GOP searching for less politically volatile way to legislate around their view of 'legitimate rape'
Last edited Thu Jan 22, 2015, 02:03 PM - Edit history (2)
____ Republicans found themselves engaged in an internal party revolt this week when two of their female members objected to a provision in the anti-women abortion bill they intended to bring up this week (coincidentally, on the anniversary of Roe-Wade) which would require women to report sexual assaults to police before being allowed to medically terminate a pregnancy.
It wasn't really a fundamental difference the republican women, Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC), and Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-IN), had with the language in the bill banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy that prompted them to remove their names from the sponsorship of the legislation. Both had already voted for an identical bill with the same language. It was actually the red-hot politics behind the uproar over 'legitimate rape' which prompted the women and several other republicans to shy away from passing their anti-choice constituency's pet legislation as one of their new Congress' first legislative acts.
After deciding to replace the language in the bill with a 'rape provision', anti-choice activists furiously objected and the republican leadership decided it was better to just pull the whole thing down until they could figure out a way forward.
from TPM:
On Wednesday morning, House Republicans held a long conference meeting to discuss the matter and find a way forward. They considered changing the rape language in order to placate the objecting members, Reps. Tom Cole (R-OK) and Trent Franks (R-AZ) told TPM in the afternoon. But they faced a major obstacle: softening the rape language would alienate more right-wing members who are skeptical of exceptions to outlawing abortion.
Meanwhile, Ellmers and fellow defectors faced the wrath of the anti-abortion community, which blasted her as "reprehensible" for siding with "violent injustice of the dismemberment of children" and demonstrating "ill-informed cowardliness."
Not satisfied to just leave women alone, republicans immediately put forward their reserve anti-women bill which would outlaw federal funding for abortions, as Sen. Barbara Boxer noted in a tweet this afternoon:
Sen. Barbara Boxer ?@SenatorBoxer
House GOP leaders pull their extreme anti-woman bill only to replace it with another extreme anti-woman bill:
What's hilariously sad is the hand-wringing going on in the republican leadership right now over their inability to confidently put forward anti-women legislation without facing an inevitable and withering backlash. It's not because of their concern over the substance of their efforts to define some rapes as legitimate. It's not for a lack of dictionaries available in the Senate library to provide that definition of rape they would like to invent out of whole cloth.
The short of their reasoning is that since marital or date-rape is less likely to be reported, that somehow invalidates the legitimacy of those claims. RWW noted that the bill’s previous House sponsor, Trent Franks, had even implied this week that women who are raped rarely get pregnant. Really, Trent?
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, the lead sponsor of the 20 week abortion ban, is especially anguished over the political roadblock to his intentions to dictate to women their reproductive choices. Speaking this morning to the Family Research Council’s anti-choice conference, Graham reached out to members for ideas on how to put one over on women without raising their political ire.
from Right-Wing Watch:
Graham acknowledged that opponents of rape exceptions are being “intellectually consistent and honest about ‘the baby is the baby’” but argued that banning rape survivors from accessing abortion is a political impossibility: “Some of us who have these exceptions do so in a democratic society believing that there are some places we will not go.”
“I’m going to need your help to find a way out of this definitional problem with rape,” he told the audience.
“The rape exception will be part of the bill…We just need to find a way definitionally to not get us in a spot where we’re debating about what a legitimate rape is, that’s not the cause that we’re in,” he said.
“Intellectually consistent and honest" apparently doesn't extend to republican desire to sneak their despicable notions about 'legitimate rape' into actionable law. What Graham and his neanderthal co-horts really want is a time machine to take them back to the good old days when men were men, and women had no political voice. Not even the faithful females of their flock can handle the heat generated these days by their anti-women obsessions.
watch Graham:
= new reply since forum marked as read
...by insisting in the legislation that only 'reported' or reportable rapes be allowed to qualify for reproductive services. Never mind that the court system regularly fails to prosecute rapes; or that many women don't wish to put themselves through the often demeaning police and court process.
Blue DuPage ?@BlueDuPage 2h2 hours ago
Rape controversies return to haunt GOP http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/gop-rape-controversy-114524.html … #4jobs #AmericasNewCongress
