Contributed By: Jordan Sinopoli (A follower of Women’s Rights News and LGBT News on FB & IG)
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For those that don’t know me, allow me to introduce myself: my name is Jordan Sinopoli. I am a 31-year-old openly gay woman residing in Greensboro, North Carolina. Next Saturday, the 23rd, I will be marrying my beautiful, amazing, and wonderful fiancée Jennifer.
As tempted as I am to brag and gush about how beautiful, amazing, and wonderful my soon-to-be wife is, that’s not why I’m writing this. This past week, I went to bed in 2022 and woke up in the 1950’s. The SCOTUS has overturned the ruling of Roe vs. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision of a woman’s right to an abortion in 1973. This now makes abortions unconstitutional, once again, in the United States.
I can’t even begin to express how heartbreaking and dangerous this is for so many women. Let me tell you all a story: when my fiancée was 20, she had an abortion because she didn’t want to have the baby. She was a single mother to her 3-year-old son at the time and she was also going to school and working full time. Her sperm donor didn’t even acknowledge the fact that she was pregnant. She did this alone. By herself. With no one’s help. If her daughter gets pregnant in the future, she decides for whatever reason that she can’t take care of it, or her body doesn’t have the ability to carry the child, she can’t do anything about it. She ends up risking her own life.
No one should ever control a woman’s body let alone make that decision for herself. Abortion is safer than carrying a pregnancy to full-term and without it, more women are going to die. Abortion is healthcare.
It could be anyone: your daughter that’s in an abusive relationship, but she doesn’t want to raise a child with someone who abuses her and her partner is forcing her to give birth and keep the child. But she’s simply not ready. Your daughter that gets raped. Your daughter that has a high-risk pregnancy. Your daughter that has been molested and is the victim of incest.
It has been said that the Supreme Court Justices are now going to overturn marriage equality, contraception, and interracial marriages. The United States government is stopping at nothing to turn our once precious freedoms into a dogma. Instead of going forward like we should be doing, we’re only going backwards. We’re all being brought into a darker time when we all should be seeing the light. Love is not illegal. The fact that I’m a woman who loves and is in love with another woman is not a sin. I’m not diseased nor have I committed any crime. The fact that there are couples who just so happen to be different races isn’t illegal. The fact that us women simply want access to birth control isn’t illegal.
The United States Declaration of Independence states that all Americans are entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” However, what I’m seeing now is that this is no longer a country in which we al can be free, let alone be on the pursuit of happiness. It is no longer a reality. It is simply a myth.
According to the Justices of the Supreme Court, their justification for overturning Roe vs Wade is that it “doesn’t meet the due process clause.” As far as I’m concerned, this has nothing to do with any type of “clause” – it has everything to do with controlling women. It has everything to do with having so much internalized self-hatred and so many insecurities. This also goes for the politicians who have implemented anti-LGBTQ+ laws including those against the transgender community. Those who are transgender change what’s on the outside to match who they are on the inside. And don’t even get me started on those politicians who use their “religious beliefs” as their reasoning for creating such laws. Religion should never be used as a justification to cause people harm. Last time I checked, the same God that created the heavens, the Earth, and the Universe is the same God that created you and I. We all come from the same one. The Supreme Court Justices and politicians have no compassion or empathy in their hearts. Their hearts are full of ignorance, bigotry, and hatred. They have hatred for women, the LGBTQ+ community, transgender women of color, those with disabilities, minorities, and people of color – marginalized groups of people who experience oppression and discrimination.
It appears that the future of this democracy is in the hands of constituents of the government who will continually attack these most vulnerable groups of people. Tell me why there are Justices that have been appointed that are pedophiles. Tell me why the SCOTUS will side with a coach who kneeled during a football game but will not support women and their freedom to choose with what they do with their bodies. Sounds like hypocrisy to me. This is a country in which we should be celebrating life, love, and inclusivity. Instead, this has become a country in which people within the LGBTQ+ community can still be fired, evicted, or denied medical care all for who we are or who we love. There are some states in which there are no full protections from discrimination in our community. And if we do experience discrimination, we can’t sue.
The governor of Alabama sighed not one, but two anti-transgender bills into law that pts doctors who provide gender affirming care to transgender youth in prison for 10 years and is making it a class C felony. The other bill is requiring these youth to use the designated bathrooms assigned to their biological sex. Her blatant transphobia is apparent within these laws. What kind of transphobic tomfoolery is this? This only does more harm than good and now, the unaliving rates among the transgender community are only going to go up.
All of these Christian pro-lifers will say that they’ll “love their child no matter what” but then they’ll turn around and disown them if their child is LGBTQ+. Not only that, but they’ll also argue that “life begins at conception”, but according to the Bible in the book of Genesis, it states that “life begins at first breath”. Y’all politicians are so fixated on this “agenda” that you’re mixing up what’s factual verses your own beliefs.
Let me remind y’all that these are the same politicians who will argue that “all lives matter” and think the BLM movement is a hate group. What good does attacking racial, gender, and marriage equality do? Nothing.
You don’t get to dictate my life and how I choose to live my life. You don’t get to dictate what women choose to do with their bodies. This government is slowly turning into a dictatorship. What we do with our lives shouldn’t and doesn’t affect you.
Instead of overturning all these rulings, how about the government do us one better by fixing inflation? By lowering gas prices? By ensuring that we have affordable healthcare for every American? A lot of us are becoming homeless because the cost of rent and mortgages are going up. A lot of us are going without electricity and gas because we can’t afford our utility bills. A lot of us are losing our jobs because we can’t make it to work because of the high cost of gas.
We live in a world where guns have more rights than women. Guns are apparently free to carry, but babies are being forced to carry. And that’s a problem. We live in a world where are right and freedom to marry who we want and who we love us dubbed “unconstitutional” by the United States government. So many LGBTQ+ couples are now doing dual power of attorney so that in the event our rights do get taken away, we can protect ourselves should something happen to us. We live in a world where separation of the church and state is alive and well and that it doesn’t mean anything unless you’re a male, Christian, or straight. The same males who try to silence women. The same Christians who tell us LGBTQ+ folk that we’re going to hell. The same straights who think they should have a “straight pride”. The same people who feel entitled to my body. The same people who interrupt women when they’re speaking and who clearly put their sexism on display when they say a woman can’t do a man’s job.
Conservative Christians, like the one at Stedfast Baptist Church in Texas, apparently thinks that us “us homosexuals should be charged with the abomination of homosexuality that we have and that we should be put to death and lined up and shot in the back of the head.” That’s not preaching or religion. That’s violence that this pastor is wanting to commit against an entire community.
We don’t need your Holy Water. We don’t need to be fixed. You know what else it says in the Bible? “There is neither Greek nor Jew nor Slave nor free, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). So how can we interpret this Bible verse? That together, despite our differences, despite the things that make us, us, we are all one.
The United States Government, including the SCOTUS, is full of politicians who have a deficit in understanding how women’s bodies work and that of basic human rights and decency. They attack us, treat us as though we’re property, all while trying to take our rights away from us. They’re claiming that they’re trying to “protect the sanctity of life and marriage”, so what do they do? They take that away. They become part of the problem and not part of the solution, when it should be the opposite.
Attacking these groups of people won’t stop us from loving who we love or being who we are. Taking our rights away won’t stop us from protesting so that our rights and freedoms are protected.
I never thought I would ever live in a world, let alone a country, where our right to marry who we love, what we do with our bodies, who we are, would be stripped away. Our society is nothing but patriarchal.
Here is a reminder that my body, gender identity and sexual orientation aren’t political statements. Love is a human right. Access to safe abortions is a human right. Stop trying to strip us away of our basic human rights.
The best weapon that we have to use to fight for change isn’t a Glock or an AK-47 or our fists, but our voices. We will not back down or sit back. We will not remain silenced. We will not be spectators.
There is still a hell of a lot of work to be done. Because none of us are free until we all have the right to choose.
