Castle On The Beach

what is left for women in America?

This will make some people angry. I won’t apologize for that. Anger can be useful.

In America—this America—we cared so much about the lives of women that we built a castle on the beach. We built it with great care, great labor, and great planning over many years.

It had walls thick enough to protect our mothers, wives, and daughters from sexual assault and gave them legal rights to be heard and believed. We built ramparts of stone to grant and protect women’s unique reproductive health issues because that shapes so many lives, and we built towers tall enough and strong enough to shatter any glass ceiling. We were very proud of our castle. It was the envy of the world. We used it as an example of how much better we are than our enemies in the Middle East, where women had to hide their faces and do what they were told.

And then, the tide came in.

So, what went wrong?

For one thing, our leaders were often idiots who fell in love with their position but not the people. They stacked celebrity endorsements but remained disconnected from the people who voted. The other side has absolutely shit leaders too, but they don’t have as much to protect, and they’re devious as hell. Age and treachery will beat youth and strength every time.

For forty-five years, I’ve been saying it was a mistake to rely on court rulings that grant women (or anyone else) their rights. Our constitution was designed to separate the Judiciary from the political process and protect them from political manipulation, but as soon as they ruled on Roe v Wade, you saw people building siege engines around the Supreme Court to manipulate who was on it so they could manipulate how they ruled. There’s no other way to describe it.

Manipulating the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade was a principal objective in this country for hundreds of thousands of people for forty-five years, and they got what they wanted. The entire time, people like me pointed and shouted that someone was digging a hole through the wall, but it went unheeded.

First proposed in 1923, Americans spent over one hundred years trying to enact the Equal Rights Amendment. Roy Cohn famously used America’s failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment as an example of how women lacked the political will and the political power to protect themselves. He called them losers. Roy Cohn was the Merlin to Donald Trump’s Wart. Wart grew up to be king. So did Trump, but the story was very different after that.

So, after November 5, 2024, what is left for women in America?

Well, you still have the right to vote and, apparently, the right not to vote together. You have the right to initiate a divorce. You have the right to own and sell property. You have the right to a credit card. You have the right to file charges with the federal government if you believe your boss creates a hostile workplace because of your gender. Compared to many places in the world, that sounds like quite a lot.

In 2022, Mahsa Amini, a twenty-two-year-old citizen of Iran, was killed when police arrested and beat her for not properly wearing her hijab. She wore it, but they said she wasn’t wearing it properly, and a part of her hair was showing.

American women still have it pretty good compared to Iranian women. My question to you is, “Is that enough?” Is being more free here than you would be in Iran enough? Are we, as I fear, steering our ship to the same place that Iran steered theirs, but more slowly?

I’ve been telling people not to be afraid of what happened last night, not to despair, but I have not and will not tell them not to be angry. You should be angry. I am angry. Truth be told, I am afraid, too, but I’m standing my ground. I’m standing my ground because if somebody my size breaks ranks, it can cause a panic.

We built a castle on the beach, but we failed to protect it, and the walls were overrun. That’s the nature of castles. When the smoke clears, we look where there were weak spots and rebuild them, better and stronger than before. Every defeat teaches you something. That’s the nature of defeat. Be afraid. It’s natural to be afraid, but don’t break ranks. It’s not over yet.