It’s a more than even chance that our next president could be a woman. As the old cigarette commercial said, “You’ve come a long way, Baby!”

But we haven’t come far enough, as this graphic from the National Women’s Law Center shows. Just look at the pay disparities, especially among women of color.

When I started working in daily newspapers in 1982, I was paid $50 a week less than a man in the same level with the same experience.

I complained and got a raise, and later found out he got a raise, too, to keep his paycheck larger than mine. He was after all, a man, and I was just a women.

It was assumed that I was just working for spending money, even though I had two children to feed, clothe and shelter and my coworker was unmarried and lived with his mother, whose house was paid off.

It didn’t matter. I deserved less because I’m a woman.

And that’s not all. I had to have a “note” from my doctor — in addition to the prescription — saying my prescription for the Pill was for medical reasons and not birth control, while men were able to get testosterone treatment without any special requests.

Until the mid-1970s, an unmarried woman in Massachusetts couldn’t get birth control. If she did, she wasn’t the one punished, though; it was her doctor who faced charges.

Most of the people who make the decision to force women’s health clinics to close are men, and they do it under the guise of being “pro-life,” — even though nearly all of what these clinics do is provide health care to women who have no other place to go for well-woman checks, contraception and cancer screenings.

Here in North Carolina, legislators have led a fierce and prolonged attack on women’s rights.

Remember the so-called Motorcycle Safety Bill that shut down virtually every women’s health clinic in the state? That bill contained precisely 17 words about motorcycles. The rest was all about denying women their right to health care and to legal abortions.

Women make less money than men, and now we have less access to quality health care.

Some legislators are talking about making birth control pills non-prescription, supposedly so women can have greater access. But making them over-the-counter will mean insurance policies can’t cover the cost. Women will have to pay the full price, not just a co-pay.

More women live in poverty than men, partly because we make less, but also because we usually are the ones who care for our children and men all too often get out of paying sufficient support for their children.

It’s time for us to stand up and put a stop to this attack on our health care, our reproductive rights and our incomes. We need to work together, and we need women of all ages, not just women who fought the fight 50 years ago.

Me, speaking at last night’s Bitter Pill rally. We all wore these silly pillbox hats, but we are very serious about protecting women’s rights.

Last night, I spoke at a rally for women’s rights. It was sponsored by the National Organization for Women, which I re-joined the day of the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision. It is time again for feminism.

When I was 18, I got engaged and went to the doctor for a prescription for the pill. He couldn’t give it to me unless it was within two months of my wedding.

It wasn’t his choice. In 1971, doctors in Massachusetts were forbidden by law to prescribe any contraception to unmarried women. It wasn’t against the law for women; it was illegal for doctors, since women weren’t to be trusted making those kinds of decisions about our own bodies.

Young women today don’t remember this and so were pretty much absent from yesterday’s rally.

It’s all done under the guise of protecting innocent babies, but it’s really about pushing women back under the thumbs of men. If we can’t control our own bodies, we can’t control much else about our lives.

Young women today don’t remember that women could be fired just for getting married. They don’t remember young women dying in desperate attempts at abortions after they were denied contraception.

As recently as the 1980s, insurance companies refused to cover contraception for women. I went to pick up an prescription for the Pill for medical purposes and the pharmacist told me I needed a note from my doctor. I waved the prescription and said, “This is a note from my doctor. This is hormone therapy and I expect it to be filled now.”

Well, the insurance company didn’t pay for contraception, so I would need a note from your doctor”

I started waving the prescription again when a man who had been standing nearby stepped up.

“Why is my testosterone replacement therapy not questioned?” he asked. “That’s just wrong. If I can get hormone therapy without question, she should be able to as well.”

He wasn’t an attorney, but his logic seemed frightening enough that the pharmacist called the insurance company and informed them he would fill prescriptions for hormones for everyone with no questions asked, and unless they wanted to fight an expensive lawsuit, they would pay.

Since lawsuits were working their way through the courts already, the insurance company agreed to fill my prescriptions without question.

Now the Hobby Lobby decision makes this same scenario possible. I can’t believe I still have to fight for this.

A young woman recently said to me, “If she opens her legs she should be ready to live with the consequences.”

Why is it acceptable for a young man to “sow his wold oats,” but not a woman? Where the hell is he supposed to sow those oats if women can’t have sex? And why isn’t he forced to suffer the consequences? Why isn’t he shamed?

I did teach my sons that sex was for creating babies and if they weren’t ready to parent, they weren’t ready for sex. I knew, however, that it was highly unlikely they would wait to have sex, so I taught them about contraception. Abstinence is the only foolproof method, and the Pill is a pretty close second. But I stressed again and again that they were as responsible for any consequences as their partners.

Secondly, when I was a young woman, it was legal for a man to forcibly rape his wife. If she wound up pregnant, that was supposed to be a blessing from God.

A woman could be forced to bring a new life into a violent home where its life would be endangered by an abusive father. A son would be likely to follow in his father’s footsteps and become abusive; a daughter would be likely to marry an abusive man.

But that didn’t matter to the white men in power; it still doesn’t.

I don’t remember the struggle for the right to vote; my grandmother’s generation fought that battle. But I remember enough about women’s struggle for equality to know we’re losing our precious rights, and I can’t sit still for that.

I thought we won these battles back in the 1960s and 70s, but our right to control our bodies is slipping away from us and we have to stand up and fight again.

We need young women in the fight, though. They take it for granted that they can get contraception, that they can go to a woman’s clinic for checkups and prescriptions. Women’s clinics are closing across the country as powerful old men claim they’re nothing more than abortion factories.

In truth, these clinics provide affordable care for millions of women. Until every state in the nation has expanded Medicaid, these clinics are the only access to care that low-income women have.

More than 85 percent of he services provided by women’s clinics have nothing to do with abortion, but women going in for checkups, contraception and cancer screenings are subjected to verbal, emotional and physical abuse. Even women seeking abortions deserve the respect of making this horrible decision without being screamed at, spit upon and hit.

If this abuse really was about the babies, there would be more help for women and children.

If you only support the fetus, you are not pro-life. You are anti-woman, and that is not acceptable.

We women are onto the effort to subjugate us again, and we’re not going. We will fight, and we will win.

If you don’t know history, you might think Rep. Louie Gohmert was just spewing harmless crap on Wednesday when he accused immigrants of coming into this country as sexual predators looking for white women to ravish.

While he was spewing crap, it was the same crap that white people spewed as an excuse to torture and kill innocent African-American men on lynching trees and lamp posts from the 1880 to the 1940s in this country.

More than 5,000 African-Americans were slaughtered during this killing spree, very often falsely accused of raping — or wanting to rape — white women.

Emmett Till before and after he was “punished” for speaking to a white woman in Jim Crow Mississippi.

On Aug. 24, 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was visiting relatives in Money, Miss. He was from Chicago, so he was unfamiliar withe he rules black men and boys were forced to live under in the Jim Crow South.

He and some cousins went into a store to buy some gum after a long day picking cotton, and it is believed Till had the audacity to flirt with or whistle at the store owner’s wife. No one knows for certain what the offense was, but it was punishable by death.

Three days later, a group of angry white men went to the house where young Emmett was staying, dragged him out and drove away with him.

He was beaten beyond recognition, shot in the head, tied with barbed wire and thrown in the Tallahatchie River. When his body was pulled out of the river three days later, the only way his relatives could identify him was by the signet ring his mother had given him before he left Chicago.

The Rev. James Cone, in his book The Cross and the Lynching Tree,”  writes at length about the fear instilled in African-Americans by the lynching tree. You didn’t have to be related to anyone who was lynched, you only had to know how people were dragged from their homes, tortured — beaten, castrated, raised and lowered over a fire to prolong their suffering and then, finally, killed.

White people came out by the thousands to watch the terror because it was entertainment to see another human being tortured and killed. They took body parts as souvenirs. They had their pictures taken next to the corpse as it hung from the lynching tree. They bought post cards and sent them to family and friends.

Politicians ignored the horrors — in fact, some took part in the carnage. Still, the description of the perpetrators was always “persons unknown.”

The excuse more often than not was that black men were sexual predators and the whites were “protecting” their women.

So here, Rep. Gohmert accuses the president — an African-American man — of not protecting women from Latino men, using the same rhetoric that was used as an excuse for the terrorizing of African-Americans for generations.

Gohmert deserves to be driven out of Washington. He should be forced to hear the stories of people who were lynched, be forced to see the photos of Emmett Till’s mutilated body. And there are photos because Till’s mother insisted on an open casket so the world could see what had been done to her precious son.

This is not idle chatter Gohmert is spewing; it is terrorist rhetoric. He is deliberately inciting fear and anger and promoting the same thing that kept African-Americans subjugated in fear for 400 years in America.

I don’t support the death penalty for anyone, not even for hate-filled people like Gohmert. However, we must call him out on this. I planned to send him a lengthy e-mail, but he only accepts e-mails from his Texas First District constituents.

Gohmert is a coward in the first degree, and we need to let him know that’s what we think.

You can message him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Louie-Gohmert/50375006903.

Oh, and take a look at the photo on the page of Louie with an African-American child. Apparently, he is completely unaware of the irony.

I have seen a number of posts today on Facebook, claiming the Hobby Lobby decision is a victory for religious freedom. Actually, it’s not.

Although the owners of Hobby Lobby say they have religious objections to certain kinds of contraception, the company invests in corporations that manufacture the very kinds of birth control they claim to oppose, which reeks of hypocrisy.

This is about having the power to control other people, in this case, women.

Men can still have drugs for chemically induced erections, they can have penile pumps and they can have vasectomies. But women can’t have the contraception method of their choice.

It doesn’t matter that I may not share their beliefs; I have to live by them anyway. That’s what the separation of church and state was all about.

We know that if Muslims had brought this case it never would have been heard by the Supreme Court. Let’s not pretend it would be any other way.

If you want to talk about Bible, let’s do. I was raised in a church at least as far-right-wing as these folks.

We didn’t go to dances; we didn’t go to R-rated movies. We didn’t try to have them banned, we just didn’t go. If we didn’t like what was on TV, we watched something else or turned it off.

Would they have liked to control everything? Sure, but back then, they knew they couldn’t. Now they can.

So-called Christians have gotten bolder in their quest to impose their religion on the rest of us because they made a pact with Republicans, who gave them power in exchange for voting against their own best interests. Now they believe they’re persecuted if everyone isn’t forced to live by their beliefs.

I rejected the misogynistic, racist beliefs promoted by the church I was raised in when I was a teenager, and I don’t want to live by them today.

Jesus once was asked why anyone should pay taxes. He asked the person to show him a coin.

“Whose likeness is on that coin?” he asked.

“Caesar,” was the reply.

“Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” he said.

In other words, government is not your religion. To follow God, you must be the one following and you don’t have the right to force others to practice your beliefs any more than they have the right to impose theirs on you. Government and God are two separate entities. If it wasn’t OK for the Romans to force their beliefs on and persecute Christians, it isn’t OK for Christians to do that to others.

This is about not trusting women to make our own choices about health care. To them, it’s about original sin. See, they believe Eve committed the first sin and therefore no woman can be trusted. Women are to be controlled at all times, in every way. If they have sex, they deserve to get pregnant.

That’s why it’s OK for men to have Viagra and penile implants. That’s why women so often are blamed for rape and domestic abuse. We were the original sinners in their eyes, so it’s always our fault when men abuse them. He’s only asserting his natural authority, after all.

Think about the first two questions that come to mind when a woman is raped: Where was she? What was she wearing?

If you think it’s anything less than this, I think you’re wrong. I grew up among people who thought like this, and I heard their “logic” for my entire childhood and adolescence.

I have re-joined the National Organization for Women. I will join Emily’s List.

I thought women won these battles two generations ago, but I see the fight isn’t over yet.

I’m a bit confused about the rhetoric from the right lately. A few months ago, the president was un-American for leaving Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in a prison in Afghanistan because “we don’t leave anyone behind.”

So, the president got him out and now he should be impeached for doing so, even though Richard Nixon got John McCain out of a Vietnamese prison the same way.

Until last week, the right was screaming that we needed to bring the Benghazi mastermind to justice, so when we capture him, they scream it was done to benefit Hillary Clinton’s book tour.

George Bush and company started an illegal war in Iraq and now that the result is a massive disruption, the right criticizes Obama for not going back in and risking more American lives for Bush’s folly.

The right blames President Obama for the fiasco at the VA, but it was Bush who started two wars with no plan to pay for them and then no way to care for the soldiers who were sent into combat four, five and six times.

Yes, Obama knew about the mess when he came into office, but he was thwarted by the GOP every time he asked for more money for the VA.

He was thwarted when he asked for more money to defend embassies and other diplomatic outposts around the world and then criticized when one of those outposts — in Benghazi, Libya — was attacked and four Americans were killed.

It’s obvious this president can do nothing to please the right wing, even when he meets their demands.

A couple weeks ago, a conservative legislator accused the Moral Mondays protesters of being hypocritical because we didn’t have these demonstrations when the Democrats were in power.

Not true, I told him. The NC NAACP has been doing HKonJ demonstrations in Raleigh every February since 2007. The difference was that the Democrats would meet with us and talk to us and listen to our concerns. The leadership now runs away from us.

Yes, my legislator, Tim Moffitt, will meet with me and treat me with respect, but the leadership is so arrogant, they refuse to talk to anyone who doesn’t agree with them. Then they lie about it, claiming we’re the ones who won’t sit down and talk.

Seriously, why don’t their pants really catch on fire?

George Will thinks that women who have been the victims of sexual violence have a special status and that we embrace it.

I would hardly classify the shame and guilt I experienced after being molested by a family member special. More than a half century later, I still live with it.

Embrace it? I spit on it. It took me years and some disastrous relationships to learn to function in a healthy relationship because of what happened to me as a child.

More often that not, victims of childhood sexual violence grow up to become victims of adult sexual violence. Because the victim of this crime is told by society to be ashamed, to feel unworthy of respect.

Things you think protect us actually do us more damage. Why shouldn’t my name be used? If I was beaten with a baseball bat, people wouldn’t even ask if I wanted my name withheld. But because I was the victim of sexual violence, I should feel ashamed to have my name used in public.

The inference is that I somehow caused my relative to molest me. Perhaps I cast a sultry 3-year-old glance in his direction. Maybe it was the short dresses I wore or the fact that I had the audacity to be alone in a room with him.

I can still see my chubby little fingers closing around the quarter he gave me — hush money. I can still remember feeling dirty and knowing I would be punished if I said anything. The abuse continued for years.

I didn’t say anything to anyone until I was in my 30s. My sister challenged me. He had tried it with her too, but she got away from him. She was saucy enough to tell his secret; I was not.

Once, a year or so after our conversation, my sister asked why I was being so open about it.

“Maybe you shouldn’t tell people,” she said.

I’ve spent many hours in front of a mirror telling myself I was the victim of a crime and I have nothing to be ashamed of. I still don’t always believe it.

Being a victim of sexual violence changes you. We are more likely to have depression, to overeat, to abuse alcohol and drugs, to have unsafe sex, and therefore to contract STDs, and to become victims of abuse.

When we report the sexual violence, we’re always asked why we were walking alone at night or why we wore those shoes or that dress, as though it’s our responsibility to quiet men’s “natural urges.”

In our rape culture, we blame the victim, while too many men go on thinking we’re here to fulfill their desires. If we resist their come-ons, we must be “frigid” or lesbians. There’s this sense of entitlement among some men that says we’re here just for them. If they desire us, they’re entitled to take what they want because we wore those shoes or that dress or we went into a bar alone.

Back when the Kennedy kid was accused of rape, the young woman was ostracized for taking off her pantyhose before a barefoot walk on a beach, while no one said a word about the young man taking off his socks. And it should be pointed out that taking off one’s socks is not the same as “Come hither.”

So, violence is done to us and we are blamed.

Breaking free from that is difficult at best. It takes an incredible amount of work on ourselves to begin to feel worthy of respect.

If you think that’s a special status, fine, as long as you understand the special thing is that we survived it.

If you think we embrace it, think again.

Perhaps if you had been raped your understanding would be different. But I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, Mr. Will, not even you.