I know that I am a little hung-up on Mike Huckabee’s libido remarks, but I can’t help myself. I am certain that someone, somewhere knows what the hell he was trying to say, but I haven’t found them yet. Certainly, I cannot rely on Kathleen Parker. After all, she thought he got off to a good start:
What Huckabee was saying was that women are not just packages of reproductive parts whose lives are circumscribed by access to birth control. This is the thinking he ascribes to Democrats. Instead, he said, Republicans are fighting a war for women “to be empowered to be something other than victims of their gender.”
Not bad so far, but then . . . uh-oh.
See, as soon as Huckabee suggested that women are “victims of their gender,” a little alarm bell went off in my head that told me that something was amiss. I know, I know that Huckabee was suggesting than Democrats think of women as victims of their gender, but he was also saying that Republicans want to help them overcome this misfortune. Instead of praying away the gay, they want to relieve women of their feminine plight.
How?
I don’t know.
But it isn’t by empowering them to avoid having a baby every time a man climbs on top of them.
Ms. Parker seems confused about this. But logic isn’t her strong suit. Take, for example, her thoughts on the so-called War on Women:
The alleged war on women was based essentially on the notion that people who think abortion is a bad idea — or who don’t think the government should mandate insurance coverage for birth-control coverage — are anti-woman.
Democrats point mainly to new state laws that have limited access to abortion, not to mention the unforgettable observations of a few Republican men about “legitimate” rape and so on.
Whatever one’s own position, Republicans could be characterized as waging a war on women only if no women agreed with the premises mentioned above.
Something is already wrong when you begin talking about abortion rights as if they are a “good” or “bad” idea. But it is really a stretch to suggest that a political party cannot be hostile to a group of individuals if even one member of the impacted group actually consents to their own mistreatment. Using that logic, if there was even one slave who liked their living conditions and didn’t want to be set free to leave the plantation, then slavery couldn’t have been a war on black people.
Further proving that Kathleen Parker has no more idea what Huckabee was talking about than I do, she asks the following question:
Who, really, is worried about women’s libidos?
Of course, the answer is every man who knows he isn’t satisfying his wife. And Mike Huckabee.