House Republicans Just Can’t Help Themselves

On this episode of Reality Cast, Andrea Grimes discusses her new column for Rewire. In another segment, host Amanda Marcotte looks at reactions to House Republicans yanking a bill banning abortions at 20 weeks at the last minute.

Related Links

Response to “The Apology” video

DRAMA

Melissa Harris-Perry on the abortion bill debacle

“Definitional problem” is not actually a real problem

Kristan Hawkins

What the polls actually say

“Republican females”

“Losing My Lege”

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Andrea Grimes will be on to discuss her new column for Rewire. Republicans yank a bill banning abortions at 20 weeks at the last minute, and I’ll look into the reaction.

There was this weird video that went viral a couple of weeks ago of men “apologizing” for letting women get abortions. Funny or Die responded with their own video of women apologizing.

  • video *

The lack of self-awareness that goes into multiple men apologizing for abortions they didn’t actually get is darkly funny on its own, but they did a good job building on it.

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So the anniversary of Roe v. Wade did not go how anti-choicers expected. There’s kind of a dull, predictable rhythm to how conservatives, uh, celebrate the legalization of abortion, which gave the movement to turn American into a Christian theocracy an issue to kickstart its cause. People amasss on D.C., Republican politicians turn out to give routine speeches, organizers wax nostalgic about how great it was in the imaginary halcyon days when women didn’t have sex, and the Republicans bring a go-nowhere bill trying to ban abortion in some way to the floor. This year, it was supposed to be a ban on 20 week abortions that Obama was surely going to veto. This was a big effing deal. They poll-tested this thing and everything, finding that you can trick Americans into thinking women get abortions after 20 weeks because they were too busy getting their nails done to bother sooner, when of course the truth is most women who get abortions that late have medical issues or had financial problems that prevented them from getting abortions sooner. This was supposed to be an easy win: Grand-standing about life while actually implying that women are just dumb lazy sluts who need to be taught a lesson. And then, at the last minute, it got yanked out from under Republicans.

  • abortion 1 *

Let’s be clear. The Republican women that stopped this thing are not suddenly growing a heart and thinking that maybe they’re being too hard on women who are facing fetal abnormalities or who just came home at 4 months pregnant to find their husbands have run off with the babysitter. The issue here was rape and the totally legitimate concern that some female Republicans have with their male colleagues tendency to wallow in the whole “legitimate rape” thing, where they imply that most rapes shouldn’t count as “real” rapes.

  • abortion 2 *

This entire thing is truly amazing. Let’s be honest here: Ellmers [R-NC] isn’t some kind of champion for women. As Harris-Perry points out, Ellmers furiously denounced regulations requiring that health insurance cover maternity care. She’s a classic anti-choice conservative, in that she wants to force you to have a baby and then she wants to deny you health insurance, family leave, social assistance, or anything else you might need to have that baby. She, like her colleagues, clearly sees forced childbirth and subsequent suffering and starvation as the price you should have to pay for daring to have sex. This is obvious. But she also knows that Republicans at least have to pretend that none of this is about misogyny. And you know what makes it hard to deny that you’re a misogynist? Obsessing over the myth that women are constantly lying about rape for the lulz. Or telling women that it wasn’t really rape when he held you down and forced you because of your skirt or because you were drinking or because you weren’t sitting in a convent knitting or whatever. Or, in this case, claiming your rape doesn’t count because you were too afraid to bring it to the police. All of this just makes you sound like the misogynist you clearly are, and Ellmers was right to gently suggest to her male colleagues that they just let this one go. It wasn’t about loving women, but mostly about managing optics.

And that this is all about misogyny has been definitively demonstrated, and not just because male Republicans were so unwilling to listen to a woman, even when she’s trying to help them, that they ended up proving every lingering suspicion that they’re running a clown car rather than a congressional caucus up there. It’s also because they weren’t willing to budge on this paranoid belief about lying women. It was that important to male Republicans to enshrine the belief that women are a bunch of lying sluts into law, that they basically shot themselves in the foot over this. But sure, let’s hear about how this has something to do with “life” and not just a deep-set hatred of women and desire to control their bodies.

But even this debacle will not cause male Republicans to let this one go and concede that all rape is rape. While speaking at a Family Research Council event, Lindsey Graham [R-SC] spoke about this bill’s derail and, well, yeah, they [Republicans] can’t help themselves.

  • abortion 3 *

What’s amazing is there is a simple away around this so-called “definitional problem” with rape. Just admit that all forced sex is rape. Stop trying to say that some rapes aren’t real rapes or legitimate rapes. Stop implying that there are occasions when it’s okay to force a woman to have sex. All they need to do is let go of this obsession with finding a way to make exceptions that allow some rapes to somehow not be rape. That they can’t let this one go speaks volumes.

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Interview

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So how are anti-choice activists and hardline conservatives reacting to the news that some female Republicans would like slightly fewer rape victims to be forced to give birth than anti-choicers would?

  • anti 1 *

Let me remind you that Rep. Ellmers was trying to save conservatives from themselves, trying to keep them from having to explain to journalists why they think it’s a good idea to force a 14-year-old rape victim who didn’t know she was pregnant to have her rapist’s baby. She knew the answer too frequently veers toward insinuating that rape victims are dirty lying sluts and was just trying to shut that down. But we’re dealing with extreme misogyny here, and extreme misogynists, in my long experience, do not know how to moderate themselves, even to accomplish basic political goals, such as punishing women for consensual sex with unwanted childbirth. No, they will not be stopped until they can also punish women for non-consensual sex. And so the response from the hardline anti-choicers has been pretty ugly. Jill Stanek, who seems to live not on oxygen but on judging other women, and Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life decided to protest at Ellmers office. Ellmers had justified her decision in part by citing evidence that shows one reason millennials don’t like Republicans is because of the obsession with so-called “social issues.” Hawkins claimed that this was all wrong and attacking abortion rights is totally how to get the kids these days. Her argument, needless to say, is unconvincing.

  • anti 2 *

The poll she appears to be talking about was commissioned by a super-conservative group called the Knights of Columbus, and no it does not say the majority of millennials would ban abortion. They asked questions like, “Do you think the abortion rate is higher than it should be?” and assumed that a yes answer meant that you were anti-choice, when it could actually mean that you think people should have more access to contraception. But better polls that ask more specific questions about what laws people would actually support shows that Hawkins is simply wrong wrong wrong. Public Religion Research Institute polling data shows that 60 percent of millennials think abortion should be legal in most or all cases. That’s the issue here. It’s easy to get people to agree that something is “immoral” on a phone poll even if they don’t actually think it is. We live in a culture where a lot of behaviors are characterized as “bad” or “immoral,” but if you really question people about it, they don’t really think of it as bad or immoral so much as a little naughty. Like pot-smoking, drinking, eating chocolate, sleeping in instead of going out jogging, cursing, that sort of thing. They also respond that way to sex, but when it comes down to the actual policy questions, people do not think of having sex as immoral in the sense that they think you should be punished for it. The anti-choice polls are about trying to imply that people who say something is a little naughty are arguing that it’s evil and should be banned, and that is not what people are saying at all.

  • anti 3 *

Yeah, no, this bill wasn’t about courage. Nothing is less courageous than pushing for a bill that you know the president is going to veto. This bill was about having it both ways: Giving the appearance of supporting an abortion ban with the full knowledge that you’ll never have to live with the results of your supposed principles. Hawkins is also blowing smoke with this notion that the same millennials who turned out in record numbers for Obama are somehow going to be wowed by a movement whose not-particularly-well-hidden goal is trying to force young people in particular to accept that the price of having sex is getting married at a very young age to someone you aren’t particularly sure is the right one for you and having a slew of kids so that you have a glorious middle age of wondering how your life passed you by. Sure, that’s a strong message, but not really appealing to young voters.

Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas was also incensed by all this.

  • anti 4 *

You get the feeling that the “wrong message” Gohmert was afraid of sending was the message that the GOP allows women to have any power at all. What is it about men who insist on using the word “females” instead of “women,” by the way? It’s just so obvious that there’s a dehumanizing going on, a tendency to see women as somehow more animal than men. It’s objectifying, is what it is, which is no surprise when we’re talking about a man who clearly has never even considered for a moment that women are people and that forcing them to bear children for rapists would make them suffer.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, professional victim edition. Erick Erickson is one of those conservative pundits who claims to oppose abortion because of “life,” but he’s so incredibly sexist that it’s clear that he actually has other motivations. We got another reminder when he was on Rush Limbaugh’s show recently.

  • Erickson *

You know, it’s funny, I frequently run into conservatives online who rant about how my women’s studies degree ruined me and made me a quote “professional victim.” There’s a lot of nonsense in that line, but I always find it funny because I got my degree in English literature. But obviously, the right gets a lot of mileage out of claiming both that women’s studies is brainwashing and that people with more traditional degrees reject feminism as silly stuff. But it’s really just a lot of wishful thinking on their part and studying women’s role in society is clearly a good use of your time, as we are half the frigging population.