Davis County, Utah GOP precinct chair Casey Fisher posted on Facebook Sunday, saying that it was a “grave mistake” to give voting rights to “others not head of household,” which is being plainly interpreted to mean men. Fisher was bombarded with angry comments, prompting him to delete the post and delete his Facebook account. However, his GOP county chairwoman, Teena Horlacher, came to his defense. Salt Lake Tribune on Facebook:
“The sentiment was along the lines of what our Founding Fathers believed in,” she said. “Not necessarily that men only have the vote, that was not necessarily what he was saying.” She later added that, “I certainly don’t agree with that sentiment.”
“He’s not trying to say that only men should vote, that’s not what he’s saying,” she added. “And that’s as far as I’m going to go.”
Fisher has not clarified what he meant by the comment, apologized, or responded publicly.
ThinkProgress:
Fisher is not the first GOP official to publicly admit the party’s goal of suppressing voters — especially those that tend to vote for Democratic candidates — although Republicans tend to keep those comments behind closed doors. In April 2016, Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI), slipped up and claimed in a television interview that he believed Wisconsin’s photo ID law would make it more difficult for Democrat Hillary Clinton to win the state in 2016.
And he’s not the only Republican to express skepticism about the Nineteenth Amendment, which since 1920 has prohibited the federal government from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex. ThinkProgress reported in November that Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, a conservative Republican, once co-authored a textbook that was critical of the women’s suffrage movement.
It’s sobering to think that there are a lot of GOP Neanderthals that believe that a woman shouldn’t even be allowed to vote, let alone be President. Just one more insight into our great cultural divide, which unfortunately appears to be getting greater, not narrower.