The Republican Party is leading an assault on the rights of American women and girls. In June 2022, the Supreme Court’s six unelected, unaccountable, very conservative justices stripped American women of the fifty-year old right under the Constitution to make decisions about their bodies. Overturning Roe vs Wade removed access to abortion which also threatened or removed the health care that women, pregnant and otherwise, often need to survive. These justices ruled in direct opposition to between 65 and 90 percent of the American public. They cloaked their decision in word salads about states’ rights, divisions in our society, and cited a British jurist, Matthew Hale (1609-1676) who held distinctly unfavorable opinions about the role of women in society. The justices said that their reactionary move would go no farther than abortion access, but almost immediately one of the justices threatened to use this decision as the basis from which to strip other Americans of certain of their rights under the Constitution – from same sex marriage to contraception to interracial marriage. These rulings, beginning with the overturning of Roe, are a full-throated attack on the freedoms of at least 50 percent of the population of
the United States. If we don’t step up…

Women will be the most immediately impacted and hard hit by this reversal. These conservative justices and most of their Republican allies seem to have concluded that any life is more important than the life of the pregnant female. A “mother,” regardless of her age, mental or emotional capacity, means or other circumstances must carry a child conceived during rape or incest to term. The justices do not appear to care about life after birth; there is no guarantee of help, financial or other, to a “mother” forced to carry her abuser’s child. The life of an unviable fetus takes precedence over the life of a pregnant woman or child, increasing danger to her health or life for the sake of a sterile principle. Pregnant females who need reproductive measures to survive disease or complications have to wait until they are near death, to be sure there’s no abortion and physicians must try to work miracles. This ruling has revealed a range of hideous consequences and the cruelty of letting these rulings continue is mind- numbing. If we don’t step up…

And, these justices, these representatives of the party of small government – historically, government that doesn’t intrude on private lives – have decided that the government gets to intervene in a deeply personal and private matter. That government gets to change the course of private lives and gets to decide which direction lives should take, based not on science, but on a religious principle. A principle not all religions recognize. If we don’t step up…

The reversal of Roe is one prong of the new national security threats the Republican Party represents – the threat to personal decisions and freedoms in situations which pose no danger to anyone except the pregnant female and her family. The threat is not from overseas; it is from inside the United States and has been launched only by one of the two major political parties. This attack on women and girls is just the beginning of the Republican threat to the United States as we know it. They have promised to reverse other rights under the Constitution: civil rights; voting rights; equal rights; and human rights the expansion of which make us a better society, more closely built on what our founders said they believed. And after the Republican candidates take away our rights to control our bodies, they will take aim at American democracy – at free and fair elections, using lies, threats, and fear to do so. If we don’t step up…

We can and we must step up. Neutering this threat does not require specific training, expertise, or equipment; it requires something we can each do. Vote for people who will guarantee abortion access and health care for everyone. Vote for rights – for civil rights, for voting rights, for marriage rights. Vote for truth and science. Vote for democracy by voting against anyone from the Party of Lincoln and Reagan. And vote only for Democratic Party Candidates; a vote for anyone else is a vote for suppression and a vote against democracy. We must step up.

The women and girls of Iran are superb role models for us. Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, died while in custody of the Iranian morality police for not wearing her hijab (headscarf) properly. Massive numbers of Iranian women and girls continue to take to the streets, braving the deadly fury of the police force to protest Amini’s death. These women and girls are removing their hijabs, burning the hijabs, chopping the hijabs into pieces, and cutting their hair in public – all in defiance of the law and the murderous morality police. We must step up.

We cannot make the case for effective action more eloquently than Robin Wright did in the 9 October 2022 edition of The New Yorker: “The girls and women of Iran are just bitchin’ brave, flipping the bird at its Supreme Leader in a challenge to one of the most significant revolutions in modern history. Day after dangerous day, on open streets and in gated schools, in a flood of tweets and brazen videos, they have ridiculed a theocracy that deems itself the government of God.”

We can do this. We must thwart the efforts of the Republican regime to control the bodies of American women and girls. Lives literally depend on it. We must join the tens of thousands of Kansans who recognized this and voted to keep their access to abortion, as well as the New Yorkers who chose Pat Ryan over his Republican opponent. Each of those voters sent the message that human rights and country are more important than party. It’s our time to step up to vote for our national security, and send the bigotry, lies, and anti-democratic autocracy of the current Republican Party and their Supreme Court justices into the dustbin of history. We must step up.

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The Steady State is a group made up of retired national security officials who served the United States in multiple agencies in the US government. We have seen, studied, and worked abasing threats to the United States for decades. And we are determined to keep working against threats to the US.