Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site

Getty Images/ Political commentator Rush Limbaugh, left, and Sandra Fluke, a third-year law student at Georgetown University and former president of the Students for Reproductive Justice group there, are shown in these file photos.

Today is Mother's Day, 2012, the same year as election year, the same year women's concerns over reproductive freedoms, healthcare coverage, economic equity in pay, etc. are under attack. A war on women? An attempt to relocate the notion as a war between women?

Today I read Huffington Post's article by Pauline Arrillaga titled 'War On Women' 2012: Amid Controversy, Women Ponder How They Became Campaign Issue  which recaptures a good deal of the imagery and energetic that swirls around what many women and men thought a non-issue, something as a nation we've already determined and a matter for families to decide privately and for women to shoulder responsibly and without invasive coercion from outside by dominator forms of religious and government imposition. 

The article recaps "Susan G. Komen ending cancer-screening grants to Planned Parenthood (quickly reversed). And disputes over laws designed to protect women against wage discrimination (Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker last month signed a repeal of his state's equal pay law, while a U.S. Senate candidate in Michigan called a federal equal pay law a 'nuisance')" along with bringing back into the fray the very evident assault on abortion rights. I note the article articulates how, what many thought was an issue already decided, returned with "the historic Republican gains during the tea party-driven 'red tide' of 2010." Although someone else may have already made this connection, this is the first time I've seen in print what I intuitively already understand. 

Now it appears the 2010 red tide "teaparty-bringing" activism to culture in socio-political surfaces in a "war on women" has become a "tea garden"―but written, "teegarden" as in Karen Teegarden, the woman who launched UniteWomen.org. Its mission statement: "Help defend women's rights and pursuit of equality." Her activism comes to the fore in the infamous and insensitive Rush Limbaugh/Sandra Fluke slut-calling fiasco.  Teegarden's response comes at a critical juncture in a larger call to social activism for men and women.

If you didn't know it, Teegarden's UniteWomen.org used social media and internet to organize protests in cities across the country on April 28th, 2012. My locale, Phoenix, took part where coat hangers were on display featuring a plea: "Keep Abortion Safe & Legal."  Photos of coat hangers inudated Govenor Jan Brewers office in protest to the Govenor's signing of a bill, HB 2800, unfunding Planned Parenthood. She did this at a gathering of the Susan B Anthony List, a grassroot activist organization intending the systematic defunding of Planned Parenthood. No "war on women," eh? Or "the only 'war on women' is the one being waged by the left," eh?  Saying such things to we, the people is called gaslighting, telling people what they really see isn't really going on. But, who's nuts?

Of central importance is supporting and sustaining Planned Parenthood as an important, primary source of women's healthcare and it must not be covered over, something I think the phrase " 'Sluts' over 'Nuts' " taken as metaphor and turned diaphorically, suggests. My thought is that an amplification of the mythologem which underlies this notion may dwell within its “depth-nature”