his sense for the practice of ego theology, something going on right now in the christian, religious, arrogance of a very paternalistic attempt by a social, christian, conservative thrust in politics wishing to seize government control over the female citizen's body processes against their individual alterity in individuating will.
Miller (w)rites in Three Faces of God: Traces of Trinity In Literature and Life (Fortress Press, Philadelphia: 1986, p.3), "Both doctrinal and pietistic theologizing tend to deny or defend against the depths of religious meaning, its fundamental mystery and ambiguity, its terror and grace, its autonomous nature that comes and goes as it will, like the Holy Ghost wandering over the face of the deep." You have to let THIS NOTHINGNESS get into you, the voice of a depth experience operating in what operates openly.
There is a call to awaken the heroic nature within the feminine (life-giving, regenerative) principle in both men and women returning this to its own ground of authority and reshaping its poetic turn, its embodying power in soul and body―"female" as bodies that matter (voices themselves that stand in for their own representational authority as opposed to bodies spoken for against their own alterity of difference.)
Something has risen up and embued national soul in the Limbaugh/Fluke moment shining through in "sluts" who are not "sluts" addressing a body that matters (a Democratic committee) acting out of bodies that matter―both individual and female, (Sandra Fluke) as well as collective and feminine (Students for Reproductive Justice)―bodies charged with the inner life's visionary soul-making in manner much like the christic, feminine "annuciated" body, the mythologem, "Mary".
It is this embodying power which is enlivened with divinity in the vision intuiting "The Annuciation" and/as in both men and women of good will. The and/as space is newly forming and carries the will that expresses alterity of free being like a spirit moving over the face of the deep. (!)
Strikingly, within each new form of livliness grows an alterity of being which authors/fathers its own stories (the personal mythos of a heroine's adventure, Psyche's "soul") in relation to the on-going egoic theology's storytelling by un-doing and re-doing what attempts to picture "femininity" using 2012's campaign politicisms through gender―paternalisms, which are "nuts", meaning both crazy and too masculine in their works thus far nationally, if the Pew Institute's stat on which voter block (white, Protestant, evangelical and Republican) is really behind the return of what most Americans thought already decided when it comes to women's reproductive rights, rights most believe belong to a specific ground where such things are to be worked through, ie within families themselves.
Clearly the practice of religious freedom does not mean unlimited freedom to practice your religion through government seizure of someone else's body processes and colonizing these processes for your own purposes, religious and political will not withstanding, nor targeting a highly reputable and collective body held in high esteem such as is Planned Parenthood. For, as David Miller also wrote in the passage quoted above, "Ego theology is a defense mechanism which banalizes religion." Meaning a socio-political practice meant to merely reinstate an ego theology is what is really nuts. One thing the new refrain is not to sing is "give me that old time religion."
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