If LGBT Virginians have reason to wake up with night sweats at the thought of Ken "Kookineelli" Cuccinelli in the Governor's mansion come 2014, so too do women. Kookinelli would cause untold damage to women's rights if elected, packing boards and commissions with extremists hand picked by The Family Foundation and virulently anti-abortion and anti-contraception groups. As note here earlier in the week, the farcically named Susan B. Anthony List (Anthony was an early feminist and thought by some historians to have been a lesbian) has launched the extremist effort to buy the governor's mansion for Kookinelli. A piece in Think Progress looks at not only this effort by extremists but also Kookinelli's views towards women which echo those of failed senatorial candidates Todd Akin (R-MO) and Richard Mourdock (R-IN). Anyone who isn't a far right Christianist or angry while male who wants to disenfranchise blacks and sabotage freedom ought to be terrified at the prospect of Kookinelli winning in November. Here are article highlights:
Virginia’s gubernatorial election, is eight months away, but a leading anti-choice group is already spending big money to buy the governor’s mansion for Tea Party Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R-VA). Susan B. Anthony List — an anti-abortion group that launched a program early this year to teach Republican candidates how to talk about rape without using words like “legitimate” or “gift from God” — pledged at least $1.5 million to Cuccinelli’s campaign, an amount that approaches the entirety of its spending on federal races in 2012.
Cuccinelli has not been captured on film expressing the kind of career-ending gaffe about rape that kept candidates Todd Akin (R-MO) and Richard Mourdock (R-IN) out of the United States Senate last year, but his stance regarding the rights of women who are raped is more or less identical to Akin and Mourdock’s. In his first campaign for elected office, Cuccinelli said that he “opposes abortions that are not for the purpose of saving the mother’s life.” So women who are pregnant because of rape or incest are out of luck.
Rape survivors aren’t the only people who face a bleak future in Ken Cuccinelli’s vision for America. In a book he published last month, he endorsed the view that Medicare is “despicable, dishonest, and worthy of condemnation.” He claimed that Social Security, Medicaid and Food Stamps are attacks on people’s freedom. And he suggested that we should stop spending money on these programs because “[y]our government will never love you.”
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