The Republican party declares war on women

Republicans and their Tea Party shock troops say they want to "take America back". Progressives think they mean back to the 1950s, back to when men were men, women were ladies, and black folks only got into the White House by the back door. But Republicans are thinking big: they actually want to take us back to the Middle Ages, back to the "good old days" of sexual repression, regulation and punishment. Forget the economy: this election is becoming a referendum on women's bodies, since it's women (according to the Republicans' Book of Holy Misogyny) who like to have sex without wanting to get pregnant, and, if they do get pregnant, might want to have an abortion; women who demand, as former Senator Rick Santorum says, a "license to do things in the sexual realm that is [sic] counter to how things are supposed to be." Republicans in Congress have launched a dubious investigation of Planned Parenthood, the century-old women's health organization, and tried to take away its funding. The Senate narrowly defeated an amendment that would have allowed employers to deny insurance coverage for anything the employer found morally or religiously objectionable: contraception, certainly, but perhaps also lung cancer treatment ("you should have stopped smoking"), HIV/Aids testing ("homosexuality is an abomination"), and pre-natal care for single women ("nice girls get themselves a husband before they get themselves a baby"). With the notable exception of Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, a moderate who announced last week that she'd had enough of the ugliness and would not seek re-election, the Republican party has regressed to a pre-modern state, making war on any woman who, to borrow Rebecca West's words, "expresses any sentiment that might differentiate her from a doormat or a prostitute". Just the other week, an Indiana legislator pitched a hissy fit over the girl scouts, the US version of the girl guides, accusing them of promoting lesbianism and feminism and, worst of all, working hand in glove with Planned Parenthood. Republicans aren't bothering to be subtle. A couple of weeks ago, California Representative Darrell Issa convened an all-male panel on birth control. He claimed that the issue was not women's health, but "religious freedom" (Representative Nancy Pelosi sighed:"I may at some point be moved to explain biology to my colleagues"). Therefore, he refused to allow Sandra Fluke, a young law student and an admitted female, to speak (pdf). Democrats later held their own hearing at which Fluke testified that while Georgetown, the Roman Catholic-run university she attends, provides some health insurance, it does not include contraception – and the pill can cost $1,000 per year. Women take contraception for a variety of medical reasons, not only to prevent pregnancy: Fluke recounted the story of a friend, a fellow student, who needed the pill to treat cysts. She couldn't afford it, got sick and had to have an ovary removed. Fluke's reward for speaking truth to power? A public trashing. Rush Limbaugh – if not the de facto leader of the Republican party, then surely the clearest expression of its "id" – called her a prostitute and demanded that she post video of her sexual encounters on the internet. After several days of outrage and the loss of some important advertisers on his radio show, Limbaugh issued something approximating an apology. But the conservative blogosphere, the radio provocateurs and Fox News continue to attack Fluke as a Democratic "plant", a "FemiNazi" activist, and, of course, a harlot. Republican presidential candidates have not exactly covered themselves in glory, either, on Fluke. Indeed, they don't seem to realise that women actually vote. Frontrunner Mitt Romney said mildly of Limbaugh's insults, "it's not the language I would have used." Newt Gingrich (whose wife Callista said she was "giving up opinions" for Lent) blamed "the media" for exploiting the story and said there were far more important issues – Barack Obama's "war on religion", for example. As for Rick Santorum, the holier-than-everybody über-Catholic who thinks contraception is "dangerous" and leads to "libertinism", the most outrage he could manage on Fluke's behalf was to call Limbaugh's comments "absurd", the licensed remarks of an "entertainer". Along with Gingrich, Santorum supports "personhood" amendments, laws decreeing that a fertilized egg has the same rights under the United States constitution as those of us who happen to live outside the womb. Romney, Gingrich and Santorum all oppose the Obama administration's mandate that employers (except actual churches) cover contraception, but Santorum burns with a special zealotry. It's as if he's channeling one of those early Church Fathers who went overboard trying to justify celibacy: Tertullian, maybe, who said a woman was "a temple built over a sewer". Purity solves everything: remember, Santorum's millionaire supporter Foster Friess recommended women use aspirin to keep from getting pregnant: "The gals put it between their knees." The charitable view says he thinks he was attempting humor; but he wasn't joking about the regressive values. Santorum's vision of America is a hybrid Puritan and Catholic theocracy. He constantly rants against Obama's promotion of "secularism", and says the idea of an "absolute" separation of church and state makes him want to throw up. He should try being pregnant. His delicate stomach and weak understanding of the constitution notwithstanding, he knows that getting in bed with the anti-feminist evangelicals energizes social conservatives, helping him fight Romney to a delegate-count tie in the Michigan primary – a state Romney, who grew up there, should have won decisively. And Santorum now leads polls in Ohio, Tennessee and Oklahoma, ahead of Super Tuesday's primary elections. The lawsuit against the federal government over the contraception insurance mandate was filed by several Catholic institutions and individuals, but seven states – including Texas, South Carolina, Florida and Ohio, all of which have large numbers of evangelical voters – have also joined in. One of the lead plaintiffs in the suit, Ave Maria University, is Santorum's kind of place. Built by Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan on the edge of a Florida swamp, and now run by George W Bush's former director of faith-based initiatives, the university insists that students "dress modestly" and pretty much refrain from doing anything that could be construed as fun. In 2008, when Obama was running for his first term, Santorum gave a speech at Ave Maria in which he warned that Satan was gunning for the "good, decent, powerful, influential" America – indeed, that the US is engaged in a "spiritual war". And what's that war about? Abortion, of course. Blame it on Eve, blame it on the deadly sin of luxuria. It all comes down to women's bodies, which are, as Tertullian reminds us, "the devil's doorway".