Marty Clark’s Sept. 30 letter cried, “Women, wake up!” Oh, we women are wide awake! We have seen the Republican platform and Republicans in action. We know they want to require us to carry every fetus to term, regardless of how it was conceived or how defective it is. We know that if they can’t make terminating pregnancy illegal, they will make it impossible to obtain. Yet they oppose helping fund women’s health care and want to ban certain contraceptives.
We see that Republicans oppose any governmental role in getting women equal pay for equal work or in supporting the rights of labor in general, including the right to collective bargaining. Their enthusiasm for reducing the size of government includes ending the fight against poverty, ending support for students and public education in general, ending support of the arts and even funding for public services. They want to cut government regulation of industry, allow drilling anywhere, pollute at will, despoil the landscape, and risk the health of that next generation they’re so concerned to protect from the national debt. To view both parties’ votes on the issues, see the website of the nonpartisan organization Project Vote Smart at http://votesmart.org/.
Gene Kuechmann
Vancouver
