Finally, after a year of one-upmanship, we’re in the stretch. Flat-out, like the great mare Zenyatta.   Two things should bother the thinking voter, particularly the woman voter: Mitt Romney’s foreign policy naivete with its verbal breast-beating, which he has proven beyond reasonable doubt across three debates, and what Misogynists for Mitt aka the Republicans want to do to women’s reproductive health and freedom.

Romney’s extremist views would endanger all of us were he put in the White House.  His whole notion that Obama has led from behind, apologizing for the U.S. all over the world,  would alone be enough to put him at the mercy of  the hawks in his party, especially those cut of John McCain’s cloth.

If you want to see us in another war, your sons and daughters go off to war, raise your hands.

Especially callow and incontrovertibly inane is the manner in which the very people espousing church-state separation want to move into women’s bodies and set up an office.

GOP: we don’t want you to occupy women.  Who is any pasty, lard-jowled white man to tell us when life begins.  We don’t care if you’re a bishop or a fish monger: you don’t belong in a woman’s uterus and you need to stay the fuck out of it.

I remember what it was like in the early 70’s to exercise my newly minted right to choose to terminate a pregnancy.  It was hard, but I did it very early on, and I did it to protect myself from being saddled with an infant when my survival day to day was on the line as a struggling poet in the Twin Cities.  I did it to protect an infant from my then billowing case of alcoholism.

I did it because I was brave, and I stood up to my conditioning and the long shadow the Church cast over me even as I lay in bed in a hospital the night before the procedure when a nun helped herself to an opportunity to sell me on the Bible and I ordered her out of my room.

As the daughter of a scientist–a forest pathologist–I wasn’t operating under the illusion that what I had growing in me was, about ten days out from conception, anything but a tadpole; a mote of life.  Despite the fact that I certainly had love for my fetus, I hold these beliefs and that my intellect should govern my choices.

Ergo, I seriously doubt that some deity wants us to conceive at its whim, such as when we are being raped.  I doubt that God if God there be legislates the things that happen in the mortal world, the animate world.

And as a thinking woman it is absurd to me to imagine that God selectively speaks through people such as those bivouacking around in the GOP Right Wing.  How obvious it is, Mr. Mur-douche and Mr. Ryan, that your argument is a classic reductio ad absurdum,  the notion that God wills everything, even conception during a violent crime.

Misogynistically Mormon Mitt  would repeal Obamacare, defund Planned Parenthood and our endowments in the humanities, arts and sciences, defund education,  build more battleships when we have plenty and change the dynamic of the Supreme Court so that Roe goes down the drain.

Our beautiful brave country would become a patriarchal oligarchy– the worst of all possible worlds.  We would be disempowered to the level where our Muslim sisters live, owned by men.

The central problem of theism is that people become entrenched in dogma; post-indoctrination into religion– any religion– those entrenched in fundamentalism can’t see the world any other way.

I am a recovering hostage to dogma– that of the anachronistic and patriarchal cult of Alcoholics Anonymous that owned my intellect for years, and of the Anglican Communion, where Archbishop Rowan Williams never has a thinking person’s answer to the arguments against the existence of the supra-natural made by Richard Dawkins.

I’ve thankfully had an intellectual awakening and the most important things to me are freedom of thought and freedom of being.  I get to call the shots, not the guy hidden in the clouds millions imagine to be beaming down on us night and day, and not the hair-brained Mormon shoe salesman running for office whose position changes have turned him into a human weather vane.

The disillusioned intelligentsia in this country who have turned their backs on Obama need to wake up and join women in insuring that our gains in personal hegemony and free agency are not lost, and that we don’t have another trigger-happy cowboy in the White House, as we did for eight years.  Or have we forgotten that?