Dispatches From the “War on Women”

Cartoon by Matt Wuerkler for Politico

In the wake of Rep. Todd Akin’s comments about “legitimate rape,” the Republican National Convention featured a parade of X chromosomes in the form of female governors like Susana Martinez and Jan Brewer, as if Democrats had attacked the GOP for a lack of women rather than an attack on women. (Note that none of those women happened to be moderate Republicans; instead of Susan Collins of Maine or Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, the RNC chose hard-right stalwarts who endorse draconian restrictions on abortion, like Arizona’s ban on the procedure after 20 weeks that invokes dubious “fetal pain” rhetoric, measures the 20 weeks from the nosy criteria of the woman’s last period, and would throw doctors who violate the ban in jail for six months).

Unfortunately, the problem with the Republican Party lies in its ideas, which are universally hostile to reproductive freedom, not its gender breakdown. One need look no further than Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin to see that bad ideas are not an exclusively male phenomenon. Polls show that more women consider themselves “pro-life” (49 percent) than “pro-choice” (44 percent) and groups like the Independent Women’s Forum pride themselves on denying the very existence of a wage gap. Women who agree with Republican dogma are perfectly happy in the Republican party; it’s the party’s attempt to impose its conservative values on the rest of us that constitute the much-ballyhooed “war on women.” Likewise, plenty of women belong to the Catholic Church, but no amount of Marian worship is going to convince me that a religion that bars women from the priesthood and considers virginity the highest virtue is female-friendly.

At the Washington Examiner, it is not one of the paper’s pantheon of old white male columnists (a step away from the “dead white guys” of English Lit) but one of its few female reporters who is clueless enough to deem Paul Ryan a “pro-female Republican” and to characterize Rush Limbaugh’s slander of Sandra Fluke (a “slut” who is “having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception”) as mere “mocking.” It would be more accurate to say that Ryan is “pro” Republican females; he may be great if you’re a right-to-lifer, but his belief that “The freedom to choose is pointless for someone who does not have the freedom to live . . . so the right of ‘choice’ of one human being cannot trump the right to ‘life’ of another” isn’t doing much for the rest of us. Beyond the Examiner’s right-wing audience, I suspect many women are rolling their eyes at the suggestion that Ryan — who opposes abortion even in the case of rape or incest and who has repeatedly pushed legislation to declare embryos “persons,” with all the 14th Amendment protections that entails — is remotely pro-female.

In Tampa, Mitt Romney’s biography-heavy acceptance speech addressed women primarily in terms of motherhood. Various forms of the word “mom” came up 14 times, Lisa Belkin notes at the Huffington Post, which “was one more time than he said the word ‘Obama’ or ‘future’ and ten more times than the word ‘economy.'” He did toss some crumbs to working women, though his claim that, “in business, I mentored and supported great women leaders who went on to run great companies” was somewhat undermined by the fact, as reported by Bloomberg, that private equity has a horrible record on, uh, gender equity. Only 8 percent of Bain Capital’s managing directors and senior executives are women (right on track with the 8.1 percent average for the largest PE firms), a sharp contrast to the 30 percent at large investment and commercial banks. After this sop to the employed, Romney jumped feet-first into the motherhood rabbit hole. The candidate name-checked his own mother, suggesting that her 1970 Senate run schooled him in the importance of giving women a voice in politics, and made the improbable claim that his wife’s “job” as a full-time mother was “harder than mine” and “a lot more important” than anything Romney himself accomplished in the private or public sector. (Health care for all in Massachusetts? Heck, that’s nothing compared to wrangling a passel of tots.) Matt Yglesias calls B.S.:

After all, he’s the one running for president, not the spouse who purportedly did the harder and more important work. And the content of the GOP convention was overwhelmingly about the need to unchain the job creators, emphasizing over and over again that entrepreneurship and paid market labor are more important than childrearing and housekeeping. Romney even bragged that as governor of Massachusetts he appointed lots of high-ranking women to office—something he presumably did because he thought helping him govern a medium-sized state is actually more important than raising a handful of children.

Yglesias highlights the fact that it is not only Romney’s personal actions but his party’s policies that undermine his claim to value traditional “women’s work.” After all, there is nothing more appalling to Paul Ryan than the pre-reform welfare system, which supported low-income mothers without requiring them to work outside the home. If conservatives truly think raising children is a job unto itself, why are they running ads attacking Obama for supposedly “gutting” the welfare work requirement? It is this discrepancy that prompts Yglesias to title his post “Romney’s Incoherent View of Mothers.”

When Ann Romney herself took the stage, she too talked incessantly of motherhood. “It’s the moms who have always had to work a little harder to make everything right,” she confessed to the audience, before giving a bizarre shout-out — “I love you women!” — so transparent that I wondered whether a page from the Boston strategy binder had been slipped into the teleprompter feed. The speech may have appealed to the married women who constitute the Republican Party’s share, albeit meager, of the female vote, but it failed to speak to singles or women concerned with life outside the domestic sphere. (Contrast that to Michelle Obama’s response to a question from Parade Magazine about women “having it all”: “We have fought so hard for choice and options with our lives, and we’re just getting to that point where we’re willing to embrace all the different facets of woman­hood.”) Sally Kohn, the token liberal commentator on Fox News, snarks that Ann Romney “asked women to trust that Mitt and the GOP care about them, since their policies and statements show anything but.”

Ironically, though conservatives regularly accuse Democrats of reducing women to biology, the GOP’s motherhood obsession does just that. At the Weekly Standard, Meghan Clyne contends that Democrats of “view women as incapable of concerns beyond childbearing” and alleges that, to the liberal mind, “womanhood is thus defined by the desire for unrestricted abortion and free birth control.” What conservatives fail to realize is that, by elevating maternity to the pinnacle of female existence, they are no less obsessed with ovaries than the pro-choicers and femi-nazis they condemn. There is nothing more dehumanizing than being regarded as a glorified egg incubator. Take, for example, the synecdoche of “the womb,” as in erstwhile preacher and present-day talk show host Mike Huckabee’s allegation that President Obama “believes that human life is disposable and expendable at any time in the womb or even beyond the womb.” Slate’s Amanda Marcotte has few kind words for such sentiment:

Setting aside the usual annoyance at the way anti-choicers reduce women with arms, legs, and brains to “the womb,” this is just a risible and obvious lie. But it’s not one that Huckabee made up out of nowhere. Like Todd Akin and “legitimate rape,” this anti-choice myth that Obama hates babies so much he wants to smother them at birth has a long pedigree within the woolly world of anti-abortion activism.

Cartoon by Joel Pett of the Lexington Herald-Leader

Republicans love to make the case that women care less about niche issues like abortion than everyday, bread-and-butter things like the state of the economy. Political strategist Mary Matalin declares that “the presumption that all women are as obsessed with their ‘reproductive rights’ is retro, liberal tripe. Women are concerned about their jobs — or lack thereof, their bills, their families, the nation’s debt.” But that formulation still reduces women to single-issue voters who lack the ability to hold two thoughts in their mind at once or to have more than one priority. Newsflash: women, like men, can chew gum and walk at the same time. Matalin contends that “women are way more concerned about the kids they have, or hope to have, than the ones they may or may not abort.” This ignores the fact that reproductive choice is inextricably linked to economic well-being. Even as conservatives like Charles Murray lament the breakdown of the nuclear family and politicians like Rick Santorum denounce single mothers who mooch off welfare, Republicans seem unable to acknowledge the connection between giving women power over unplanned pregnancy — via contraception and, yes, abortion — and keeping women out of poverty. In the conservative worldview, women simply shouldn’t be having sex unless they’re ready to pop out a baby in nine months. For all the talk of “agency” and “independence” from government interference, there is very little debate about giving women agency over their own reproductive organs. Mary Curtis of the Washington Post’s “She the People blog” laments that “speaker after speaker deconstructed the category of ‘women’s issues,’ placed into its own category, separate from the grown-up stuff like the economy” — when women’s issues and economic issues are not separate at all. It’s a refrain that reminds me of the old feminist bumper sticker: Women’s rights are human rights.

Despite the GOP’s professed commitment to economic issues above all, their actions speak louder than words: In 2011, state legislatures passed a record number of restrictions on reproductive rights, according to the Guttmacher Institute. If Republicans really think the firestorm over Todd Akin’s comments are a Democrat-manufactured “distraction” from the lousy economy, they sure have a funny way of showing it. Far from focusing laser-like on job creation and middle-class finances, conservative legislators found time to enact 92 restrictions on abortion, a number which “shattered the previous record of 34 adopted in 2005.” More than 1,100 reproductive health provisions, mostly restrictions, were introduced in state legislatures last year, including attempts to ban all abortions after 20 weeks and force women seeking the procedure to undergo ultrasounds. “If conservatives do indeed want a ‘truce’ on issues like abortion,” writes Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly, “that’s fine with me: let them start observing one.” What Republicans have no right to do, he continues, is to “complain at this late date that when he [Akin] says something that reminds people of the underlying radicalism of the entire GOP’s position on reproductive rights, progressives are trying to “distract attention” from other issues by pointing it out.”

Obama on the RNC: “It was a rerun . . . . You might as well have watched it on a black-and-white TV.” Cartoon by Clay Bennet of the Chattanooga Times Free Press

Interestingly enough, even if Republicans are going to argue that women vote their economic interests, they still have to contend with the gender gap. Those economically concerned women are apparently voting for Democrats; Obama received 56 percent of the female vote (and won 70 percent of unmarried women) in 2008 and currently maintains an 8-point lead over Romney, according to Gallup. Married women tilt slightly more conservative — but you’d expect an edge in this category for the party of the cult of motherhood. For women in general, and single women in particular, the GOP’s policies hold little appeal. And right-wingers admit as much. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard does some mind-reading and reveals that liberals think the gender gap is due to the fact that “the pro-life position of Republicans causes women more than men to vote for Democrats.” (Actually, liberals can read polls as well as anyone else, and they too can see that a plurality of women identify as pro-life. The Republican stance on abortion is only one of many conservative policies that are, as Obama puts it, “better suited for the last century” or are, as Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa would have it, “from another century, maybe even two . . . It looks like the platform of 1812.”) Barnes continues: “This is untrue. That gap is based on other issues—Social Security, the role of government, domestic spending, financial security. The proof: It occurs in races where the Republican candidates are pro-choice, not just where they’re pro-life.” Did a conservative just admit that, when women take Sarah Palin’s advice and vote their pocketbooks, they vote . . . Democratic? So much for the theory that Romney will win in a landslide if he can only make this election a referendum on the economy.

Romney frequently attacks the president with the misleading (though statistically accurate) claim that “over 92 percent of the jobs lost under this president were lost by women,” and Rae Lynne Chornenky, the president of the National Federation of Republican Women, said in her RNC speech that “If there is a war against women, it is President Obama who has waged it.” Of course, the policies outlined by Romney and his running mate would slash funding for the very professional fields — teaching, government, health care — in which women are disproportionately represented. Without Obama’s stimulus package, thousands more teachers — female teachers — would have lost their jobs. Romney asks women to vote their economic interests, yet he advocates a dismantling of the social safety net that would leave women poorer, sicker and less able to provide for their families. Once Paul Ryan’s “hammock” of poverty programs and Medicaid coverage is eviscerated, where do Republicans think struggling women will turn? Kathleen Parker writes that “You have to have food on the table . . . . before you can start contemplating the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin,” but the financial implications of having a child hardly constitute ivory-tower philosophy. The ability to choose whether to give birth at 19 or 29 has a lot to do with securing a job that can put food on the table.

Another portion of Matt Yglesias’s superb Slate post on Romney’s attitude toward motherhood is so relevant here, and sums up the situation so much better than I could, that it’s worth quoting at length:

But there really is a profound difference here. The Obama administration, more or less, wants to encourage women’s full participation in the American economy. They’re advancing that goal through legislation barring pay discrimination and through legal abortion and subsidized contraception. They’re reforming the individual health insurance market so women will no longer pay higher premiums than men, so women will have an easier time switching jobs and launching businesses. They’ve proposed doubling the child care tax credit, one of several working-class tax benefits that would be eliminated under the Romney/Ryan plan.

By contrast, Romney has nothing. He doesn’t say women should go back to the kitchen, stop working, and instead do the much harder and more important job of raising kids full time. But he doesn’t want to spend any money or burden any business with any kind of rules or programs that would push us to a new more egalitarian equilibrium. Nor does his lip service to the values of full-time childrearing seem to have any content. He thinks the idea of paying poor women to stay at home and raise kids is outrageous and certainly doesn’t encourage fathers to engage in the much harder and more important job of full-time homemaking. He’s a guy who loves his wife and wants to say something nice about her when given the opportunity to talk on a national stage, and he’s a guy who doesn’t want to do anything to address the challenges that parents face in an economic environment shaped around the obsolete expectation that behind every working man there’s a full-time homemaker. But he’s not a guy who in any way acts as if there’s any content to his belief that full-time parenting is harder and more important that entrepreneurship or market labor.

It’s no coincidence that Newsweek chose last week to roll out a provocative article — “What the *#@% Is Wrong With Republican Men?!” — by Kathleen Parker, a reliable conservative who has been surprisingly direct in her recent critiques of the Romney-Ryan ticket. Her latest column slammed Ryan for his distortion-filled convention speech, and the observation I made in my last post bears repeating: If you’ve lost Kathleen Parker . . . . When the author of “Save the Males,” a 2008 book which insists that “men, maleness, and fatherhood have been under siege in American culture for decades,” writes that “Akin simply provided the exclamation point at the end of a Faulknerian paragraph of Republican offenses,” you know the “war on women” meme has penetrated the national consciousness further than the liberal blogosphere. Parker is still a partisan — she maintains that the war narrative was “carefully crafted” by Chicago to “divert attention and allow Democrats to change the subject” — but she also admits that, “hackneyed and contrived as this ‘war’ is, there’s a reason it has gained traction.” The reason, according to Parker’s interviews with young conservatives? “Because it’s true.” While she tends to make excuses for the GOP’s clumsy handling of women’s issues, attributing offenses like Paul Ryan’s attempt to limit Medicaid-funded abortions to cases of “forcible rape” to poor messaging skills, she is also quite damning in her assessment of her party’s “suicidal” tendencies. She asks,

To whom, then, are these Republicans talking? Apparently not to women, whom they treat not as equals but as totemic and unknowable. Which is to say, they don’t “get” women. As such, they risk losing not only independents and moderates, whose votes they desperately need come November.

Conservatives, who delight in accusing Democrats of waging wars on everything from Christmas to the Second Amendment, are hardly in a position to cry foul about the “war on women” narrative — especially since their presidential nominee is himself on record saying of Obama, “His policies have been, really, a war on women.” Often, the right-wing pundits who complain the loudest about being tarred with the anti-woman label are the ones who do the most to further the argument. Like Parker, they whine that Democrats “equate the pro-life position with being anti-female,” yet their words and actions repeatedly confirm liberal suspicions that, no matter how many female governors the RNC shuffles onto the conventions stage, a disturbing strain of misogyny persists at the heart of the conservative worldview. And for the record, being pro-life is not anti-female; attempting to legislate that every other woman obey your pro-life views is.

Eugene Robinson writes that there is a simple way to combat the liberal accusations; unfortunately, it’s one that Republicans don’t seem to consider an option (or perhaps aren’t able to force their rank and file to do): “The GOP refuses to do the one thing that would neutralize the “war on women” issue: Stop the misogynistic attacks. Stop them now.” In the same vein, I would advise that, if you don’t want to be accused of sexism, perhaps you shouldn’t say sexist things. Off-hand, nasty remarks about women surface so often in the right-wing media, bubbling up not only from expected places like the Rush Limbaugh show but from respectable legacy publications like National Review, that I occasionally find myself cutting and pasting them into a Word document just to . . . what? To create a record, I suppose; to quiet my outrage by attempting to assure myself that, hey, they’re not getting away with it. Someone — even if it’s just me — is noticing! If you’re looking for proof that Todd Akin is no sui generis off-the-ranch renegade, look no further than the following examples, helpfully annotated with suggestions for conservative writers. Sample advice to the WSJ’s James Taranto, who takes Chris Christie — that raving liberal GOP governor! — to task for “poor grammar” and “feminist pandering” for saying that the ACA “put[s] those bureaucrats between an American citizen and her doctor”: the term “feminist supremacists” is not OK outside of Pat Schlafly’s house.

First up, one of the most offensive things I’ve seen yet from the American Spectator, a magazine which is so over-the-top in its “Obama the Marxist” rhetoric that it would be easy to dismiss as fringe craziness if conservatives did not actually regard it as a reputable, worthy source of journalism. (Paul Ryan, who could potentially be a heartbeat away from the presidency, has written for the Spectator four times in the past year, and chose the Spectator to publish an anti-Obama screed alleging that the president harbors “a vision of a collective, government-centered society” and has turned America into “a welfare state in decline.”) The writers at the Spectator give Taranto’s “feminist supremacist” nonsense a full buy-in, seeking to link any Democratic woman those hairy-legged, bra-burning femi-nazis of the 1970s. At least, that’s what I think they’re doing; it’s not really clear what Larry Thornberry is getting at when he mocks Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s name, though I’m assuming he’s trying to imply that all liberals use words like “womyn” and “riot grrls.”

South Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserperson-Schultz, chairwomanperson of the Democratic Party, gave up a howler this morning on Fox News Sunday (along with her usual garden-variety nonsense). She said, with a straight face, that she didn’t know if the people who put together that infamous ad accusing Mitt Romney of causing a steelworker’s wife to die of cancer were Democrats.

“I have no idea of the political affiliation of folks who are associated with that super PAC,” our Debbie crooned. I wonder if Debbie has any opinion on whether or not the Pope is a Catholic.

“Crooned” is particularly classy here. I suppose Thornberry would describe anything President Obama says as “shucking and jiving.” Misogyny seems to be a pattern for Thornberry; more recently, he referred to Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s deputy campaign director, as “Mz Cutter.” (Does he think feminists also don’t believe in punctuation?)

Another gem from the Spectator comes in the form of a reaction to a New York Times op-ed by Greg Hampikian about the growing irrelevance of men. The op-ed, by a biology professor at Boise State University, is standard liberal Times fare; it offers some musings on how inconsequential males are to most species’ reproduction and young-rearing, but it’s not particularly offensive. The Spectator’s William Tucker detects a nefarious “progressive trend to declare women self-sufficient save for an occasional trip to the sperm bank” and somehow comes to the conclusion that writing about the limits of the Y chromosome “questions the very existence of people like myself.” He puts Hampikian in the category of “men who don’t want to be men.” Tucker obviously thinks the Times piece is over-the-top, so naturally he responds with something even more outrageous and ridiculous. He thinks the Times diminishes men, so he takes a hatchet to women. What sets humans apart from the animals is, he Tucker asserts, is men. “In terms of reproductive behavior, female chimpanzee and human females are not very different.” The clincher:

By concentrating only on the act of reproduction, Professor Hampikian has also missed out on something else — what we might call “civilization.” Here the shape and form of our public life — the rules and regulations by which we live, the trade and cooperation, conflict and war — have all essentially been crafted and created by men. Women are getting very good at participating and in some cases even exceeding the performance of men. But despite what feminist historians will tell you, civilization — in both its positive and negative aspects — has essentially come out of the male gene.

Well, gee, I guess passing along culture to the next generation and instilling the very values of “trade and cooperation” that Tucker extolls doesn’t count as contributing to civilization. How nice to know that women are now allowed to participate in civilization! The domestic, female-driven economy may not receive as much attention in the history books as Adam Smith or the Battle of Hastings, but it’s doubtful that civilization could have stumbled along without it. Conservatives talk a good game about the importance of motherhood — it’s a “a lot more important” than the presidency, after all — but when they reveal their true colors, it’s clear they have no respect or interest in women at all.

Then we have this lovely description of the author of “Prozac Nation,” which, in addition to mischaracterizing her Atlantic article (it was neither hysterical nor contemptible toward anyone), is just a crass ad hominem attack. Note to self: if you wish to be taken seriously by conservatives, pop out a few children first. And heaven forbid you ever visit a psychiatrist.

Elizabeth Wurtzel, the childless, manic-depressive attorney-writer who recently revived the Mommy Wars with an hysterical piece in the Atlantic charging that stay-at-home moms are contemptible and cultish, and helping to kill feminism, is on the fringe of the fringe.

The next outrage-of-the-week comes from Thomas Sowell, who is himself an outrage wrapped in an insult surrounded by an affront to civility. Sowell tosses out misogyny as a sort of afterthought; more typically, his worst remarks are related to the evils of affirmative action and his belief that every other African American in the country hates white people. Sowell is to race what Michelle Malkin or Ann Coulter is to gender; because he is a member of the group that once suffered the very discrimination he now engages in, he feels he should get a free pass to speak supposedly uncomfortable, Bill Cosby-esque “truths.” (Why talk of the “Democrat plantation” is any less offensive coming from someone whose ancestors were once enslaved on actual plantations is beyond me. It devalues the horror of slavery in the same way that anyone, even concentration camp survivors, who uses the term “Holocaust” to refer to killing animals for fur or the Iranian nuclear threat diminishes the tragedy of six million deaths.) Just as Ann Coulter is shocked, just shocked, that anyone would consider her sexist, Sowell bristles at being called racist . . . and yet he continues to say racist things. But I digress. In this case, what offends is his sense that he is entitled to comment on the appearance of any woman in the public sphere. Sandwiched between other “random thoughts” on entitlements and the Tea Party, he volunteers this question out of the blue:

Does anyone seriously believe that short dresses, exposing bony knees, make women look more attractive?

In another piece for National Review, Sowell offers this sentiment:

A political term that had me baffled for a long time was “the hungry.” Since we all get hungry, it was not obvious to me how you single out some particular segment of the population to refer to as “the hungry.”

Eventually, over the years, it dawned on me what the distinction was. People who make no provision to feed themselves, but expect others to provide food for them, are those whom politicians and the media refer to as “the hungry.”

Yes, a single mother working two jobs in order to put food on the table for her kids — the same woman the GOP believes should be voting Republican — is making no provision to feed herself. Thanks.

Rounding out the stable of nasty male writers at National Review is Kevin Williamson, who feels compelled to insert a dose of misogyny into a story that has nothing to do with gender. Describing budget troubles in San Bernardino, California, he writes:

A phalanx of pant-suited she-bureaucrats and the city attorney explained that in addition to filing for bankruptcy, the city needed to declare a fiscal emergency.

What do pant suits have to do with anything, other than to resurrect the 1990s conservative caricature of Hillary Clinton as a pant-suit-wearing, sexless battle-axe? And why is it relevant that the “bureaucrats” are female?

National Review also loves to publish screeds against abortion, usually in the form of interviews in which Kathryn Jean Lopez (who fashions herself as some sort of ambassador from the Vatican) pretends to ask reasonable questions while passive-aggressively encouraging the interviewee to make the truly bomb-throwing statements. Of course, this particular subject probably doesn’t need to be encouraged to say repugnant things. David Gelernter, whose book “America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered In the Obamacrats)” Lopez calls “alarming yet cautiously exuberant,” discusses what he terms a “cultural revolution” in higher education. (I think Chinese dissidents might take umbrage at such characterization.) He believes intellectuals “became contemptuous of biblical religion, of patriotism, of the family, of American greatness” and laments,

American culture had its throat slit and bled to death at our feet. Isn’t that revolutionary enough? The blood is only metaphorical, but to the 40 percent of [all] infants [who are] born to single mothers this year, the consequences will be real.

Did no one at National Review see something wrong with featuring an author who compares single parenthood to murder?

A final hint for the right: If you’re really so upset at being called sexist or misogynist, perhaps you shouldn’t do things like put scare quotes around the term “dating violence,” (“Biden, White House Take on ‘Dating Violence,'” the Weekly Standard reports), as if violence that happens in a relationship isn’t real violence at all. (Shades of “legitimate rape” — remember, it wasn’t so long ago that society considered rape within marriage to be a husband’s prerogative.) Frankly, even the appearance of the dating violence item on the Weekly Standard’s blog is suspect, given that the Obama administration is only ever mentioned in the context of embarrassing incidents (Solyndra! Joe Biden’s gaffes!) or wrong-headed policies (Israel, spending, Israel). That a PSA about dating violence warranted an entire post strongly suggests someone on the Standard staff sees domestic-abuse prevention as a waste of taxpayer dollars.

I could go on. There doesn’t seem to be an end to this sort of bile, and the perpetrators never learn — or never try to learn. Conservatives deride the “war on women” as nothing more than “a cynical political ploy hatched up by Axelrod and Plouffe at Obama HQ in Chicago,” but then strap on their armor and march into battle. You tell me there’s not a war on women? Fine. Put down your weapons and prove it.

Todd Akin Is a Jerk, But Not an Outlier

Todd Akin’s crime: saying what too many in the GOP really think. (Photo via The Week)

The GOP doesn’t like the intimation, originally made by Democrats last spring when Republicans howled about insurers being forced to cover contraception and Rush Limbaugh infamously applied the “slut” label to a Georgetown grad student, that it is waging a “war on women.” To be fair, conservatives have a point; it’s more accurate to say the GOP is waging a war only on women who value autonomy, reproductive rights and the hard-won victories of 20th-century feminism. Considering half the country votes Republican, perhaps that eliminates a lot of American women. But every time an aggrieved conservative like Kathryn Jean Lopez, the uber-Catholic writer at National Review, attempts to make the argument that “much of this ‘war on women’ rhetoric is a cynical scare tactic to ensure that single women vote Democrat this November,” some Republican Neanderthal comes along and knocks the entire debate back to the 1950s. The most recent Exhibit A: U.S. Rep. Todd Akin, the candidate challenging Claire McCaskill for her Missouri Senate seat, who stirred up controversy on both sides of the aisle when he tried to explain why he opposes abortion in all cases, without exceptions for rape or incest. Pregnancy, according to Akin, hardly ever happens unless a woman is, you know, faking a rape:

It seems to me, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. You know, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

To their credit, prominent Republicans — including Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell and Scott Brown — denounced the remarks, though Akin’s ill-advised monologue differed more from the Republican party line in its impolitic rhetoric (and its junk science) than in its substance. How shocked, just shocked could conservative luminaries possibly be when Akin’s hard-line position on abortion and invocation of “legitimate” rapes is a mere finger’s breadth away from the beliefs of the Republican vice-presidential nominee? As Margaret Carlson writes at Bloomberg View, “The difference between Ryan’s views and Akin’s could fit on a Post-it note.”

Paul Ryan, with his 100% rating from the National Right to Life Committee, also opposes abortion without exceptions for rape, incest, or the woman’s health. (He would permit it only in “cases in which a doctor deems an abortion necessary to save the mother’s life.”) When Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels proposed a “truce” on social issues, Ryan fired back, saying, “I’m as pro-life as a person gets. You’re not going to have a truce.” Ryan is as good as his word; in the House, he and Akin were co-sponsors of the Sanctity of Human Life Act, a lovely little piece of “personhood” legislation that would have defined humanity as beginning at conception, when the sperm meets the egg, and given embryos the “all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.” The law would not only have allowed states to criminalize abortion, but would have potentially enabled them to ban the morning-after pill (on the scientifically dubious grounds that it could prevent a fertilized embryo from implanting in the uterus) and in vitro fertilization (the procedure that produced one of Mitt Romney’s grandsons). In 2010, Ryan penned an essay titled “The Cause of Life Can’t Be Severed From the Cause of Freedom,” and Daily Beast writer Michelle Goldberg has this to say about the veep candidate’s cri de coeur: “For anyone who wants to know how Ryan thinks, that essay is worth reading. It’s about 1,500 words long, but the word “woman” doesn’t appear in it once.”

Ryan has also dabbled in the same “legitimacy” canard that Akin has been so roundly condemned for bringing up. He and Akin were among the 173 co-sponsors of last year’s No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, a another piece of legislation that passed the House — where it won the vote of every Republican representative, plus 16 Democrats — but died in the Senate. One proposed section of this subtly-named law would have added the word “forcible” to the rape exemption to the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funds from being used for abortions. Currently, Medicaid pays for abortion if a woman has been raped or is the victim of incest; the NFTA Act would have narrowed the exception to “forcible rape” — what Akin later told radio host Mike Huckabee that he meant by “legitimate rape” — a term almost Orwellian in its redundancy. (In actuality, Medicaid rarely ends up paying for abortions; Dylan Matthews writes at the Post that state-level restrictions and complex reimbursement requirements mean that, of women covered by the rape-and-incest exemptions, “only 37 percent of women ended up getting eligible abortions funded by Medicaid. As a consequence, a quarter of women on Medicaid who planned on getting an abortion and were eligible under the Hyde amendment ended up giving birth instead, according to a study by the Guttmacher Institute.” Most states require a doctor to certify that the woman has been raped, but 11 states force women to submit a police report to include in the Medicaid claim. NFTA attempted to further reduce the number of eligible abortions. When the legislation was under consideration in the House, Mother Jones reported:

For example: If a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion. Other types of rapes that would no longer be covered by the exemption include rapes in which the woman was drugged or given excessive amounts of alcohol, rapes of women with limited mental capacity, and many date rapes.

Why did the future VP nominee feel compelled to define rape down? Because, in the words of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Associate Director of Pro-Life Activities (try putting that one on a resume), the change in language was “an effort on the part of the sponsors to prevent the opening of a very broad loophole for federally funded abortions for any teenager.” Back to Mother Jones:

Pro-life advocates believed they needed to include the word “forcible” in the law to preempt what National Right to Life Committee lobbyist Doug Johnson called a “brazen” effort by Planned Parenthood and other groups to obtain federal funding for abortions for any teenager by (falsely) claiming statutory rape. Abortion rights groups, Johnson warned, wanted to “federally fund the abortion of tens of thousands of healthy babies of healthy moms, based solely on the age of their mothers.”

The “forcible” language was removed after it sparked an uproar, but the Republican party has a history of looking to classify and demonize “unworthy” rape victims. In March, the sponsor of a bill in the Idaho state legislature that would have required all women to view an ultrasound before an abortion, state Sen. Chuck Winder argued that no exceptions should be made for rape victims:

Rape and incest was used as a reason to oppose this. I would hope that when a woman goes in to a physician with a rape issue, that physician will indeed ask her about perhaps her marriage, was this pregnancy caused by normal relations in a marriage or was it truly caused by a rape.

Ladies: before seeking to abort the child of your attacker, please make sure you have actually been raped. Sen. Winder understands this can be confusing; maybe it’s best that you not worry your pretty little head about abortion in general.

The canard that rape cannot cause pregnancy also has a long history on the right, albeit on the pro-life fringe of the right. Most of the so-called “evidence” is drawn from a 1999 article by physician John C. Willke, a former president of the National Right to Life Committee, that the “emotional trauma” caused by “assault rape” (but not, apparently by the lesser forms of rape) can disrupt hormones that “radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, implantation and even nurturing of a pregnancy. So what further percentage reduction in pregnancy will this cause? No one knows, but this factor certainly cuts this last figure by at least 50 percent and probably more.” As Dave Weigel of Slate snarks, “Pro tip: If your medical argument includes the phrase “no one knows, but…” then you might want to head back to the crime lab.” Lest you think that Willke’s article is a relic of the benighted 20th century, be aware that it’s currently reprinted on the website for Christian Life Resources, and was referenced just yesterday by Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association (who has made more news lately for his virulently homophobic views than his positions on abortion), who linked to the article in a tweet that read, “Todd Akin is right: physical trauma of forcible rape can interfere w/ hormonal production, conception.” The New Republic’s website has a run-down of some of the conservative politicians who have made similar statements, including North Carolina state Rep. Henry Aldridge’s 1995 contention that “the facts show that people who are raped — who are truly raped — the juices don’t flow, the body functions don’t work and they don’t get pregnant.”

Again, there’s that “truly raped” language. For all the hubbub over Akin’s use of the term “legitimate,” he’s hardly the first knuckle-dragger to do so.

More mainstream Republicans whine, not without reason, that they are unfairly being tarred with the beliefs of their party’s radical fringe. (Though Red State’s Eric Erickson, who is mainstream enough to do commentary for CNN, did make the pretty fringe-y accusation that President Obama supports infanticide, when he wrote that “I’ll take Todd Akin’s inarticulate remarks over an infanticide supporter any day of the week.”)But apart his scientific illiteracy, Akin is squarely within the mainstream of conservative thought. Exceptions for rape and incest may come off as compassionate, but most pro-lifers oppose them — and for this they at least gets points for intellectual consistency. If you think that “Blastocyst Americans,” as Think Progress sarcastically refers to the fertilized embryos given Constitutional rights under “personhood” legislation, are real people, then it’s wrong to kill people, no matter how they were conceived. William Saletan of Slate notes that Republicans copacetic with exceptions tend to pin the issue on responsibility; a woman pregnant by rape should not be made to suffer for actions she didn’t commit, while women who choose to have sex should pay the price — er, take personal responsibility. No word on why pro-lifers think a woman willing to kill her unborn child to avoid personal responsibility would make a good mother. The idea that children conceived by rape should not be “punished” for the crime is firmly entrenched in the Republican establishment; today, under the subhead of “Let’s not double down on violence and pain,” National Review ran a sampling of reactions by conservative thought leaders to the Akin flap. Serrin Foster, executive director of Feminists for Life, said: “When someone asks about abortion exceptions for rape and incest, we must also consider the feelings of those who were conceived through sexual assault.” A member of the state Republican central committee backed Akin’s argument that few rapes cause pregnancy, telling the Times that “at that point, if God has chosen to bless this person with a life, you don’t kill it.”

Yes. Consider the feelings of the fetus, please. Or, as Paul Ryan’s favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, would have said, Consider the feelings of the “piece of protoplasm.” (While Ryan continues to enthusiastically embrace Galt-style economics, he has disavowed Rand’s atheism and, presumably, her conviction that “abortion is a moral right” and her dismissal of embryonic personhood as “vicious nonsense.”)

The righteous outrage on the part of conservatives only masks the true depths of the Republican threat to women’s rights (and yes, I do count abortion as part of “women’s rights.”) While Romney issued a statement claiming that “Gov. Romney and Cong. Ryan disagree with Mr. Akin’s statement, and a Romney-Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in instances of rape a Romney-Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in instances of rape,” the campaign later confirmed that Ryan’s personal views differ. The Republican candidate for Montana Senate, Denny Rehberg, put his piety on display by giving away a $5,000 contribution he received from Akin’s PAC — to a “crisis pregnancy center,” of all places. Such centers, many of which don’t even have a medical professional on staff, are thinly-disguised pro-life organizations designed to encourage “alternatives” to abortion by demonizing Planned Parenthood and peddling discredited myths about links between abortion and suicide or breast cancer. Crisis pregnancy centers, which advertise themselves as neutral clinics but which push women to keep their pregnancies in all cases, would find little to disagree with in Akin’s rejection of exemptions for rape — and might very well be promoting similar junk science about pregnancy-preventing “rape hormones.”

Akin has apologized for using “the wrong words in the wrong way” but hasn’t backed off his opposition to exemptions for rape or incest. Vowing to stay in the race, he characterizes the GOP response as “a little bit of an overreaction,” and on this point I am inclined to agree with him. It’s hard not to be cynical about remarks like these from Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, a Tea Party favorite: “Todd Akin’s statements are reprehensible and inexcusable. He should step aside today for the good of the nation.” Evidently, it’s “inexcusable” to expose the nasty side of Republican extremism; yet today, as party bigwigs meet in Tampa to develop the 2012 platform, CNN reports that “The Republican Party is once again set to enshrine into its official platform support for ‘a human life amendment’ to the Constitution that would outlaw abortion without making explicit exemptions for rape or incest.” This stance is nothing new; the platform has included similar language since 1976, and the current elocution is unchanged from the 2004 and 2008 cycles:

Faithful to the “self-evident” truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.

The DNC has already blasted out fundraising e-mails dubbing such language the “Akin plank” — and it’s well within its rights to do so. A separate e-mail characterized the Republican position as “trying to take women back to the dark ages” and proclaimed that “Akin’s choice of words isn’t the real issue here. The real issue is a Republican party — led by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan — whose policies on women and their health are dangerously wrong.” Strong language, but this is an issue that deserves strong language. If conservatives are content to label Democrats “baby-killers” and accuse the president of promoting infanticide, they shouldn’t be surprised when liberals strike back with references to the dark ages. When Sen. Johnson suggests that Akin should quit the race “for the good of the nation,” he gets it precisely backwards: If anything, Akin’s candidacy is good for the national dialogue, as it pulls back the curtain on the GOP’s views of women and highlights the party’s staunch opposition to reproductive rights. “Polls show Americans broadly oppose a constitutional amendment banning abortion,” the Washington Post reports, and over 75 percent of Americans believe exceptions should be made for rape and incest. If mainstream candidates like Mitt Romney are going to embrace people like Bryan Fischer and Eric Erickson — and if they are unwilling to denounce even Rush Limbaugh’s “slut” remarks in terms harsher than “not the words I would have used” — then they should be held accountable to the electorate. It presents a sharp contrast with President Obama, who said yesterday that “rape is rape” and that “what I think these comments do underscore is why we shouldn’t have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making health-care decisions on behalf of women.” Amen.

I have no illusions that voters will suddenly rise up and toss abortion opponents out of office. In fact, polls also show that a strong majority of Americans approve of restrictions on abortion; the right has succeeded in smearing “abortion on demand” as a femi-Nazi plot. The latest PPP poll out of Missouri shows Akin still beating McCaskill by the narrowest of margins, though it’s unclear how many of the respondents were aware of the latest controversy. But as Eliot Spitzer, who knows a thing about bouncing back from controversy, writes at his Slate blog:

We should not be fooled that Akin’s statement, merely because it is so offensive and quickly retracted or clarified, is a mere slip. It actually represents the worldview of Akin and many like-minded Republican colleagues. His comments are part and parcel of a view of civil rights, women’s rights, and science that should be antithetical to a modern society.

Akin, in refusing to drop out of the race, tells Mike Huckabee that “I’m not a quitter . . . . To quote my old friend John Paul Jones, ‘I’ve not yet begun to fight.’” Pro-choicers should take a similar attitude. This is not a battle we can afford to “quit,” and it’s not a fight we can afford to lose.