Telling married women to “close their legs” doesn’t seem to be working out for them
by digby
Who would have guessed that the party which characterizes women who used birth control as evil sluts would have trouble getting women to vote for them?
Republicans launched a new crop of super PACs, recruitment programs and messaging campaigns to boost the GOP’s female candidates and win over women who vote. The latest such effort, an unrestricted super PAC unveiled in June by former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, cleared $1 million in its first four weeks.
“We cannot permit liberal orthodoxy to marginalize women or suppress their enthusiasm for our candidates,” declared Fiorina, chairwoman of the American Conservative Union Foundation, in the mission statement for her new Unlocking Potential Project. The Unlocking Potential PAC’s top donors last month were Marmik Oil Co. President Michael Murphy and his wife, Arkansas designer Sydney Murphy, who each gave $500,000.
But female Republican fundraisers, PAC organizers and candidates remain badly outgunned by their Democratic counterparts, particularly in Senate contests. Democratic women in this midterm’s most competitive Senate races uniformly raised more than their GOP opponents. Polls in the Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire and North Carolina Senate races all show sizable gender gaps.
And controversies related to women seem to keep dogging the GOP. The Supreme Court’s Burwell v. Hobby Lobby ruling granting religious employers an exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate gave Democrats fresh fundraising fodder. The ruling helped push receipts at EMILY’s List, the Democratic women’s political action committee, to well more than a half-million dollars in June alone, the group’s biggest haul in any month this year. The ruling has sparked proposed legislative fixes on both sides of the aisle.
“That is a huge motivator, both for voters and for donors,” Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesman Justin Barasky said about the Hobby Lobby ruling, “and Republican Senate candidates are on defense about it — especially in Colorado.”
I’m fairly pessimistic about the right wing’s alleged impending destruction — they’ve always been around and I’m going to guess they always will be. And they’ve rigged a system that’s fairly easily rigged (by design) to allow outsized influence even if they are a minority party. But this insane attack on birth control may just make a difference. Public opinion on abortion has remained the same even as the right has successfully rolled back access in much of the country. The stigma has never fully been removed. But birth control? 95% of American women have used it and the birth control methods which are under assault by the right wing are the birth control methods favored by married women. These are the “sluts” these neanderthals are telling to just “close their legs” if they don’t want to get pregnant. It strikes me as a very foolish move.
I have been burned too many times in predicting that they must have gone to far with one thing or another. But these men in congress declaring that they shouldn’t have to “pay for” maternity leave, the ignorant statements that women’s bodies won’t allow them to become pregnant from rape and now this idiotic jihad against birth control as if the only women who “need” it are nymphomaniacs could actually be hurting them. It doesn’t take much of a defection from their ranks for that “demographic” (an insulting way of looking at half the population) to make it impossible for them to win. The only female GOP majority in recent years has been white, married women. Screaming that they’re all a bunch of whores probably isn’t a good way to retain their loyalty.
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