The GOP’s Big Government War on Women

You can’t miss it these days, the “Americans Against Food Taxes” commercial. The one in which a maternal-looking actress pushes a shopping cart while griping that Washington is “trying to control what we eat and drink”—by taxing soda and other sugary soft drinks. Lovingly placing a huge bottle of pop on the checkout conveyor, our heroine delivers her kicker line:

“Government is just getting too involved in our personal lives.”

(AAFT, by the way, calls itself a “coalition of concerned citizens – responsible individuals, financially strapped families, small and large businesses;” according to SourceWatch, published by the Center for Media and Democracy, it’s merely “a front group funded by the beverage industry. We’re shocked—shocked.)

Anyway, the No Sugary Soda Tax lady is royally pissed over Big Government’s intrusion into her shopping cart, and her right to fatten up her kids with Mountain Dew. Just as Sarah Palin is steamed over Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity initiative, a Kenyan Socialist Muslim attack on our God-Given right to heart disease, stroke and having our diabetic legs amputated as the Founding Fathers intended. Also.

With the Health Care Reform debate, the ascendancy of the Tea Party and all its corporate enablers, we’ve heard a lot of anti-Big Government bloviating over the past couple of years, culminating in the Great Midterm Shellacking of 2010. “Death panels,” “pulling the plug on Granny,” “Keep your Big Government hands off my Medicare and Social Security” (a statement so breathtakingly stupid on so many levels, where do you begin?).

And there’s always that evergreen, the NRA’s “Keep your hands off our guns.” Or “Keep your hands off our high-capacity ammunition magazines used only for mass murder.” Yes, for the ever more extreme rightist Republicans in Congress, Big Government (read Barack Obama, Reid, Pelosi et. al.) is your enemy.

There is one topic, however, on which the GOP’s anti-government zealotry takes a little ideological sabbatical: Reproductive rights. Granted, I miss a lot, but I’ve not yet heard archconservative Republicans shout, “Keep your hands out of my uterus!”

In fact, some GOP legislators blush at the mere mention of the word. Perhaps it’s since some main sponsors of Congress’ current avalanche of anti-choice legislation, like Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, Rep. Chris Smith, from my native state of NJ, and Rep. Joe Pitts, of Pa., do not, to my knowledge, possess uteri. (Though Pitts looks surprisingly good in black pumps).

In any event, the GOP House is keeping its promise to address our nation’s joblessness crisis by…focusing on eliminating abortion.

Protecting zygote rights.

To paraphrase the “No Tax on Sugary Soda Lady,” Big Government is getting way too involved in the most private aspect of a woman’s personal life.

It’s happening at the national level, and in states all across the country. And much of it arises from the evangelical Religious Right, whose application of unyielding, unquestioning,  fundamentalist Christianity to government represents totalitarianism in its purest form. (And this goes for all faiths in all nations). At least when it’s forced on those who don’t share their beliefs.

And so for any pro-choicers—especially young women—who chose to sit out the 2010 Midterms (after all, you could have been watching Bristol Palin on Dancing With the Stars that Tuesday night), well, elections have consequences.

Consequences like GOP-led House of Representatives’ obsession—even at the expense of shutting down the U.S. Government—with defunding Planned Parenthood, and its vital  family planning and cancer screening services—using as evidence shady undercover videos from an anti-choice fanatic.

As The Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim reports:

The House Republican move to strip federal funds from the nation’s most well-known reproductive health care provider as part of its budget last week was the culmination of a multi-year effort that involved parallel action by top Republicans and conservative media operatives playing up the work of a California college student who has been creating surreptitious videos of Planned Parenthood employees for years. The student, Lila Rose, is the president of an organization called Live Action that pays actors to walk into Planned Parenthood offices with hidden cameras, much as James O’Keefe did to undermine the community-organizing group ACORN. The Live Action stars pretend to be a pimp and a prostitute engaged in human trafficking and looking for birth control, STD testing and abortions. The videos that the organization puts out can be convincing and disturbing — and in at least two cases were found by Planned Parenthood to be legitimate cause for dismissals — but thorough, frame-by-frame reviews of the full-length videos show that what is posted on YouTube often bears little relation to what happened in reality, due to heavy editing that alters the meaning of conversations.

Two other recent GOP bills, HR3 (Smith) and HR358 (Pitts) have sparked special  outrage. HR3, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortions Act, caused a firestorm over language that redefined rape and incest. Even more heinous, if possible, is HR 358. The so-called “Protect Life Act,” is an amendment to the 2010 health care reform law modeled on the so-called Stupak Amendment, an anti-abortion provision pro-life Democrats attempted to insert into HRC. Those of us who oppose 358 call it the “Let Mommy Die” act: The bill would allow hospitals, on “moral” grounds, not only to refuse a life-saving abortion to a dying woman, but also refuse to refer her to another provider.

Somehow, this can be construed as “protecting life.” Then I guess we should have given Ted Bundy the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

(As an aside, it’s worth noting that between 1990 and 2008, the number of American women who die in childbirth annually rose from 12 to 17 per 100,000 live births)

HR 3 and the even more ghoulish 358 are violent—perhaps fatal— Big Government assaults on women’s bodies. But they’re only the most outrageous weapons in the GOP attack. This from Talking Points Memo’s Brian Beutler:

“The GOP’s plan to ban tax-payer money from funding abortions includes giant tax hikes for businesses. More specifically, it would eliminate tax incentives on employer-provided health care benefits if those benefits cover abortion as a medical procedure.Supporters of the bill say those incentives essentially constitute federal spending on abortion….Republicans, says Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) are trying to limit “private choices by private individuals and businesses in the private insurance market.”….Ultimately, the impact of tax like the one in the Republican legislation would likely be to phase out abortion coverage in the private insurance market… “The Republicans in the House are proposing tax hikes because they don’t like a health plan a private-sector business chooses,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA). “What they want to do is essentially make abortion unavailable.”

Not as sensational as Let Mommy Die, but effective, nonetheless.

Recently Rachel Maddow aired the profoundly moving tale of Wyoming state legislator Sue Wallis—a Republican in the reddest of states—who opposed an anti-choice bill that would have required doctors to inform abortion patients that they could view ultrasound images of their fetuses before the procedure. Wallis gave an impassioned floor speech telling her personal story. Here’s the AP summary of her comments:

“I’m going to tell you a couple of things that are none of your damned business,” Wallis said as she addressed the committee. Wallis said she’s been pregnant five times and has given birth to three children. She said she lost one baby two weeks before it was due to be born and once underwent an abortion, something she said she had never before revealed in public. Wallis said proceeding with the abortion was the best decision she ever made. She said she has spent time counseling young women and said they already know what the implications of abortion are when they visit a doctor.

As Wallis’ Republican colleague, Lisa Shepperson, also declared on the floor of the Wyoming House:

“When I go to the doctor, it is the most private thing you can imagine. I want myself, I want my husband, and I want my doctor there. I don’t want any government.”

I don’t know what kind of soda Reps. Wallis and Shepperson drink. But I do know that anti-choice tyranny is forcing its Kool-Aid down the throats of American women.

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Dear Republicans: The Hell with Your “Children and Grandchildren” Love, The Unemployed, The Uninsured, and Anxious Ordinary Americans Everywhere XOXOX

From John Boehner to Paul Ryan to Ben Nelson, it is the mantra of Republicans, Blue Dog Democrats and all others who style themselves fiscal conservatives: “We can’t charge the bill for (fill in the blank) to “our children and grandchildren.” Over and over again they repeat it, like a prayer, in media sound bites and ads, press conferences and on the floor of Congress. And if I hear it one more time, I’m going to shoot out my TV like that hapless Wisconsin man who just couldn’t take one more second of Bristol Palin‘s crappy dancing.

There are, of course, real concerns about the debt, the deficit—and Dancing With the Stars. But it is jaw-droppingly disingenuous, cruel and economically misguided that Republicans in the House—like Louisiana Rep. Charles Boustany—were repeating the “children and grandchildren” refrain today while blocking the extension of unemployment benefits. Just before the holidays, no less.

Like so many of us, I have friends—some educated, middle-class and highly accomplished—who’ve remained jobless, though no fault of their own, for as long as 18 months. They’re trying to find work, trying to figure out options, trying to reinvent themselves. They’re not lazy, spoiled, or shiftless. They’re just really, really scared.

How can legislators deny vital, perhaps lifesaving benefits to people down on their luck and at the same time dig in their heels to extend tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires (many of whom have found endless tax loopholes anyway)?. Not to mention that in so doing they’re exploding the same debt (by an estimated $700 billion) they claim to fret over?

How can they look middle class and working class Americans in the eye—live, breathing Americans walking our towns and cities today, fighting and scrapping for survival today and say, “No, we won’t throw you a lifeline?” How can they do this even though the holidays are coming up, even though they’d be putting money in people’s pockets to shop during those holidays—or to just spend on essentials—and in so doing stimulate the economy?

Even if it would help feed somebody’s children and grandchildren. Today.

You want to cut? Slash some pork, close some tax loopholes, prune some bloated, redundant defense spending.

Maybe the point is that these legislators—many of them millionaires themselves and all of them with government health insurance and benefits—are in such a privileged, protected Beltway bubble, that they don’t HAVE to look ordinary Americans in the eye.

We must force them.

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