Will the day ever come when pro-aborts develop enough of a conscience to stop slandering people they disagree with? Don’t count on it, if the brazen malice of Jezebel’s latest screed is anything to go by. Katie JM Baker writes on the Republican Party’s alleged inability to secure the female vote, even with the prominence of pro-life women such as Gov. Sarah Palin and Rep. Michele Bachmann.
Certainly, Palin and Bachmann being women isn’t enough to make them or their party worth voting for. Politicians are individuals with distinct views and records and should be judged as such. But it is the left who reduces all policy disagreements to characteristics like sex…as Baker herself charmingly does right here, by declaring that the source of their troubles is simply that “neither women gave a f*** about most American women.”
By contrast, Baker hails Hillary Clinton as a stateswoman “women like” because “she consistently supports feminist policies.” Not so fast. Let’s not forget that Barack Obama owes his 2008 nomination victory in part to the Democrats’ wariness about how long Hillary and her husband had dominated their party. Further, as New York Times number-cruncher Nate Silver points out, the recently beleaguered Secretary of State’s favorability has dropped nine points since February, which was entirely predictable:
Over the course of her long career, the public’s views of Mrs. Clinton have shifted along with her public role. When she has been actively engaged in the hand-to-hand combat that characterizes election campaigns and battles in Congress, her favorability ratings have taken a hit, only to recover later […] It’s easy to be popular when nobody is criticizing you — and there was a long period, from the closing stages of the 2008 campaign through most of her tenure as secretary of state, when Republicans had little interest in attacking Mrs. Clinton directly.
Baker runs down the whole litany of feminist demands, many of which don’t pertain to abortion. However, the veracity of her other claims do speak to the overall picture she paints of conservatives’ motives; if antipathy toward women isn’t apparent in the other issues she cites, then she has nothing to suggest that sexism animates opposition to abortion.
Women want to close the wage gap.
Only the ones who are also likely to be stumped when they hear statistics about households with 2.5 children. The rest understand that the wage gap is an “exercise in statistical manipulation,” that actual gender-based pay discrimination for equal work has been illegal since 1963, and that their most recent PR stunt legislative initiative for demagoging addressing it, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, was loaded with provisions irrelevant to discrimination but very beneficial to trial lawyers [PDF link] and was based on a case the titular victim lied about at the 2012 Democrat National Convention.
Women want government policies that mandate paid pregnancy and sick leave.
As we’ve discussed before, this is a classic of the “bribe people with nice-sounding things and who cares how it actually works” school of politics. Aside from liberals’ never-ending refusal to accept that holding public office isn’t a license to dictate the use of money and resources that don’t belong to them, a working knowledge of economics would tell them that money does not, in fact, grow on trees. Paid pregnancy and sick leave are lovely things, but the money for them has to come from somewhere, and government forcing every company to offer a certain set of benefits means that such money will be lost somewhere else, be it in employees’ paychecks or in some other benefit. Oh, and it’s depressing that I even have to point this out, but it can’t be sexism if conservatives don’t favor comparable mandates for male employees, either.
Women want to make their own choices when it comes to their reproductive health.
Calling abortion “reproductive health” is like calling slavery “entrepreneurial security,” or saying pedophiles simply “love children.” In any event, as long as the left keeps repeating this lie, we’ll keep swatting it down. Polls have shown that there is no strong pro-choice consensus among women, and that women are actually more pro-life than men on some aspects of the question. Last month, Gallup found that 57% of women believe that abortion should be legal in only a few or in no circumstances, compared to just 40% who support it in most or all. I guess it really is the fairer sex!
Women don’t want to be told by politicians whether they were legitimately raped or not.
True. But they also know the difference between lone statements by buffoons and the positions of a political party. An August 2012 CBS poll revealed that a paltry 13% of Americans considered Todd Akin’s infamous rape remarks indicative of the rest of the GOP, and that not even the number of Democrat voters who saw a link between the two rose above 24%.
But since you opened the door to guilt by association, Ms. Baker, presumably women also don’t want to be told they deserve to get raped, date rape isn’t really rape, not to even try warding off a rapist with a gun, that their rapists deserve everything from visitation rights and tax-funded Viagra to lenient sentences and union defenders, that genital mutilation isn’t such a big deal, or that “sluthood” is something their daughters should strive for.
Women don’t want to be patronized by “women-friendly” politicians who are actually deranged fools.
Why does that sound familiar? Oh, right: that’s the Democrats’ and the abortion movement’s entire business model, not to mention what might as well be Jezebel’s official slogan.
Basically: the GOP can’t win over women if the party doesn’t respect women who aren’t submissive to men, as dictated by a strict interpretation of the Bible and various old white dudes. That doesn’t look like it’ll happen anytime soon.
And so, having utterly failed to make a case that the GOP “doesn’t respect women who aren’t submissive to men,” Baker throws in a link to Fox News host Megyn Kelly excoriating Fox contributor & RedState.com editor Erick Erickson for saying it’s “anti-science” for a household to have a woman in the “dominant role.” But let’s dissect it: Erickson represents just one blog, which has had plenty of its own disputes with the GOP and other conservative platforms, like National Review. Kelly is on Fox far more than Erickson is. So even if we were to accept the childish premise that anything any conservative says is attributable to the movement as a whole, you’d have to do some pretty tortured gymnastics to make Erickson’s statement the authoritative one.
The debate over abortion is about one thing: the lives of babies. It’s not about gender roles, it’s not about conquering the home or the workplace, it’s not about sexual purity, and it’s not about enforcing a religious ideal. We fight because we don’t want children to be killed. It really is that simple.
