They swept to majorities in the House and state legislatures in 2010 dedicated, they said, to putting our finances in order. Instead, of course, they voted to shut down the government and threatened (and as yet promise) to end government and any reason for having one by voting to default on debts they, themselves, voted to own. Yet primarily what they've done, and so often just beneath the full national consciousness that it has become routine, is to attack women and girls.
There are so many attacks; I'll note three recent ones.
Religious reactionaries in New Mexico tried, even as a minority in that state' legislature, to pass a law that would criminalize the termination of pregnancies of rape and incest on the bizarre and sordid idea that abortion in those instances denies the state evidence of rape and incest.
You read that right.
Women and girls would be sent to prison for up to three years for failing to be evidence-incubators in crimes in which they, themselves, were the victims. While New Mexico is blue, numbers of benighted red legislators looked at ways to pass and implement this kind of venality.
Wisconsin is considering a bill which would grant a grown woman's relatives an abortion veto. (AB 217)
You read that right, too.
As written, the law would give a woman's in-laws (other relatives, too) the legal authority to overrule her decision to abort. Proponents say it's an important way to prevent women from aborting based on fetal gender. Yet there's no evidence that's even remotely common in Wisconsin (or anywhere else in the United States) and the language of the bill is loose enough so as to be not unreasonably interpreted to allow for in-laws muscling in on a woman's decision, even in the absence of the fetal gender issue. (As if in-law issues aren't tough enough... )
The U.S. House of Representatives has just appointed an all-male sub-group of its Judiciary Committee to write a bill that would permit IRS audits of rape and incest survivors who use their (legal) abortion coverage.
Yes, again: you haven't got astigmatism.
But they do; a moral astigmatism. They rail on about getting government out of our lives... except when it comes to shoving women all over the show.