Hey ladies get busy. Time to procreate and MAGA!by digby
This is a fundamental white nationalist view. Whether Paul Ryan knows that, I don’t know. But it’s fucking digusting either way:
During a news conference on Thursday, House Speaker Paul Ryan urged American women to have more babies, saying their lack of procreation was stunting economic growth.
“People — this is going to be the new economic challenge for America. People,” Ryan said, in response to a question about entitlement reform.
Alluding to the fact that he’s a father of three, Ryan added, “I did my part, but we need to have higher birth rates in this country. Meaning, baby boomers are retiring, and we have fewer people following them in the work force.”
“We have something like a 90 percent increase in the retirement population in America, but only a 19 percent increase in the working population in American,” the Speaker continued. “So what do we have to do? Be smarter, more efficient, more technology — still going to need more people. And when we have tens of millions of people right here in this country falling short of their potential — not working, not looking for a job, or not in school getting a skill to get a job — that’s a problem.”
While it is true that birth rates in the U.S. have been declining, that’s not necessarily bad news — for instance, birth rates for teenagers hit a record low last year. Ryan’s comments also overlook the possibility that people may not share his belief that economic growth is a goal to be pursued at any and all costs.
Furthermore, there’s an obvious solution to the problem that Ryan completely ignores — allowing more immigrants into the country to fill the jobs being vacated by retiring baby boomers. But instead of using his position as House Speaker to pursue immigration reform, Ryan has instead indicated he’s on board with Trump’s hardline anti-immigration positions, including the president’s insistence on spending billions of dollars on a border wall.
Ryan isn’t alone among male Wisconsin Republicans in believing that women should have more babies for the good of the economy. On the floor of the Wisconsin State Assembly last month, Wisconsin state Rep. Scott Allen (R) argued on behalf of a bill that would prevent health insurance plans for state employees from covering most abortions, saying more births are needed to spur economic growth.
Women aren’t brood mares to grow the American herd. They have every right to have fewer children if thy choose and the idea that they have an obligation to procreate to help the economy is just sick, particularly when there are people clamoring to come to this country to work and these white supremacists want to build walls to keep them out.
This stuff is now in mainstream establishment GOP rhetoric and it’s scary as hell. For all the women’s empowerment we see in the headlines, this is where the other side of the argument comes down. And it’s not new:
The fear of being outnumbered by racial and ethnic minorities is the driving force of the so-called alt-right, and in this regard, they are no different from many nationalist movements abroad, or from previous white nationalist movements in American history.
Kelly J. Baker, a religious history scholar and the author of Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930, says that the need to ensure that more white women were having white babies was a key part of the Ku Klux Klan’s platform during its resurgence in the 1920s and 1930s.
“One of their planks was a defense of white womanhood,” Baker told HuffPost. “They’re very explicit that they have to protect white women from Black men, but also from immigrant men and Jewish men.”
The resurgent Klan was also fixated on the home and the family and on women’s roles in it. The Klan’s position was that “the best role that a woman can have is as a wife and mother who’s going to instill in her children patriotism and white supremacy,” Baker said.
Nearly a century later, the self-proclaimed alt-right has similar fears, and, when it comes to the rightful place of white women, similar goals. The movement seeks the “restoration” of what some leaders call “natural relations” between men and women — that is, men leading in public life and women confined to the domestic sphere, with marriage and procreation for all. To this end, the so-called alt-right sets itself against feminism and the feminist insistence that women and men have a right to an equal footing in public life and that encourages men to contribute more labor in the domestic sphere.
Think about Trump going on about “beautiful Kate” being killed by the illegal immigrant. And his Central Park Five diatribe. Ryan’s not that explicit. He may even think it’s ok if the Latinas and African American women breed too, that just how non-racist he is. He’s just saying that American women need to do “their part” to Make America Great Again. And we all know what that means, don’t we?
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