Who’s the civic illiterate, George?
by digby
Gird your loins ladies, George Will is wading into women’s issues again:
One of the wonders of this political moment is feminist contentment about the infantilization of women in the name of progressive politics. Government, encouraging academic administrations to micromanage campus sexual interactions, now assumes that, absent a script, women cannot cope. And the Democrats’ trope about the Republicans’ “war on women” clearly assumes that women are civic illiterates.
Access to contraception has been a constitutional right for 49 years (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965). The judiciary has controlled abortion policy for 41 years (Roe v. Wade, 1973). Yet the Democratic Party thinks women can be panicked into voting about mythical menaces to these things.
LIMBAUGH: What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke [sic], who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.
She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps.
The johns, that’s right. We would be the johns — no! We’re not the johns. Well — yeah, that’s right. Pimp’s not the right word.
OK, so, she’s not a slut. She’s round-heeled. I take it back. [Premiere Radio Networks, The Rush Limbaugh Show, 2/29/12]
The Family Research Council hosted a panel discussion Wednesday on religious liberty in America. If you have paid any attention at all to the frantic warnings from FRC’s Tony Perkins that tyranny is on the march, you could have guessed what was coming. The overall theme of the conversation was that the HHS mandate for insurance coverage of contraception is a dire threat to religious freedom in America. So are the advance of marriage equality and laws against anti-gay discrimination – or the “sexual liberty agenda.”
“I’m beginning to get some evidence from certain doctors and certain scientists that have done research on women’s wombs after they’ve gone through the surgery, and they’ve compared the wombs of women who were on the birth control pill to those who were not on the birth control pill. And they have found that with women who are on the birth control pill, there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb. They’re just like dead babies. They’re on the inside of the womb. And these wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.”
One of the things I will talk about that no President has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea. Many in the Christian faith have said, “Well, that’s okay. Contraception’s okay.”
It’s not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They’re supposed to be within marriage, they are supposed to be for purposes that are, yes, conjugal, but also [inaudible], but also procreative.
“This same administration said that the churches and the institutions they run, such as schools and let’s say adoption agencies, hospitals, that they have to provide for their employees free of charge, contraceptives, morning after pills, in other words abortive pills, and the like at no cost,” Romney said.
There has been a lot of talk about the Obama administration’s attack on the Catholic church,” Gingrich said. “The fact is Governor Romney insisted that Catholic hospitals give out abortion pills against their religious belief when he was governor. So you have a similar pattern.”
Now maybe there’s little chance that any of these men are serious about banning birth control. Some of them, like Gingrich and Romney, seem to be using the term “abortion pill” as a red meat sleight of hand to entice their voters. Nonetheless, all of those quotes are sufficient to give the “civic illiterates” cause to think that any pro-life Republican who votes for “personhood” might be a tad hostile to contraception. After all, while it’s true that the right to access contraception has been the law of the land for more than 40 years so has the right to have an abortion. And I don’t think even George Will is so out of touch that he doesn’t know that Republicans are as serious as a heart attack about reversing that right. Why should we believe they are only kidding when it comes to birth control? After all, people as different as Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum seem to think that women who use birth control are either sluts who “can hardly walk” or are unfortunately driven by their base desires and refuse to see that sex is supposed to be procreative.
The basis of the objection to abortion is an objection to women’s agency. Reproductive freedom is intrinsic to that. There is no reason to assume that the people who are trying to end abortion rights are any less serious about ending the right to contraception. Any woman would be a fool to take that chance.
Oh, and George Will understands women’s issues about as well as I understand video games. He makes a fool of himself every time.
.