women who love republicans who hate them
Women Who Love Republicans Who Hate Them
Katha Pollitt
I know there is no monolithic voting bloc called womenfemaleness, like maleness, is cross-cut with race, education, class, income, ethnicity, religion, marital status, even geography. I also know we all make allowances for our own side, which usually boils down to forgiving men for sexual shenanigans and insulting gaffes (aka blurting out their true feelings) that no woman politician would get away with. But with that fully acknowledged, I still want to say: Women! WTF?! After all the weird, heartless, misogynistic, ignorant things Republican men have said about women and pregnancy and rape over the past month, Im ashamed for my sex that any woman is still planning to vote for Romney and Ryan.
And a lot of them are: 51 percent of white women, to be exact. Whats the matter with them? Do they have Stockholm syndrome? And how about you, women of Virginia21 percent of whom in a just-issued Public Policy Polling survey say they strongly agree that abortion should be banned even in cases of rape and incest? (For women 18 to 29, its 32 percent.)
Ladies, I doubt you read The Nation, but Im going to say it anyway: The Republican Party is not your friend! It does not respect you or even like you. Rush Limbaugh thinks women who use birth control are sluts and prostitutes. Ann Coulter regrets that women can even vote. Most recently, you may have heard, Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin said its really rare for women to get pregnant from rape because if its a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. He has said he misspoke about legitimate rapehe meant forcible, another problematic wordand denies believing that women have magic sperm-killing plumbing. But both ideasthat only some rape really counts as rape, and that such rape doesnt cause pregnancieshave long, inglorious Republican pedigrees. Some highlights:
§ In 1988, Pennsylvania Republican State Representative Stephen Freind said that women emit a certain secretion that stops pregnancy when they are raped.
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http://www.thenation.com/article/169630/women-who-love-republicans-who-hate-them