American women have now been esteemed to such a level that for taking a stand against religious liberty and becoming the nation’s contraceptive cover girl, Sandra Fluke is actually being considered as TIME magazine’s Person of the Year.
Women who commiserate with Sandra likely view themselves as also suffering the hammers of hell here in the misogynist war zone called America. After all, American women have withstood the abuse and pain of living thus far without the benefit of free contraceptives. Now, however, equipped with newfound fame and with the re-election of Barack Obama signifying a battle won, maybe Ms. Fluke can now branch out and become an international spokesperson on how women around the world can stand strong in the face of male-imposed tyranny.
Who better than Sandra to represent injustices such as a 15-year-old girl being beheaded by a male cousin over a rejected marriage proposal?
Here in America, while girls of Mexican-American descent picked out dresses for a festive quinceañera, in the Imam Sahib district of Kunduz province, 15-year-old Gisa was out gathering water by the river when she was ambushed by close male cousin Sadeq, who proceeded to saw off her head with a knife.
Gisa’s father refused to allow his daughter to marry because of her tender age. So, instead of a wedding dress and a wedding, the girl’s headless body was returned to her family, wrapped in a sheet and dressed for a funeral.
With that in mind, Sandra Fluke did do a bang-up job on Capitol Hill advancing awareness of the war on women by schooling the Catholic hierarchy on polycystic ovary syndrome. So why not fly Sandra out to Khanabad to give a similar speech to Afghani men about the discriminatory display of hostility exhibited when one separates the head of a young girl from her body?
After she celebrates the rampant practice of female feticide, Sandra can then turn her attention toward injustices like beheading, stoning, genital mutilation, rape, and splashing acid in the faces of Afghani girls. Then the war-on-women/endometriosis expert can pack her copy of TIME magazine and a fresh supply of free contraceptives and fly off to Michoacán, Mexico.
After all, it was in Michoacán that former mayor of Tiqicheo Maria Santos Gorrostieta’s half-nude, mutilated body was recently found dumped in a rural field.
Maria stood up to drug cartels over marijuana and heroin in the same way Ms. Fluke stood up to the patriarchal Catholic Church over the right to NuvaRings and FemCaps. One difference, though — Sandra Fluke became a liberal hero, while Maria was kidnapped, tortured, and then executed.
America has Sandra Fluke working on behalf of free contraceptives for all, and Mexico had Maria Santos Gorrostieta, who died defying a drug-driven turf war. Unlike America’s gutsy Sandra Fluke, Maria didn’t live long enough to have the opportunity to solicit free birth control in front of Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Instead, what this lovely young woman did do was spend her short life working selflessly on behalf of the region’s poor.
Before her death, the mayor had already suffered and survived many gunshot wounds at the hands of drug cartels. Even Maria’s husband, the town’s former mayor José Sánchez Chávez, was killed in one ambush. In a subsequent attack, gunmen opened fire again on Santos Gorrostieta, leaving her scarred, maimed, and in need of acolostomy bag.
When Gorrostieta left office, her security detail was withdrawn. Then, like Gisa’s cousins, the former mayor’s vengeful stalkers lay in wait to seek the retribution that had formerly evaded them.
Eight days after Gorrostieta pleaded that the life of her daughter be spared, farm workers found the woman’s battered corpse on the side of the road. What happened at the hands of the quasi-religious drug cartel La Familia Michoacana during the previous week, no one knows for sure. Still, it’s reassuring to know that there’s someone like Sandra Fluke out there, who can, having endured gender oppression at the hands of male clergy at Georgetown University Law Center, empathize with Maria’s pain.
Maria Santos once said, “Despite my own safety and that of my family, what occupies my mind is my responsibility toward my people, the children, the women, the elderly and the men who break their souls every day without rest to find a piece of bread for their children.”
Prior to her throat being slit, little Gisa’s last words were probably a cry for help for someone to save her life. Sandra Fluke, on the other hand, is celebrated for furthering the fabricated, self-absorbed point that “[Paul] Ryan’s abortion position kills women.”
It is a shame that in some circles, women having to pay for their own birth control or abortion elicits a greater outcry than females being victimized by multiple assassination attempts or decapitation by a close relative.
In the end, for her part in the “war on women” Fluke did get a gig at the DNC Convention and will get her beloved contraceptives for free and, unlike young Gisa and Maria Santos Gorrostieta, will also likely achieve fame on the cover of TIME magazine.
Suffice it to say that while women suffer and die all around the world, in America, liberal “ladies” represented by the likes of political prop Sandra Fluke come across like a bunch of whining ingrates who defame the memory of martyrs like Maria Santos Gorrostieta and innocents like Gisa — two victims of the world’s real war on women
Jeannie DeAngelis
