We cats are very taken with "Wolf Hall," the PBS series based on Hilary Mantel's Man-Booker Prize-winning novels about Thomas Cromwell and the reign of Henry VIII. It's not just that we're devotees of English history — we love the political drama that Mantel and the series portray. Just imagine: politics in which being on the losing side could mean you'd die in nasty ways. Scary!
In those circles, if you were a woman, the only political weapon you had was your womb. Marry the king and give birth to a male heir, and you were golden. Fail to do that — as, given the medical realities of the time, Anne Boleyn did — you'd get your head chopped off. (As Katharine Hepburn said in "The Lion in Winter," such is the role of sex in history.)
So we cats had "Wolf Hall" in mind when we saw the latest news on reproductive rights here in Virginia. Attorney General Mark Herring has declared that abortion clinics in the Old Dominion — contrary to Ken "My Fetus Is Better Than Your Fetus" Cuccinelli's previous opinion — do not need to adhere to hospital-style building standards to remain open. Thus endeth a full-scale and very sneaky assault on abortion access in Virginia.
And we cats say, whew. The anti-choice advocates here have driven things mighty close, haven't they? For years, they've been chipping away at reproductive rights. And with a solidly right-wing Republican legislature and — until recently — Republicans in the statewide offices, they were salivating at the prospect of returning Virginia women to an Anne Boleyn-like state of helplessness in the face of biology.
Well, no more. We cats spent the fall of 2013 going door to door in Northern Virginia, asking people to vote for Terry McAuliffe for Governor, Ralph Northam for Lieutenant Governor, and Mark Herring for Attorney General. And we're happy to report that all three squeaked in — in Herring's case, by only 907 votes. Don't tell us that grass-roots organizing doesn't count — maybe we personally convinced two or three of those 907 to vote Democratic!
Fast-forward to today, when we cats pulled into our pleasant housing development, and passed a neighbor who was driving a car with a "Choose Life" license plate. We wondered: If that neighbor is so hot to trot about choosing life, did she dial up voters or ring doorbells last election? Or did she just put that tag on her car and plant a campaign sign on her lawn for Cuccinelli and his fellow haters, Obenshain and Jackson? If she did, we say this: She has only herself to blame for Herring's decision yesterday.
Like the Tudor court of old, these political battles are a fight to the death. In the anti-choice community's view, it's the "death" of the fetus that's at stake. But we cats know that in the real world, it's the lives of women that matter. Attorney General Mark Herring has made it clear that those are the lives that matter to him, and that's why we'll be in his court when Virginia chooses its next Governor in 2017. In the meantime, we'd rather live in a society slightly more advanced than Tudor England, and we PURR.
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