Conservative Assault on Women's Rights
So, you probably heard ala Sarah Palin that this is the Year of the Conservative Woman! Woo Hoo for equal rights! Er, wait a minute…Remember 2008, when women were expected to vote for Sarah Palin just because she was a woman? She was supposed to be our consolation prize for Hillary. Sadly for John McCain, we were not so easily duped. So, let’s look under that Year of the Conservative Woman hood to see what it stands for, shall we?
Sure, this field could be super broad, but let’s just focus on this week’s winners of the Patriarchy Award: Sharron Angle (Senate Candidate R-NV) and David Vitter (R-LA). Sharron Angle announced that she’s against abortion even when a girl is raped by her own father, and indeed, the Mama Grizzly Conservative suggests that said rape victims make “lemonade out of lemonsâ€. But hold on to your outrage, my friends, because the compassionate conservatives also bring us David Vitter (he of the diaper changing prostitute who kept his seat because it’s OK when Republicans do it), who appointed a man who was found GUILTY of stabbing his girlfriend to be in charge of women’s issues. This man was the point man for the domestic violence coalition. No, I’m not kidding.
Let’s dive right into the bitter tang of Patriarchy on a Friday:
Republicans like to talk a lot about God’s Plan. Sharron Angle thinks God has a plan for rape victims. It sure seems like God has a plan for Sharron Angle, and it’s looking like it isn’t the US Senate. Yes, it appears that Angle is actually Harry Reid’s lemon from which he can make lemonade because this woman is ….. nuts.
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Sam Stein of the Huffington Post reported on Angle’s radio interview on the conservative Alan Stock Show:
STOCK: What do you say then to a young girl, I am going to place it as he said it, when a young girl is raped by her father, let’s say, and she is pregnant. How do you explain this to her in terms of wanting her to go through the process of having the baby?
ANGLE: I think that two wrongs don’t make a right. And I have been in the situation of counseling young girls, not 13 but 15, who have had very at risk, difficult pregnancies. And my counsel was to look for some alternatives, which they did. And they found that they had made what was really a lemon situation into lemonade. Well one girl in particular moved in with the adoptive parents of her child, and they both were adopted. Both of them grew up, one graduated from high school, the other had parents that loved her and she also graduated from high school. And I’ll tell you the little girl who was born from that very poor situation came to me when she was 13 and said ‘I know what you did thank you for saving my life.’ So it is meaningful to me to err on the side of life.
Yes, it sure is meaningful for YOU, Sharron. But there are other lives involved. Perhaps you small government conservative Tea Partier should stay out of Americans’ bedrooms and their uteri? Just an idea.
Lest I get bogged down in Angle’s utter hypocrisy, let us continue on our journey to David Vitterland, where good judgment has never been much in evidence and hypocrisy rampant. Just to recap, you might recall the diaper incident, after which his wife did NOT cut off his penis as she swore she would do after Bill Clinton was demonized by the Right for…..well, blue dress, etc.
Vitter, that beacon of women’s rights, had a certain Brent Furer in charge of women’s issues. Said Brent Furer had pled guilty to attacking his girlfriend with a knife in 2008. I guess this only made him seem MORE suitable to carry out the patriarchal agenda, eh? Sort of a resume builder in the Republican Party. Oh, to be fair, we don’t know if he was appointed to be the point man on women’s issues because of his crime or in spite of it.
You have to know that Vitter denied this report as true, even as documents proved him a liar, but since the Main Stream Media is loath to point out the facts in their quest to appease the whines of the Right, Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo got the documents to prove it:
“Brent Furer pled guilty in 2008 to attacking his girlfriend with a knife, but was nonetheless retained in Vitter’s DC legislative office in the role of legislative assistant for women’s issues until the details of Furer’s crime were publicized in late June. He subsequently resigned. In Louisiana today, Vitter categorically denied that Furer worked on women’s issues in any way. But numerous records and published accounts prove otherwise.â€
All of this on the heels of Palin’s latest video claiming that conservative pink elephant mama grizzlies are going to rise up this fall out of concern for their kids has me wondering. What kind of world do these pink elephants envision for their daughters? Most American mothers don’t seem to want their daughters necessarily relegated to giving birth to a baby fathered by their father, or having an abuser be in charge of legislation regarding domestic violence.
Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t see these positions as making any sense at all. Maybe the problem is that the People aren’t looking at the positions, they’re just buying the Image. While these are but two examples in a given week of Republican patriarchy, we don’t hear any repudiation of these positions by anyone on the Right.
They can dress it up and call it the year of the Conservative Woman, but it’s the same old patriarchy as before.
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