REPUBLICANS ADVOCATING CHOICE!...?
Well, we heard it ourselves. Saw the ad on TV. No doubt about it. The Republican Party is running election ads supporting choice.
Well, no, not that kind. Ya see, to please their base made up of irreligious right and unchristian coalitioners, ads are being run encouraging lesbians to choose.
Their pitch goes something like this: Somewhere along the way, these women made the wrong choice of sexual preference. They chose to be lesbians. But, with the help of the Rychus one's god, these lesbians can choose to become heterosexual. It's all a matter of choice.
Now there should be no need for the Republican election committee to get all haired up about lesbians if it was not for the fact that doing so stirs up animosity among women.
"Divide and conquer." Turn women against themselves and get their vote. The media has always promulgated this. Time Magazine recently pronounced our movement dead, for example, and columnist, Laura Ingram, loudly broadcasts that the only F-Word-ists now are lesbians.
Whenever any opinion is sought concerning our movement, the media's darlings such as Sommers, Wolff or Huffy-Puffington are interviewed. The many women in the movement who don't write sexy best sellers are never asked for their opinion. These are the ones in the trenches day after day teaching work skills, helping battered women or keeping women's health centers open -- just to identify a few.
So the election committee is bringing lesbianism to the forefront to exacerbate any weakness in our movement that they can find.
It's certainly worked before. Throughout the women's movement, any woman who stood up for her rights or refused to be sexually harassed was labeled a lesbian.
Most women responded to this label with various versions of, "blow it out your ear," but many more were intimidated. Just as our culture uses race and religion to divide people, it uses sexual preference.
And it is not a small population they are going after. Those people are everywhere. In our homes, our offices, our schools and marketplace etc. They are our parents, our children, our siblings (poor Newt!), our friends, our doctors, our lawyers, our mail carriers and our fellow workers etc.
"Where Do They All Come From," Eleanor Rigby? Well, 'Gappers looked into this and found conclusive proof that ALL lesbians come from heterosexual coupling.
And so do all heteros. So, this choice thing, it seems to us, works both ways. If lesbianism is a choice, so is heteroism.
But the Conservative ads appear to indicate that heteroism is the natural and correct choice, thereby promoting healthy, blessed and living happy-ever-afterly lives.
A lesbian, they assert, converted to the true way, would then be able to enjoy rewards such as: "submitting gracefully to her husband," having a new baby every year, and adding to the overcrowding of earth.
Even aging lesbians would not be left out with all the new fertility drugs and a swell helping hand from Viagra.
After all, why should hetero women have all the fun?
But we wonder if the Conservatives have thought this through. They may be contributing to the very situation they wish to eradicate. With all their prayers and invocations to drive the devil out of lesbians, they may succeed.
Then, the increase in converted-to-heteros and their subsequent coupling, will just produce more and more females that choose their sexual orientation.
And they might not choose hetero. They might choose homa (female form of homo.) And homa may truly be where their heart is.
1998-030
Copyright 1998 Renee T. Louise and Ruth M. Sprague, Ph.D. These articles may be republished for noncommercial use only, provided that they are copied intact, and that this copyright notice is attached. Address all queries to: twanda@ConnRiver.net.
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