In the legal system when there is a lawsuit against a business for
negligence that caused death or disability, it is a standard practice to
put monetary value on the life that was lost or forever changed. The
concept of putting an arbitrary value on life is beyond comprehension,
but it is more prevalent than the average American realizes and is part
and parcel of repugican policies, especially when women’s lives are
involved. American women have made progress since they earned the right
to vote, to serve on juries, and own property, but regardless their
hard-won advancements, they are still little more than second-class
citizens at the mercy of the latest repugican assault on their rights.
This past week the nation barely noticed it was the 50
th anniversary of “Equal Pay Day,” the day John F. Kennedy signed the
Equal Pay Act of 1963, and declared the end of the “
unconscionable practice of paying female employees less wages than male employees for the same job.” Despite the 50 year-old law, the “
unconscionable practice” is still in force and if repugicans have their way it will remain that way in perpetuity.
The idea that women are worth less than men informs that as far as
their relative usefulness to society, The repugicans hold them in the same
regard as breeding livestock or house servants. Women have always been
held in contempt by repugicans, but for the past two years their
attacks were not reserved to assaulting their reproductive rights. Last
June, repugicans in the Senate blocked a Democratic bill calling for
gender equity in pay, and three years earlier they opposed, vehemently,
the Lily Ledbetter Act with all but 8 repugicans in the House voting
against gender equity in pay.
Women still only earn 77-cents on the dollar for doing the same job as a man, and in
many areas
of the country women are earning between 62 and 67 cents on the dollar
for the same job. Not surprising, in congressional districts where women
earn much less than the national average (77-cents), Republican
representatives
voted against
both the Lily Ledbetter Act and opposed the Fair Pay Act of 2012. In
January on the anniversary of President Obama signing the Lily Ledbetter
Act, Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) introduced the Fair Pay Act which would
build on that legislation and help ensure equal pay for equal work by
requiring employers to provide equal pay for jobs that are comparable in
skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions, as well as give
women information to determine when jobs are undervalued. The bill has
gone nowhere like Senator Barbara Mikulski’s Fair Pay Act (
2013) did that was meant to strengthen the
Fair Labor Standards Act protections against pay inequities based on gender.
The repugican opposition to gender equity in pay is not confined to
congressional obstruction to equal pay; the assault on unions in repugican-controlled states primarily targets women in the form of
attacks on teachers’ unions. The repugicans dream of destroying unions in
the states, but they exempt professions like law enforcement and
correction officers’ unions and pensions when they take a greater share
of state funds than teachers, and yet teacher unions and education are
the primary targets. Why? Because in the teaching profession,
87% of teachers are women,
and while male-dominated unions are taking a bigger share of state’s
resources, women are targeted as draining resources repugicans earmark
for corporate tax cuts and reduced tax rates for the rich.
Between 2009 when the recession ended and August of 2012, over
300,000 teachers lost
their jobs to education cuts and hundreds of thousands more took pay
cuts, benefit cuts, pension cuts, and furlough days. That works out to
well-over three-quarters of a million women with University,
graduate-level or higher, degrees being sent into unemployment lines or
to work part-time, minimum-wage jobs at WalMart or McDonalds. In nearly
every state in the Union, correctional officers earn a
higher mean wage
than school teachers with no experience required and a high-school
diploma (or equivalent) the only education necessary, and yet like law
enforcement, correctional officers’ unions are spared repugicans’ wrath
and it is impossible to believe it is anything other than
gender-related.
One of the reasons repugicans oppose the Affordable Care Act was it
eliminated gender healthcare cost inequity, and why repugicans’
first-line spending cuts always target women’s programs whether it is
Planned Parenthood or Women, Infants, and Children (
WIC)
program providing supplemental foods, health care referrals, and
nutrition education for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and
non-breastfeeding women. As reported
here, repugicans launched 694 attacks on women’s reproductive
rights in 3 months, and besides treating them like breeding stock, the
economic damage of forcing women to become birth machines is
immeasurable because not only are they taken out of the labor market,
they are relegated to providing precious resources for unplanned
children for at least 18 years.
The repugicans have been on a crusade to put women in their
biblical-assigned roles as subservient to men with a vengeance since
they took control of the House and several states in 2010, and despite
their electoral beating at the hands of women in 2012, their assaults
are increasing in 2013. The repugican attacks on women are purely
ideological because despite women as an electoral force, the repugican cabal made it
clear their assaults will be unrelenting regardless the consequences in
the last, or the next, election, and what they fail to accomplish
nationally, state repugicans achieve locally. The attacks on women’s
reproductive rights is more about control than abortion and
contraception rights, and it informs the declining value repugicans put
on over half the population. The anniversary of the Equal Pay Day was a
stark reminder that after 50 years, repugicans devalue women and
consider them as worthless today as they did in 1963, and the past four
years’ opposition to paycheck fairness is only matched by their attempt
to control when women give birth revealing that they place the same
value on women as they do breeding stock.
Once
upon a time, and not all that long ago, the medicine you took had more
to do with advertising and wishful thinking than with scientific testing
of its effectiveness. The latest miracle cure would be discovered,
sweep the country, and then die out when it turned out to not work. But
worse, many of the cures could kill you. 
