Here’s another thing that makes me want to punch someone in the face:
Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, tried Sunday to defend the Texas anti-abortion law that shut down 13 clinics this week. But he seemed to have no idea what the law actually does.
“The issue for us is only one thing, and that’s whether you ought to use taxpayer money to fund abortion,” Priebus said of the state law on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The statute in question has nothing to do with taxpayer funding of abortion. It requires all abortions in Texas to take place in ambulatory surgical centers, or mini-hospitals, and requires all abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. The law also bans abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy and limits how doctors can prescribe medication abortions.
Since the first provision of the law went into effect nearly a year ago, all but seven of the 44 abortion clinics in Texas have been forced to shut down or stop offering the procedure.
Chuck Todd, the host of “Meet the Press,” asked Priebus why Republicans “don’t like a lot of regulations on businesses, except if the business is an abortion clinic.” He noted that the new law has effectively closed 80 percent of the abortion clinics in Texas.
Priebus dodged the question.
“The fact of the matter is that we believe that any woman that’s faced with an unplanned pregnancy deserves compassion, respect, counseling, whatever it is that we can offer,” he said.
We might as well tell men that they’re free to get a vasectomy but the procedure can only be legally performed on the Moon.
Or we could tell Chik-Fil-A franchisees that they are free to operate their fast-food restaurants, even on Sunday, so long as they agree to levitate their stores 12 feet in the air and let the kids have free unicorn rides.
Never mind getting a vasectomy on the moon.
Tell men that if they want to fill their prescription for a ‘quicker-pecker-upper,’ they have to travel to Somalia to fill it!
Compassion and respect for women – and gays, minorities, immigrants, and non-Christians – are things conservatives are completely incapable of.
Two things jumped out at me immediately:
Yes Chuck did ask the question but he allowed him to getaway with the bull shit answer
Let’s be real clear and honest here.
Republicans don’t have a problem with abortion. They pay for them All. The. Time.
They have a problem with poors and browns getting abortions.
Uh, no. They have a problem with white women impregnated by white men getting abortions. They just haven’t figured out the rhetoric required to ban abortions for whites and mandated abortions for women of color. So, they go with their no abortion for any woman stance with their fingers crossed that it will lead to a higher percentage of white babies being born.
I disagree.
Abortion laws make it a pain in the ass for poor women to get abortions.
When Republicans need to get an abortion for their mistress, wife, or child, they can simply fly them to a liberal urban hellscape – like Manhattan – where they can get a safe and legal abortion.
And then maybe a day in The City.
You’re conflating the personal with the political. It doesn’t work that way for RWNJs. Yes, they hate poor women, particularly women of color. And making them suffer because they engaged in sex appeals to them. However, they didn’t concoct the anti-abortion rhetoric and arguments. Before the Catholic anti-birth control position was politicized and took hold within the evangelical community, they not only supported birth control but favored sterilization for poor women of color. Their roots are in eugenics.
If they were in the least bit rational, they would support public dollars for birth control, including abortion, as it’s a tiny fraction of what it costs in public dollars to birth and raise an unwanted child in poverty.
That may be true, but ultimately the poors and browns are the help. The more of them, the cheaper their labor.
For Republican politicians and wealthy, their fellow whites are simply competition, especially when it comes to the neo-feudal society they want to install. They aren’t competing with the poors and browns. They’re competing with each other.
So, personally, they’ll get an abortion if they want one. Politically, they are members of the RightToLifeTM tribe and it is politically expedient to shout and scream RightToLife conjuring words.
They are definitely worried about the future electorate, and don’t particularly want browns in the majority, but any increase in population because of a lack of safe and legal abortion can easily be made up through voter registration laws and more laws that target particular segments of the population, like drug laws. Or just outright murdering browns through their prison guards, aka police.
Remember to differentiate between the wealthy and GOP politicians and their voter base. The former manipulates the latter through emotional appeals, mostly racist. The former also knows that cheap labor is easily imported and generally harder working, preferably undocumented which reduces the chances that they will ever become citizens and vote.
Home grown “cheap labor” is costly. Beginning with the birth ($5-10,000 w/o complications; almost half of all US births are covered by Medicaid), years of education, food (SNAP/school lunches), and Medicaid/SCHIP. In current dollars, all that adds up to something in the neighborhood of $200,000.
Better still for the oligarchs is to outsource the cheap labor jobs. And then the whites, browns, and blacks do compete for the same crappy jobs that are left.
So, to recap:
when asked a question about a Team Conservative policy, one of the head coaches makes blatantly factually false statements, followed by meaningless slogans (“any woman…deserves compassion, respect”, etc). Repeat as necessary until the “journalist” moves on to the next topic.
That’s “conservatism”! And a majority of white women (and men, of course) apparently will vote for this.
We are shackled to a corpse.