"Unite Against the War on Women" march, Los Angeles

On Saturday, a coalition of women’s rights, feminist, labor, progressive, and pro-choice groups organized marches in over 50 cities nationwide to protest in favor of President Obama’s health care agenda and against any restriction on abortion rights.

Photojournalist Ringo of Ringo’s Pictures attended the Los Angeles rally and has now posted a report about what happened.

[NOTE: As of 9:00am on May 2, this report has now been UPDATED with new photos, videos, text and links. If you only saw the original “preview” version earlier, keep reading.]

You can view Ringo’s full report here:

Women March Against the Phony “War on Women” – Los Angeles, CA 4/28/2012

This PJM post is merely an excerpt of Ringo’s report, to draw attention to it; click the link above to see plenty more photos.

By adapting the phrase “War on Women,” the protesters are unabashedly aligning themselves with the Democratic Party and the Obama 2012 presidential campaign, both of which are pushing this exact term as a campaign issue this year, claiming that the GOP is waging “a war on women.”

Here’s Ringo’s summary of the impetus behind the march:

We all know the story – When the Catholic Church objected to a provision in President Obama’s 2000 page “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”, that requires Catholic hospitals and schools to provide both contraceptives and so called “Day After” pills as part of their employee healthcare packages, Democrats pulled the old bait and switch, accusing Republicans of engaging in a “War on Women” for supporting the Church’s objections. A 30 year old Democrat activist named Sandra Fluke, posing as a doe-eyed college student, was brought in to speak before a group of House Democrats as part of the “Conscience Clause Committee”. She explained how the Catholic University she attended did not provide her with free contraceptives and so she was forced to spend over $1000.00 per year of her own money to pay for birth control. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, finding Flukes claim of spending $1000.00 per year on contraception to be a bit of an exaggeration, made a series of tasteless jokes about how much sex would be required in order to spend more than $1000.00 on birth control in a mere 365 days….

A rational person might think that the real issue is whether the Federal Government has the right to force a religious organization to provide (or subsidize) services that are in direct opposition to their long held religious values, but Democrats (and the Left in general) are not concerned with reason (or the U.S. Constitution), and they quickly pounced upon Limbaugh’s comments as an opportunity to create a distraction from the true issue at hand.

So on Saturday, April 28th, women (and some men) gathered in various cities around the country to protest against the completely fabricated, entirely phony, non-existent “Republican War on Women”.

I paid a visit to the rally at Pershing Square in the middle of Downtown, Los Angeles.

For a few more specifics about the march, check out the organizers’ Facebook page and the site of a local NOW chapter.

[All photos in this essay are by Ringo of ringospictures.com.]

This short video of a speaker at the rally is a good illustration of exactly the worst argument you can make at a pro-abortion rally:

In psychology, they call this “cognitive dissonance.”

The march was not particularly large — Ringo estimates a few hundred. Here’s his video showing the entire protest column:

An observation from Ringo:

At one point after a speaker gratuitously used the words “penis” and “vagina” again and again, a young girl of perhaps 7 or 8 standing at the front of the stage put her hands over her ears and yelled out, “Hey, there are children here!” to which the woman on stage replied, “Some day you’ll find out what your vagina is for, and then you’ll thank me”. The crowd had a good laugh.

The obscenity wasn’t just on the signs. Here’s what one of the rally’s speakers sounded like (NSFW):

Want to see the full photo essay? Check out Ringo’s report.