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Perspective: My daughter's rights

Unsplash

Independence Day 2022. The year we celebrated the reduction of women’s rights in our great country. Where I looked at my daughter knowing she now has fewer freedoms than her mother and grandmother. Give me liberty or. . . don’t.

The overturning of Roe v Wade is the most significant Supreme Court ruling in a generation, creating two Americas -- one where women control their bodies and one where they don’t.

How did we get here? Religion. Evangelical fundamentalists have been waging war on women for decades and this was their most significant victory. However, this is not about “saving babies.” This is about exerting control over women and driving our nation ever closer to a theocracy, all in the name of the “good book.”

The Justices voting to overturn Roe cloaked their personal feelings about women’s rights and women’s health care behind a veil of jurisprudence. Justice Amy Coney Barrett is a member of a fundamentalist group where women are considered subservient to men. Did she apply Constitutional law and an understanding of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to her vote? No. She applied her religious beliefs, which see women as nothing more than a vessel with which to incubate and birth a baby.

The hypocrisy of the religious right is staggering: Limited government, little business regulation, minimal protection of the environment, and absolute access to as many firearms as possible, no matter the resulting carnage. Yet, in that same breath, conservatives will argue that government ABSOLUTELY SHOULD control what a woman does with her body.

Dark as the times may be, all is not completely lost. When we head to the polls this November, we must vote at the state AND federal level as though women’s lives depend on it, because they do.

I’m Wester Wuori. And that’s my justifiably angry Perspective.