Inside the Beltway, while the media and politicians are preoccupied with the latest version of sex, lies and videotape, the real scandal is the assault by the ultra-conservatives on women and our families. Using Zippergate as a smokescreen to distract voters, the Gingrich-led Congress is passing laws that hurt women and working to increase their stranglehold on power.
And while the Republicans in Washington, D.C. accelerate their partisan game of chicken, heedless of whether the government crashes, religious political extremists in Colorado and other states are working to pass ballot measures that will turn back the clock for women.
NOW PACs' Women's Votes Count Campaign is here today to sound the alarm and to help turn out our vote this November 3. We must not allow reactionary forces to make further gains as a result of women voters' disillusionment. If disgust with the current crisis depresses women's votes, we will face a Congress even more hostile to feminist issues and a roll-back of reproductive rights in this state.
We must send Dottie Lamm to the U.S. Senate with reinforcements both in the House and here in Colorado. Women must also get out the vote to elect Gail Schoettler governor and to defeat the onerous anti-abortion rights measures on the Colorado ballot. We have too much at stake in this year's elections to stay home.
By only three votes the U.S. Senate sustained the president's veto of an unconstitutional abortion procedure ban like the one on the ballot here. And the radical right wing is working overtime to eliminate those three votes. NOW PACs' Women's Votes Count Campaign will fight hard to reelect the women we sent to Washington in 1992 -- Barbara Boxer, Carol Moseley-Braun and Patty Murray -- and to add Dottie Lamm to their ranks.
The same people who have targeted Dottie Lamm and Gail Schoettler for defeat and launched attacks on abortion rights are also working hard to elect more "stealth" candidates -- who try to pass themselves off as moderates when, in fact, they are right-wing ideologues. We will be working even harder to increase the margin of victory for candidates who support reproductive freedom and other issues that affect women, our families and our communities.
In the wake of Zippergate, women's progress is indeed at risk -- less from the president's appalling behavior than from the impact of this scandal on electoral politics in 1998 and beyond. The obsessive focus of pols and pundits on White House scandals threatens to eclipse the campaigns of feminist candidates and the fight to preserve abortion rights.
The Women's Votes Count Campaign is organizing activists across the nation to elect candidates at all levels who will support women's equality. We will defeat the anti-choice ballot measures. And we will fill the pipelines with feminists who will take back the Congress and the country. Through this national campaign, we are moving from trying to influence people in power toward becoming the people in power.
I challenge every progressive person in Colorado to get out and vote
on November 3, and to work in these critical last three weeks to elect
feminists and to defeat the anti-abortion rights ballot measures. Your
work and your vote are the only way to put an end to the keyhole peeping
by the House Judiciary Committee and to stop the attacks on our rights
in this state and in Congress. Women have been counted in the endless array
of opinion polls. Now it's time to be heard in the only poll that
really counts -- the voting booth.