The GOP's Ridiculous War "for" Women

Unless one is a Kool-Aid drinking Christofascist or utterly motivated by greed and a quest for lower taxes, it is becoming harder and harder for saner and rational women to vote Republican.  The GOP at both the state and federal level is obsessed with controlling women's' bodies and seemingly wants women bare foot and subservient to either their husbands or other white males.   Despite this reality, the GOP is trying to "win back women voters" through approaches that would require one to have had a lobotomy or have the IQ of a trainable mentally retarded individual - Karen, are you listening?  Not surprisingly, most women are not buying the disingenuous propaganda.  Here are highlights from Salon n this GOP idiocy:

In an exciting new development for American politics, the Republican Party ran some spreadsheets and crunched some numbers and — lo and behold — have discovered that women vote. However belated this revelation might be, the GOP is running at this knowledge with everything they have.

Yesterday, high-ranking Republican woman Cathy McMorris Rogers unveiled a bold new campaign to reach out to the half of the population the GOP has been trying to keep broke, barefoot and pregnant. And to prove that they are the party of business and branding, Republicans even came up with a scorching new slogan that’s destined to set the meme-world on fire:  “The War for Women.”

That’s right, they’ve cleverly declared that they are not, as is widely assumed, waging a war on the fairer sex — it’s actually all for them. So now the GOP is fighting against those who are saying it’s a war on women.
[W]omen are working and they are making money and they are buying things. Which means that something has changed since 1953 when Cathy McMorris Rogers was put into the cryogenic chamber from which she apparently emerged just this week. 

Because reliable contraception combined with changing social attitudes and laws making labor markets more hospitable, large numbers of women left traditional forms of female employment and sought careers. They are the reason that today’s commentators can have meaningful discussions about “women at the top.”

That’s certainly not something Cathy McMorris Rogers wants anyone to think about too deeply. After all, she’s adamantly opposed to the birth control mandate in the Affordable Care Act . . . .

Instead of helping women maintain control of their reproduction, the “War for Women” is a hodgepodge of stale policy proposals for weak tax credits, a bill to prevent employers from firing women who ask about equal rights in the workplace (shocking that this is even necessary) and the pièce de résistance: a bill to allow “flex time” in lieu of overtime, an employer’s dream legislation that will lower their bottom line while giving the ladies the illusion that they are “free” to work less. (Flex time should be an addition, not a tradeoff for overtime.)

Meanwhile, as the Huffington Post’s Laura Basset points out, the record shows that in this Congress the GOP blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act — a common-sense initiative that would halt the practice of firing employees who talk about their salaries with their co-workers — and refused to bring bills to the floor that would have provided real childcare tax credits, mandatory paid sick leave and family leave and would have required that employers allow pregnant women certain accommodations in the workplace.

The patented GOP reverence for “life” is remarkably absent everywhere in society except on the sidewalks outside of abortion clinics. If these people are fighting “for” working women, they’ve got a funny way of showing it.

[T]these ongoing assaults on women’s freedom from the courts, as well as the insulting rhetoric coming from conservative pundits and politicians, are only helping women’s groups and the Democratic Party raise more money than ever. It appears that women don’t actually like being exhorted to just “close their legs” and seem to understand quite clearly that the Republican Party agenda is hostile to working families and they and their male allies are putting their money where their mouths are.  

Far Right/GOP to Women: Stay Home Barefoot and Pregnant

If one wants proof that the far right elements and the GOP want to drag America back to the "good old days" of the 1950's it can be found in a new Heritage Foundation panel that recommends that women be content to be at home mothers - barefoot and pregnant if you will.  Missing from the panel discussion are (i) any recognition that women may not choose such a life and (ii) the financial reality that in the new Gilded Age economy so loved by the GOP, a married working man cannot support a family on a single income.  But then again, today's conservatives and the GOP are not living in a world connected to objective reality.  What's frightening is that Heritage is what counts as an intellectual "think tank" for today's far right.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the backward thinking.  Here are highlights:

The conservative minds of the Heritage Foundation have found a way for Republicans to shrink the gender gap: They need to persuade more women to get their MRS degrees.

The advocacy group held a gathering of women of the right Monday afternoon to mark the final day of Women’s History Month — and the consensus was that women ought to go back in history. If Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s mantra is “lean in,” these women were proposing that women lean back: get married, take care of kids and let men earn the wages.

. . . .  “feminism has done so much damage to happiness.” And the solution to this damage, it turns out, is matrimony — the same thing that will solve problems such as income inequality and the Republican Party’s standing among women.

This, they argued, also would have the felicitous effect of making women more Republican.  . . .

As a matter of statistics, this is true: President Obama’s 11-point win among women in 2012 came entirely from his 36-point advantage among unmarried women. But Republicans will be waiting a long time if they think they can improve their fortunes by persuading more women to get hitched. 

Essentially, they’re saying that Republicans aren’t the ones who need to change — women are.

There’s a running debate on the trade-offs of feminism, but this sort of traditional assault on the movement is unlikely to boost the GOP’s standing among women. If Republicans want to appeal to more unmarried women, they might reconsider the no-exception opposition to abortion and, increasingly, birth control that dominates the party. Otherwise, a throwback strategy of convincing unmarried women that they have been misled by feminism is tantamount to convincing Hispanics that they have been led astray by immigration advocates or telling young voters that they have been deceived by the gay rights movement.

The reality, the panelists at Heritage said, is that women are less happy than they were before the feminist movement, that women enjoy domestic work, and that most moms would prefer not to work full time, if at all.

Maybe so. But it will take some convincing. The audience for these pronouncements Monday was small and mostly male, many of them apparently Heritage interns.

“Wow,” said John Hilboldt, Heritage’s lectures director, as he opened the session. “Where are all the ladies?”  It’s a question Republicans may be asking for a long time.

While not mentioned, I suspect the panel also would like to see gays to once again become invisible and for blacks to once again "know their place" and be content with domestic work and blue collar jobs.  These people are living in a fantasy world.