The right wing and so called "Christian" organizations have been waging as concerted a war against feminism and women just like the racist slave owners waged against abolition. Hell, Southern racists committed the ultimate act of treason by seceding from the United States and then waging war against it, one of the bloodiest wars in America's entire history.
Now they have tried to repackage the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression in which the noble south defended its way of life from the brutality of the industrial north. After all the African-Americans benefited from the care and tutelage of the benevolent plantation owners who made great sacrifices to care for those poor ignorant children.
Don't believe me... Go study your conservative histories written by the neo-klan apologists like David Barton.
Suddenly, in a historical rewrite straight out of "1984" all our Deist Founding Fathers are Fundamentalist Christians. Forgotten is how the concerns of the Baptists were one of reasons why we have freedom of religion and as separation between church and state, lest we repeat the religious wars of Europe.
One of the vilest trends I seen develop over the past thirty or so years has been the rise of the anti-abortion "Emergency Pregnancy Counseling Centers" disguising themselves as offering full spectrum reproductive choices, while really offering anti-abortion propaganda.
It is an understatement to say these organizations are guilty of false advertising as the "counseling" they foist on women in crisis can have life destroying results.
One of the right wing/Christo-Nazis most recent outrages has been the stealing and repurposing of one of America's greatest and best known Feminists, Susan B. Anthony.
Since the rise of the ultra right wing during the Reagan Regime the neo-con/Dominionist war on women has taken ever more onerous and Machiavellian twists and turns. You have anti-woman/misogynist ultra right wing/theocratic groups disguising themselves as being feminist/pro-women organizations.
Organizations such as the Eagle Forum/John Birch Society spin off: Concerned Women of America and the Independent Women's Forum
Starting in the 1990s a religious right anti-abortion group purloined and repurposed the name of one of our greatest Feminist heroines, Susan B. Anthony and set up an organization to target and defeat pro-choice candidates.
As the actual misogynistic goals of the anti-sex, anti-reproductive rights movement have come to reveal their aim is not to simply end abortion but to end contraception as well.
From Wikipedia:
The Susan B. Anthony List, a pro-life organization, is named in her honor. Anthony's position on abortion (or lack thereof) has been the subject of a long-running dispute.
(AmericansuffragistSusan B. Anthony's position on abortion has been the subject of a modern-day dispute, centered not around Anthony's personal position on abortion, but rather around whether she worked or spoke against it and how she would fit into the modern debate over the issue. Scholars, pro-choice activists and journalists have said that the recent pro-life narrative is a case of invented historical revisionism.[2][3])
Anthony's birthplace in Adams was purchased in August 2006 by Carol Crossed, founder of the New York chapter of Democrats for Life of America and affiliated with Feminists for Life (FFL).[33] The museum is operated independently of those two groups, though two FFL leaders serve on the museum's advisory board. Anthony's childhood home in Battenville, New York, was placed on the New York State Historic Register in 2006, and the National Historic Register in 2007.[34]
From Mother Jones: http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/susan-b-anthony-list-sharp-right-turn-rachel-macnair
Susan B. Anthony List Founder: Republicans Hijacked My PAC!
Why Rachel MacNair says she's embarrassed by the now-powerful pro-life political action committee she launched 20 years ago.
Wed Feb. 22, 2012
Rachel MacNair is a Quaker, a vegan, and to the left of many Democrats on most issues. In other words, she's just about the last person you'd picture as a founder of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion political group so hardline that it targeted pro-life Democrats for defeat in the midterm elections because it didn't consider them sufficiently anti-abortion. MacNair, who parted ways with the group in the 1990s, is the first one to tell you how far she thinks the group has strayed from her initial vision. When I called her and asked whether she was the same Rachel MacNair who helped to launch the SBA List, she replied, "Much to my embarrassment."
In the two decades since it was founded, the group, and its associated political action committee, has grown from a shoestring operation that directed several thousand dollars to a handful of female congressional candidates to an anti-abortion juggernaut that plans to dump millions into the 2012 elections. The organization, which last week endorsed Rick Santorum, has drawn high-visibility support from conservative luminaries like Sarah Palin and can claim at least partial credit for renewing the GOP's war on Planned Parenthood. That was not quite what MacNair had in mind when she co-founded the group in 1992 as a pro-life answer to EMILY's List, the pro-choice PAC.
Just as EMILY's List (an acronym that stands for "Early Money Is Like Yeast") supported pro-choice female candidates, MacNair intended that the Susan B. Anthony List would do the same for pro-life women—and it would be bipartisan. Its first slate of endorsements, in 1994, was a mix of Republicans and Democrats. "We were proud of that," MacNair says.
SBA's three initial founders were also a political grab bag. MacNair, who had spent 10 years as the president of Feminists for Life, held liberal views on most every issue except abortion, while her cofounders were more conservative. Hers was a broad concept of "pro-life," drawn from her Quaker beliefs—she is also anti-war, anti-nukes, and anti-death penalty. Through the SBA List, MacNair envisioned not just electing candidates who shared her pro-life position, but of getting more women in office—period. "My idea was that it was always going to be all women," she says.
Soon after MacNair left the group in mid-1990s to pursue her doctoral studies in psychology, the committee's new leadership jettisoned this and other founding precepts. SBA now backs male candidates, after opening up its endorsement criteria in the late '90s to include pro-life men who are running against pro-choice women. "I was furious," MacNair says. "But at that point there was nothing I could do about it." Nor has the group remained bipartisan. The group has supported only one sitting Democrat in Congress in recent years—Rep. Dan Lipinski of Illinois—and has formally endorsed only two Democratic candidates for a federal election since 2003. In 2010, the SBA List specifically targeted pro-life Democrats who had voted for the health care reform law, which foes claimed provided taxpayer funding for abortions. The group ran ads against 20 pro-life Dems, and claimed credit for defeating 15 of them. It was the first time the group had actively campaigned against anyone—let alone politicians who shared the group's views on abortion.
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