"You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation.” Marian Wright Edelman, American activist for children’s rights
April 16, 2014
By: Linda Case Gibbons
There is no war on women, not unless you’re Sandra Fluke.
The rest of us? Well, we can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan and don’t have the time nor the inclination to agonize over contraception and abortion as "our” issues.
We don’t have to. We already have Roe vs. Wade, so choices are available to whomever wants them. And there are drug stores on every corner, even near Georgetown University.
No, we have bigger fish to fry.
There are some who would like us to revert to the basics, make us concentrate on our gender, our bodies, but we’re way past that and we’re way too smart for that.
The men we marry, the men we work with, like strong women. Not everyone does, but so what?
We don’t let anyone tell us what to think or what to do. We just "work hard, create our own luck and believe anything is possible, because we’re crazy, driven, hard working believers.”
That’s what they said in the Cadillac commercial which the Left hated and we loved.
We don’t focus on phony "racism” floated by the Left.
We reject that "grass” is good for you even when high-ranking elected officials boast that they smoked it and it’s safer than alcohol.
We did the research. We know what this drug does. It changes your brain: Lack of focus, impaired judgment. And we’ve watched those very same officials perform their jobs and can only say – the research is right.
We know when the government comes in with guns and attack dogs, they aren’t going after cows eating the other kind of "grass.”
We know calling American citizens "domestic terrorists” is hype. We know what getting ready for mid-term elections looks like.
We don’t need Harry or Barry or Bill to tell us what to say when they need to send a woman out there with their talking points.
Or to tell a woman to wait for her turn, for the next election, to be rewarded for putting up with whatever they want her to put up with.
Sure Candy, Susan, Hillary, and Katie may walk off with all kinds of awards and promotions for carrying the Liberal Left’s water, but that sort of thing doesn’t register on our radar.
As I said, we have bigger fish to fry.
It’s true that strong women may not get the awards. They may get kicked to the curb, be ridiculed and persecuted, but that won’t stop them.
Catherine Engelbrecht was targeted by the IRS for her Tea Party activity after she applied to the IRS for non-profit status for her groups, "King Street Patriots” and "True the Vote,” groups designed in part to combat voter fraud. This was in 2010, right before the mid-term elections.
Her application still hasn’t been approved, and June 2010 was when the targeting began.
The IRS continued to deny her application, to ask exhaustive questions about her activity and those of her members. Then the agency threw everything they had at her.
For the next three years, just long enough to sideline her group’s impact on elections, she was subjected to a personal audit, an audit of her family business and numerous visits from an alphabet soup of government organizations: OSHA, the FBI, and the BATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms),while the IRS continued to plug away at her.
Financially and personally exhausted, what did Engelbrecht do?
What she didn’t do was beg off. She didn’t call in sick like our secretary of state did. No, she turned around and sued the IRS.
She said it was frightening to challenge a powerful government establishment like the IRS, but she did it anyway. She said she wanted to set a precedent for other private individuals and organizations who are targeted by out-of-control government agencies.
She and her attorney, another strong woman, Washington tax attorney Cleta Mitchell, testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs and told the truth about what Engelbrecht’s government was doing to her and people like her.
And when it was discovered committee member Congressman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) had a hand in the IRS targeting True the Vote, they filed an ethics complaint against him.
"I will not retreat, I will not surrender, I will not be intimidated. I will not ask Rep. Cummings, Lois Lerner, Barack Obama or anyone else, for permission to exercise my constitutional rights.”
Backing down was never an option for Engelbrecht, and it wasn’t an option for Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Malala Yousafzai either. These strong women made the decision to take on their own formidable foes:
It was Islam for Ali and its role in legitimizing female genital mutilation, honor killings and the use of Sharia Law to justify domestic abuse of women and children.
Malala Yousafzai took on the Taliban.
Harshly criticized and physically threatened for her views, persecuted and pursued by pro-Muslim groups such as the Council of American-Islamic Relations for years, Ali most recently was the target of criticism in a controversy involving Brandeis University.
The University had decided to confer an honorary degree on Ali at their Spring Commencement ceremonies, but then took back the offer, buckling under pressure from CAIR.
"Her past statements are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values,” was the explanation the University gave.
It happens. Strong women. They are perceived by those less strong as threatening.
As a survivor of these abuses, raised in a strict Muslim family as she was, her rise to parliamentarian in the Dutch government and her humanitarian work would seem to make Ali a perfect role model for women.
But for some people this type of accomplishment just makes them mad. They cannot control a person like that and it makes them want to destroy that person.
Malala Yousafzai became an activist in Pakistan when she was eleven. It was her life goal to become a doctor and her passion to fight for the right of Pakistani women to be educated.
Her father ran one of the last schools to educate girls in bold defiance of the Taliban. His daughter came to international attention because of the blog she wrote about her experiences in her country.
She was awarded Pakistan’s first National Youth Peace Prize for her efforts. But when she was fourteen, the Taliban targeted her, shot her in the neck and head while she was on a school bus, and left her in critical condition, a bullet near her brain.
Her activism means that the militants will certainly try to kill her again, a Taliban spokesman said. "Let this be a lesson,” he warned.
So I’m wrong. There is a war on women. It’s not the "Talking Points War” the Democratic Party talks about, not the phony war on female reproduction rights or wage inequality.
No, it is a war waged against strong women who are unafraid to confront, speak out and stand on their own two feet. These women can walk and chew gum at the same time and this makes some people very, very angry.
You can’t control that type of woman. Women like that are intimidating to the Left, to Democrats and to anyone who likes to control others.
But these people, the opponents of this type of woman are destined to lose the "War” because this type of woman won’t ever back down. No matter how hard you lean on them, they will not back down.
Hold the line, America.