the right's hate of the archetypal feminine runs deep and parallels the Islamist extremist mindset that responds to western secular values and media with terrorism.

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A few weeks ago, Chris Matthews mentioned that blacks got their right to vote  50 years before  women.  Yesterday, Meryl Ann Butler  wrote an article, suggesting similar ideas, WHEN ANATOMY TRUMPS COLOR: Race and Gender Patterns and their Possible Effect Upon the 2008 Presidential Race,  saying;

In race and gender patterns in the United States, men of color have traditionally been granted their rights in advance of women. Therefore, as long as this pattern continues, Barack Obama is better positioned than Hillary Clinton to beat John McCain, or any other white male Republican.

One woman commented on the article, titling her comment, THE WAR AGAINST WOMEN, saying,

 You can argue whether racism or sexism is stronger in America, but I don't think you can argue that women - both black and white - have not been the victims of systematic violence. "The War Against Women" by Marilyn French, talks about this.

Leonard Shlain wrote a fascinating book, THE ALPHABET and the GODDESS, collecting together a report on the research which described how the advent of writing changed the way the brain processed information.

Cultures went from storytelling and oral transmission of cultural history to the more linear writing. This changed the way the brain worked and culture changed from a female, priestess and empress, earth mother worship culture to a male dominated one.

It's not that the brain changed, but the patterns of use changed. Much has been written on this by other language experts and anthropologists.

Hillary faces this and more challenges in her efforts to win the Democratic primaries and the presidency.

More recently, Susan Faludi, in her book Terror Dreams, describes how the response to the 9/11 attack mirrored, or recapitulated early America's treatment of women-- as helpless, dependent and weak.  When I first heard Chris Matthews observe that black voting rights came before women's, Faludi's book came to mind. Faludi used a biomedical analogy-- the concept the ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny--- that the stages of development of a fetus recapitulate the evolutional stages from single celled micro-organism to fish to amphibian to reptile to hairy mammal.  It's tough to fight the tide of nature. And tough to fight the inertia of centuries old cultural habits.

Today, right wing values include rejection of the feminine-- not just women, but the whole spectrum of feminine archetypal ways of seeing, living, thinking.  Bush and his machismo offer undereducated men who have lost their jobs through globalization and outsourcing a dose of viagra to make them feel more masculine.

Hillary is a huge threat to their sense of self, sense of power. There's nothing rational about it.

Until the left faces this reality-- that part of winning with progressive, liberal values includes changing men's and religion's reactions to the feminine-- the left's strategy for success will be unsuccessful. That's a challenging assignment. Just look at how so many religious organzations are built upon "values" that  reject equal rights and treatment for women.  Southern Baptists, the Catholic Church, Islam, Orthodox Judaism-- they all require different and not equal treatment for women. Most, if not all of them, argue that women are better off that way, with more power in the home, protection from men, etc. 

This is not an easy battle. I do think "battle" is the right word, because the churches, temples and mosques that  oppose equal rights for women, that oppose the ascendance of the feminine, consider efforts to give women equal rights, to give women the right to control their bodies an assault upon the faith, upon the church. 

When we look at the progress women have made-- that it took just 50 more years to give women the vote, then we can be hopeful, that such change has overcome the millenia old cultural inertia that has resisted the changes sought.

This comment ought to get me in trouble. Sadly, the battle for women's rights may actually be stoking Islamic terrorism. I believe that the main inspiration and motivation for Islamic terrorism is the assault of western culture and values upon Muslim culture. When Christian missionaries attempt to evangelize and convert Muslims, it is understandable that religious leaders and practitioners see t his as an attack on their culture and values.

The fact is, Christianity has an ugly history of demonizing non-christian cultures as heathen, as despicable, and of going in and destroying those cultures, often assisted by devastating diseases carried by the missionaries and soldiers. Many cultures, even whole civilizations have fallen in the face of Christian evangelical assaults.

Unlike the indigenous tribes and south american cultures, which fell to the missionary armies, the Muslim world has fought back against both the Christian evangelism and the secular media assault. Combine the two western forces of cultural change and you have something that may seem quite malevolent to major portions of the Muslim world. When Bush says they hate our freedoms and our democracy, there IS some truth to it, but it is also our Christian evangelism, our hypersexualized television and movies and our cultural values which involve very different rights and roles for women. 

The road to equal rights and equal opportunity for women has not been easy and will continue to be a challenging one.

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

Rob Kall Wikipedia Page

Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel

Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel

Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.

For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.

Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..

To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.

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Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.

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