BY BOB BEARDEN
Equality should be a right for every single member of our society.
OK, Oklahoma just made dead last in another category. We are now the worst state in the union for the quality of life of women. And given the way a lot of Republican state legislators think about women and try to pass laws that hurt women in one way or the other, I guess that shouldn’t be a surprising statistic. Over the past few years, since Republicans have taken charge of the state, they have enacted many onerous laws that have targeted women in one way or the other.
So being below even Louisiana in quality of life for women, while very shameful, isn’t unexpected given the medieval mind bent of a chunk of our state elected officials, including Mary the Failure and her cavemen who are inhabiting many offices in the state Legislature.
After all, we are the – woo hoo! – Family Values state in which one state legislator thought it was the right thing to do to send out a family Christmas card celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace with his wife, two sons and daughter along with himself [King of the house, of course] all holding various types of guns and rifles.
You have to wonder what rock this guy crawled out from under that would lead him to conclude that Jesus Christ was about weapons? How he could find any virtue in celebrating the birth and life of that Jewish Rabbi from Nazareth by expressing his joy over his birth with a card that celebrated everything that Jesus didn’t stand for.
How he can even consider himself to be a Christian is beyond my comprehension. I grew up around guns, which we used less for protection and more for helping supplement our food supply, but my mother would have taken a very dim view if anyone in our family had even suggested we send out a family Christmas card showing our weapons [which consisted of a 12-gauge shotgun, a .22 bolt-action rifle and a bow and arrow].
The guy with the weapons of mass destruction Christmas cards hates Muslims so much that on Muslim Day at the Legislature he required anyone professing to be a Muslim to fill out a questionnaire when coming to his office at the Capitol. One of the questions the men were required to answer was whether or not they beat their wives. One might speculate from the expression on his wife’s face on the card that she was none too happy about having to pose holding a gun for the card.
Which brings us back to the quality of life for women in Oklahoma. People like him, the state senator caught in a motel room with a young boy, and the ignoramus that claimed the rape of a woman to be the will of God make it understandable why Oklahoma sits on the bottom rung of quality of life for women.
Men like those three obviously look upon women as objects and not as equals.
In Oklahoma women must continually fight for equal pay, equal rights and even control of their own bodies. And evangelicals in Oklahoma often contribute to that scenario, enabling such people as the three state legislative clowns to keep women in a second-class status.
They certainly don’t know much about their own religion which, were it not for women being at the forefront of spreading the news about the teachings of Christ, they not might be able today to call themselves Christians.
It was women who after the death of Christ helped keep his ideas and teachings alive. Had it been left to men, Christianity might never have gotten to be one of the world’s three great religions.
We need more women in Oklahoma to take to the streets and help end the discrimination against women. There is no reason for people like a lot of the clowns we have inhabiting our state Legislature to keep women from being equal partners in our state and in our nation.
After all, women make up more than half of the population of this nation. Isn’t it only right that they be equal partners?
– Bob Bearden is a trustee with the Central Oklahoma Labor Federation and a member of Mayflower Congregational Church UCC in Oklahoma City
