The Woman’s March on Washington last week was by many accounts the largest of its kind in American history – one million people (500 or so from New Mexico) peacefully moving through the capitol without a single arrest or act of violence. It was an utterly amazing and ultimately civil insistence on fairness and decency in American political culture. In more than 750 other cities around the country as many as 2.5 million more people marched. When you put these together with peaceful protests in sanctuary cities threatened with a loss of federal funds by a recent White House executive order, you see the nobility of free public discourse, guaranteed by the First Amendment, powerfully at work in our nation.
It doesn’t matter that the President’s chief strategist scowls and yells at the press to “keep its mouth shut,” implying that the rest of us should abandon our First Amendment rights just because we lost an election in the Electoral College. That’s not the way America works as all Obama-hating obstructionist alt-righters know so well from eight years of racial animosity and relentlessly crude opposition.
The non-violent demonstrations last week point to an upswelling of civility and compassion in our country in the face of vulgarity and disrespect. They are an expression of a renewed faith in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The marchers and their hard-right opposition remind me of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s public life in the 1930s and 1940s. She has become a model for me of principled, pragmatic opposition to cruelty, injustice and gross propaganda in the mad world of primitive head-bashing for political power in America.
What would Eleanor Roosevelt do with the viciousness and vitriol coming from the new president and his people? Reading an excellent biography of her by Blanche Wiesen Cook entitled “Eleanor Roosevelt: The War Years and After,” the answer seems obvious. She would place her trust in the decency of her fellow citizens, knowing full well that mean-spirited woman-haters, racists, and those made violent by loss of perceived entitlements are always lurking in the shadows. She would advocate against harming anyone and would, herself, give as much help and support as she could to those who were suffering injustice and the physical and psychological pain it brings. In all her years of public life, she never turned her back or took the easy way out. She opposed anti-Semitism and worked to get more refugees out of Germany into the United States before WWII. She opposed the internment of Japanese Americans based solely on racial profiling. She was a constant champion of the rights of women and children, and of everyone else who couldn’t protect themselves from abuse. She was a faithful visitor and confidant to soldiers burned and maimed in battle.
I know she would have been a part of the million strong Woman’s March on Washington. She would also have joined with decent people working to dispel hate and promote free choice, free speech, and a national conscience free of the agonies of repression, intimidation and self-serving power here and around the world.
She would have seen, I think, the degenerate patriarchy that has occupied and infected the White House now as an unwitting, but useful, goad to the empowerment of women and all those who our society demeans and oppresses. I’m sure it would seem obvious to her that the timing of the President’s executive order to defund reproductive and woman’s health organizations around the world was a punch back at the Woman’s March on Washington.
While the president’s executive order is reinstating a 1984 Ronald Reagan initiative known as the Mexico City Policy to ban U.S. spending on abortion and reproductive health at NGO’s abroad, the latest version is much more intense and destructive than the older version. Tradition has it that Democrats rescinded the Reagan ban and Republicans reinstated it. But this time the White House doubled down on the provisions, making them much more stringent and restrictive.
The Mexico City Policy is not strictly an anti-abortion move. The United States by law, under what is known as the Helms amendment, cannot fund abortions oversees. The Mexico City Policy is a gag order that forbids any NGO to even talk about abortion if it wants to keep its U.S. funding. Now this gag order is not just applied to family planning NGOs but to health organizations that deal with malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDs, tropical diseases and vaccinations, according to Lori Adelman, Planned Parenthood’s director of global communications. “It is not an exaggeration to call this catastrophic.” Millions of women around the world will suffer abuse under his executive order, and hundreds of thousands will die. We can all be thankful that the Netherlands has resolved to try to fill the monetary gap the U.S. has left behind. But the moral vacuum left in this country will take years to heal.
As the chairperson and a major architect and champion of the l948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt understood that women’s rights are human rights. Arguing against Soviet opposition, Mrs. Roosevelt prevailed in creating a document based morally on the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. Among the world’s most inspiring documents, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that gender bias has no place or standing in a world that struggles for justice and equality. In an address at the 10th anniversary of the Declaration in l958, Mrs. Roosevelt spoke of the global nature of the human rights movement.
“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood … the school or college … the factory, farm or office …. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”
It seems the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt was alive and well around the nation last week, in all the peaceful demonstrations of women and men who still hold sacred their right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” May her patience, her resoluteness, and her sensitivity to injustice and to the pain and torment of others remind us always that democracy is more than just voting. It is lobbying, petitioning, assembling, persuading, and expressing opinion even in the face of suppression. It is as Mrs. Roosevelt used to say, “What you don’t do can be a destructive force.”
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
I was waiting for someone to bring Eleanor Roosevelt into the conversation, include her among the array of models we can look to–as well as our own consciences–to help us shape a response capable of bringing neo-fascism to its knees. It is significant that ER lived and worked at a time when the first great fascist surge was sweeping Europe. Freedom-loving peoples believed they had vanquished it, albeit at a terrible price. Now we are called upon to do so again–this time hopefully before the concentration camps and secret torture centers are fully operative. Bravo, V.B., for so often sounding a voice of reason… and empowerment.
Excellent piece Barrett! These are very dark times and you shine a beacon of hope by pointing out that words and actions do matter and that we do have a voice.
Thank you for not only reminding us of the great works and humanitarianism of a great woman but also putting her in the frightening context of what is currently happening in the US.
Perfect…thank you for your elegant article!
Another superb article. Thank you Barrett!!