This morning I sent a bunch of emails to several feminist and pro-choice bloggers on the matter of Matt Brown. Right after the Alito confirmation I sent an email to Matt Burguess, Matt Brown's communications director. I've been receiving their press releases probably like everybody maybe many other political bloggers all around the country.

I am fed up with what I think is a lack of vulvas, not cojones, effecting the political discourse around choice. We need more feminists raising money, evaluating and promoting candidates, getting on the TV and radio and newspapers and the net and blasting over and over and over again that forced pregnancies are anti-American, that forced pregnancies are a new kind of slavery, that forced pregnancies are a fundamental crime against humanity.

We need to have more women speak like this publicly to all candidates, Democrats and Republicans. I was introduced here in New York City to Eric Massa, an upstate New York candidate running for Congress. I was very happyt to know he's running against Randi Kuhn, a Republican who has been taking tons of money and support from the extreme right with organizations like Focus on the Family and the Homeschool Legal Defence Association. But then, he lost me. When I asked Mr. Massa how we stood on abortion he flubbed, he fumbled, he totally ho-hummed.

As much as I'd like to have a pregnacist tool like Randi Kuhn out of office, it does not make me warm and fuzzy at all to have to fucking spend an hour with a candidate educating him on why finding a moral or religious reason to be against the idea of abortion has to necessarily mean he, as a public servant, has to be against the constitutionally protected right of women to reproductive autonomy.

It's like I'm going to have to print out Mario Cuomo's speech, On Religion and Morality and give it to these so-called values candidates to frigging memorize.

[via c u l t u r e k i t c h e n: Mario Cuomo on Religion and Morality]:

The Catholic Church is my spiritual home. My heart is there, and my hope.

There is, of course, more to being a Catholic than a sense of spiritual and emotional resonance. Catholicism is a religion of the head as well as the heart, and to be a Catholic is to say, "I believe", to the essential core of dogmas that distinguishes our faith.

The acceptance of this faith requires a lifelong struggle to understand it more fully and to live it more truly, to translate truth into experience, to practice as well as to believe.

That's not easy: applying religious belief to everyday life often presents difficult challenges.

It's always been that way. It certainly is today. The America of the late twentieth century is a consumer society, filled with endless distractions, where faith is more often dismissed than challenged, where the ethnic and other loyalties that once fastened us to our religion seemed to be weakening.

In addition to all the weaknesses, dilemmas, and temptations that impede every pilgrim's progress, the Catholic who holds political office in a pluralistic democracy --who is elected to serve Jews and Muslims, atheists and Protestants, as well as Catholics-- bears special responsibility. He or she undertakes to help create conditions under which all can live with a maximum of dignity and with a reasonable degree of freedom; where everyone who chooses may hold beliefs different from specifically Catholic ones, sometimes contradictory to them; where the laws protect people's right to divorce, to use birth control, and even to choose abortion.

In fact, Catholic public officials take an oath to preserve the Constitution that guarantees his freedom. And they do so gladly. Not because they love what others do with their freedom, but because they realize that in guaranteeing freedom for all, they guarantee our right to be Catholics: our right to pray, to use the sacraments, to refuse birth control devices, to reject abortion, not to divorce and remarry if we believe it to be wrong.

The Catholic public official lives the political truth most Catholics through most of American history have accepted and insisted on: the truth that to assure our freedom we must allow others the same freedom, even if occasionally it produces conduct by them which we would hold to be sinful.

I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant, or nonbeliever, or as anything else you choose.

We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might someday force theirs on us.

This bears copying and posting on every single so-called liberal blogger that finds the time to rationalize a confederalist ban on abortion.

So I told Matt Brown's campaign people that I am in. They're eager to know what is it that I have in mind. I'd like to help with his campaign in any way I can. Especially if that means kicking Licoln Chafee's ass out of Congress.

This post is the first step. The second? Get more people on board. So my question is, who's wants to join in on the ass kicking?

Michael Bouldin, one of my co-editors at The Daily Gotham agrees this is a good race. I'm still going to go against his better judgement and I'm also going to support Chuck Pennacchio over Bob Casey Jr. in Pennsylvania JUST TO PISS THE VICHY DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICRATS OFF.

I think it's a good point-counterpoint strategy. We have a pro-choice candidate in Rhode Island that could really win it and one in Pennsylvania who'd be our "moral victory" and message to the Republicrats.

What do I have in mind?

I think we all should look into creating a PAC, a feminist bloggers PAC. Lorraine also had the brilliant idea of creating a "Candidate of the Week" feature where we look at candidates across the country that look good from a feminist and pro-choice point of view.

I'd like to add to that a "Judge Watch". We need to start taking a real serious look at people who are on the bench at the moment and get ready for a possible replacement to Justice Stevens.

I also believe that we should be taking seriously the idea of networking our blogs with the meme, the message. If we blog once about candidates and/or issue involving their selection and endorsement, at the end of the week we all should have a round-up of all links published, just like the gossip bloggers do. It will center the attention and focus on the messages we want to put out. Because, we really do not have to "on message" as much as committed to get our side of the story consistently out there.

Networking on and off the net is also important. I believe that having meetings or conference calls among us --sans candidates-- is important. We here in the national blogosphere need to get in the practice of doing more groundwork. And I can tell you right now it is not easy.

One of the big criticisms we have at The Daily Gotham is that we don't post enough. Well, if you are a national politics blogger that posts about New York City, you ought to cross-post at our blog. We need more bloggers because all the people involved in that blog are also political activists. We are pounding the pavement as well as writing; all on a volunteer basis and with families to support.

It is not easy to do both, the blogging and the political activism, but that is the challenge for us at the national level : We need to bring this political activism and network it with people off the Internet. We need to bring the blog revolution to the streets.

Allowing for meetings offline, for conference calls with bloggers and non-bloggers we may be able to spread this energy farther afield. We start among us, bring in non-blogging activist and move that beyond to regular folk who are just like you and me ... but don't blog or read the blogs or even have a computer.

The bottom line is that we need to do what many of these fine advocacy and political institutions do not do : We need to create such a critical mass that we become irrelevant because we've created a movement and not popularity contest.

I have not seen her this season at the soccer classes, but Elise, a homeschooling friend of mine said to me sometime last year, "I have to thank you for your blog because you break down the issues for me. I have no clue what's going on by reading the papers but with you I get it".

Elise is the kind of people I want to reach. Yeah, it's nice to know that people all over Capitol Hill, Albany and Capitol Hill read my blogs. What brings me satisfaction is knowing that there are some soccer moms out there being moved to action because "I've broken it down" for them; because I've shed light on the issues that matter.

There are legions of soccer and PTA moms that ought to have been storming Capitol Hill, voicing their disapproval of Alito. I consider my inability to get that message across as more of a stumbling due to my insecurities than a failure.

If there is one thing I have learned from the Alito nominations is that we do need more pundits. We do not need more 'political experts' or 'legal strategists' or 'policy wonks' in the blogosphere. What we need is regular people, with regular voices effecting how we think and talk about not just politics but our rights as human beings to exercise our free will and personal autonomy without some government, religion or institution trying to stop us.

Yeah, I make up weird words and phrases like "pregnancists" or "human harvesting", but they caught your attention, didn't they?

So I am in on the Matt Brown and the Chuck Pennacchio races. Jane Hamscher over at FireDogLake has already raised 6K for a list of her pro-choice candidates and there's other people getting busy.

So who's in; what do you want to do and when do you want to start doing it?