When I get together with friends nowadays, we talk about what’s going on. Of course. Oddly, though, when we bring up the November election, we say in quiet voices, “I hope women will be out voting in force,” almost as if we don’t want to say it too loudly.
It’s not a prayer. It’s more “It must be.”
This is the election for women.
I’m not going to itemize the long, long Project 2025 plans for America if Trump wins this election. If you’re not yet up on this ridiculous, adolescent boys’ testosterone-fueled phantasmagoria, you can find tons of digests and discussions on line.
Many of these laughable absurdities seeped out of males who are terrified of women, males who clutch at fundamentalist religions the core purpose of which is to suppress all women’s rights and powers.
I’ve seen several of these guys on TAFKAT videos, giggling over how they’re going to end women’s right to vote.
But it’s more than just my passionate feeling that we women will be out to vote en masse. I’ve seen signs in Ohio, Maryland, Florida, Colorado, Nevada, and South Dakota; and, separately, Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska and Kansas.
What do these states have in common? The citizens in the first group of states have collected enough certified signatures on petitions to put abortion rights on the ballots this November. The second group are states in which enough signatures have been collected and the ballot initiatives await certification.
As for Kansas, its Supreme Court has rejected GOP anti-women laws; abortion rights are enshrined in the Kansas Constitution.
From what I’ve been hearing, I don’t know that men, even the ones supporting women’s rights, fully appreciate what these ballot initiatives mean to us, what exerting this kind of democratic right feels like to a constituency who did not have such rights for much of this country’s history.
The people I read and listen to are certainly agitated to the max about what this election means to our democracy, but the male pundits do not often mention how events of the past eight years have fueled us — us women, I mean. Maybe it’s because we don’t yell about it every day, but I’ve seen comments which, to me, are weird — that maybe people are forgetting about the damage to women caused by the Supreme Court Six, and how we need to be reminded every day that Roe is gone and women are suffering because of it.
If you believe that, you were not on the women’s march on Washington after Trump edged into the White House.
If you believe that, you do not understand women.
We don’t forget and we know where to find our enemies.