Photo by Elizabeth Goolian

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

What the GOP Has Confirmed in this Election

Rick Santorum. Paul Ryan. Todd Akin.  And now, today, Richard Mourdock.   Men who do not want to take us back to the 1950s, as many commentators have said, but who want a return to the Middle Ages when it comes to the most basic of women's rights.

The positions these guys have taken--against equal pay for women, against both abortion and contraception--a crazy and illogical stance if ever there was one, and supporting the insane ideas that a cell that has just been fertilized is a person, that there is such a thing as illegitimate rape, that women's bodies will reject a pregnancy if the rape is legitimate, and that if a woman does become pregnant via a rape it is God's plan--are hysterical, illogical, and profoundly misogynistic.

And what they prove is this:  No man has any right to take any action concerning women's reproductive rights.  Sure, they can have their stupid opinions, and they can shout them from the rooftops.  But they have no right whatsoever to act on their stupidity.  Because they have no understanding of women's bodies or women's lives.  And they are happy to politicize the very real lives of women with no regard for what rape, incest, or a simple mistake means in the life of a woman.  And even less concern.

What every woman in this country knows, whether she chooses to admit it or not, is that if men could become pregnant, there would be an abortion clinic on every street corner in every city, town, village, and burg in the United States.  They would be franchised, and they would be successful.  By now, the procedure itself would have advanced to the point that a pregnant man could dash into a nearby clinic (and they would ALL be nearby!) on his lunch hour and go right back to work.  If men could become pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.  If men could become pregnant, there would be no question as to whether health insurance would pay for contraception--just as there has never been a question about health insurance paying for boner pills.  Even when many insurers were not paying for Pap smears, men were getting their dick dysfunction prescriptions filled without paying a cent for them. And no one ever raised a question or took a moral stand againt it.

But men can't become pregnant.  And so they should have no say.  Period.

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