Open Letter: Rep. Andrea Kieffer
Shut up, girl.
Hi. Let’s chat. I don’t have the patience for pleasantries. Sorry, not sorry.
“We heard several bills last week about women’s issues and I kept thinking to myself, these bills are putting us backwards in time. We are losing the respect that we so dearly want in the workplace by bringing up all these special bills for women and almost making us look like whiners.”
So I’m going to say this:
You are a woman. You are also a politician. Politicians tend to make their jobs a top priority. That’s totally fine, nothing wrong with that. But in you putting your career first you’re forgetting that you and I have something in common. We sit down to use the bathroom. Because we sit down to use the bathroom people who don’t sit down to use the bathroom tend to look at us as less than. That’s not hyperbole, Andrea. That’s an unadulterated fact. You want people to vote for you, right? Well, if not for a bunch of whiny women…you wouldn’t be able to vote, hold public office, do what you want with your uterus, etc. A bunch of whiny women stood up for rights you should have had since the very beginning just because you’re human. Thank them.
Almost 25% of America’s children are raised by their mothers in a single parent home. Let’s do math, Andrea. There’s approximately 76,000,000 children under the age of 18 in the United States of America. If twenty five percent of them are raised in single parent families that’s almost 20,000,000 children. The average American woman has 2 children. I don’t have any children and I can’t support myself on minimum wage. If I had a child, I’d be truly destitute. If the minimum wage was raised to accommodate current economic trends, how does that hurt you? It doesn’t. But it will put a lot of poverty stricken women and children above the poverty line. It will put clothes, healthy food, school supplies, health care, and improved living conditions in the reach of millions of women and their children.
Someone like you may tell women that if they can’t afford to have children then don’t have them. You’re assuming every single mother starts out poor, single and struggling. Life is messy and it will always throw something at you that you weren’t expecting. But that isn’t the issue here. The issue is you. You cannot possibly be serious when you say that women wanting equal pay to men is “whiny”. You simply cannot. Parents wanting to be able to stay home with their sick children? Take them to the doctor? These are crazy requests? What is wrong with you? This isn’t even JUST about women, it’s about moms and dads being able to provide for their families without having to cut corners. They’re poor because the wages are too low and the cost of living is too high.
These bills that were introduced to you exist to serve men, women and children. Each bill is a shovel that would help people dig themselves out of unfortunate situations. Having an economic barrier stand in your way can create a snowball effect that pushes you into a rut so wide and deep that you can’t dig yourself out of it. I know what that struggle feels like for just one person. I can’t imagine what parents go through in situations like that. Your blatant lack of compassion for people who don’t share your economic comfort is disgusting, appalling and abhorrent.
You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
❤ Niki
