“GOP Sensitivity Training In Animal House”: The Real Harm Is The Ugliness Of The Policies Themselves
When we learned last month that John Boehner was providing “sensitivity training” to his male Republican colleagues, I knew we would be in for a treat. But who knew Boehner’s friends would provide an almost daily dose of “can you top this?” outrageous comments.
Just look at the sensitivity toward women that prominent members of the GOP have displayed just this week.
Yesterday, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a favorite GOP pundit and former presidential candidate, said that it’s the Democrats who have the “war on women” because they think women “cannot control their libido” and so rely on “Uncle Sugar” to provide birth control. (True to form, maybe he was trying to show us the difference between the pill makers and the pill takers?)
Then, later in the day, Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, went off on a rant about how bored but crafty high school girls have figured how to work the system by having more children to increase their welfare checks.
And we also learned that Republican Rep. Steve Pearce of New Mexico wrote in his memoir that women are to “voluntarily submit” to their husbands, and that men are to take “the leadership role” in the family. Perhaps hoping nobody would actually read his memoir, Pearce promptly denied saying what he has said in print.
Never wanting to be outdone, yesterday afternoon Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, blamed a rise in sexual assaults on college campuses on President Obama and Sandra Fluke. Although Perkins used more polite language than that of Rush Limbaugh in describing Fluke, his implication was the same. Fluke’s “crusade…for unlimited birth control,” he implied, had encouraged young women to invite sexual assault on themselves.
What is going on in those sensitivity trainings?!
And that’s before we even get to the policies. Last week, the House Judiciary Committee approved a Republican-sponsored bill that further restricts low-income women’s ability to access abortion, threatens to wipe even private abortion insurance coverage from the market, and requires the IRS to investigate whether a woman who obtains an abortion has been raped. When confronted with the fact that the bill could drive low-income women “deeper into poverty,” Rep. Steve King of Iowa snickered. Speaking at the March for Life on Wednesday, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor made this bill the centerpiece of his speech.
Meanwhile, Republican-led state legislatures are having a field day restricting women’s access to birth control and abortion. The Guttmacher Institute found that more state-level restrictions on abortion access were enacted from 2011 to 2013 than in the entire previous decade. If Michigan’s recent debate over “rape insurance” is any indication, that trend of Republican legislatures trying to outdo each other is not slowing down anytime soon.
Even if the sensitivity training were working — which it clearly is not — no amount of sensitive language can cover up demeaning and disastrous policies. For example, Todd Akin was insensitive when he said the words “legitimate rape”; the House GOP was just being its authentic, retrograde self when it tried to write that principle into law. This is part of why GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan had to go into hiding on the campaign trail. Ryan never said the words “legitimate rape,” but he did think that rape victims shouldn’t be allowed abortions.
What the GOP doesn’t seem to have grasped is that just saying sensitive things (or refraining from saying stupidly insensitive things) isn’t enough to win voters. It’s the policies, not just the way you talk about them.
If Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus’ planned “reboot” of his party’s image taught us anything, the new Republican craze for “sensitivity” will be short-lived. This week, after moving its annual meeting to accommodate the March for Life, the RNC will be encouraging its members to spend more time talking about their opposition to abortion rights. Yes, you read that right — more time talking about it. The GOP’s half-hearted attempt at outreach to women seem to already be going the way of its planned overtures to Latinos.
We shouldn’t be surprised when proponents of policies that are based in misogyny say misogynistic things. But we need to be clear that the real harm is not just a lack of sensitivity. It’s the ugliness of the policies themselves.
By: Michael Keegan, The HuffingtonPost Blog, January 24, 2014
“Why Wendy Davis Terrifies The GOP”: Fighting For Women To Have Their Choice
The National Rifle Association didn’t just stop the effort to close the loopholes in background checks, even though that effort was supported by more than 8 in 10 Americans. It has crushed academic research on gun violence to the point that we don’t even know how many people commit suicide at gun ranges each year.
Some say the gun rights movement has learned from what happened to the tobacco industry, as decades of denial gave way to legislation that has increasingly diminished the ability of their product to be consumed in public.
But smoking tobacco laced with nicotine isn’t a Constitutional right, unlike the right to bear arms or a woman’s right to choose. If firearms advocates want to search for an example of effectively legislating away a right, they can look at what their allies in the anti-abortion rights movement have achieved.
Exactly 41 years after the Supreme Court ruled that a woman’s right to privacy via the “due process” clause of the Constitution gave her a limited right to end a pregnancy, 87 percent of counties in the United States lack an abortion provider. The right’s effort to use local and state control to enact laws and regulations make it impossible to provide the procedure in most of the country. And they’re far from done from trying to make abortion rights “a thing of the past,” as Governor Rick Perry vowed last year before signing legislation that will force dozens of clinics to close.
State Senator Wendy Davis (D-Fort Worth) rose to speak for 14 hours against laws that were clearly designed to close as many clinics as possible, making an abortion far more difficult to obtain, and then ban the procedure earlier than the Supreme Court had previously ruled was Constitutional.
Imagine if you couldn’t purchase a gun in 87 percent of the country. Imagine if nearly every day in some state a new piece of legislation was being considered that didn’t close gun shops but made it impossible for them to operate, forcing buyers into the black market. Gun owners may not mind that because buying a gun from a private individual is less of a hassle. But the industry, which finances the NRA, would never let that happen.
Despite what Republicans want you to believe, there is no “abortion industry.” We know this because an “industry” would never let the march against women’s rights proceed as rapidly as it has in the last few years.
Knowing that abortion is actually more common where it’s illegal, the right is pushing women into a black market that could cost them their health and their lives. The only hope women have is the courts, politicians and activists willing to stand up for the right to choose.
Wendy Davis did just that in a way that captured the country’s attention. It infuriated those against abortion rights who brand their opponents as murderers, or with the more stinging “infanticide.” And now that Davis is raising lots of money in her effort to become Texas’ governor, they’re seizing on every inconsistency in her story to shame her as a bad mother and craven opportunist.
Shaming women who attempt to exercise their right to have an abortion is an effective tactic. One of the women who went to Kermit Gosnell’s vile clinic, where actual crimes were committed, reported that she avoided the local Planned Parenthood because “the picketers out there, they scared me half to death.”
Even politically, Democrats have at times adopted the talking point that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare” because that’s what people say in polls that they want. In a CNN/ORC poll last May, 42 percent said abortion should be legal in few circumstances while 25 percent were in favor of “all,” 11 percent said “most” and 20 percent said “none.”
The “none” is the official opinion of the GOP in its party platform, even as Republicans oppose the family planning and sex education that are the best hopes for actually reducing unintended pregnancies. And the “none” position is winning, with just one vote on the Supreme Court threatening to end more than four decades of choice.
Wendy Davis is a threat to those who feel their position for “life” is on the march. She says, “I’m a mother who made the choice to keep my child and I will fight for you to have your choice.” Her life story and courage are inspiring and embolden others to speak out. She’s even redefining being “pro-life” in a way that holds conservatives responsible for the care of children after being born.
So Republicans must destroy her.
The anti-abortion movement — like the gun rights movement — sees any hope for its opponents as something to be destroyed before it can make actual progress.
One conservative said the recent attempts to undermine Davis’ life story remind him of Rush Limbaugh’s pyrrhic attack on Sandra Fluke. But they bear more resemblance to the way the right tried to undermine now-Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), another singular voice from the left who enrages the right with fear.
Republicans kept trying to call her out for mistakenly saying she had Native American ancestry. But in the end all they did was reveal their own dizzying hate and the emptiness of their arguments.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, January 22, 2014
“Good Girls Don’t Have To Pay”: Michigan’s Shameful “Rape Insurance” Plan
No one plans to get raped, to be the victim of incest or to find herself pregnant when her birth control fails or was not used (something that is a joint responsibility, which lawmakers trying to legislate sex sometimes forget). So why would anyone buy abortion insurance? Who plans for such a thing?
Yet, this is exactly what Michigan’s legislature is requiring women to do. Using a rare procedural tactic, the state’s legislature is forcing – without the signature of the governor, conservative Republican Rick Snyder – women to obtain “abortion insurance” even before they get pregnant. The idea is so extreme that even Snyder opposes it. And it flies in the face of perhaps the most important part of the Affordable Care Act, that which prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage due to “pre-existing conditions.”
It’s similar to policies some people have had prior to the passage of the ACA, policies that, for example, demanded people buy special cancer insurance just in case they get the serious illness. Who thinks he or she will get cancer? But if you do, and you don’t have the coverage to pay for the very expensive treatment, you’re dead. Maybe literally.
What makes the Michigan law so hateful and misogynist is that it has little to do with actual cost; abortions don’t cost as much as chemotherapy and tumor-removal surgery. It’s about shaming women, insisting that they brand themselves with a big scarlet A on themselves to show they think they may be just the sort of irresponsible whores who might need abortion access at some point. Good girls, apparently, don’t have to pay, since they won’t be having sex.
And what about cases of rape or incest? It shouldn’t matter, since the decision to have an abortion ought not be based on whether the female in question is a victim or sexually active. But women and girls – some of whom might be too poor to pay for an abortion or too scared to come forward after an assault – will have to pony up for an abortion or pay in advance.
This raises some interesting issues for the defense, should a female report a rape or incest to police. So, Miss Slutsmith, you purchased abortion insurance. Should we not infer that you were planning to get pregnant – and could not possibly have been raped or abused by a male relative?
But then again, the law doesn’t address men’s sexual health. It doesn’t insist that men pay in advance, for example, for treatment for sexually transmitted diseases or for Viagra. They get to have sex without consequence, unlike the women. They don’t have to give up their privacy and undergo the humiliation of paying extra to deal with erectile dysfunction or gonorrhea. But for the women – shame! The word is appropriate here. But it ought to be directed at the Michigan legislature.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, December 13, 2013
“Women Are From Earth, Republicans Are From Mars”: Demonstrating Once Again How Not To Message To Women
We’re well into the 21st century, and both the leaders and candidates in the Republican Party are well into their respective adulthoods. How is it that they are still reaching for some Dobie Gillis-style handbook on How to Talk to Girls?
The GOP did not do well with female voters in 2012, and lost a theirs-for-the-taking Senate race in Missouri because of some truly remarkably stupid comments the party’s Senate candidate made about “legitimate rape.” Since then, we have had a sitting Republican U.S. senator talk about the “hormones” that lead men in the military to sexually assault their female comrades, and we have seen the party’s last presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, discuss how he’s learned that when one employs women, one must be flexible to make sure they can be home at 5 to cook dinner for their families. Perhaps he found those job candidates in one of his binders full of women. And maybe he should ask Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a member of the House Republican leadership who just gave birth to her third child while serving as a congresswoman.
There’s no better example of how women can be parents, spouses and lawmakers, but others in the GOP are still not getting it, and it’s baffling why. Speaker John Boehner recognizes the problem, and spoke to Politico for a story about how the GOP was in training to learn how to win over females’ votes. The party, Boehner said, is:
trying to get them to be a little more sensitive. You know, you look around the Congress, there are a lot more females in the Democratic caucus than there are in the Republican conference. And some of our members just aren’t as sensitive as they ought to be.
You think?
The problem here is that the mostly-male members of the GOP establishment sit around and try to deal with women as though females are some kind of bizarre and baffling other species, as though they couldn’t possibly care about the same things men do or have informed opinions about them. Instead we continue to see evidence that GOP candidates are unable to stop patronizing women and treating them as though females have some extra, irrational gene that must be handled. Iowa Senate candidate Mark Jacobs, asked on a radio show how he would reach out to female voters in a way that differs from talking to male voters, said:
I think you have to connect with women on an emotional level. And with a wife of 25 years and an 18-year-old daughter, I’ve had a lot of coaching on that.
Jacobs makes himself sound like the hapless male victim of a home full of surging estrogen. And worse, he implicitly buys into the fallacy that kept women out of positions of power for years – the idea that men think but women feel, ergo we need to put the thinkers in charge of the governments and economies of the world. They’ll need to think a little harder if they want to get electoral support from women, who make up the strong majority of voters. Because if Republican men lose women voters again, how will that make them feel?
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, December 10, 2013
“Hey, GOP, Here’s How To Coach Men”: What Republican Operatives Should Be Teaching Their Political Candidates
It was recently revealed that Republicans, presumably in a desperate attempt to resuscitate their “autopsy” after the 2012 election, have been coaching male candidates about how to run against women in elections. The details of the trainings, as reported by Politico, are rather sparse. So it’s up to the rest of us to use our imaginations. Don’t mind if I do…
Thus, below, is my informed rendering of what we might imagine Republican operatives are coaching other Republicans to do or not do in the future to avoid such disasters as Todd Akin, Trent Franks and Saxby Chambliss. And then, because I like to be helpful, I’ve also offered my suggestions for what such operatives might teach GOP candidates instead.
What they’re probably coaching: “Just say rape, not legitimate rape.”
What they should be coaching: Don’t minimize rape. Ever. Don’t defend or try and justify the acts of rapists. Ever. In fact, to be on the safe side, don’t ever talk about rape. Because if you need coaching on how to talk about rape, it’s probably a sign you shouldn’t be talking about it. At all. But what you should do is talk about the scourge of violence against women. Yes, you can use the word “scourge” since you’re an old white guy. And you can talk about how we need to make sure that domestic violence shelters and community health clinics and rape crisis centers and special police units and courts are adequately funded. For added measure, you can also support laws that make sure women who have been sexually assaulted have information about and access to emergency contraception—and for added measure, support access to emergency contraception in general. Because just because a woman didn’t report a rape to a hospital or the police doesn’t mean she was not sexually assaulted and may need access to emergency contraception. Then again, per above, you really should stay away from the details….
What they’re probably coaching: “Try and sound empathetic and respectful.”
What they should be coaching: Actually be empathetic and respectful. Don’t just say you support women, put your policies where your rhetoric (barely) is. Think dealing with an unplanned pregnancy is a difficult choice? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, sometimes it’s complicated—but either way, what makes it really a “difficult choice” is not having any choices about what to do with your pregnancy and your own body. You, Mr. Republican candidate sir, wouldn’t know this—you don’t have a womb, that’s why you’re in this training. So instead of trying to feign compassion for something you don’t actually understand (and don’t actually seem to have compassion for), as they taught you in kindergarten, show don’t tell. Don’t just talk about your commitment to women and their choices, show your concrete support with concrete policies that let women make their own reproductive health decisions instead of you.
What they’re probably coaching: “Talk about pocketbook issues, not social issues.”
What they should be coaching: Stop trying to impose your narrow, personal moral beliefs on others through legislation and then you might actually have some credibility to say that you care about more than just social issues. Plus if you stop trying to cram your moral rectitude down the throats of voters, you might just stop turning off the (incidentally growing) swath of the electorate who are socially liberal, including most women voters. Instead, sure, focus on jobs and the economy. But even there, you might want to pay attention to what voters (including the “takers” in your red states) actually want—and therefore not hang your cuts to food stamps and public education like a decorative albatross around your sagging neck. Instead, you should support expanded access to higher education and, heck, while you’re at it, equal pay measures—to do something about the fact that women still earn $0.77 for every dollar earned by a man. Heck, talk about how that inequality is immoral and women voters will love you!
What they’re probably coaching:“Treat women voters and colleagues with respect.”
What they should be coaching: Actually respect women. You can’t fake this one, guys. When conservatives call a private citizen a “slut” or a courageous female elected official “Abortion Barbie”, even the women who live in the caves with you are reminded of all the nasty names and catcalls they’ve ever endured just for being born with breasts. If you disagree with a woman, do so respectfully—leave out the personal insults and slander. Speaking of respect, it helps to assume that your voters and colleagues of the female persuasion are as smart and informed as your male voters. So, and I’m just spit-balling here, but don’t offer to mansplain the federal budget to your new lady colleague in the United States Senate. Generally speaking, treat women with the same respect you treat men. Or at least the same respect you treat men who own successful businesses, who are mostly white and well-educated. Don’t treat women like fast food workers or folks on unemployment benefits. Or maybe start respecting those folks too… Hey, at least the good news here is, like your approval ratings, you almost have nowhere to go but up.
For more tips, you might check out this awesome TED talk on “emotional correctness” in political discourse. Or check out the #HowToTalkToWomen hashtag on Twitter. Or if you know anyone under 60, have them show you… In the meantime, if you have any questions, don’t bother raising your hand or anything, just interrupt. I mean, can’t teach an old dog too many new tricks, can ya? And we’ll look forward to our next programs—“How To Pretend Like You Have Black Friends” and “How To Mask Your Homophobia With A Dash Of Metrosexual Style”.
By: Sally Kohn, Women in the World, The Daily Beast, December 6, 2013
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