As Oprah Slaps Bush / With 30 states poised to smack down women’s rights again, the one true savior emerges By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Here’s the bottom line: 50 million eligible women didn’t vote in 2000, and 22 million of them were single and nearly every one of them probably thought their vote doesn’t matter and it isn’t really worth it and who cares anyway because no matter who wins, everything’s still pretty much run by rich powerful men anyway. …

[W]hat so many women don’t seem to know. That the Bush administration has already, in just a few short years, managed to roll back a truly astounding number of their basic rights, making it more difficult, for example, for doctors to perform abortions, or making it illegal for schools to discuss contraception or for hospitals to discuss pregnancy-termination options.

From demeaning and ineffectual abstinence-only programs to biased counseling to cutting all funding for international women’s health organizations that provide care to poor women in third-world nations (hell, Bush hacked that one away in his first month in office), Dubya has done more than any president in the last 100 years to smack women upside their sexually empowered heads. … Bush has already upheld the ban on abortions for servicewomen stationed overseas, even if they were raped, even if they pay for it themselves. …

Hello, 1950s. Hello, coat-hanger surgery. Hello, millions of despondent daughters of uptight parents. Hello, dead or mutilated teenage girls who suffer botched procedures. Hello, a fresh national nightmare, revisited, regurgitated, reborn. And hello again to smug right-wing males who’ve wanted to put women back in their place for the past 50 years. Check that: 200 years. Check that: forever.

Just a silly nightmare? Utterly impossible? A ridiculous liberal daydream? Not even close, sweetheart.

It’s all about the Supreme Court, of course. Fact is, our next president will almost surely get to appoint a number of new high-court justices to replace those who will likely retire after enduring Bush’s toxic first term. They hung in there, these few — especially stalwarts Sandra Day O’Connor and moderate, pro-choice John Paul Stevens — hoping to disallow the nation’s highest judiciary from becoming overly stacked with homophobic self-righteous right-wing neocon wingnuts (hi, Justice Scalia!) who would have us revert — morally, sexually, spiritually, misogynistically — to 1953. Check that: 1853. Check that: 1353.

With the exception of nearly useless neoconservative sycophant Clarence Thomas, not a single justice now serving on the court is under 65. Many insiders say Stevens, O’Connor and bitter old man William Rehnquist (almost 80) are all likely to retire before 2008. BushCo’s chosen replacements could easily tip the scales of the court the other direction, from its very precarious 5-4 progressive tilt to a very sneering 6-3 conservative one, a court that would then very easily overturn parts or even all of Roe v. Wade. Talk about a malicious legacy.

It gets worse. It gets nastier, more widespread. Because should Shrub swipe another term, he will also be on his way to naming more federal trial and appeals judges — hundreds, by most counts — than either Clinton or Reagan, the last two-term presidents. Bush could, in short and for all intents and purposes, stack the nation’s courts with enough neoconservative, antichoice, antiwomen crusaders to make Strom Thurmond giggle in his grave.
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Reproductive Rights Steadily Eroded in the States

A majority of state legislatures, along with both houses of Congress and the White House, are allied against a woman’s right to make personal and private decisions about her reproductive life. A lone appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court — one more Supreme Court justice who will not affirm Roe v. Wade — is all it would take to bring victory to those who will deny women this fundamental human right.