It seems good conservative Republican women are not entirely on board with the ongoing Republican menfolk's obsession with abortion. Whether they're on board with the whole restricting-women's-rights thing or not, they cannot help but notice that
Republican men truly suck at it:
“It is a white hot issue, the messenger has to be very skillful. But why is it always a man? It doesn’t make it any easier,” said former Rep. Mary Bono Mack, a pro-abortion rights moderate from California. “First and foremost, if this is the charge, they would be wise to have a woman leading the effort. But most women are focused on the economy and jobs and national security and a whole host of other issues that are right now on the forefront of people’s minds.” […]
“Even if you agree with the issue, and you personally are pro-life, whenever these bills come up you basically live in fear your boss will say something stupid and offensive,” said one female staffer for a very conservative member of Congress. “We keep putting ourselves in this position and it never turns out well for us.”
Let me help you out with this: The reason Republican men are very, very bad about talking about The Womenfolk is because they do not give a damn about The Womenfolk. This tends to lead to situations where they are writing new health laws based on creative crayon-and-glitter reimaginings of how women's bodies function, since they could never quite be bothered to look those things up, and speeches in which they say things that sound profoundly sexist because, well, they are. I appreciate that you might consider your own political dedication to screwing poor people and giving money to rich people to be more important than whether or not Republican men openly think of you as something less than full citizens, but let's not be gullible about this. If it's always a man and they're always offensive or incompetent about it,
take the hint.
Republican strategist Liz Mair says that Republicans might do better to tone down their abortion rhetoric and pair it with something that would actually, say, decrease abortions:
“I’d urge them to think strongly about whether there is companion legislation they might introduce to ensure greater access to actual contraception, such legislation optimally being free-market friendly, such as proposing lifting or easing regulations restricting the sale of the Pill without a prescription, or streamlining or simplifying the FDA approval process which could potentially help bring new and better contraceptives to market, potentially at much lower cost.”
Yeah, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say there is not a snowball's chance in hell of this actually happening. The Republican war on contraception, if you haven't noticed, is fully tied to the war on abortion. A vast portion of the conservative base doesn't even understand the difference between the two, and on any given day you can hear
crazy-ass screeds about how allowing people to get contraception is pretty much punching Jesus in the face. Again, take the hint: Abortion is not the issue here. Sexytimes is the issue. Sexytimes, and making sure the menfolk are in charge of the sexytimes, and making sure there is proper religious-based punishment when sexytimes happen that a narrow band of conservative freaks don't like.
I'm not going to be one of those people that says "oh, all American women should obviously abandon the Republican Party" because I realize that if you're a woman and you're a Republican, it's because other things are more important to you than your party's rather controversial notions of what women's rights should be and how we should enforce them, or remove them, but let's not pretend that the continued dedication among Republican men to saying offensive or imbecilic things about women is just a question of poor tact or botched tactics. It's because they really do think offensive ideological things, and really do believe imbecilic medical things. If you're only mad because they so often pipe up and say those things out loud, you're getting mad about the wrong thing.