For a cold and misting Saturday afternoon outside the state Capitol, a woman had re-engineered her umbrella.
She had installed coat hangers, the tools and symbols of back-alley abortions, in place of the spokes.
It was dark symbolism, but it kept her dry.
“Oh, how wonderfully awful,” said Rita Sklar, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Arkansas.
That-wonderfully awful-is such a powerfully apt description. It could almost apply to this event, a rally attended by about 500 to protest the Legislature’s assault on the rights and dignity of women.
But it would be better, more precise, to say wonderfully futile.
It was wonderful that women, and some men, could be stirred to venture into unwelcoming weather on a Saturday afternoon to assail the policy making of a right-wing legislative assembly run amok against a woman’s right to choose.
It was wonderful that this was a spontaneous “net-roots” event that had sprung up on Facebook.
It was wonderful that the issue was framed clearly. This was not an event to promote abortion. Hardly anyone actually promotes abortion.
It was an event to protest that, 40 years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a woman was master of her own private body, the Arkansas Legislature was presuming, smugly and arrogantly, to take back her mastery and invade her body.
There were gray-haired women in the crowd who weren’t saying they needed, or wanted, a personal right to an abortion. They were saying they didn’t like the way this state was turning the clock back on their daughters and granddaughters, even against their daughters’ and granddaughters’ doctors.
One woman’s sign said, “Keep your small government out of my vagina.”
That might be a little crude for reference in a family newspaper. But it bears quoting because it speaks to the irony: Professed conservatives who declare they want to get government out of our lives actually inject government so far into a woman’s life as to regulate her unmentionables.
These professed conservatives are not in favor of small and inactive government. They’re in favor of government that is big and active in places they want it to be big and active, primarily bedrooms.
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What was futile about the event was that it’s not going to make even one tiny bit of difference.
If you want to influence the Arkansas Legislature, Saturday is not the day to come to the Capitol.
Business is not being transacted. Legislators are home cloaking themselves in the warm comforts of their cocoons.
Yes, people have jobs during the workweek. Most folks can’t leave work to stir trouble at the state Capitol.
Women would tell you it’s even more difficult for them to take leave from the man’s world that is the workplace.
But when bills to weaken the animal-cruelty law came up in a Senate committee on a workday two weeks ago, animal-protection advocates filled the room and so overwhelmed the chairman with requests to speak that the bill got deferred. It now is likely dead or at least headed to wholesale weakening by amendment.
When motorcyclists opposed the law several years ago to require them to wear helmets, they didn’t ride their bikes to the Capitol on Saturday. They scared legislators half to death on a workday.
Some people go to committee meetings because they love animals.
Some make laws because they love zygotes.
Somebody needs to love women-female human persons actually born, that is, for they are the ones on the losing end.
And if you want to influence public opinion, your opening speaker probably shouldn’t be the aforementioned Rita Sklar of the American Civil Liberties Union.
She is a brave and smart and admirable women. But she is incurably typecast.
She is inevitably marginalizing.
The ACLU exists, thank goodness, for filing often-unpopular lawsuits to protect rights that the political mainstream finds uncomfortable and doesn’t seem to want. But it does not serve well as the voice and face of a political effort.
People fear activism on this issue. Being called a baby-killer is not pleasant.
So people leave the hard and thankless work to the ACLU. They leave the public noise making to weekend warriors.
They cling to the courts.
If what you cheer loudest is a promise of a lawsuit, as was the case Saturday, then you don’t need a rally or even to fill a legislative committee room.
You are casting your lot wholly with case law, which-be advised-can change over time as new judges get appointed to reflect the evolving political will.
At some point, you must try to change political will. Otherwise, you’re losing ground.
Here’s hoping the event Saturday was but a warmup, a good place to collect email addresses for calls to action about whatever the blowhards and fire-and-brimstoners will try to do next on workdays at the Capitol.
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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial, Pages 15 on 03/26/2013