You can call it the apron strings of the election season, a notion William Ross Wallace noted more than 100 years ago when he wrote, “the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.” Women are America’s largest voting bloc and winning requires winning our hearts. That’s not a threat. It’s reality.
Nothing has changed since the president’s unpopular health care law was passed along party lines. Recently, The Hill reported that women are opposed to the individual health care mandate by an astounding 52-39 percent margin.
The Supreme Court’s rewriting of the law as an attempt to say the law is a tax and therefore Constitutional may have settled that specific provision in the courts but it only fuels the grassroots fire.
The decision is not only a blunder on Constitutional grounds but it will also have political fallout come November. Remember, women make 80 percent of all health care decisions and are more likely than men to act as the caregiver when a family member falls ill. Forcing women, under the new healthcare law, to pay for health care services they do not need or want is pure tyranny.
Women are eager to elect representatives, whether it be in the state house or the White House, who listen to our concerns, our needs and our priorities. It’s wishful thinking to believe a candidate on a white horse will ride in and fix all that’s broken in our nation. However, our political leaders make decisions that directly impact our lives. They have amazing control over everything from how much of our paychecks we keep, to terrorism, to the national debt. Women have to keep fighting.
On the other hand, we need to tell President Obama that raising taxes is regressive and a particularly bad idea in a recession. Twenty new taxes in his healthcare law are astounding. A study by Americans for Tax Reform purports that the healthcare law will heap a whopping $670 billion in tax increases onto the backs of citizens. Moreover, Concerned Women for America’s (CWA) study, “Obamanomics,” explains how this tax increase will hurt women more than men because women enter and exit the labor force more often and for longer periods of time. For example, women generally outlive their husbands by 15-18 years of life.
The question you’re probably wondering is, if women have the political will-power to determine the trajectory of the nation, then how did we come to find ourselves in this troubled political climate?
The answer is that a missing link has existed over the past 30 years – conservative women.
Look around you at church on Sunday. See the mom to your left and the young single woman on your right? One is not registered to vote. Of the registered women in your church, only half will actually cast their ballot on election day.
It isn’t that conservative women have ignored the course of public policy. They’ve stayed busy tending to their families, churches, and community activities.
Concerned Women for America (CWA) is the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization and is uniquely positioned to connect with and advocate for women and families. Over the past three decades, CWA has built an effective grassroots network of conservative activists, which includes 500,000 constituents and 600 chapters reaching women, families, and cultural leaders.
Now, through our get-out-the-vote campaign, She Votes 2012, conservative women are joining forces to steer the direction of the country. She Votes 2012 works to raise awareness and activism of women, resulting in stronger conservative leadership on the state and federal level. By using phone-banks, social media, and public events we are encouraging our mothers, sisters and friends at the grassroots level to encourage voter participation and remind them that political involvement is one more step we can use to protect our families’ well-being.
Of the country’s 60 million Christian conservative women, only 30 million will register to vote and 15 million will turn out to the polls on Election Day. If She Votes 2012 mobilizes five million of these citizens through education and activism, then we can affect the entire election.
This is how women can solve the nation’s problems. If conservative Christian women vote, then the outcome will result in electing like-minded representatives working together for a common goal. And like a newborn, rocking in the cradle, it’s a powerful thing.