I’m not sure exactly when my womb became a dead ringer for the post-Dubya Republican Party, but, like a vegan at a barbecue, my fetus farm was never quite welcome. By age ten I had already decided I was never going to have kids. Through sheer force of will, I delayed the onset of my first period until I was fifteen, and planned to have my tubes tied as soon as I turned twenty-one. When I reached that age, however, I canceled my plan, on the off chance that I might one day change my mind about having children.
Flash forward to early 2009. Obama was recently elected President in a landslide, along with a passel of Congressional Democrats, and I am forty-three years old and gay. I still don’t want to have kids; neither does my wife. My womb now has no chance whatsoever of fulfilling its sole function, and probably never did.
Indeed, I have rejected the yearnings of my uterus as unequivocally as the nation has rejected the policies and politics of today’s Republican Party. And yet, just like the GOP, my baby bunker remains oblivious to its utter irrelevance. In fact, both entities, though equally obsolete, cling ever more fiercely to the same tired tactics that made them pariahs in the first place: bloating and scapegoating, cramps and theocracy, bleeding and bluster, irregularity and deregulation. Each one appears intent on becoming a more extreme version of its old self, indifferent to the sad fact that it has birthed nothing but pain, suffering and permanent stains. Seems to me they’re both long overdue for a Change.
