Are you muttering to the television, do you yell at your TV?  Are you weary from all of the assaults of the Home Grown Taliban? I know. Now you think I am crazy. No I am fine and just being realistic about the life of women.

Are you tired of hearing State Congressmen and -women and Federal Senators and Representatives saying things in public that you want to have them fired for? One of my favorites is Senator Orrin Hatch speaking this pearl:  “Capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.”  There are the remarks dealing with “legitimate rape”, women needing to be beaten, daughters being worth less than sons. It goes on and on ad nauseum.

Here in the United States we are no longer top in the fields of math and science.  Part of the reason we have lost our place is the extreme religious right. For the first time in thirty-six years, the U.S. now educates fewer scientists each year. We import more high-tech items than we export.

The religious right fights against programs to provide condoms to the poor. Abstinence programs  are failing, and teen pregnancy is on the rise.

The health of those that the religious right does not value is endangered.  There have been republicans who say that if a HIV vaccine were developed, they would be against using it. Scientists have developed the human papilloma virus vaccine to prevent cervical cancer, but the religious right’s opposes funding the vaccine for those who need it.. The stem cell research is moving slowly now because the religious right opposes the research, ignoring the gain to medicines that are being lost.

For instance, my younger sister has a genetic liver disease that will inevitably kill her. She doesn’t drink, this is totally genetic. She needs a new liver, but cannot get a normal transplant because she cannot take the medicine that prevents rejection.  The only hope for her and others like her is that scientists develop a method for growing a new liver from her own cells . It won’t happen now unless it happens from stem cells.  So the religious right has decided, essentially, that my sister and thousands like her will have to die.

James Dobson’s War on America is the first book written by a religious right organization.  All women, men of color, Jews, Muslims, homosexual people and others are harmed by the actions and attitudes on the part of the Christian Right.

The extreme religious right operates behind the scenes, urging opposition to what people in American need.

The great Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote, “Those who won our independence believed…that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people…that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope, and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government…(Fear) can’t alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly.”

Therefore, there is much that is similar between the religious right and the Taliban. They both agree on women and want to disenfranchise women, keep women from education, and keep women silent in the background, possessions of their men.

The state of our Union has been corrupted, and the women of the U.S. have been disenfranchised the way the Taliban has disenfranchised Middle Eastern women. The three largest Christian-right organizations call for “crusaders” to pray that certain  U.S.  Supreme Court justices whose voting records they dislike will die, An emotional war of hatred. The televangelist Pat Robertson has blamed Ellen Degeneres for Hurricane Katrina, because she’s gay.

If the religious right is not stopped, as time goes on, we women will lose more and more of our rights and equality. The Religious Right is beginning to sound and act like the Taliban. This is terrible for women everywhere. Speak up and speak out before you use this right. Sign petitions, volunteer at a women’s shelter or a women’s clinic. We can all light our candles and not look away. Face those who denigrate women.