Originally published at: Abortion bans fail to pass in South Carolina and Nebraska despite GOP control | Boing Boing
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Welcome to feminism, republican women… and good luck!
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Based on the Republican response to trans and family-of-trans legislators, I suspect the next move is to claim that any uterus-having legislator has an inherent conflict of interest in abortion legislation and therefore should not be permitted to debate or vote on them. (Maybe males with daughters as well, but only if they vote against Gilead)
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The GOP is finally waking up to the reality that their regressive stance against women’s rights is costing them. But watch now as the Republican women who took these stances are railroaded out of the party by the religious extremists who see their desire for a nation controlled by Christian nationalism slipping through their grasp when it seemed so close.
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Republican state Sen. Sandy Senn … said abortion laws “have always been, each and every one of them, about control — plain and simple,”
Oh, did we just notice the leopard gnawing on our face?
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Nice to know representation works, even in the GOP, if only in the most dire of circumstances.
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Indeed, what happened in Montana recently is really, really disgraceful.
They literally banned an elected representative from the legislature for speaking up against a bill intended to remove her own rights. How is that even democracy anymore?
Unpaywalled link:
Paywalled link:
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Well, now if we could get GOP women to get their heads out of their asses and start voting to protect trans folks and the Black vote, things would be much better. Sadly, I think that they are pretty much voting strategically on a singular issue rather than understanding the interconnectedness of these issues.
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First they came for the…
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True, but to give a modicum of credit, in Nebraska the ban was blocked by one male.
While it was women who helped defeat the measure in South Carolina, in Nebraska it was an 80-year-old man who stalled it. Sen. Merv Riepe, a longtime Republican who would have been the decisive vote to advance the bill to a final round of voting, abstained over his concern that the six-week ban might not give women enough time to know they are pregnant.
Riepe told the Flatwater Free Press that he was concerned the Nebraska bill would be viewed as a total ban. “At the end of the day, I need to look back and be able to say to myself, ‘Did you do the best?’” Riepe told the paper. “No group came to me, asking me to do this. This is of my own beliefs, my own commitments.”
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Can someone please explain to me how a person who is not a straight, white, cis, hetero, “Christian” male can be a member of the Republican Party? It’s Turkeys voting for Thanksgiving!
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It’s beginning to dawn on a few of them that they might not be the “special ones” after all and were merely tolerated as the country firmly marched backwards.
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Well, I am all those things, and most definitely not a Repug voter. You left out “lacking totally in empathy, foresight and/or a soul.” Nazi will do if that is too much of a mouthful.
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My comment is about women and non-binary folks. How can they be Republican? I don’t get it.
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“Surely the leopards won’t eat my face! I’m one of the good ones!” maybe? “It’s in my short-term financial interest to do this, I’ll get out before it’s too late.” Possibly. “It gives me a power rush!” This is certainly a factor for some. The common thread is all the benefits are very much short-term. All of them will find the leopards at their throats and be very surprised by it.
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I don’t either, but I’m guessing the one thing that trumps all empathy and conscience; they’re rich.
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Yah, that’s a good summary of all the reasons, I think.
There’s a major trans Instagram influencer who is an alt-right activist. She does videos about how nobody should be giving people like her special rights, that sort of thing. I won’t name her here but Contrapoints has covered her a lot in videos if you want to know more.
Anyways, the question of “why on earth would a trans woman side with these people?” is always forefront. It seems to be, as you articulated, that she gets a tiny amount of special power from it. The alt-right likes being able to hold her up as a prop for how they aren’t actually causing harm (“because look at who we have on our side!”). So she gets a fair bit of support. When groups are severely oppressed, there will always be a few people who cling to any small amount of power they can get because it’s better than nothing, regardless of the source of that power.
For women (and trans women especially) there’s also a bit of daddy complex at work, I think. When a group of men has extremely narrow definitions of what a woman is allowed to be (certain height, weight, hair, beauty standard, etc) there’s a certain pride and privilege that comes with being able to meet that standard. The trans woman in question meets that standard which is exceptionally rare for trans women, so she gets extra power and privilege for that. The men hold her up as, “why can’t all trans women just be like this?”, and so on. “If they were all hot like her we’d like them”, being the obvious subtext.
I think it’s also that, like most trans people, she has a lot of anger at the hand we’ve been dealt by the universe. Just like disenfranchised young men, occasionally young women will manifest anger as authoritarian beliefs. So some part of this for her is processing her anger, I’m sure. She may also have been a fascist-leaning person before transitioning. A percentage of every group is trans, regardless of your religion or other beliefs you may have had beforehand. For most of us, being trans cures us of right wing ideas, but not always.
Of course what she doesn’t understand is that she’s made a deal with the devil and they will turn on her instantly when she’s no longer useful to them. Everyone but her knows it’s going to happen and it’s hard to watch.
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don’t they have a conflict of interest?
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I wonder if there are two other pieces at play here, too:
- “Everyone I know votes republican and/or rails on the “democrat party” every chance they get, if I don’t I will be ostracized”, and
- I get the feeling that there are just a lot of people who have bought into the Fox cool-aid that no matter how bad the decisions are for the GOP, the dem’s would be worse, for some value of “worse” that resonates with them (there’ll be less jobs here / more taxes and I can’t afford things already / tax dollars wasted paying for immigrants/teaching “useless” stuff in schools/wars that have nothing to do with us - pick your FUD.)
When your life and prospects suck, I think it’s even harder to make a change, a combination of the sunk cost fallacy and the very real fear that “as bad as things are, what if things are worse if we change?” is very real (and applies to a lot more than just political choices, too.)
I really think Trumpism turned the “yeah but how much worse might it get if we don’t win” dial up to 11 for a lot of people, and now the GOP appears to have embraced that strategy as a whole.
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