I mean seriously, not only are they weaving their own hangman’s noose, they are making sure it’s nice and strong.
No women on birth control panel.
Do they have even the vaguest clue how this looks to female voters? A line of middle aged men ready to a pass judgement on what is an appropriate public stance on female contraception options.
Congress Hears All-Male Testimony On Birth Control: What’s Wrong With This Picture?
Agreed, makes no sense at all. Obama must wake up every morning this week with a grin on his face. Keep it up, fools!
Maybe they secretly want Obama to win. Not sure why.
Latest news indicates that a major portion of the Pubbies realize that they totally stepped on their own dick this time, and are in full “misspoke out of context” mode.
I kinda step away from “equality” on this issue. I think (and, perhaps more importantly, feel) that women as a group and class have more skin in the game of conception and birth, since the process takes place within their bodies. Men and women have the same voting rights, and that is as it should be, but it behooves we men to defer to their judgment on issues like birth control. There are some issues where “Yes, dear” is the only reasonable position.
If the Democrats are smart (and I am not holding my breath), they can use “They want to take away your birth control!” in the same manner the Republicans have used “They want to take away your guns!”.
So, does this mean we can look forward to a Republican ban on scary-looking contraception? Because, to be honest, an IUD is really creepy looking.
snicker
It is pretty alien looking. I can remember seeing one of those plastic cutaway uteruses with one used as a demonstration of how it is implanted and I asked my doc of the time if it would get HBO … 
The Democrats line on this should be, “The Republicans not only want to take away your access to abortion, they want to prevent you from avoiding pregnancy.”
or
“The Republican’s attack on Planned Parenthood is not only about abortion. They don’t think American’s should have access to contraception.”
If I were a Democrat campaigning against a Catholic Republican I’d talk about the Catholic Church’s stance on contraception every day.
The Catholic Church has finally found an issue to legitimize Anti-Catholic sentiments in the U.S.–now even Catholics can oppose the Pope and the church’s teachings, and the Catholic Church’s only allies will be those fundamentalist Protestants who were their worst sworn enemies not so long ago.
I wouldn’t.
This is one of those times that requires a pianissimo approach. In aggregate, women voters seem to be getting fairly irritated about this issue. I think I saw a number earlier this week that the President’s approval among independent women (an enormous voting bloc) has swung eighteen points since this began. That’s an enormous swing and one of the reasons the Congressional Republicans are backing off the issue and ‘looking for a compromise’.
The republican primary hasn’t changed much in dynamic because those guys are still focused on winning primaries among the more motivated republican voters. There’s still a percentage for them to be taking stands for short term gain. But for anyone looking at the general election? This is a bad, bad thing to get behind.
So for those on the D side of the ledger right now it’s all about sitting back and letting an important voting bloc get pissed off at your opponent. Best yet, by not being overt you don’t open yourself up to being attacked about being mad at religion and such.
Republicans should consider that Barbara Bush, Nancy Reagan, and Lauren Bush have all made public pro-choice statements. If these women are pro-choice, how much opposition against restricting choices do you think there is among women voters as a group?
Prevalence of being pro-choice by gender is a pretty frequently polled question. The GOP doesn’t have to try and intuit what the nations woman think by observing a trio of GOP grandmothers, polls show woman are split pretty similarly to the public at large regarding abortion. And there’s plenty of pro-life females, there’s a slight pro-choice majority, but its within a few points of being tied.
Contraception, on the other hand, is pretty uniformly supported by the public. While the GOP argue they are fighting about religious rights rather then against contraception per-se, by keeping on the issue even after the Church has said they’re alright with the current compromise, puts them in pretty serious danger of being the “anti-contraception” party.
Making abortion an election issue doesn’t really help either party. Making contraception an issue, even if the GOP says its about a wider principal then contraception specifically, is going to be a pretty bad thing for the GOP.
I’m not sure I follow you, Simplico, but I don’t think that Gallup poll really shows that abortion is a wash for both parties (despite how they try to summarize it.) Admittedly, people claiming the labels “pro-choice” and “pro-life” are about equal (49% - 45%) - they don’t give their respondants a chance to say “neither”. (Or, if they do, they don’t talk about it.)
Similarly, the wording on the graph about American’s opinions on the morality of abortion is quite strange. It implies that there’s a second graph they aren’t showing us, and it doesn’t include a line for people who don’t think abortion is anything to do with morality - a position which is quite different than saying it’s morally acceptable.
Finally, in the big graph, they ask people, "Do you believe abortion should be legal under any circumstance, legal under certain circumstances, or illegal under all?’
Their reported numbers are:
Legal in all circumstances: 27%
Legal in certain circumstances: 50%
Illegal in all circumstances: 22%
Pretty clearly - the vast majority of Americans do not want to outlaw abortion entirely, regardless of whether they call themselves pro choice or pro-life.
Despite this, when consolidating their numbers by party, in their final chart, Gallup lumps the “legal in certain circumstances” in with the “legal in no circumstances” numbers, compared to the “legal in any circumstance” and “legal in most circumstances”. This lets Gallup to fudge the fact that the numbers for Independents and Democrats show that less than 20% want abortion to be illegal, with 80% wanting abortion to be legal under certain (undefined) circumstances.
The divide is not between people who want abortion to be limited and people who want abortion to be legal. It’s between people who want it to be legal and people who want it to be illegal. Gallup’s numbers clearly show that the majority of people want abortion to be legal, and, of those who are in the majority, the majority of them are independents and Democrats.
The Republicans are on the wrong side of history on abortion (and pretty much everything else.) If they try to make this contraceptive debate about abortion, they’ll lose even harder than they’re doing at the moment.
I think there’s an overlap of people who are both pro-choice and pro-life. They personally are opposed to abortions but they do not want the government to mandate abortion policy. And I think there are a lot of women who fall into this group - they don’t want women having abortions but they also don’t want the government telling women what to do.
And I agree with you that the consensus on contraception is clearer. I think the mistake the Republicans are making is thinking that the position of the Catholic Church is the same as the position of Catholics.
The first part is certainly true, the poll I linked to shows that there’s a decent sized chunk of people that think abortion is immoral but still consider themselves pro-choice. And while that’s true of woman as well, your phrasing makes it sound like its particularly true of woman. The poll contradicts that, it doesn’t show much in the way of a gender disparity between men and woman on the questions of the immorality of abortion or on self-identification as “pro-choice”.
But in anycase, its kind of a hijack. The thread is about contraception, and we both agree that the American Public is heavily pro-contraception, and opposing contraceptive availability, even on the very narrow grounds of religious freedom, is a pretty dicey proposition for the GOP to take.
And they are scrambling away from that position at warp speed! They are the guy holding a dog turd in his hands and saying “Wow! Look what I almost stepped in!”
I think that is true. Men who are strongly anti-abortion are probably more willing to sacrifice a woman’s freedom of choice then anti-abortion women are.
Have you seen the Republican crop of candidates?
I’m no authority on American politics, but it seems to me that the best part of this conversation is the expression “the contraception issue”. My first thought upon reading that was “wait, contraception is officially an ‘issue’ now?” I think that the more popular that phrase becomes in political discourse, the better it will be for the left.
Contraception is only an issue because healthcare and how it is paid for is such a huge political clusterfuck in this country.
However there is a puritanical segment of the Christian Right who think that if they can outlaw abortion and at least make contraception less available then everyone will stop fucking and American society will return to the “golden age” of the 1950’s.
It’s like they don’t realize that women can vote.
Fun to watch, though.