The GOP’s War on Women:
Very neatly, and on three separate fronts, conservatives in America turned the clock back to the 1950s with their rhetoric about women’s rights Thursday, according to women in politics on both sides of the aisle. This could be a big problem for the GOP when the calendar reaches November.
Let’s take a look at Thursday, February 16, 2012, the day Washington fell into a time-warp.
• On Capitol Hill, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) held hearings on contraception and religious freedom that produced the now-famous picture of a table full of men called to weigh in on access to contraceptives. Democrats wanted a woman — a Georgetown law student with a friend who lost an ovary because the university doesn’t cover birth control — to say her piece at the hearing, but Issa wouldn’t let her on the panel. He said she wasn’t “appropriate or qualified” to discuss the topic at hand.
Jaws dropped in the women’s rights community.
“She didn’t have the right credentials?” NOW President Terry O’Neill scoffed. “I’m thinking to myself, ‘Buddy, you and your little panel over there don’t have the right anatomy to talk about birth control.’”
• Politico published a story about a right wing firestorm that had been burning for days: Did the young women who attended this year’s CPAC wear skirts that were too short? The days following the massive conservative conference, which closed Saturday, were filled with tweets and blog posts weighing in on what conservative pundit Melissa Clouthier called outfits that made the college-age women at CPAC look either “frumpish” or “like two-bit whores.” CPAC needs these women to survive — 55% of attendees at the 2011 conference were under 25 — but apparently conservatives want to make sure they don’t show too much of their legs lest they detract from the solemnity of the proceedings. The general agreement among conservatives after days of debate: a CPAC dress code would go too far — but ladies, please.
Comments
16 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.I swear to fucking Christ that if one motherfucker limits my access to birth control, I will rain down hellfire.
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Well I have testicles, but I’m not qualified to tell you how they work, exactly. Why didn’t they get a female OB-GYN to talk? This girl is a law student with a friend? Unimpressive for this debate. This is all a political side show to make people forget about our ailing economy. They are NOT going to take access to birth control away.
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The OB-GYN wouldn’t have been allowed to talk, either, as Issa stated that the panel was an inquiry into “religious liberty” and not about women’s health and contraception. That was his reason for denying the young woman the ability to testify.
Good thing, too, because how silly would it have been for an avowed celibate (The Most Reverend William E. Lori, Roman Catholic Bishop of Bridgeport, CT) to testify at length in a discussion of women’s health and contraception? /snark
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Considering the HUGE number of anti-abortion provisions passed last year, and the fact that many of these people think that the pill causes abortion, not to mention that Planned Parenthood, which they would love to destroy, is many women’s only real means of access to birth control, I think you’re wrong, unfortunately. The Republican party might have tricked social conservatives into voting for them with empty promises to end abortion and so on in the past, but that group is more and more powerful within the party these days, and a lot of them don’t approve of contraception either.
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They aren’t trying to openly take away birth control from the market. Not the precious market. No, there are many efforts to remove access from poor women, the kind who would rely on PP or insurance to cover the otherwise burdensome cost. The growing number of workers entering low-wage jobs is on the rise, with positions like medical assistants being one of the top growers. The women (and men) taking these jobs need every last penny they make, and their healthcare should include all vital services like contraception. Limiting access to birth control is another attempt to shame women, control their bodies, and invade both public and private life with the unwanted force of religion. I see any attempt to restrain access to birth control as a major affront to feminine liberty and therefore an overt act of sexism.
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I think having a woman testify about the real world consequences of the policies that religious institutions are allowed to make regarding the women who merely work for those institutions is completely appropriate. Can you imagine, say, a miners’ representative being told that his testimony had no relevance at a hearing on mining safety because the hearing was “really” about mine operator’s “freedom” to run the mine any way they felt like it?
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Sometimes I forget that I’m not like everyone else. I start to think that I’m an adult who lives in a free country and that I can do whatever I want with my life. Then one of these helpful men comes along to remind me that I’m actually a filthy whore with the mind of a child.
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You must have a really terrible male dominant lifeform lording over you if he lets you use the internet. Now get back into the kitchen, you heretical hussy.
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Thanking my lucky stars that I’m past menopause. But I weep for my sisters across the country.
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Me, too. But I have three daughters and one granddaughter. I also remember having to pay for birth control pills, and a friend who had a fourth, unwanted child because she couldn’t afford them.
I’m also glad that my father, a staunch Republican, is not around to see what’s happened to the party. I remember him telling me that it was Republicans who said government had to stay out of the bedroom. He’d be a Democrat today, too.
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Barry – freakin’ – Goldwater would be a Democrat today.
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Apparently the GOP is not content with only getting votes from non-Christians, blacks and Latinos who are clinically insane. Now they want to ensure that sane women never vote for them either.
No wonder they have to work so hard at voter suppression.
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When did the GOP leave the 50s? To them the 50s are the real founding of the US. I bet if you got enough conservative pundits to say the Constitution was written in the 50s a lot of people would believe it.
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More recently, Santorum has said he wants to talk to America about the “dangers of contraception.”
The Republican party, or at least Santorum’s faction of the Republican party that thinks government should be legislating personal behavior at every turn, has indeed gone back to the ’50s — the 1450s. They truly want to legislate from the altar, and while I hesitate to speak in such absolutes, there couldn’t be anything less American.
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America seems to have gone straight off the deep end lately, somehow we went from voting in a centrist deomcrat into office to voting in limitations on what should be personal choices, not matters of nationwide legislative debates. As many people have pointed out, there are so many other much more important issues that we should be focusing on as a nation than telling law abiding citizens how they can and can’t live their lives.
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Darrell Issa’s office is a mile from my house. I’ve met him. Nice guy, shitty politic views. Darrell Issa is a Rep?.. doesn’t represent, in my opinion, the people of San Diego, not even close.
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