All opinions, all the time

I've gotten incredibly opinionated about women's health issues lately, and I'm okay with that. The newest incident to get me bugged is a story I read about this morning in regards to the cartoon Doonesbury. The writer of the comic, Gary Trudeau, has taken issue with the new abortion laws put in place here in Texas, and created a week-long sketch about it. Some newspapers have elected to not run the sketch. Others have, but put it in the op-ed section. Others still, I'm sure, will run the strip where it belongs, in the comics section. Now, Doonesbury has always had a tendency to get edgy, or topical. Some people like that, some don't. Some don't even read it, and this means nothing to them. Well, I never read the comics, but the news about this particular topic, and then the reaction to it got me perturbed.
Amazingly, I'm not as annoyed at the papers that chose not to run the comic this week (CENSORSHIP!!), as I am at those that put the strip in the op-ed pages (I'm looking at YOU, Los Angeles Times). Duly noted that abortion is a hot topic these days (I still can't fathom why it's a discussion, but let's not get into that again), but isn't every comic an opinion piece? Opinions, of course, are expressions of what a person thinks or feels about something. You can't tell me that there is a comic that doesn't express an opinion about something every single day:
Garfield had an opinion about pizza, Mondays, Odie and naps (good, bad, bad, good, respectively).
Marmaduke had an opinion about barking (pro).
The Family Circus thought kids and parents were ridiculous.
Calvin loved snow, disliked school, liked television, didn't like Susie, and LOVED his male best friend, Hobbes, AND THEY SLEPT AND BATHED TOGETHER.
Cathy thought Irving was good looking.
Every comic is an opinion. It's chicken shit to run a comic expressing a topical and divisive opinion in the op-ed pages. It's more chicken shit to not run the comic at all, but that's for the people who "get out of the kitchen," or who don't care for women's health. I'm posting all of the Doonesbury comics this week on my Facebook page, just because I think every medium that exposes how women's health is being degraded in this country deserves all the attention we can give it. (Here's Monday's; click it to make it bigger.)
STAY AWAY FROM OUR LADY PARTS. (That's my new motto, I think.)